I was a social scientist, not a physical scientist so I don’t claim to be able to understand the fine points of scientific experimenting.
But some basics are known and they are the importance of input, output, and conditions of transformation.
Our input as human beings – this lifetime – are our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, conclusions, decisions and interpretations.
Our output is similar, but transformed.
The conditions of transformation are quandary, dissonance, breakdown, resolution, and breakthrough. And the days ahead will give us plenty of practice with these.
As long as we travel in a problem-free area of life, much of it resides in unconscious awareness. As long as we experience no quandary, dissonance, and breakdown, life continues in its way unobserved and much occupies what Werner Erhard called the “background of obviousness.” Only when a problem arises, do we notice something isn’t working and then we generally experiment to restore it to workability.
When we find ourselves in a quandary – a departure from the norm, a situation we can’t easily get through – we find the dissonance mounting. We feel out of sorts. We’re troubled. We’re frustrated.
If the dissonance disables us, we may find ourselves in breakdown. We can’t go forward. Our life pauses until we address the situation.
Breakdown forces us to abandon our old way of thinking, which we may have tried to hold onto for dear life. Left without our old way of seeing things, we may begin to see things newly, unencumbered.
And by any of a number of processes – seeing without our paradigm mediating what we see, being fed guidance from higher sources, recognizing what we’ve been missing in our seeing – we’re propelled into a realization, an “Aha!”, a Eureka moment. And a new paradigm emerges. We’ve broken through to a new way of seeing that resolves the quandary and dissonance.
When we create paradigmatic breakthrough for ourselves, we may soar into the realm of conscious awareness. Entry into the Fifth Dimension will eventually place us in conscious awareness permanently – what Saul so often calls “full consciousness” (although it isn’t; just a higher form of consciousness).
So we can afford to welcome problems as the start of our experimental phase and our movement from not knowing to knowing.
Three tools present themselves for our use: they are discrimination, detachment, and devotion. Discrimination means to discriminate between the Real, the permanent, the infinite and the unreal, the temporary, and the finite.
Attachment means attachment to the illusory. Devotion means attachment or devotion to the Real. We’re to detach ourselves from the unreal and attach or devote ourselves to the Real. These are classically “spiritual” tools and I’ve discussed them elsewhere. (1)
I’m more interested here in the behavioral tools that the Growth Movement bequeathed us. Some of them are: raising to awareness, trying it on and testing it out, noticing and sharing, and calling ourselves on our own numbers.
These are just a few. There were many. I’m only wanting to introduce the subject here.
Raising to awareness means allowing into our awareness all we see, think, feel, do and conclude – without censoring. It means being with what we see, without judgment and without denial.
Trying it on and testing it out means taking the feedback of others and actually trying it on to see if it fits. If it fits, the next step is to acknowledge it and then walk around inside that space and see how life looks now.
Noticing and sharing means to discuss with others what we’ve seen and to listen to what they’ve seen. It’s our way of comparing notes and is the type of discussion that went on around the clock at Cold Mountain Institute and other growth centers.
Calling ourselves on our own numbers means not to wait until someone else observes our investments, designs, and manipulations, but to call ourselves before we’re called. That’s the brass ring of the Growth Movement.
These are some of the tools given to us by the Growth Movement. I so miss the experimentation there.
I think I’ve said enough for one go. By turning our lives into an experiment in which we foster our own awareness and expansion, we position ourselves in the best possible way to take advantage of the continuous change in which we’ll soon be immersed and benefit from it instead of suffering from it.
Footnotes
(1)