Turq said to Rory: "Now let me get this straight. Someone says something, and that causes part of you to feel discomfort, which you perceive as suffering. So you do "the work" until the discomfort goes away and you're feeling blissful, in the "paradisical state of radiant Being," the way things *should* be. Did I get that right?
Sure doesn't sound *anything* like moodmaking to me. :-)" Turq, My definition of moodmaking has always been "pretending." Theatrical acting. Katie's "the work" seems like "making it so." To me, that's a big difference. It might end up being merely a matter of degree if one really hacks down to the core concepts, but on a workaday level, the work seems like it gets the job done: no more fear in that "part of the nervous system;" whereas, moodmaking seems to do little to prevent the fear from arising again. "Fear" means dissonance in some fashion, cognitive, emotional, physical, the "Arjuna dilemma." Moodmakers whistle past the graveyard; workers stop by the graveyard and peer Frost-snowy-woods deeply into it until the fear "gets over it." Something like that. How workers do "one thing at a time," is harder for me to see. That's the part of Katie's plan that seems a big hump to surmount. I think most of us here would support the notion of infinite correlation, so actually any work done has to involve all of existence if it is to be done "perfectly." Oy, such a bother! I intuit that the work is somewhat superficially done if done in the waking state's cacophony as opposed to what can be done in a deep, calm, almost-no-thinking-going-on-otherwise, ritam-ish state. Not having done the work, much, I don't know if this is true -- just seems theoretically so to me. Compared to the energy levels of waking, the subtle realms are quite delicately sensitive to noisy big thoughts. Like trying to talk in a normal voice to a friend when a fire engine screams by, who can do the work with any precision on the ritam levels or even a merely "somewhat subtle" level, if waking life's concerns are creating a big emotion? Trying to do the work in an ally with a mugger's gun in one's neck seems unlikely to succeed, right? Oh, I suppose the work, even in the ally, can be done like that Zen guy, hanging by a branch over the cliff with the tiger above and the rocks below, who tastes the strawberry and finds it an especially sweet litany, but for most of us, the work is a tough slog -- just trying to find the motivation and time requires a deep clarity and resonance with the work, methinks; otherwise, who bothers to do this when the list of things to attend to is so very long? To me the work seems like "THE TON OF WORK THAT IS PAINFULLY HUMBLING." Try putting that on your morning agenda. I think the work is strongly challenged by the TM concept of capture the fort. Why do so much reprogramming of the personality when one should just get out of the "I'm a personality" identification? But, of course, every Buddhist out there doing 10,000 prostrations will have a different view, eh? It's like the prostrations are "the work -- in the waking state," in that so much of one is engaged by that processing -- heart, mind, body -- a prostration is a fast puja to me. To me, the Buddhists should at least philosophically wholly embrace the work's dynamics, mundane though they be. The TM shuffle whereby karma is "cheated," seems so alluring comparatively. TM -- the no persperation spiritual exercise. TM of course promises 200% -- freedom and then, cherry on the top bonus, the personality you now no longer are is a beautiful automaton-of-God doing wonders every nanosecond for all sentient entities. Such a romantic vision -- no wonder I fell for it. To me, CC is freedom, and GC is doing the work to get the personality in line with the situation. That done, unity dawns when the robot is in resonance and comfortable with the egoless state. It's one thing to have the checkbook and scepter of the king, and quite another to act naturally and spontaneously in a kingly fashion. See the films King Ralph, Matrix, Thirteenth Floor, Freaky Friday, and/or The Hidden for the trials and delights of sudden shifts in identification and the struggle to adjust. Right now, if I were freed of my identification with this meat robot, I'd be basking in the eternal sunshine, but the robot would be working still on the spotless mind part of the deal. A plane's propeller keeps spinning after the engine shuts off. Like that. They say it takes 15 years in a cave for that propeller to stop, or much longer if one is engaged in daily life's pushes and tugs. I believe this. Even if not free yet, I believe that one has to merely stop using a "part" of the brain, and it will slowly lose identificational investiture, fade, dilute, spread out, diffuse -- something like that -- and become less likely to "create thoughts." If I were in CC, I believe I would be not working on parts anymore and be removing identification from the whole system -- gets the job done faster probably. To me that's what's happening from CC to GC; without an ego controlling the attention of the robot, attention is freed to be infinite instead of point value oriented. And the body/mind, suddenly free of gravity, takes some time as it gets used to floating. Merely words, above, not truth, but that's what we do here, eh? Anyone hungry for a slaumer? Edg
