More Notes from SWEDA

SWEDA's a not-doing. Not-doings center around acting for something besides personal gain.

Not-doings are acts that we can't have strong feelings about, that we can't invest in, emotionally or otherwise. That's what makes them not-doings, and why they allow us to experience ourselves outside the constructed identity, with its carrot-whip agenda, as neutral, impersonal awareness.

Not-doings are things to do simply because we can ~ and because we know that, since in the light of our pending death, nothing is really "worth" doing, we may as well do something. It is the start of controlled folly.

A "pure" not-doing has no result at all, however, such as moving rocks around in a garden then trying to remember where they were and place them back in the exact same positions. It is pointless, and the only "reward" is that, because we can't think about what we are doing (it makes no sense), it calms down the internal dialogue and we experience a freer, more childlike expression of our being.

One problem people have with sweda, or with the people there, isn't that they aren't being straight about their incapacity to be straight; it's that they aren't enjoying expressing their twisty lack of straightness enough. They feel bored because they are used to only acting when there's something in it for them, some sort of perk. There are no perks at sweda.

Beyond the boredom and despair of constant self-immersion, of dwelling endlessly on our personal self, is the delight of acting and living for the sheer hell of it.

At SWEDA, you get to talk about yourself all day long with an audience of sorcerers!

What more could you possibly want out of life??

***

Being a man is like being a ghost. Living with death always at arm's length, just one touch away.

Living for nothing, yet with the abundance that comes through us when we are emptied of all our wants and needs.

***


Going finer.

The greater the noise, the harder it is to find a signal in that noise. But the deeper and more information-rich that signal will be if we do find it.

JDR talks about how it's easy to smell a flower and tune into the essence-of-being within that flower. He compares that with breathing in fumes, and tuning into the essence of being within those fumes. Point is, it is the same essence, the same being, but it's a lot harder to tune into it with fumes, than with the flower.

Going finer means being willing to drop beneath the surface and find what's of value even in the coarsest or most uncomfortable of situations. It's ignoring the gorgeous hard-bodied babe at the bar to talk to the geeky girl with pimples, because you sense that she has something to offer beyond boobs and lips. And then, by connecting to the geeky girl, experiencing a kind of attraction much softer, subtler, and richer because it wasn't immediately apparent.

It means being in an uncomfortable situation and, instead of trying to get out of it or change it to make ourselves more comfortable, just being in it as-it-is, and seeing what is actually on offer. What happens then is that we find a place within ourselves that is comfortable in the midst of our discomfort, and then we realize that we don't need all those surface elements to be comfortable, or turned on, or happy, or whatever, because we have all that within ourselves. We have the capacity to find a signal of truth in any amount of noise, of lies or ugliness or pollution or discomfort, or whatever we are surrounded by.

In simple terms, it is settling for less. And the less we settle for, the more we find.

The Soft Warrior

Here's a transcript of JDR from the last evening we were in Amsterdam. This is the one during which I felt John was talking directly to myself, as I had added my intent to the question. (Yes, John: tell me about rage!)

I also came to see it as a delayed response to my previously unanswered question, during our own talk, "Am I still a warrior?"

The answer is, "Yes. But a soft warrior!"

(I just found out that my own talk with JDR is going to available as a video download soon, BTW.)

Man: I am moving into the void, experiencing love and a lot of rage at the same time. I see my awareness of the external shifting simultaneously. I lose capacity to formulate.

John: Your heart is entreat-able. Where there is love your heart is entreated and in your heart you open and you respond. It’s your Will that you are identified with

Your Will is also entreat-able, but it is only entreat-able by love. When love touches your Will, you recognize it in your heart and your Will opens, but when something other than love touches your Will, in your Will, you close and you do that which you are able to do…and that is push.

In knowing that in your heart and in your Will you are entreat-able but only by love, then incline your heart to that despite anything else that touches your Will. That for you then is the surrender of your own Will to That that touches your heart the most. You won’t have the advantage in your person of ‘push’ any more. You won’t have the satisfaction in your person of ‘push’ any more. What you will have, even in your person, is a delicate pull of being touched in your heart. This will cost you in your self everything that you have acquired in your self in being able to push and in having pushed. You’ll be turning into, throughout your self, a delicate willingness of heart that will come up first in your Will.

