May 14
13
Integration of the Mind – Part Twenty-Five
-Backing Up Does Not Mean Starting All Over-
Always be cautious when looking back.
Backing up to the point where we were switched off the track onto a siding doesn’t require starting all over, but the visual does help us reach the point of realization that we can’t move forward UNTIL we do back up. This brings up one of my favorite tools – I refer to it as my desperation tool. It is the tool that, when all else fails, brings me back to a place of peace and joy and utter gratitude AND CREATIVITY.
To continue using the metaphor, we can’t back up the train until we are aware that there is no way to make forward progress, again, UNTIL we are back on the main line. That takes admitting that we got off the main track. Admitting when we are stuck takes humility and that’s my tool of desperation.
It comes from a story that Jesus told about two men who went up to the Temple to pray. The implications are amazing …the application has been nothing short of powerful for me and for those who are willing to try it.
What the story uncovers is simple, according to Jesus. One of the men, who was religious, and had done everything properly in his life, was praying and thanking God, no less, for being better than other men. He went through a litany of all the things he did right …and he expressed gratitude especially for the fact that he was better than the other man in the story – a Roman tax collector, a breed known for being the worst among the worst. This tax collector had become aware of all the bad things he had done …and was beating on his chest and crying out, “Oh God, be merciful unto me a sinner.”
Humility changes you, when applied honestly or applied repetitively.
What Jesus said about the two men is what caught my attention. He said that the tax collector went away from the experience clothed in God’s righteousness, INSTEAD of the religious guy who most people think of as “good” and who walked away unchanged and still filled with self-righteousness and powerlessness.
When I simply cannot get freed up to think freely and productively, and I feel loaded down with all sorts of obstacles and try every other tool in my box, I literally beat on my chest and cry out, “God be merciful unto me a sinner!”
Sounds silly, I know, but it also works a “miracle.” Continuing on with the visual and metaphor of the train stuck on a rail siding in the middle of nowhere …instead of having to go backwards to the point where it was switched onto the siding it is miraculously lifted back onto the track, if not instantly, within a relatively very short time.
Now, to let you in on a little secret, this series and/or book, if that is how you are reading it, is not aimed at a religious audience …the religious types in my acquaintance turn a deaf ear to this story anyway. But curiously, those who are somewhat anti-religious (as I confess to being) recoil at the mention of Jesus because they tend to think of him in religious terms; well, folks, anti-religious is just the other side of the same coin of being religious, both sides of the coin get polished and the reflected light (as opposed to light directly from the SOURCE blinds us to the truth of the message.
Over and over again, until it works. You'll know when it does.
I cannot tell you why this crazy act works, but it does and quickly. This is where I will probably (no guarantees) end all reference to hypnosis …still a great tool in my tool box, but the point of hypnosis, as I was first exposed to the practice, was in an application called “regression.” Hypnotherapy, as was part of my psychiatrist friend’s training, during his hospital residency and perhaps why the visual of the train is having such a continuing impact upon me, meant using hypnosis to take a mental patient back to the age where he or she lost touch with “reality” as some within the mental health profession view that state of being.
I was amazed, early on, in my business consulting career, to find that owners of companies, even presidents of corporations, who were not only decidedly NOT religious, were quite open to the story and would even try the exercise themselves, later telling me how amazed they were how well it worked!
Sometimes you need help to get unstuck. Ask Source, "is this for me?"
Instead of seeing some business problem as being insurmountable, they began to see it as simply a challenge to look at what had seemed to be a vexing problem as teeming with opportunities. So, while many of my contemporaries insist upon using hypnosis …which can and will work to get someone “unstuck,” I find this and many other tools to be far quicker and less fraught with problems, including the resistance and fear many people have even at the mention of hypnosis.
In other words, we not only don’t have to start ALL over, we may not even have to go back to where we got off the track. Abject humility gives the SOURCE, by whatever other title or name, permission (for those of the mind that we are created with a “free will”) to take over and place us back on the track and it is totally effortless and freeing.
Just one more time, I don’t know WHY it works, but it does. It takes me to the place of insight and power, again, for me, of realizing that I don’t know squat and that I have to continually ask, “What Now?” …which, like it or not, was how I “received” this article.
Nuff sed for this time out …see you right back here at #26.