What do you mean by 'The situation will respond to the situation'?

What do you mean by 'The situation will respond to the situation'?

Dear Rupert, 

While allowing the body, mind and world to be, different thoughts arise, some not so savoury and others that might be better left not acted upon. It has been stated in your sessions that once one begins to abide as presence, situational responses will flow naturally. Some thoughts will engage the body, others obviously will not. 

Once again the quandary of will and volition plague me. In ‘The Timeless Place’ you state that the situation will respond to the situation. This is obviously no act of will. Is this akin to a stream flowing into a seeming obstruction and naturally re-routing itself as the terrain dictates? Am I seeing this clearly? Is this yet another area where we once believed that the separate entity had control but in reality it has none? 

Thank you for your time as always,
Kevin

 

Dear Kevin, 

Yes, I like your analogy of a stream flowing into an obstruction. However, it is not just the stream that is altered by the obstruction. The obstruction is also altered by the stream. 

Of course, this is only true if we consider the stream and the obstruction to be separate; they are in fact one indivisible landscape. That indivisible landscape is only made of separate parts from the point of view of one of the imagined parts. From the point of view of the landscape itself, there is always only one landscape, simultaneously acting upon itself and being acted upon by itself.

In other words, our seemingly objective experience is a single, indivisible whole, made only of mind (from a relative point of view). ‘Our own’ thoughts, feelings and actions, which are, of course, our own only from the point of view of the imagined entity that thought believes us to be, are an inseparable ‘part’ of the whole.

In fact, there are no separate entities or objects anywhere in existence. If we admit provisionally the existence of objective reality, it is one single whole. In order to consider it to be made up of parts, all acting upon one another of their own free will, we first have to imagine ourself to be one such an entity. In other words, entities and objects only seem to exist from the point of view of the imaginary entity that we consider ourself to be. 

That apparent entity is simply the forgetting or apparent ignoring of awareness. But awareness never truly forgets itself. It is only seemingly forgotten or veiled from the point of view of the mind. 

 

*     *     * 

 

Going back to your question about the practical implications of this understanding in life, see that your own thoughts and feelings are an inseparable ‘part’ of the totality ‘at every moment’. Nobody has, owns or chooses these responses. They simply arise along with everything else. There is no having, owning or choosing entity there.

As it becomes clear that there is no separate, individual doer, chooser, decider, and so on, ‘as time goes on’, the thoughts and feelings that revolve around this apparent entity, and the habits of behaviour that inevitably follow, will appear less and less. The thoughts, feelings and actions that do appear will be in line with your understanding. They will express love and understanding rather than the neurosis of an apparent entity. 

There may well be a period of time during which the olds habits of thinking and feeling (and therefore acting) on behalf of a separate entity continue to appear after the belief in such a one no longer appears. This is a transitional time in which the olds habits of the mind and the body are slowly winding down. In such a case, these thoughts, feelings and actions are not a sign of ignorance but simply the residue of ignorance at the level of the mind and body, slowly unwinding, as it were. 

So the answer to your question, ‘Is this yet another area where we once believed that the separate entity had control but in reality it has none?’ is ‘Yes’. 

However, it is not that the separate entity once seemed to have control and is now realised to have no control at all, but rather that the separate entity is utterly non-existent. It is simply that thought that identifies awareness with a body. Once this is seen clearly, there is no longer any question as to whether that non-existent entity has control, choice or free will. 

With love,
Rupert

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