Underlying all of the rage is that you want to ‘do’. There’s the openness to do, but as soon as you move to do, you move in a Will that is conditioned to how you’ve made your self, and in that is a real frustration because in openness to do and the willingness to do the wrong thing keeps happening, so then you do what you can…and that is push.

Follow-through to the actual openness, within, the openness to do, even if you don’t know how to do. Hold that openness to do within the softness of your heart and you’ll know from within that a very little bit of how to do, because you’ll already in your heart be being that. That beingness coming into your Will, coming into your capacity as a person to do, will move with an openness and a kind of softness, even in your Will, that you’ve not been accustomed to.

Look for such really Little-Bits that you already know in your heart and you’ll not be frustrated in your Will with little bits of movement. Those little bits of movement in your Will will be very much touching your heart. You will love the delicate process in that. You will love the softening in that. You’ll love the real nurture in that. Your self will soften as your heart does. As that becomes your way, the way of your heart in your self, your person will soften and you’ll love the nurture of that. You will love the delicateness of that in your person.

The rage comes from your trying to make too big of a jump at once, and you’ll be skipping over the delicacies in your heart that do make a real step in your Will, work. Follow-through with the Little-Bits, look for the really Little-Bits, and you’ll be overcome with ‘pull’ in your heart instead of ‘push’ in your Will. As you begin to do this and you experience the hardness of your own Will open and soften, you’ll be filled with joy at the delicacy of that. As soon as you see it work, your heart will be won by that.

When you see it begin to work, you’ll have the innocence of glee in your heart, just like that in a lovely, lovely little boy. You’ll know the same, but as a man. Living by that will make you a lovely, lovely man. In your Will make no really big steps or you’ll be reverting in your Will to using what you can…and that is ‘push’. Relate to the Tiny-Little-Bits in your Will that touch your heart, and you’ll then be moving as that in your Will, opening and softening in your Will in ways that affect your self and your person. You’ll see the Tiny-Little-Bits of progress, the kind of progress that fills your heart.

Stay close to it and you’ll not fall away from it.

The Art of Unliving

I've asked current SWEDANs to come up with advertising pitches for the process. Here's the first, from Steve "Hail." I'd like to see someone top this.

I lost all my friends, all my money, and all my aspirations on the ARGO-plan diet!

People keep coming up and saying "Shit man, you look awful! What happened to you?"

I tell them it's all thanks to new formula SWEDA! Say goodbye to your old personality and say "Hello!" to a brand-new you TODAY! Stop living and start dying!"

Before:

After:

Would You Pay Good Money to be Unplugged?

I have invented a service (SWEDA) for others that is difficult to identify the benefits of without first experiencing it. Since, ostensibly, all it entails is interaction via forum and skype ~ WORDS ~ the initial assumption seems to be that this is something that ought to be free. It's not costing me anything (besides my time), after all, and the Internet is all about the free traffic of information. Even the fact that I have started a private forum pushes a lot of peoples buttons. That's just what I am up against: consensus reality, and specifically, that pocket of CR that has formed a new consensus about how to break the old consensus, complete with rules and assumptions about how private forums are elitist, and so on (the 2nd matrix).

But this is all besides the point, regarding why so many people react with suspicion, and even hostility, to my charging to provide an existential detection service.

The penny finally dropped after talking to Joe. It's really very simple: I enjoy what I do.

This fact communicates to my audience. How could it not? Enjoyment is unmistakable. My audience (that's you), then, sees that I enjoy doing what I do, and they hear me asking for money to carry on doing it. The conscious question people are asking is: "Why should I pay for something when I don't know what I'm getting?" But, underneath that, the real question (I now suspect) is: "Why should I pay this guy to do something he obviously likes doing?"

We are programmed from very early on to accept that whatever we do to earn a living will not be for our enjoyment. It will be from sheer necessity. We learn to accept this "reality," and to compromise our natures and our desires so as to submit to society's decree. In order to live within the system, we have to become slaves to that system, and wind up doing things that we really don't want to do in order to have the money to do the things we do want to do. That's "reality." Right?

