While we confine our interest in Field practice to that inner state of self-friendliness we call “alignment,” we are aware that the Law of Correspondence operates—that is to say, that who we are determines the contours of our reality, inner and outer, for the universe is always paying attention to and “proving” who we believe ourselves to be. If we believe we are victims, we will not have to wait long for the universe to arrange conditions that allow us to demonstrate that belief. If we believe ourselves lucky, then this belief, too, will work its magic, for the universe is a magical place, and we ought not to let those who have become inured to the wondrous tell us otherwise.

Einstein said that the most important question we can ask is the question, “Is the universe a friendly place?” Here at the Field Center, we feel that there is a more important and prior question: “Are we friendly?” for the universe is neither more nor less friendly than we are resolved to be in the inmost recess of our being. In this, we see that the Law of Assumption is none other than the Golden Rule, for as we are, so we receive, and with an efficiency that never rests, never takes a vacation, never forgets. So we are wise to direct our attention not to what we are getting but to what we are giving, for the giving informs the getting, and does so with the authority and relentlessness of natural law. If we are friendly, which first and foremost means self-friendly, then we must find ourselves living in a friendly universe. And this is why we answer Dr. Einstein’s question with a question.

Now, if this self-friendliness were easy to come by, everyone would embrace it, and the evening news would not be what it is. We would not give in to the siren songs of adverse fact; we would release old payoffs gracefully the moment we outgrew them; we would be more inventive than reactive; love for the ideal would motivate us more than fear; and we would be so busy lighting the candles of alignment that there would be no darkness to curse. But we have been tireless in coming up with ways to be set against ourselves. Do we settle for less than our dreams, our passion, our “bliss” as Joe Campbell calls it—having condemned the best in us as “unrealistic” or “impractical?” Do we give in to despair or hopelessness, or assume the role of the victim? Do we secretly believe that we have been thrown here without purpose or meaning, to fend for ourselves until death comes for us? Are we unwilling to receive? Are we carrying burdens of responsibility that we are not constituted to carry? Do we deny what we know in our heart and gut, or pretend to know more than we do? Do we secretly believe that no matter how hard we try, it’s never enough? These are only some of the ways that we have devised to be unfriendly—and we wonder why life can be so hard.

This is why we do the work we do at the Field Center. Even one person shifting from contradiction and suffering to alignment and joy becomes a candle, an example, an inspiration, and a nonlocal influence. And we recognize further that, while the work is inner, the results ripple outward into reality, infusing the air with the friendly self-relation such that everyone with whom an aligned person comes into local contact and many with whom he or she does not will end up smiling, perhaps without knowing why. One form these ripples of self-befriending take in their less local expressions is something Carl Jung termed “synchronicity”—a word for ingenious timings that demonstrate an extraordinary degree of relevance in a form that proves helpful or useful. These are the Field’s ingenious remedies that come unbidden, when we have forgot to look for them, when we are too busy being in love with being alive to believe that we’re lacking anything, when our identity has become an outflow of gratitude for the improbable gift of this very moment. Then we see the friendly universe taking up our cause, opening doors where there were none that we could see, making the arrangements and connections for the fulfillment of our heart’s desire in ways we never could have anticipated.

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It seems like a simple enough matter to state, as Field training does again and again, that identity is the key to conscious creating, that “reality is in the I of the beholder.” Yet I suspect that if we caught even a glimpse of the identities to which we are giving ourselves, we would be startled if not shocked, for we would see that we are not who we think we are, that we are often deeply committed to identities that we would never wittingly accept. Let me give a simple example: One Field training student announced proudly that she was a “survivor.” This is how she saw herself. What she did not see was how this identification amounted to a contract with the Field that her reality had to fulfill, and she continually found herself in situations to survive. Another student understood her identity as a mother, with “mother” defined as a woman tirelessly devoted to rescuing her children from one crisis after another. This was, it seemed self-evident to her and so beyond questioning, what a good and loving mother did. Unfortunately, and this part of it was anything but evident to her, the identity of “the one who rescues” requires others who are willing to read the opposite lines—which is to say, to need rescuing. The moment she realized that her commitment to “mother-as-rescuer” involved a secret, nonlocal contract that her children, out of their great love for her, kept signing and fulfilling, the very love that had informed the contradiction made the old choice unacceptable.

