Welcome to An Inner Walk-About

There is an inner landscape that sounds the wild call for stillness. It is both empty and cognizant at the same time. We may fall into its desert and become lost. Here, we may disappear, dissolve, die before we die. We are searching for a life, fully lived.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Ship's Agenda


Many of us have felt deep despair and confusion as we tried to navigate on board this vessel we have called the SS Relation-Ship.  As we began to explore the impact of sliding around on the deck of this social mind institution, we may have noticed that we are not alone in our struggle to find some relief from the affects of entrusting our precious love to the confines of this Ship.  In our attempt to bring conscious awareness to this social mind form and its content, to basically unearth much of its story, we have come across some fascinating observations.

 So, let’s go back to a quantum physics point about attention, discussed in earlier posts. Attention is both energy and sub-atomic particle. If we hold attention inside our own energy circuit, it remains a fluid energy. In other words, keeping the focus on us without projecting it onto another object such as our partner or the Ship, allows attention to remains in its energy form. If attention leaves our circuit and gets projected and deposited onto another object, it becomes a solid sub-atomic particle that forms a new reality. 

As we explore the “love” reality we call the Relation-Ship, our investigation has discovered that the amount of energy required to power this vessel is enormous.  The Ship’s code of discipline exercises a heavy hand in its attempt to mold its shipmates into a singular, compliant unit.  After all, individuality could foreshadow a mutiny, and must therefore be labeled as too dangerous.  In our innocent enthusiasm to meet the Ship’s needs, to “save it”, we begin to attach to a very specific agenda. “You must keep your partner happy”, is the tune that settles into our bones. As soon as a Ship sails into our life, a hierarchy of needs begins to establish itself. The Ship comes first, along with the beloved’s needs, which are enmeshed with those of the Ship. Permission to attend to ourselves is last on the agenda. 

As we ponder over this relational hierarchy, might we recognize an interesting possibility? Are we perhaps conditioned to not take care of our needs on the Ship, because if we were to do so, we wouldn’t need to create a Ship? The notion that The Ship needs to support us is a common assumption. Is this term “supported” not another slippery agent used in the social mind’s love vocabulary? What is the intent of this word?  Doesn’t it presuppose we would otherwise feel weak, or that we are in need of being held up by another?

When we keep an awareness of the lies in our life, created by external focus, it is a natural progression to examine this potent social tyrant.  Let's look through the lens of a viewpoint that the social mind  would most likely consider treason. Could the social mind be holding us captive to all its institutions, including the Ship, to insure that we remain its power supply and continue  to fuel it?  If we entertain this viewpoint, an interesting question may arise. What has made us such an easy target?  Isn’t it our habitual external focus?

Perhaps such an external focus can easily gravitate to the creation of Relation-Ships out of a refusal to take responsibility for making ourselves feel safe, cared for and loved – out of a refusal to pay attention to our own well-being.  Have we invented these Ships to continue directing our attention to something external? Is this a huge distraction that establishes yet another social institution, one that collaborates in hiding our essential wholeness from ourselves?

We seem to have placed the welfare of this abstraction – the Ship – before our own best interests.  Instead, we have opted to behave according to the assumptions and expectations that define life aboard a Relation-Ship.  Perhaps, as we continue to examine our participation, it might become conceivable that Ships are deliberately designed to prevent real intimacy.

For many of us, Relation-Ships will appear to offer liberation from a deep-seated fear and sense of unwholeness. And so, we will mistake their decks as salvation vessels. This seems to be the human experience in its unredeemed, unconscious, unaware, unenlightened state. 

But what would authentic, conscious, aware, enlightened connection look like? The fact that we are questioning the phenomena called the Ship is the root of our liberation from confinement to its hull. Let’s trust the energetic principle that observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.

So, let’s continue to ask the questions. How might we extricate ourselves from this social institution’s pitiful, substitute intimacy? How might we move ourselves back into the very center of our own life equation and rhythm?

1 comment:

  1. What you are suggesting is that each of us make a conscious decision to disconnect from the social grid to save ourselves. While it looks good on paper, the reality of disconnection is that it quickens and advances the isolation between people, a place none of us wants to be. Disconnection breeds contempt, anger, and hatred for others, all hallmarks of our current societies and cultures. The mentality of 'us and them' is insidious. It permeates our lives from birth to the grave.

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