L had tried this CHALLENGE many times, and observed where he was feeling anxiety, which was quite often around the stomach. Some people might get a headache, some people might feel it in the guts.
After he had been doing this challenge for a while, the physical feeling became less marked, as did the anxiety. It was a helpful challenge in that it reduced anxiety from what it might otherwise have been.
RM had noticed that as soon as he thought about desires and fears, 'I'm afraid of this, I want to go there', a tension started to rise in him and he was miles away. His thinking seemed to be incredibly active, but the minute he asked 'Am I here?' all those thoughts seemed to disappear and his anxieties disappeared too, because the anxieties were always attached to thoughts.
J said that anxiety and fear visit him but rarely. Unlike L, he isolated the emotional reaction, not to the stomach, but just beneath the chest, and it was quite distinct from the intellectual, which is whatever it was that caused the anxiety. Rarely did anxiety emerge without some cause that he could ascribe to it after he experienced it, but he could hold both, quite separately, in his head; the intellectual concern that he thought had caused the anxiety and the pain that was a result of the anxiety. Unlike L, by thinking about them, he didn't find that the anxiety went away. What actually happened was the anxiety went away when he considered the question of what he thought had caused it and come up with a solution. It was then that the pain, which he would call more of an ache, dissipated. If he didn't consider the intellectual aspect of it, the pain, the ache didn't subside.
D said that thoughts exacerbate the intuitional or emotional response to anything, they make it worse. Thoughts are so powerful they can destroy a person. Be careful what you think!
RG had an additional shock this month because of a sudden bereavement and she had to run to family abroad. She experienced anxiety and fear, but then she stopped, and she started to think that fear, anxiety, tension were all external influences. Now the trick was how to respond to that. When she did meditation she first observed her thoughts which then calmed her down and then enabled relaxation. If she had anxiety and fear, she observed it but didn't let it go inside of herself. The last month had been a lesson for her. She sat down and said to herself, 'I need to calm down. It's happened, we are here' and she just let it go.
For "R" there had been all sorts of pressures; preparing a big Christmas dinner for a family of twenty four, working out the seating arrangements, trying to find ideas for gifts for people. All of that built up pressure. She would say that it was not thoughts, it was associations which made her anxious and troubled.
She had revisited something which she learned many years ago, which was, when she sat, she did not sit for one minute, she sat for at least twenty minutes, because in one minute she did not even begin to get to a point of letting go, but if she sat with her arms out 'like this' ("R" demonstrated by holding her arms out wide to each side, sustaining this position as she spoke) and at the same time she counted to two hundred, that all of this occupied her attention, and occupied her sense of her body. The emotions were going on during this time but they were not in the forefront, and it became possible to let go of some of the tensions and anxieties. In her case she had a bad back, and things which physically troubled her, so she was never without some sense of her body, but to make an aim of holding her attention, counting with her arms held out wide, she was able, to a certain extent, to overrule the anxiety. However, she also got used to this process and when she became accustomed to it, it didn't work so much.
T had a challenge the last few weeks because of a month of being seriously ill, after finishing work for the holidays. The illness had forced her into her body, experiencing the body in awful ways, her breathing was compromised and breathing is the ultimate link with life. So she wouldn't say it was an intellectual exercise for her, because she was just forced into this connection. Although it was horrible, as she was coming out of it over the weeks, it felt very positive because of that connection with the body, and the contrast with how she usually went about in life, floating around in her mind most of the time and not connected. She had also started doing exercises, stepping, only for several minutes at a time, hearing the orchestration of the lungs, with all the phlegm in them. She felt the aerobic exercise infused the body for those several minutes. So she realised how she had neglected her body over the years. So in that sense she wasn't doing the exercise consciously, she was just sucked into it.