Now, neither the woman who saw herself as a survivor nor the mother who did not realize the nonlocal implications of needing to save her children even suspected that they had given themselves to contradiction, and not just a five-and-dime, take-it-or-leave-it contradiction, but a contradiction that gave the universe no choice but to keep presenting problems and suffering. We may take up a role in which we feel some sense of pride, but what does that role presuppose? What condition must be fulfilled in order for that identity to be expressed?

There is a well-known Native American saying: “What you protect, you make weak.” The one who identifies with the role of the protector as a rule does not see how that identity invites weakness in others. The payoff of assuming such an identity eclipses the price it exacts, but the Field doesn’t miss a trick, and we get what we require whether or not we understand what the requirement itself requires.

Every identity has its dialectic, which means that every identity is a curriculum that eventually leads beyond itself to something greater. Identities in this sense are seeds; they are broken open by what they contain. This breaking open takes place the moment we wake up to the secret contract implicit in whatever identity has had our allegiance. Hidden in every identity, however tormented by contradiction, is an ideal, the longing for the fulfillment of something beautiful and good. There is something beautiful in the resolve to “survive,” to overcome all odds, and so on. In the same way, the impulse to protect and support and help those we love ultimately is an expression of selflessness and devotion that bears witness to the deep and abiding empathy of love. And yet. . .and yet—the preconditions are there, on the hidden side of the ideal, like the dark side of the moon. And we are responsible for the contracts we sign, even the secret ones.

Field training is a path of self-awareness. It is not something that we can use to create this or that factual condition. In truth we, as Heidegger noted about philosophy in general, we cannot do anything with it—but if we let it, it can do something with us. Something wonderful.

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While Field training is a philosophical rather than religious model, many regard it as a spiritual path for daily living. In that it deals with fundamental principles, it shares common interests with the world’s great spiritual and religious traditions East and West, insofar as these traditions also are viewed as addressing the great questions of existence and our place in the universe, and especially of our nature as creative beings made “in the image” of that which created us. For this reason, Field training often cites statements and passages from the various scriptures of these traditions, in order to illuminate an understanding of them from the perspective of consciousness-as-cause.

One of the most beautiful of these for the sheer simplicity and elegance of its language is the 23rd Psalm of David. Here’s the psalm with a annotations based on Field training principles:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Here David tells us that we exist in relation to something greater than ourselves that, like a shepherd, can protect, guide, and provide for our every need.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.

“Green pastures” signify the abundance that is available to us when we are willing to follow the promptings of the “shepherd.”

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

The life of abundance, the life in which we “shall not want,” is characterized by “still waters,” which means stillness in consciousness, or inner stillness. Water is a universal metaphor for consciousness. Paradoxically, the abundant life of “green pastures” is found when we withdraw from the world and allow ourselves to become aware of the stillness that is ever present within us.

He restoreth my soul.

This is a deeply reassuring awareness. Regardless of the state of doubt, anxiety, confusion, fear, or lack in which we may find ourselves, our consciousness (soul) can be restored through dipping into the still waters that feed the green pastures of life in abundance.

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake.

“Paths of righteousness,” in Field training terms, are the paths of alignment, self-love, self-honoring, and willing acquiescence in the truth as expressions of our creative nature. As creators, we are “made in the image” of the Creator (the Field), out of which we spring forth each moment, the All That Is that some refer to as God. Here we have a reminder that our creative nature is derived from the Eternal. Thus, Field training would suggest that “Name’s sake” is more profoundly translated, “namesake.” It is not for the sake of the Field’s name that we are given the opportunity to walk the path of alignment, but for our own.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

The worst obstacle or fear is rendered a mere shadow by returning to the place of “still waters” and remembering that the shepherd is always with us, accompanying us, protecting, guiding, and providing for our every need. It is a remarkable arrangement! Our part is to be still, to be willing, to acquiesce in our truth, and to follow willingly—to be “sheep,” though only in this sense, and not in any sense of passivity or thoughtlessness. The student who has discovered the power of “Thou art with me,” and who lives in deference to the Field—who lives every situation “through the Field, as it were, has unlocked the secret of the psalm.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

The enemies of life manifest within our consciousness before they manifest as factual conditions. David is reminding us here that we have something to say about this, that we can meet adverse conditions—inner and outer—willingly, regarding any situation before us as the “preparing of the table,” or fulfillment of our greater good, and so refuse to allow our consciousness to be taken over by fears, doubts, unwanted conclusions, and resistance.

