I am so sorry that I have been out of touch with you. I have been undergoing a very stressful time. My son Wade has been near death several times from brain cancer. And then my Foundation itself is under organizational stress, unable to manage what we are doing. I feel for the first time in my life sort of unable to see a clear direction, even though many good things are happening. I feel listless. Maybe its the accumulation of all these pressures. Plus of course the awareness of the suffering on Earth.

Love to you, and thank you for your presence on Earth. Barbara

In your comment you said that you especially liked the image of “having a choice to walk through a door, or not, and when.” Let’s open this cryptic message a little because it hints to a powerful secret.

To put this short and seemingly innocent note inside a developmental context you could, for example, place it within the Spiral Dynamics framework at Second Tier, turquoise and yellow. Within the framework of Wilber’s updated color code this could be in the teal, turquoise and Indigo.

In the Emerald workshop we talked about this notion in the context of developing the capacity to know something and not act upon it, like a circuitry that is deliberately non-active and not engaged because of “having no need to go there at this time.” You can also think about it in the sense of self-care diplomacy with your own process and with your own mind. What we call here ‘self-care diplomacy’ is different from ignorance or not knowing and different from suppression that builds a self-deception shadow. We can liken it to the intelligent pragmatism of the healing process. The healing process goes where it can, when it can, in the order and pace easiest for the system undergoing healing, whether a human body, a forest or a group of people.

My guess is that in your oriental medicine work with your patients you apply the same mindset. You don’t decide which way the healing process must follow. You open energetic pathways so that the process can unfold in its own intelligent way.

So, what is the developmental secret in this? I once coined this phrase to capture it: “The mastery secret is not in solving all the contradictions of life but in developing the capacity to contain the greater contradiction of living.” How else can you have your head in the stars with the purpose of living, and your feet on the ground to manage business, put food on the family’s table and take the trash out on Wednesday? (And I still need to be reminded weekly that it’s Tuesday not Wednesday.)

What we are talking about is development of an emergent capacity that enables you to keep intact while still involved in the busy terminal of life – to be coherence inside chaos. It’s a never ending practice. The monastic alternative was to shut all the worldly doors. Their strategy as it was practiced both in the East and the West by mystics of the great traditions, was a reclusive retreat from the world in order to attain mastership and enlightenment.

The 21st century opportunity and challenge is to be a mystic in a business suit, a mystic in a nurse uniform, a mystic as a gardener or elementary school teacher – to be a mystic in the world, integrating these realms without diluting them. That is the developmental path of living with guidance while in the world, wherein you master the art of not shutting doors you do not have to shut, and developing the capacity to leave them open but without a need to walk through them, until the time that you do. This is the greater freedom.

There are many special mystics walking the earth now, only they don’t appear to us in the traditional archetypal forms of the priest, the guru or the medicine man.

Think of this discipline in terms of the routine practice of the links you choose not to click and not even look at – a skill we all have to quickly master on line. In this case, because you chose to not click internally, you shaped and changed the logarithm output of your own inner google. The inner google is the mind preferential sorting system the logarithm of which builds according to the mind choices.

If I can contain the contradiction I don’t have to shut the door which a little less violent way to handle life. By leading a non-violent transformation inside we change ourselves which is how we change the world little by little.

Aviv

I really appreciate your extrapolations projecting the influence of this new perspective on all of our ways of thinking. I especially like the image of having a choice to walk through a door, or not, and when.

cheers! here’s to more evolutionary musing,
christy