by Terry 65 Replies latest jw experiences
Terry
If you had to have a doctor operate on you, would you want the doctor who graduated at the top of his class or the one who was near the bottom?
There are degrees of everything we know. Most people do not care about the details, the specificities and the inner connectedness of information. The genius will not settle for less.
I'd actually prefer not to have a genius operating on me - what if he had a eureka moment during surgery -
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
Full story online here: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html
'Real' isn't necesarily about hard facts - real is made up of what we experience too - you can't measure and quantify love, hate, joy, sorrow, anger, fear, happiness - does that mean they do not exist? And yes, being that part of real sometimes hurts - a lot - another part of reality.
Terry, please do read the rest of the story - I sense a hint of wild rabbit in you!
"What I want to know what is real or not is Terry's boobs."
Aww, my little gumbuddy is hungry, Terry...
(the beloved) I have come to my garden, my sister, my spouse; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk.
(to his friends) Eat, O friends! Drink, yes, drink deeply, O beloved ones! Song of Solomon 5:1
love dashulamite
'Real' isn't necesarily about hard facts - real is made up of what we experience too - you can't measure and quantify love, hate, joy, sorrow, anger, fear, happiness - does that mean they do not exist? And yes, being that part of real sometimes hurts - a lot - another part of reality.
Terry, please do read the rest of the story - I sense a hint of wild rabbit in you!
As an aside...
We actually can measure and quanitify our emotions (Love, hate, etc.) by realizing that those involuntary physical sensations are reflecting our core values about life. We build our values by how we pay attention to people, places, things as we go through our life.
The things we hold dearest (values) produce the strongest reactions as we encounter situations that enable us to possess our desired objects or--wrench us away and jeopardize the safety of them.
To the extent we inform oursleves, we form values and valuations.
What you will give, exchange or pay (in time, money, sacrifice or trade) for a valued thing, person or status determines the VALUE.
How much do I love my daughters, for example? What would I do to preserve them from harm? What I would pay (up to and including my life) indicates the extent of that valuation to me.
Secondarily--
The tricky part of us is the way we keep things sorted.
It comes down to labels and contexts.
We look into a mirror to see how we really look. The image is flipped. A mirror next to a mirror will flip it back again.
Recursively we keep track of what is what. Each remove flips and unflips our sense of things until we peer aghast at an infinity of mirrors trailing off into a vanishingly still point of darkness.
When we die, we are either remembered, or, not.
How we are remembered is not necessarily with any reality as to who we were. But, it becomes more "real" than anything remaining.
All this said to make one point:
If we cannot actually keep track of what IS and (is) we lose our way in a maze of recursive labels without context.
In Scientology, when a person becomes hurt or disoriented, a "Contact Assist" is ordered to set them right again.
This consists of touching actual objects and naming them...
"This is a table, this is a chair, this is the wall, this is the floor...."
Reality, for us, is how we reflect from our senses.
The snake we don't see coiled in the shadows can strike us and kill us.
The branch that looks like a snake can do us no physical harm---yet, alarm us to a fear of death.
Seeing, knowing and sorting is the sole responsibility of an active, searching, specific awareness stemming from an act of pure will.
What we don't bother to see or define can harm us. What we misidentify can terrorize us without merit.
The life we are living is set right or askew by our skill in knowing the difference.
(Very nice story. I'm a sucker for such tales and have told many a one myself to my kids each night as they were growing up.)
T
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=dyD3d5mRWMk
in natural selection
I've avoided all detection
and the tender bits underneath
all with window dressing and
calculated guessing
and a bark bigger than my teeth
It was the suit that got me the gig
It was the tear that got me the girl
I'm a sheep in this wolf's clothing
I'm a picture that I'm holding
of someone who is cool
soul like a thimble
swallowed up in symbols
wanting what I don't need
if sympathy's the answer
I'll have temporary cancer
but that's not what I'll have you believe
It was the suit that got me the gig
It was the tear that got me the girl
I'm a sheep in this wolf's clothing
I'm a picture that I'm holding
of someone who is cool
someone who is cool
close but kind of meatless
like actors who play Jesus
in movies of the week
What other people wish for
oozes from my every pore
I'm the coffee not the sleep
and I'm the song about the song
that once said something new
I'm a scandal that's unfolding
I'm a picture that I'm holding
of someone who is cool
someone who is cool
amour le femme
You can identify by their physical nature and observeable reality the after effects of a warzone!
Within a psychological warzone ( all too forcibly part of a real one as well) it is invisible to us and so all manner of psychologist speak appears often to those experiencing it, as politicians discussing the pros and cons of real war and the lives it destroys both in the civilian and military.
So it is my view that there is more to learn from them and less to tell them! There is more to just learn and ponder and less to impose as self help mechanisms doomed to fail!
Maybe help will evolve in some way but not by imposing another 'help' regime ontop of the one that has wrecked their lives.
Too many 'learned' scholars with no real experience of the emotional wreckage tell to those who have how they think or have learned things should be!
Methinks it often distills down to the one human fundamental;
One or more who love you and will stand by and build with you a future, a family and a community extolling love, compassion and caring with endless energy for each other - a tribe of energetic empaths is the secret to success and or recovery as far as I can tell! Nothing else comes close! IMHO