But what if someone did exactly what they wanted to be doing, what they most enjoyed, and got paid for it? Within the frame of reference of our social mandates, this is anathema, unthinkable, a fantasy. What's more, it is an affront to all those hard-working people who have sacrificed their time and compromised their beings in order to get along. It's insulting!

If I'm right, the reason people question me for charging money for what I do is less about their doubting the value of what I am doing, and more to do with an unconscious resentment that someone might actually be able to earn a living doing what they love. People are thinking to themselves: "I have to work for a living; why shouldn't he?"

(Sure, there are people who enjoy their work; but there's still the assumption that they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have to, and that they just learned to enjoy it by getting good at it. And even these people are fairly exceptional, and probably especially in my audience, which seems to consist of a lot of slackers who, like me, are trying to avoid work altogether.)

The irony of this is that, in work as much as sex, enjoyment is above all what improves our performance at it. The more I enjoy what I do, the better I am at doing it, and vice versa. Enjoyment is the essential factor in anything we do, most of all what we do "for a living."

What I do for a living is to facilitate awakening, by enhancing individuals' intelligence and self-awareness. In a nut-shell.

But beyond the content, there is also the form. What I am doing with SWEDA is pioneer work. It's never been attempted before. It is opening up new possibilities, not only for myself and for anyone who comes aboard, but also for anyone out there who is paying close attention.

People don't like that. To see new possibilities means to question the validity of the old possibilities, to recognize them as limited and limiting, and worse, to see themselves that way too: limited and limiting.

So if what I do fails, you can tell yourselves that you had it right all along. Nothing to worry about here. You're living as wage-slaves because, hell, that's the only choice we got, right? But if it succeeds, then you get to question all that time and energy you've been putting into drudgery. Because you too could have tried something entirely new, taken that chance, and also succeeded. That would really suck, right?

If I'm right about this, many of you out their are unconsciously invested in seeing me fail, because you are consciously invested in the old way of doing (and seeing) things. It's the way that says enjoyment and necessity have nothing to do with each other. It's the way you tell yourselves that, first you need to do what's necessary, and then, once that's done, and your future is secured, then you get to enjoy your "down-time." Doing what you love is all very well, but first you have to do what you hate. That's the program. And if you don't hate what you're doing, you aren't doing it right.

Me, I don't have much leisure time at all. Couple of hours in the evening watching Lost & Mad Men. But then, I enjoy my work day so much it sometimes goes on into the night. There are days when I don't facilitate anyone's awakening, but that's not by choice. I'm not doing this for money. I'm doing it for love of being. Which is exactly why I get paid for doing it.

This is a new way of doing business. Those who support me now, will be investing in that new way, and I suspect, they will find themselves supported by it further on down the line. I may even be paying your wages some day. ; )

On the other hand, I could fail. That's okay too. Which way it goes, is largely up to you.

How's that for an awesome response-ability?

SWEDA 101

To act out patterns usually feels good. We give our patterns what they want and so we feel like we are getting what we want: such as when we act in anger and get the other person to pay attention and listen to us.

Enmeshment is very simple: the actions of another cause certain feelings in us which we find unpleasant. We then react, either by overt provocation and confrontation, or by "withholding," withdrawing emotionally (sulking) and so controlling the other through creating distance. The aim is to generate feelings in the other that match our own.

This happens when honest and open communication breaks down, for whatever reason (usually our own fear of vulnerability and exposure).

Simply put, if we feel angry about what another does to us, instead of either taking the anger away and processing it alone, or communicating the anger to the other openly and softly, we try to provoke anger in the other so that they feel the same way we do. We have then "communicated" our feelings to the other, in the least honest (yet also most "direct") fashion. This is also known as "off-loading."

Letting our patterns control us means we get the "feel-good" of indignation or self-pity; but instead of being driven by patterns (which is like the donkey trying to escape the whip), we can give in to them without acting them out. That giving in causes us, as awareness, to sink deeper into the patterns, into what's beneath them. Beneath anger is usually fear of some kind; beneath self-pity a deep sorrow, and so on.

This doesn't feel good, because we are going into the very experience that our patterns were designed to take and keep us out of. But once we allow that experience, our patterns begin to dissolve: because they are no longer needed.