Thou anointest my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.

The anointing of the head in ancient times had ceremonial significance that marked someone as special. David himself was anointed when he became king. This line in the psalm tells us that our nature is “kingly” or royal, and so again states our kinship with the Divine. As a direct result of this anointing, or stepping up to our divine nature as creators, the cup of fulfillment is filled to overflowing.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

David ends the psalm with the joyful assurance that goodness is neither an accident nor subject to time any more than it is subject to other conditions. Goodness is our companion forever as long as we remain beside the still waters and green pastures of alignment, delegating our lives to those hands that fashioned us and living in a state of receptivity and willingness.

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Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out that we often take our questions to those who will support the answer we secretly want. The young man who is considering joining the French Resistance but feels torn because his aging mother needs him to care for her may seek out a priest for counsel, but then he is likely to get very different advice than he will get if he takes his question to a freedom fighter. So do our actions inform our path, and how we deal with a question about how to live often points to its answer.

Over the years, I’ve found that many of us frame questions along the lines of yes-answers. “Should I leave my marriage?” for example, isn’t at all the same question as “Should I stay married?” This is one of the reasons I listen closely when students ask a question—because the truth, meaning the truth of the student’s being, is already being confessed in how the question is informed. One of the most common questions, hiding between the words, is “What’s wrong with me?” The student has assumed that something is wrong, and has rounded up a posse to hunt down whatever varmint is responsible. The Field Center Course calls this “going on a witch hunt for an unwitting counterintention.” I suspect that the prevalence of the question comes from a generation that became obsessed with self-assessment and infatuated with psychotherapy. Of course, any therapeutic model presumes that something is wrong, as it is exactly this something wrong that therapy proposes to fix. Field training, being more interested in the underlying structures of consciousness than in any particular staging of them, looks more to the question itself and its underlying assumption of something-wrongness—because to the extent that one believes that something is wrong, then to that extent will the belief fulfill itself, and something really will be wrong. At the same time, however, we might point out that a very different sort of answer would follow from the question, “What’s right with me?” The question immediately takes its leave of anything therapeutic, for where something is right, there is nothing to fix. And we find that this is anything but a semantic difference. Students who start asking themselves what’s right with them begin to find reality just as eager to prove the new assumption. People who make this little journey for their own sake discover a source of confidence and well-being that their earlier question had missed. Parents who take up the stance inherent in the something-right question toward their children find almost magical improvements in the quality of their being-together. Like the young man who goes to the priest, they get out of the moment what they bring to it.

There’s a suggestion here that we can learn a great deal by paying attention to the questions we ask, how we ask them, and how we go about seeking their answers. The Course reminds us that “there’s no time off” from our consciousness. We can choose to move beyond our infatuation with what’s wrong and begin noticing all that’s right.

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It is a fundamental truth of Field training that the world is as we are, for what we mean by “the world” at any moment is already a construct of our identity. So, for example, and not surprisingly, the man who is secretly at war with the world and others will find himself in a world of enemies, while the man who heads into the day expecting the best from people, who is generous with them in spirit and slow to blame will find the world friendly and accommodating in return. These are obvious examples of a principle that often takes far subtler forms. For example, we may unwittingly operate from an identity of excessive seriousness, either generally or in one or more specific staging areas—such as love or supply. If we simply turned our attention to how we’re showing up in this area, we would see readily that all playfulness, all lightness had fled—and this is just how some students go about trying to consciously create their experience. They are serious, deadly serious—and the whole thing becomes lifeless—a labor, a chore, a burden. They drag their consciousness through the method provided in the Field Center Course, faithfully following the steps, but their seriousness banishes the natural ease and joy of it all, then they wonder why their world remains somber and gray. Often these students want to know what they’re doing wrong, but the problem isn’t the “what” of it, it’s the “how.” Deliberate intending is playful. Like play, it is something to be engaged in for its own sake.

