Recall our goal this year is to pay attention and form good questions to generate an updated human operating system for developing potential for the new age we are entering. Yes, we have repeated this process since becoming upright in the savannas of Africa and the fact that we are still doing it hints that we have done well. All potential came with creation of the game and we humans are slowly, over centuries, sampling the options. We could always, on some level, imagine and even feel potential but integration was and still is the challenge. With every new experience we store a memo on a “post note” as a pattern and attempt to file with associated incidents but the range of diversity is huge. Most of our database is not integrated and nearly 97 percent unconscious. The only way I can imagine that we have survived this long is that we, on a good day, helped each other.
We have not all marched off the cliffs yet following a lead but a large percentage have (wars and pestilence). There is a glimmer of hope. A small percentage of our brain is integrated so we have some intellectual capability. We fantasize that having a giant body of knowledge is the secret. Not really how we got here and more options tend to generate more reactions and less intelligent responses. I suggest we use these skills to observe (not think) about how we operate. You may have memorized a map of the territory you are in but if you don’t attend to the clues as to your location the map is useless.
Pay attention not to learn but to observe. Your unconscious patterns were in play long before your third level of brain, the cognitive brain, developed. Observation, not intellect, inspires your hippocampus to update old files. Just watch and feel what the pattern is implementing. Ask yourself questions as to what is occurring. Your vigilance delays the reaction to allow for a flash review of the directing pattern. The goal, again, is not to intellectualize the experience, not to judge but to delay the automatic reaction affording a chance for update. Patterns operate fast because they assume nothing has changed—no time for thinking or evaluation. Many times, the update does not occur until the next firing of the template. This is how you learned as a very small child to function.
Starting in the nineties I organized a not-for-profit training center in Calif. We did classes on basic tools for managing awareness and attentiveness, lots of discussion groups and, on average, a three-day seminar each month for over 14 years. Most themes repeated annually and a popular one was basically integrating mindful meditation with curiosity. We not only explored as a young child does, local plants and animals and basic movement from a curious nature without intellectual content, we also partnered up and one person would act out emotionally when the other would observe how they orchestrated the event. Very powerful observing life without the need to intellectually learn or know. I’m suggesting you attend, without attempting to “figure it out”, whatever is occurring in your world now. Just notice how it winds or unwinds and look for clues that you notice in the process. No thinking—just observe. Record and save your observed clues and next month we will discuss how to translate them into questions (not thoughts or possible solutions). Have fun being curious!
Chriss