Y asked L how the anxiety reduced. L said it was a phenomenon which he thought worked two ways. If he associated a feeling with part of the body, before he did the association the anxiety might be accentuated, but if he associated it with a location, that cut it down to size a little. By naming something he could reduce its power. It also worked the other way, for example, with a headache there is a technique of three questions: 'What colour is it? What shape is it? Where is it?' then after attempting to answer this to ask the same questions again about 'colour, shape, location'. Often the answers changed, the shape changed, the size reduced, and the colour lightened. D said he had used this technique, and it had worked half the time. The technique was meant to diminish intensity - if colour was black it might go brown etc. He experienced that it could be effective at certain times.
Responding to RG and "R", D said that even if he did not react to external things, his mind and thoughts were still linked to all these things. L said that some thoughts have an independent existence and rather than ignore them as distraction, they can be welcomed as inspirations. He related the experience of the poet Ruth Stone who would do her utmost to grasp such thoughts as they came by her.
T said that, 'Intellectual' was such an intellectual word, 'Emotion' was such an intellectual word; for her these were not really connected with the body and what she felt was that 'Body, Brain and Heart' meant a lot more to her than these different centres, because these were three organs that were actually located in her body, and they did different things, and did they connect or were they all disconnected? Obviously they were not disconnected in the body, but the brain was trying to understand what was going on. All she had with others was language to try and communicate with each other across the void, but language was not very close to the mark.
The reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
And so, during these observations of mine from the planet Mars through my Teskooano, it once flashed upon me that the length of their existence was, century by century and even year by year, becoming shorter and shorter at a very definite and equally uniform rate, and this served as the beginning of my further quite serious study of the psyche of these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy.
Of course when I first noticed this, I at once took into account not only the chief particularity of their psyche, that is their periodic reciprocal destruction, but also the innumerable what are called ‘illnesses’ which exist exclusively only on that planet, the majority of which, by the way, arose and continue to arise owing to the same abnormal external conditions of the ordinary being-existence established by them, which help to make it impossible for them to exist normally up to the sacred Rascooarno.
When I first noticed this and began to recall my previous impression about it, each of the separate independent spiritualized parts of my whole presence became filled with the conviction, and my essence perceived the mentioned ‘flash,’ that in truth these three-brained beings of your planet had in the beginning existed according to their time calculation for about twelve centuries, and some of them, even, for about fifteen centuries.
Looking at the text, J said there was something somewhat controversial in two of those assumptions that he was making. One, that people were living less long. That was certainly not what was happening now, existence seemed to be becoming longer and longer. The text goes on to say that illnesses exist exclusively only on that planet. J said perhaps that was so, we didn't know what goes on on all sorts of other planets, but the statement which follows says that these illnesses arise owing to abnormal external conditions established by humans. Did we establish the germs that give us illness? Was he trying to say it was our fault that there were germs?
At the time of my first arrival there in this Center-of-Culture of theirs, they were just preparing that which was afterwards the principal cause of the acceleration of the rate of the degeneration of their ‘psychic-organization,’ especially in the sense of the atrophy in them of the instinctive functioning of those three fundamental factors which ought to exist in the presence of every three-brained being—namely, those factors which give rise to the being-impulses existing under the names of ‘Faith,’ ‘Hope,’ and ‘Love.’
D said that Faith, Hope and Love ought to exist in the presence of every three-brained being, but asked if they did in fact do so.
RM had noticed that as soon as he thought about desires and fears, 'I'm afraid of this, I want to go there', a tension started to rise in him and he was miles away. His thinking seemed to be incredibly active, but the minute he asked 'Am I here?' all those thoughts seemed to disappear and his anxieties disappeared too, because the anxieties were always attached to thoughts.
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When you experience anxiety or fear, be aware of it with the intellectual, emotional, and moving centres.
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D said that thoughts exacerbate the intuitional or emotional response to anything, they make it worse. Thoughts are so powerful they can destroy a person. Be careful what you think!
RG had an additional shock this month because of a sudden bereavement and she had to run to family abroad. She experienced anxiety and fear, but then she stopped, and she started to think that fear, anxiety, tension were all external influences. Now the trick was how to respond to that. When she did meditation she first observed her thoughts which then calmed her down and then enabled relaxation. If she had anxiety and fear, she observed it but didn't let it go inside of herself. The last month had been a lesson for her. She sat down and said to herself, 'I need to calm down. It's happened, we are here' and she just let it go.
