WOW! This book is amazing.
When we attach feelings to thoughts, we take those feelings out of the here and now and put them into time & space. Time and Space has 4 directions:
We move away from the true self because we resist feeling the emotions that arise:
We take these natural feelings and attach them to thoughts, creating 'Feeling-Thoughts:'
Feeling-Thoughts consume our energy and take us out of the Here-Now.
Because of our resistance to feel the feeling, we piggyback on thoughts, and those thoughts cause the feeling to persist.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Social conditioning. She provides examples of how from a young age we are taught to solve the problem, not accept the feeling. Our parents don't want us to feel negative emotions, so they offer solutions and suggestions. Much of our society does not value free and authentic expression of feelings.
3 Linchmen:
Simply stated, these are how our thoughts pull our focus into judging, comparing, or not occurring right now. compared, or not occurring. When we do this, our energy and attention is wasted.
The term is one you may not see often: Negation - NOT Negotiation. Negation means 'that which is not occurring.'
It's the sad fact that we can be sitting in paradise and not even be aware of it. Because our thoughts are running the show.
When I first read that word, I misunderstood where the writing was heading. Negation is much different than negotiation. I wonder how often we do this through our days & lives. We jump to conclude the meaning of something we see, yet fail to see we misunderstood it from the start. I discovered it only because I took time to assimilate what I read - using the learn by writing system.
This highlights the importance of not introducing a lot of new and unfamiliar words into your writing. They may make sense to you as the author, but will often be confuse to the reader.
All thoughts are abstractions, inherently limited. The whole entails experience. Experience is not thought. Because thought pulls predominately from the past, it is limited to that experience and to what it can put into language. To experience the whole, the entirety of it all, we must stop attaching feelings to thoughts.
Life is not thought. Thoughts are only concepts and ideas about life. They can never be life itself. They can only describe it. Life is experience, and experience transcends thought. To live means to experience. Our purpose of living is to experience. Every living thing is experiencing as it lives. Only when it ceases to live does it become an idea, a thought, a concept. In other words, all thoughts are inanimate. But life is animated. We can think about doing it, but it's not until we do it that we live it. And not until we live it can we ever know it. I can tell you what it's like to teach someone how to do something, but until you teach that person, you cannot know. How can you teach other until you know? But as students, they must act from that knowledge to know it. Until we live it, it's only a concept. Concepts are flawed and in the eye of the beholder. Experience on the other hand is what is real. The only things in life we truly know are the things we've personally experienced. Everything else is just a hypothesis.
Nobody is difficult, but our concepts of who they are make it so. Nothing is difficult in practice, it's only the concepts, thoughts, ideas, preconceived notions that make them appear so.
Limits only exist in our mind. When we take ourselves into thought-space, we take ourselves into the past & future. We form concepts of the ability of ourselves our others in relation to an idea. It is in this practice that we leave the here-now, fail to see the limitless 'I Am.'
Come back to the self, come back to the here and now. What you experience is the truth, everything else is just idea (and inherently flawed & limited).