G.K. Chesterton writes, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” There is a more serious view, of course, that disdains play. Life is serious business, it insists. And there is little time to play once we have grown up to the responsibilities of adult life. This view typically holds the imagination in similar contempt. Daydreaming is for idlers, and playing is for children. And such a view is tragic is many ways, not the least of which is that it would cut us off from the wellsprings of creative power and authority that we carry natively. We would do well to follow the example of children, who are past masters of playfully adopting whatever identity pleases them. They do not do this to make something happen; they do it for the fun of it. And yet, as it turns out, this “for the fun of it” is a power in its own right, and a power with a reach that no amount of seriousness can rival.

The man or woman who sets out to deliberately intend, say, the fulfillment of the romantic identity, soon discovers something remarkable: playfulness is deeply attractive. Of course, the attracting power of playfulness is not limited to romantic aims. All of the things that we value, that we hold to be good, are subject to its gravitational pull. The pending business deal, the artistic vision, even the body’s balances and efficiencies—all are furthered by the playful spirit and charmed into expression.

Seriousness understands none of this. It is quick to dismiss the best in us, but we don’t have to take our seriousness seriously. Indeed, playfulness requires this of us, and also reminds us that “taking ourselves lightly” depends to a great extent on letting go of our will, our sense of urgency, our little demands that this or that happen in this or that way in such and such a time. Really, there is no way to be playful as long as we still believe in the power of our will to make things happen, as long as we have not acknowledged that we live each moment by the generosity, ingenuity, and elegant efficiency of a will greater than our own. In this sense, the playful person is the person who has gone on spiritually, who has overcome himself, as Confucius writes, and so “has the world spinning on the palm of his hand.”

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At our Waves of Change Conference, which ended yesterday and was attended by a most remarkable group of Field training students, I shared an excerpt of an essay written by Adi Da, a well known teacher of things spiritual. The gist of the essay was that all is mystery, that we don’t know ultimately what anything is—an apple, a tree, ourselves, each other—and that really no one knows what anything is or how it came to be. Heidegger, the groundbreaking phenomenologist who was a student of the pioneering Husserl, suggested something similar when he posed what he regarded as the central question of metaphysics: “Why are there things rather than nothing?” This “why?” we soon discover, can’t be answered in the usual way that we answer “why?” questions, because it is a highly unusual question—a question that questions everything.

“Why are there things rather than nothing?” We can only answer this by allowing a deep shift in our very being. Something in us rises up to meet the question at the edge. Heidegger’s question, if we allow it, can carry us into a face-to-face experience with the mystery of things, not of why they are but that they are. This is the question’s true purpose—to rouse us from a kind of ontological amnesia, to awaken us from what Kant called “dogmatic slumber’ so that the truth of things, which includes the fundamental mysteriousness of being-here, stands forth once again, and in the moment that we gaze upon it, and see it gazing back at us, something in us opens—a door, a way into a new order, a freeing confession—and we find that with an acknowledgment of mystery, with an admission of that, as Adi Da tells us, comes joy.

Mystery is central to Field practice for two reasons. First, as the Course tells us, the Field operates in the truth, and mystery is the truth of our being-here, such that no model that fails to recognize mystery can be true. Second, uncertainty is an essential refuge in Field practice anytime we find that we’re giving ourselves to contradiction. And uncertainty is mystery’s twin. Standing before mystery, we all become the old master, Socrates, in that we suddenly know that we know nothing. Uncertainty is not a technique. It’s the truth, and in a real sense the truest truth, because mystery is the very foundation of our existence. Its gaze is everywhere, hiding in obviousness. To be soft enough, honest enough, willing enough to allow it to disclose itself again, to admit even to oneself the ineluctable truth of uncertainty is to return to innocence (literally, “not knowing”). As we release conclusions and come home to our innocence, our lives become like soft clay. The hands of the Field can work on them, fashion them into something beautiful, something wonderful. And all of this is made efficacious simply through the willingness to gaze upon and be gazed upon by mystery.

G.K. Chesterton writes that fairy tales tell us of rivers of wine and gold apples because in order to remind us how amazed we were the first time we discovered that rivers flow with water and apples are red—and states further that this is why we love them. In the end, to live without mystery is to live without living. All we think we know is a folly that counts against our joy. The omnipresence of mystery renders all our so called knowing a Pyrrhic victory, because the opinions, conclusions, and theories that we carry around in our head soon become baggage that weighs us down. The moment we admit that we don’t know something, we feel lighter, don’t we? Why? Because the truth of the world is mystery, and the truth of self is mystery, and the truth of all things is mystery, so that it is impossible to be on friendly terms with the world or the self or things without first befriending mystery. Such befriending opens us, lights us up, returns us to innocence and curiosity, restores the miraculous that got lost along the way of growing older and growing busy, turns water into wine and apples into gold, and allows a secret conversation with—Something—to begin.

