It’s Sunday, so let’s slow right down and ask the big philosophical questions.
Do I seem to contradict myself some times?
Does that put you off?
(I mean, you haven’t unsubscribed yet, so it appears not.)
But there are times when I know I’ll suggest one thing—for instance that you could direct your focus away from the analytical mind, and more to life as it is, right now, to see a positive difference in your experience—and then two minutes (or two emails) later, I’m claiming there is no such thing as free will and you can’t do stuff like that, using so called “will power.” That really, you have no choice.
So what gives? Why am I inconsistent like that?
Well, the way I see it, especially when it comes to the nature of our experience, is that more than one thing can be (or appear) true at once.
It’s like the Great Glass Consciousness Elevator (GGCE) ↕️ I wrote about, a while ago – one minute we see something one way, and the next minute we’ve gone up a few floors, got some altitude on it and it looks completely different… but even from that loftier perspective, we will still be fooled by thought masquerading as presence, and it gets very messy, trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Giles P Croft
Up and down like a yo-yo, all day (and life) long.
It’s all relative and there’s no right and no wrong; just whatever we’re seeing in that moment.
And here’s me writing about it every day—as my own GGCE ↕️ goes up and down from floor to floor and I continue to see things differently—to a community of beautiful souls who are also in their own GGCEs ↕️ going up and down from floor to floor and no doubt seeing things from different perspectives every day too.
So why write for just one of those floors?
🤷🏻♂️
One day I’ll write something and it will catch you on the exact same floor you’re at and 💥 you’ll see something fresh, that really helps.
Maybe that’s why these writings appear inconsistent, from time to time.
It’s my best guess, anyway.
This was never made clearer than when I listed to one of my favourite teachers, Dicken Bettinger (who is very unambiguous), in a conversation about the topic of free will.
Asked directly whether or not he thought we have free will, he gave no less then three separate answers:
- No
- Yes
- No (differently)
And we can flit between all three, that look equally true, at any time. That’s about as paradoxical as it comes!
So what’s the stone cold objective truth?
Well, does it really matter, when you experience No, Yes, and a different No as if each were objectively true?
🤔
When push comes to shove, it’s the mind’s seeming need to put concepts like free will into a “true” or “false” box that is the real problem here.
It gets all black & white on us and tries to hang on to one particular position, only to experience a crisis of faith when it doesn’t actually see it that way, for itself!
Ha ha!
None of this stuff is a rigid “either/or”. That’s the path of the mind. Right/wrong. Duality.
You’ll go mad, listening to the mind debate itself on those terms.
As with these writings, life is full of paradox and I think it’s actually a much more inclusive “AND” … something I felt so strongly about and saw so clearly, that one day I went to the trouble of having a t-shirt made!!
For realsies.
😂
Giles
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