Another thing the Bellingham Meet-Up did was to make a useful and clarifying distinction around meet-ups themselves. And here I credit Cyndy.
Until that point I had been seeing meet-ups as a transitional phenomenon. People came together, shared and met and then “progressed onto” project groups.
But Cyndy pointed out that many people want what the meet-up offers – the cameraderie, companionshiop, sharing, and so on – and wouldn’t be interested in seeing it diverted in another direction.
That makes perfect sense.
Weeks ago Sitara made a distinction between the hub and the outreach teams which solved a difficult dilemma and allowed more lightworkers to see how and why they should be working together.
Now Cyndy makes a distinction that shows how it can be equally useful to have separate streams going forward.
And this is how all matters of social consequence, I think, go forward.
We hit a bottleneck somewhere and things bog down. Or I could say we hit cognitive dissonance and breakdown occurs. Or we could say lightworkers have a seemingly-insoluble disagreement.
Or two sides face off against each other. Whatever and wherever it is we cannot get together on something, what provides the way out almost always comes in the form of a distinction.
Distinctions are what take us from an old paradigm to a new. They’re what result in peace between two warring sides. They provide the breakthrough that takes human endeavor into entirely new fields.
In our case, they provide one beachhead of understanding after another as we enter what is for us a new land. With very little pre-existing understanding, we’ll have to work our way forward by arriving at one distinction after another.
Explorers work their way along by making one distinction after another after another. We call it “exploring,” but for many of them it’s a process of making distinctions.
I honestly haven’t found a dictionary definition of “distinction” that I feel comfortable with so here goes one of my own. A distinction is a re-framing of the context of a situation, that solves a problem or resolves dissonance.
In this case I held meet-ups and project groups as being part of one straight line that led from meet-ups to project groups. Meet-ups fell away like the caterpillar entering the cocoon and only the butterfly of project groups remained.
But Cyndy pointed out that my line of inquiry left people out. It was not going to result in a world that worked for everyone. It would produce residue.
She offered a different context in which many lightworkers, had many aims and followed many streams of endeavor.
It solved the problem that I was having of seeing how we induce people to move from meet-ups to project groups: we don’t. We issue the invitation but we don’t alter the status of the original group.
This is an example of mapping the way at the very earliest stages of building Nova Earth. And the way forward was laid out by making distinctions.
There are some short cuts in making distinctions.
Most of our dilemmas and breakdowns come from dualistic, polar or exclusive thinking. We think it has to be this or that, Democrat or Republican, progressive or conservative, Christian or Muslim, etc.
But what we find is that the higher realms’ approach to the same types of questions is unitive, umbrageous and inclusive.
My approach was dualistic and exclusive; it would have produced residue and would not have resulted in a world that works for everyone.
Cyndy’s approach was unitive and inclusive; it met everyone’s needs and would have worked for everyone.
To work well, a distinction must see to the needs of all sides. It has to be win/win, applicable at all times and in all places, or it won’t last and it will produce residue.
Another way of saying that is that the solution needs to be contextual. It needs to create a domain of action and knowledge that everyone can inhabit comfortably.
I’d like to add another distinction to our exploratory discussion. I wanted to distinguish between inner- and outer-directed people. As we explore this new territory, we leave our safe anonymity and enter into roles that will result in our becoming more publicly known.
If we haven’t made the switch from being outer-directed to inner-directed, we may have a painful ride ahead of us.
If we still get our sense of self-worth from others’ words, looks, and gestures, we may enter a second kind of starvation. The last starvation was that we were starved of contact. This starvation may be that we’re starved of approval. The outside world we come into contact with may not approve of what we say or do.
That’s why coming together in groups, whether for meet-ups or projects, is so important. We now need to feed and stroke each other.
If we seek support, approbation, or friendly appraisal, we now need to get it from our teams and groups. We may get it only years from now from the outside world.
Taking that further, being inner-directed really means that the source of approbation and estimation lies within ourselves and that’s where it’s properly to be sought.
If we can take back Excalibur, the sword that represented the source of power, if we can take back the Holy Grail, the cup that represented the source of holiness, and realize that we are Excalibur and we are the Holy Grail, life will suddenly blossom in a way that it hasn’t before.
The system is biased towards caring about what others think of us. But we now need to take back our power and our good self-estimation. The world we’re exploring is all about non-judgmentalness, independence, tolerance, latitude. There’s no need to “look good” out there, to have a watertight story, or to have an answer for everything.
There’s a need there for personal integrity, purity of heart, and compassion for others. And these values begin to emerge when we stop being stimulus/response machines hooked into caring about each other’s opinion of us.
So take back your sense of yourself. Liberate it from the opinion of others. Begin to have that conversation only with yourself and allow others the same privilege.
As we begin the phase of exploring Nova Earth, we’ll need to unhook from what others think of us and be willing to stand solid on our own two feet, in love with ourselves as well as everyone else.