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Happy new year, and welcome back to another year of Realities. This week, we want to look at the so called “law of attraction.” Many New Age sources make reference to this principle, according to which, as we’re told, we can attract things we want by visualizing, using affirmations, or doing something else with our consciousness. Now, from the Field training perspective, the principle is inherently flawed because it’s rooted in self-contradiction for the simple reason that one must first believe the desired thing to be distant in order for the idea of attracting it to make sense. But since belief is the generative force, and as there’s no time off from our beliefs, if one believes that the desired thing is sufficiently distant to need to be attracted, then one is already creating the distance. Distance from what we desire is equivalent to lack. There is no escaping the conclusion that anything we believe we must attract will remain far from us.

This distinction, not surprisingly, makes for very different approaches to living creatively. Field training tells us that the cornerstone of conscious creating is identity. At the end of the day, there is nothing we can do with our consciousness, no inner trick or technique that can veto the authority of who we are choosing to be. If we believe we lack something we want, then we are being the one who lacks it, and our creating already has been set in motion in the direction of the very lack that we wish to overcome. Therefore, there is nothing to attract in Field practice. There is only something to be. As we embody the identity that most pleases us, we find that what we want to experience is always at hand, and as the Course tells us, there is no waiting in practice. The desired identity is always immediately available, provided that we are willing to receive what we desire. Resting in our ideal, we leave all matters of expression, timing, and further fulfillment to the Field.

If one spends any time talking to people who have relied on the age approach based on attraction, one finds that more often than not it leads to waiting, frustration, and disappointment. I don’t say that it never works; one can realize some success with it commensurate with one’s belief in it—but the element of contradiction is there informing the process, and this explains why so many people reading “The Secret” and a host of other New Age books based on the principle of attraction are left wondering why this principle works so well for the authors but not so well for them. Virtually everyone who has come to the Field Center to study had experience, often many years of it, working with this putative law, and they discovered that if it is indeed a law, it must be a fickle one. Their years of attempts to make use of it led them to look for something more.

This something more is identity. We are not in the business of attracting things, because we do not set out by agreeing that the thing we want is sufficiently far enough to need attracting. Rather, we recognize that every desire, however subtle or even trivial, implies a corresponding identity, and that it is identity, and nothing else, that sets the creative hand of the Universe into motion. Having further recognized certain paradoxes and having incorporated them into our method, we are able to enter the game of deliberate intending innocently, without motive, and so to remain free of contradiction and suffering.

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Some years ago, a young woman enrolled in one of our classes, because she had tried everything she could think of to collect on a $2,000 debt. Her plan was to find a way to use consciousness to manifest the debt’s repayment—as she put it, “to make [the woman who owed her the money] pay her what she owed her.” When I told her there was nothing that Field training could do for her, she wanted to know why. I explained that she could not use the power of belief against itself. Clearly, she believed in the debt. To whatever extent, then, the power of belief was operative in her situation, it would be in the direction of manifesting the very debt that she wanted resolved. “The only way,” I added, “that you might be able to mobilize your consciousness in the direction you want would be to forgive the debt. As long as you believe in debt, you’ll have it in your experience in one form or another. Either someone will owe you something, or you’ll owe someone else, or both.

The thought of simply forgiving the debt was unacceptable to her. Such was the extent of her immersion. She did understand the principle, and most importantly that she could not forgive the debt as some sort of consciousness strategy—that is, as a tacit way of collecting it. The FIeld is not fooled, and as we say in Week One of the Field Center Course, “If you let it happen to make it happen, it won’t happen.” Her refusal to let go of her belief in debt ensured its continuation in her experience, despite the fact that this is far from what she wanted.

Field practice, being paradoxical, often suggests that we “go the other way,” meaning that we take the opposite path from the one called for by our will. As the case of the woman who believed in debt makes clear, our will is often informed by our belief in some factual condition from which we wish to be set free. Since we begin the project of tapping the creative power of belief by believing in the condition sufficiently to be wishing to be free of it, the game is over before it begins.