The Angel of the North Sculpture by Anthony Gormley 1998 |
T had a challenge the last few weeks because of a month of being seriously ill, after finishing work for the holidays. The illness had forced her into her body, experiencing the body in awful ways, her breathing was compromised and breathing is the ultimate link with life. So she wouldn't say it was an intellectual exercise for her, because she was just forced into this connection. Although it was horrible, as she was coming out of it over the weeks, it felt very positive because of that connection with the body, and the contrast with how she usually went about in life, floating around in her mind most of the time and not connected. She had also started doing exercises, stepping, only for several minutes at a time, hearing the orchestration of the lungs, with all the phlegm in them. She felt the aerobic exercise infused the body for those several minutes. So she realised how she had neglected her body over the years. So in that sense she wasn't doing the exercise consciously, she was just sucked into it.
Y asked L how the anxiety reduced. L said it was a phenomenon which he thought worked two ways. If he associated a feeling with part of the body, before he did the association the anxiety might be accentuated, but if he associated it with a location, that cut it down to size a little. By naming something he could reduce its power. It also worked the other way, for example, with a headache there is a technique of three questions: 'What colour is it? What shape is it? Where is it?' then after attempting to answer this to ask the same questions again about 'colour, shape, location'. Often the answers changed, the shape changed, the size reduced, and the colour lightened. D said he had used this technique, and it had worked half the time. The technique was meant to diminish intensity - if colour was black it might go brown etc. He experienced that it could be effective at certain times.
Responding to RG and "R", D said that even if he did not react to external things, his mind and thoughts were still linked to all these things. L said that some thoughts have an independent existence and rather than ignore them as distraction, they can be welcomed as inspirations. He related the experience of the poet Ruth Stone who would do her utmost to grasp such thoughts as they came by her.
T said that, 'Intellectual' was such an intellectual word, 'Emotion' was such an intellectual word; for her these were not really connected with the body and what she felt was that 'Body, Brain and Heart' meant a lot more to her than these different centres, because these were three organs that were actually located in her body, and they did different things, and did they connect or were they all disconnected? Obviously they were not disconnected in the body, but the brain was trying to understand what was going on. All she had with others was language to try and communicate with each other across the void, but language was not very close to the mark.
The reading continued from Chapter 24 of Beelzebub's Tales.
And so, during these observations of mine from the planet Mars through my Teskooano, it once flashed upon me that the length of their existence was, century by century and even year by year, becoming shorter and shorter at a very definite and equally uniform rate, and this served as the beginning of my further quite serious study of the psyche of these three-brained beings who have taken your fancy.
Of course when I first noticed this, I at once took into account not only the chief particularity of their psyche, that is their periodic reciprocal destruction, but also the innumerable what are called ‘illnesses’ which exist exclusively only on that planet, the majority of which, by the way, arose and continue to arise owing to the same abnormal external conditions of the ordinary being-existence established by them, which help to make it impossible for them to exist normally up to the sacred Rascooarno.
When I first noticed this and began to recall my previous impression about it, each of the separate independent spiritualized parts of my whole presence became filled with the conviction, and my essence perceived the mentioned ‘flash,’ that in truth these three-brained beings of your planet had in the beginning existed according to their time calculation for about twelve centuries, and some of them, even, for about fifteen centuries.
Looking at the text, J said there was something somewhat controversial in two of those assumptions that he was making. One, that people were living less long. That was certainly not what was happening now, existence seemed to be becoming longer and longer. The text goes on to say that illnesses exist exclusively only on that planet. J said perhaps that was so, we didn't know what goes on on all sorts of other planets, but the statement which follows says that these illnesses arise owing to abnormal external conditions established by humans. Did we establish the germs that give us illness? Was he trying to say it was our fault that there were germs?
| The Holy Martyresses Vera (Faith), Nadezhda (Hope) and Liubov' (Love) |
D said that Faith, Hope and Love ought to exist in the presence of every three-brained being, but asked if they did in fact do so.
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