Conflict - End Rant 16 January 2011 exLJ

A Course in Miracles, Lesson 102 talks about our belief in pain and suffering in the following terms: "It has not gone as yet, but lacks the roots that once secured it tightly to the dark and hidden secret places of your mind."

In teaching Peace of Mind Healing I emphasise that all pain and suffering comes from our thinking and that what we need to do is change our thinking. The most common response to this is "that's easier said than done". And I usually reply "don't I know?"

I don't know whether its the dreams, doing the lessons again or just simply life, but I still find myself in conflict with a lot of the stuff going on in the world. Despite my attempts to not be inundated with news (I don't watch news on TV or Internet, and I don't read newspapers) I still get to hear about some of the tragedies from friends or casual conversations.

Most of the time I'm superficially at peace and happy, but there is that underlying something always there. In psychiatric terms, it would probably be referred to as a compartment, some "dark and hidden secret place in my mind". Buried deep in my mind! How it got there, I'd like to say, I don't know, but I do. I absorbed it during my early childhood and then emphasised it again and again in all the arguments we had over the years. And that is argument in the sense of conflict not in the sense of clarification.

When I got old enough to be able to look somewhat objectively at all the arguments I could see what they are based on:

1. I am right, you are wrong.
2. If I am wrong, I cannot admit it.
3. If you don't agree with me that I am right, even though we both know I am wrong, then I get angry.
4. When I get angry, I puff out my chest, try to get higher than you and get ready to head-butt you.
5. You usually back down and I'm left with the guilty feeling that I should not have done that.

The conclusion I came to was that "violence is the last resort of angry men and war is the last resort of angry nations".

The strategy to end rant is "I am right, you are right, we are all right."

We Do it to Ourselves 4 October 2010 exLJ

We do it to ourselves. All pain and suffering is caused by our minds - the ego part. At best the body is always neutral. It responds to what we are thinking. If we think attack thoughts about anything or anyone we get pain somewhere in our body. If we think peace our body returns to neutral.

The effect is not always immediate, because some of the sources of our pains and aches are buried deep in our minds. And some of them are even 'compartmentalised' (that concept again). The Presence Technique to use when there are pain and aches is "Scan the Body".

Compartment Dreams 20 September 2010 exLJ

Recently, I've been having strange dreams. It's not the first time in my life that I've had this type of dream. They are not nightmares because nightmares are defined as "a dream arousing feelings of intense inescapable anguish, fear, horror and distress".

I've decided to call them compartment dreams after the psychiatric concept of 'compartmentalisation'. This is a very big word that describes what we do with experiences in our lives that we can't handle when they are happening. We lock them up in a part of our mind that we can't normally access.

Anyway, these dreams have nothing to do with my life, that I'm aware of. In them I'm doing totally out-of-character things. When I wake up from them I'm still totally immersed in them, and it takes me a long time to realise that it's just a dream. When I wake up the following morning, I remember that I had one, but have absolutely no recollection of the content.

The good news is that their intensity seems to be waning.