Yesterday on Joel’s call, I had such an interesting experience.
I as deliberating about speaking. Usually, if I am deliberating, I assume that I just need to do it.
This time I didn’t make that assumption. Instead I just was aware of my energy, and the energy of the others on the call. I made a different call.
When a man raised his hand to speak, and began sharing, I suddenly knew that this was why I didn’t share. He was describing his struggle with anger and experiencing an antagonistic world. Whoa, I thought. My decision to not share has directly affected this man’s decision to share.
I didn’t think this arbitrarily. It was based on the content of his share, and the content of mine.
My potential share was about how I had realized a profoundly manipulative mechanism in myself. It was the fact that I have received feelings and emotions and mistaken them to be about me or for me, and acted as if they were. In so doing, my behavior was highly manipulative. It is inevitable that my behavior was manipulative, as it was the result of a force which presented itself in such a way as to be forcefully, coercively, and violently manipulative.
But that wasn’t my exact potential share. My experience was more with my own journey of guilt, shame, blame, etc. I had realized this manipulative energy within myself, first, and I stood there at a crossroads; an impasse. The pressure to Judge and be Guilty to feel Ashamed came toward me. I perceived it, viscerally. I also perceived in it an unnamed enemy; that nameless, faceless, vague, hard-to-pin-down enemy which always eludes frank cognizance. I stood still. I apprehended the movements and the energies. Not out of fear, but out of an unwillingness to simply cede to an enemy of mine, however subtle, that which he sought.
I simply apprehended it.
And, I still do apprehend it. I’m not sure, or I don’t have any answers about, that particular enemy. What I learned through apprehending it is more about how I actually operate in the world. The feelings and emotions which I perceive as a result of accepting the invitation of that enemy are actually a choice; and a choice directs the experiences I am capable of perceiving. regardless of the fact that this enemy is so very subtle, so very sly, so very vague, invisible, and cloaked. It is only to our detriment that we believe that our thoughts are so very subtle, vague, invisible, etc, that they become so elusive to us.
And this is absolutely a choice. I am quite sure that every single human being on the planet has wondered at some point whether other people actually could perceive their thoughts. And the answer to that question is only an assuaging of their FEAR, GUILT, and SHAME! How perfectly the enemy has positioned itself! How subtly it moves and operates. It would be with immense admiration that I would apprehend it, but for it’s avarice and voracious appetite for my vital energy.
And so, when I heard this man share about his experience with his anger and resentment towards a world he perceived as antagonistic; I knew! I knew that this was indeed another confirmation of a magic that envelopes us all.
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