Yesterday’s arti­cle has gen­er­ated a cou­ple of ques­tions that I really like, and to which I responded. Now I want to get peo­ple to ask ques­tions here on the Blog!

Any­way here’s the two ques­tions, and my response.

My reply:

Ben & Jock think (and I agree) that some­where around 5% of the pop­u­la­tion chooses to exam­ine their beliefs, and let go of what does not work, adopt­ing more ele­gant behav­iours, etc.

I think your analy­sis is spot on. And yet, over the years, what I have seen are clients who decide that the way they are doing life is not worth doing any more, and so they adopt new meth­ods. And I agree this is def­i­nitely not easy, nor for the faint of heart.

I sus­pect that every­one feels a sense of “some­thing is wrong,†and what is wrong tends to be an irra­tional fear one represses. Depend­ing on your ’stripe’ you might see it as Freud did: sex­ual repres­sion, or as exis­ten­tial­ists do: fear of death, or as Bud­dhists do: (my present favourite) as an essen­tial know­ing that I have no “Self†— that there’s just a void “in there.â€

Most sim­ply feel greater or lesser amounts of Thoreau’s “quiet des­per­a­tion.†This, it seems to me is what moti­vates the 5% or so to cre­ate another path for them­selves. This requires the assis­tance of some­one who is also on a path of self-exploration and change.

Or so I keep sug­gest­ing… and so it seems to me.

My Reply:

As to events, well, your com­ment is sort of the point. Each sit­u­a­tion is entirely unique (and mean­ing­less) — and the ’flaw’ such as it is, is to attempt to fit the unique expe­ri­ence into a pat­tern. Now, in a sense, this makes sense as I don’t want to relearn to chew my food. As i relate to inter and intra per­sonal sit­u­a­tions, how­ever, I want to allow for myself the pos­si­bil­ity to respond, rather than to react. Espe­cially if the way I typ­i­cally ’react’ is get­ting me results I do not want.

In other words, ‘It is too dif­fi­cult until it is not.’

I sus­pect the key to all of this is the will­ing­ness to con­sult my goal for the inter­change. If it is to deepen rela­tion­ship, then my ego need drops away. Which also makes sense, as ’self’ is an erro­neous con­cept any­way! To para­phrase the Bud­dha, “SELF (as opposed to ’life’) is dukka (unsatisfactoriness.)â€