I’m not talking about visualizing or repeating affirmations in order to try to persuade oneself that there is no debt while in the shadows, as it were, one is still secretly believing there is. Such a practice, if it can be called that, would amount to “vain repetitions.” On the contrary, the trick is to discover the sense in which the uncontradicted report is true, and even better. For example, the woman who believed that her associate owed her the $2,000 would have to come upon a new way of looking at things—which always implies a different ontological stance, a different way of being-toward-it, whatever “it” may be—in which it became perfectly obvious that no one owed her anything, or perhaps could, any more than she could owe someone else. By divesting herself—genuinely, which is to say self-convincingly—of the belief in debt, she would have entered a state of alignment (friendly agreement between desire and belief) that would have resolved the situation spontaneously and effortlessly. How it would have done so we cannot predict. Perhaps the woman suddenly would have come up with the previously owed money. Perhaps the Field would have made up the same amount in some unexpected way. However it would have played out, the inner shift required the willingness to “walk away,” inwardly, from the condition to which her prior belief kept her bound.

There is a great instruction in this. Perhaps you’ve noticed that there’s a feeling to every belief. To believe in debt, for example, feels very different from not believing in it. In the reality of white, Western beliefs, it is possible to “own” land. Not so in the reality of Native Americans. Traditionally, they have found the idea baffling—the way we might be baffled by someone proposing that one could own the air, or time, or space, or the rain. To set out to use consciousness to eliminate debt (or any unwanted condition) from the stance that believes in the condition—that is a failure method in every sense (and Field training does not measure success in terms of manifestation). The feeling of relief or excitement that one is already free of debt (or any unwanted condition), that is something very different. It feels wonderful, regardless of the facts. Alignment, in our terms, frees us from even looking to the facts to see how to feel, frees us from living reactively, frees us from strategy and the contradiction is presupposes, frees us from waiting—and returns us to our inner authority. We may be dreaming that we own things, but if we recognize that everything is on loan, that things are ours, at best, for a time, and that ultimately, nothing is ours, then we may arrive at a deeply aligned place in which there is no debt to forgive. The power, reach, and efficiency of that, has to be seen to be believed, and only the innocent (those who are free of contradiction and motive) will see it.

Max Freedom Long, who brought the fascinating teachings of Huna to the West, suggested the following bit of verse as a way out of the contradiction implicit in holding accounts against another:

And if some hurt has cut me deep
And no amends were made,
I ask the light to balance all,
I count the debt as paid.

Have you been struggling with a problem, believing that you could do something or other with your consciousness to “make things better?” If so, do you see how your consciousness is supporting the problem and not the solution? What happens if stop believing in the problem? What happens if you “go the other way?”

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It is a revelation of sorts to many that, as Field training tells us, desire alone is not creative. As though in a New Age dream, they had thought that desiring something, perhaps passionately, was all they needed—that, plus a little visualizing here, a little affirmation there. Then along comes Field training with the idea that it is not desire but something deeper in the psyche that finds expression, inwardly and outwardly, through the mysterious workings of the Law of Correspondence. This something, we call intention, which comprises that which we take to be real, and that with which we identify.

Our intentions do not, as a rule, look like psychic structures at all, but as “how things are.” Through us, they render reality, and a reality that appears in every respect to operate independently of us. So is the great secret of cause hidden from the eyes of Particle consciousness. How then, we might ask, can we become aware of our own intentions?

For one thing, we can see what keeps showing up in our experience. The world is a great mirror that reflects our beliefs about what’s real and who we are, a construct that arises out of our intentions. For another thing, we can ask ourselves not what we want, but what we’re willing to have, for willingness is the faculty of intention as surely as sight is the faculty of the eye, and hearing the faculty of the ear. Our creating then, whether witting or unwitting, is directed entirely by our willingness—and this certainly includes what we’re willing to settle for, put up with, and allow, even if by default.

