If I watch myself very closely, I observe myself fashioning my approach to others.
If I feel grumbly for any reason, I see myself fashioning a “guarded” display. Keep away from me. Don’t get in my way. Let me pass, I’m saying to myself.
If I feel lovingly nourished, I find myself welcoming all and sundry and metaphorically gathering them under my wing as if I’m the great protector. One minute I’m guarding; the next minute I’m “protecting.”
Our minds are arranged like a chest of drawers. This way of being would represent one drawer.
Above it would be a drawer in which I just be. Everything that I work hard at being if my mind is in the lower drawer is now the case without needing to work at it at all in the upper drawer.
What changed?
There’s a layer or a cloud of emotion that lifts and subsequently is absent from my experience. That layer may be caution, suspiciousness, resentment, or another dense emotion. Whatever it’s exact nature, it holds me down.
That layer exists so much in the background that I hardly notice it from day to day. Nonetheless I do identify with it and so it and I become seemingly one at that moment. I am grumpy. I am resentful, I say, when it isn’t true. It’s true only because I make the situation be that way.
Imagine a train in a marshalling yard. A boxcar is pushed towards an existing train and couples with it. That’s a metaphor for the operation we call “identifying” with a feeling.
Now imagine the boxcar moving towards the train and the coupling arm is somehow closed. The train does not accept the boxcar but moves away without it. (1) That’s a metaphor for not identifying with the feeling.
In most cases, identifying with the feelings that exist in the background for us is automatic. We move seamlessly from irritation to resentment without seeing that we’ve accepted the feeling and identified with it.
We also have the option of not identifying with the feeling and watching it gradually disappear as all feelings do. It then becomes like a TV show, which is constantly changing on the screen. We watch the images go by without (if we don’t identify with them) being affected by them.
Admittedly this is a little difficult to do. We’ve identified with so many dense emotions for so long that they really do seem to be part of who we are. So in the beginning it may be hard to see that these feelings are actually not a part of us, but the simple result of a multitude of thoughts arising and us latching into some of them.
But if we persevere, and even assist matters by visualizing taking out Michael’s blue sword of truth and cutting away all dense attachments or invoking divine law and having the Mother take away all dense emotions, we come to a day when we see and feel a clear distinction between who we are and our thoughts about who we are.
We see that, when we uncouple from our thoughts and stop identifying them as “us,” we liberate ourselves from a dense burden that has been holding us down and back for ages.
I personally regard distinguishing between us and our thoughts as being the single biggest development on the awareness path that we run into, short of Ascension.
Footnotes
(1) An impossible situation in reality because the coupling arm remains ready to receive and doesn’t have a locked position, as far as I know.