"That's not here and now. That's gratuitous."We confuse whims with clobbers—a tiny error that compounds titanically over a lifetime of indulging the mistaken interpretation.
Hardly anyone draws this distinction, even though it's a magic button. Why? For the same reason they conjure up all that immaterial strife in the first place. They wish to torture themselves a little, because the peace and comfort of the current moment feels vaguely troublesome or inadequate. It's unlike them.
"I am not a peaceful, comfortable person who basks in peace and comfort. I am a tough guy, or a punk, or a sullen adolescent, or a weary bitter cynic, or someone who craves sharp sensations—the very opposite of the velvety embrace of the current moment."
In one of my most popular postings, "Ballasting Happiness", I wrote:
If you know a worrier, you've surely discovered that such people play a perpetual game of "whack-a-mole". Alleviate a worry for them, and they'll instantly find something else to worry about. It's all about the mindset, not the worries themselves (if there are no real worries at hand, silly ones will be manufactured). They think they're plagued by worries, but, really, they're plagued by the desire to worry.I trimmed a couple of paragraphs, but recommend reading it all.
When you try to alleviate the circumstances that make an angry person angry or a sad person sad, nothing is accomplished because circumstance doesn't create the mindset, it's the other way around. The mindset comes first. Slings and arrows are sought out and eagerly grabbed at.
Your Uncle Louie is not an Aggravated Person because things aggravate him. Things have aggravated him because he's an Aggravated Person.
How does this happen? Everyone, at a certain point, decides how happy they will be (as with most such choices, cues are taken from the happiness of family members and others around them). This decision becomes a bedrock part of identity - the "I am this kind of person" inner narrative we all maintain.
Some people can clear their slate—distinguish whim from clobber—if coaxed to simply notice the gratuitousness and the immateriality. They won't do it themselves, for the same reason they deliberately lead themselves needlessly astray. But the lightly gripped can often see clearly for a moment, and let go back into velvet.
Others are more far gone. They cannot perform this reset under any circumstances, because they're way too committed to the bit due to long reinforcement.
"My beloved deceased guinea pig Floyd is NOT something I just pulled out of the recesses of my mind. Floyd was REAL and my grieving is REAL and you can't tell me I don't MISS him every second of every day. The Hell with you and your "reframing". I loved Floyd in a way you'll never understand!"
Sometimes it's said with a near-wink. They recognize their self-indulgence, and are reasserting their whimsy, expanding the storytelling field to include the shmuck who foolishly tried to help. It's like raising a bet—"Not only will I not recognize reality; I will yank you into my delicious and turbulent unreality!"
Of course, the whimsy soon drops away, and one can find oneself locked into a hell of one's own imagining, unable to reverse course and make more grounded choices. Fancy quietly congeals into peril.
I can understand how children and adolescents might be unsettled and knocked off-course by incoming blasts from their mental noise, assuming it's real. It's harder to understand how someone might spend decades in such conditions without at least examining them.
Me, I stuck with the bit until age 47, when I found myself locked in profound oppositional conflict between actuality (a peaceful night planted on a comfy couch drinking sumptuous wine watching a great movie on a vast TV) and incoming blasts from my inner mind (it's Christmas Eve, and, having failed utterly to live up to expectations, I am revealed as a pathetic wretch—all the more so given how plumply and disgustingly self-satisfied I'd momentarily felt amid my pitiful failure).
Read the story here
Back and forth; back and forth. I was so lost that I could not tell which side of that coin was true...even though one was patently, well, true while the other was pure mental confection. Not exactly a mystery for the ages!
After spending entirely too much time grappling with the patently obvious, I literally came back to my senses, recognizing that the desperation, shortfall, shame, and thirstiness were entirely fabricated, while reality is the velvety embrace of the current moment. Reality is a point of return that's always available amid our incorrigible flights of fancy...if we don't lose all touch.
You may dispute my observation that the current moment is always a velvet embrace. Things, after all, do go wrong.
Yes, they do, but only for a moment. 99% of the pain and emotional confection are pre- and post-tremors. And the problematic moment doesn't seem problematic, because (if it's a real problem, and not just some storyline you've created) you're occupied with acting—with solving the problem!
If someone, right now, suddenly pointed a gun at you and demanded to know "where the money is," then, ok. That's not velvet. But you won't know it, because you're not checking. You won't be sensitively dipping a toe into your emotional waters to gauge how far from perfection the temperature's drifted. You'll be entirely occupied with dealing with the situation, not fussily weaving it into your narrative of pain and woe. It only frames as a problem once it's no longer a problem—i.e. from velvety embrace. That's how you know you're at peace: when you start manufacturing stress.
Agitation is the hallmark of comfort, peace, and velvety soft embrace. And thus an eternally easy flip.
Further reading
Dreams and whimsy are a wonderful human perk. There's no need to use that faculty for self-torture. Creative dreaming leads somewhere good. Buying into gratuitous misery does not. We can be selective with our whimsy, opting out of the sort that doesn't help.
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