BLOG 168
“Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.”
(G.I.Joe)
Garrison Keillor, an American author and entertainer, possessed of many talents, posts a humorous online letter that takes frequent potshots at Donald Trump, whom he has nicknamed The Occupant, in examples such as the below:
“Ours is a country with a great tradition of eccentrics and wackos from Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil and Carry Nation with her tavern-busting hatchet and the man who wrote a book with no punctuation and Hetty Green the Witch of Wall Street and the freak-show man P.T. Barnum down to our Current Occupant fascinated by tariffs and vengeance and putting his name on things and his Secretary of War and his Secretary of Health opposed to vaccination, etcetera and so forth.”
It’s not obvious that The Donald is aware of or in any way chastened by these unflattering quips about his eccentricities, nor is any inner part of me motivated to change when I speak to or of myself equally disparagingly.
I don’t know what specific influences, nature and/or nurture, shaped Mr. Trump, (aka POTUS, aka The Current Occupant), but I suspect he is ruled by an inner script such as Swami Radha talks about in her chapter on Evolution and Maya, and which has stayed in my thoughts as I contemplated this week’s blog.
She writes:
"You want to survive also in your own mind, in your own judgement, in your own criticism. The idea in your mind of what you should be is a very complicated thing in itself. That you should be beautiful, intelligent, wise, six feet tall, have this nose or that colour of hair, these are all very primitive ideas, but they are very, very powerful. You want to survive in your own mind, and your own mind sets the criteria by which you want to survive. That’s a very dangerous trap. It makes difficulties and creates a lot of absolutely unnecessary pain.”
You might have noticed that I have in past blogs referred to my inner “maniacal room mate”, a term I gleaned from Michael Singer’s Untethered Soul, to describe the part of me, a personality aspect, if you will, on which I place the blame for my less-evolved thoughts and behaviors. But as recently as this morning’s reading in Swami Radhananda’s Living The Practice, I began to see how this habit of self-disparagement may not be serving me. She writes:
“We believe in a life-story. Taking the threads of our days and weaving the dreams and dramas and images together, we build this story. But what is real?”
She continues as follows:
“The mind has a tendency to hold onto stories. Emotions and emotional words are the glue that keeps us stuck and contaminates relationships, careers and personal growth. Released from emotional interpretation, the mind can change itself, allowing you to mature as you use different language to describe yourself and your life. When we can reflect, tell stories, use our voice and ask questions, we can move away from old habits of speech that are emotionally embedded in the present, and insert a new vocabulary that more clearly embodies who we are.”
And who we want to be.
I realized that the labels or names I have frequently given myself must have had their beginnings in some incident or conditioning — a version of Eve being evicted from Eden — that I believed, and embedded in my self-image up to the present. If it is true that my mind sets the criteria by which I want to survive, how else might I change that criteria than by “day-lighting” whatever old story I’m currently “buying”?
Journaling is a good way to unearth these old scripts. By recording something from the past or present that has affected you emotionally, you can stand back, reread and observe your version of events in the third person, as if they happened to someone else. From this more detached stance you can ask clarifying questions: “Is this the absolute truth, or is there room for reinterpretation? Deeper investigation? If the latter, what else could have been meant, intended? In what way might I have precipitated this situation? What preconceived beliefs/ideas might have influenced my interpretation, and how can I change or update old misinformation?” And so on…
This can also be guided by using Swami Radha’s dream method and analyzing a real-life situation as a dream. The point being that we cannot hope to learn and grow from our experiences unless we can achieve some detachment from our ingrained stories, and objectively observe the observer. We have to use the mind to study the mind, and not shy away from what the light of greater clarity and self-awareness reveals.
So the message to my current mental occupant is, to paraphrase Socrates (or GI Joe): “self-wisdom begins when I realize I don’t know what I think I know.” But I’m always willing to find out.
PS Due to a change in the way this blog is disseminated, I no longer know how to send private messages to my blog Ohana. Yet another thing for YouTube to know and me to find out. 🤔