Much becomes clear about the reality in which we find ourselves when we hold our experience up to the willingness standard—things that remains obscure and confusing as long as we continue to measure our world against our desires. Once we understand that we get what we’re willing to have, regardless of what we may want, at least our reality starts to make sense to us. Furthermore, this willingness need be nothing more than an acquiescence. Often, students find themselves suffering in a contradiction that they “went along with” rather than exercising their creative authority to say “no,” at which point invariably they revisit the choice. “He who writes can rewrite.”

Willingness is the true speaking of the word amen. Whatever we’re willing to accept as real and identify with has received our “amen.” It is not a word we speak in order to “make it so,” as Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Enterprise in Star Trek would say. It is already so by virtue of the creative power of our willingness. We may, therefore, do well to take stock of what we are agreeing with, for what we agree with carries the quickening authority of our creative nature, and inevitably finds expression.

Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality

One of the most startling discoveries available within the study and practice of Field training is how we can and often do construct a problematic reality entirely as a distraction from something else that we feel ill equipped to deal with. The real problem, in every case, is rooted in a contradiction that the surrogate problem camouflages, and this is its entire purpose. One can think of the tacit contradiction as something of a magician who uses misdirection to create an altered reality that is, until we see through it to the underlying “secret,” utterly convincing. The seeming problem, then, while real and convincing, arises out of the underlying contradiction the way that an object stands forth in negative space. Our eye, of course, goes to the object rather than the space around it. In this way, the foreground hides the background. The logic of this “sleight of mind” comes down to this: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

In this way, even consuming problems may be fall guys, misdirections from something else we’re not yet willing to face. So, we might have, for example, chronic health or financial issues that tie up our attention, challenges that keep us preoccupied, struggling, and so on—and never suspect that all of this exists in our psyche solely to distract us from the more fundamental belief that the world isn’t a safe place, and better not get too close to it. At a structural level that has little or nothing to do with the context, then, the conjured problem keeps us out of the world. This sort of thing happens not infrequently, as the psyche is brilliant, and skilled at pulling realities out of thin air, as it were, to serve the ends defined by its beliefs. To see through the manifest problem to the latent one is no small achievement, amounting as it does to seeing through the illusion presented by a skilled magician and catching the modus operandi in the act. Then what had presented itself so convincingly as reality can be seen for what it is—a construct, and ingeniously, one that served functionally to keep something else out of sight.

Field Center Certified Facilitators and Coaches are trained to discern, among other things, the subtle incongruities that invariably mark the narrative of someone who is self-displaced in this way, who has fooled himself into struggling with a more palatable issue, as difficult as that issue may be in its own terms (and it would not be convincing if it were not difficult) than something that lives in the deeper waters of consciousness. In a Facilitating or Coaching session, it sometimes comes to light that the conversation is once removed, and the Facilitator or Coach may feel intuitively prompted to ask, “What’s really going on here?”

One of the many paradoxical statements found in the Field Center Course is, “the problem and the solution are the same.” We may want to lose weight passionately without ever suspecting that the concern itself fulfills some other belief we have that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with our weight, as the functional relevance of the manifest problem and the latent problem can be exceedingly subtle. The problems that parents often report about their children “acting out” in some way always comes down to this. The child is expressing the parent’s contradiction, and the parent, ready to be immersed and distracted, succumbs to the misdirection and now thinks the matter is first and last about the child.

It takes an abiding commitment to self-honesty to see through problems that have been manifested in order to divert attention from some precious and secretly held contradiction, but it is possible to see through the psyche’s brilliant misdirection and arrive at a deeper truth. The manifest problem cannot be resolved as long as it continues to serve other ends. In this respect, what has our attention functions the way Freud found that dreams function—among other things, as a preserver of sleep. We may work on the manifest problem diligently without ever suspecting its functional relevance to some other intention that has no obvious connection to it, and so we remember that Field practice deals with causes, not effects. To resolve the manifest problem, one must resolve the underlying one from which it draws its purpose. Einstein noted that we can’t solve a problem at the level of the problem. We can’t see how a magician pulled off a certain trick, but once we know the secret, the conjured reality is simply no longer convincing. To do this, we might ask ourselves, at the moment when we become aware of how immersed we are in a certain problem, “What would I be doing if I weren’t doing this?” “How is this problem serving me?” “What is it preventing?” Such questions tend to address the issue structurally and promote “surfacing,” that moment in which we come out of immersion and open ourselves to less local information. Once the real problem has been “outed,” the work can begin.

Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality