(You can now find the complete collection of eight installments on this Page.)
Book 4: Find Out!: The Real Way You Are Supposed to Act
Installment 2 (Below)
Chapter I: Seeing Through Illusion (continued)
“If you tell yourself that this table setting is your real-life situation, right now, it will be instantaneously clear to you that the other situation you were thinking about is not particularly useful. I’m not saying we can do anything about having thoughts, and they certainly play their role, but in terms of acknowledging one’s real status, the table setting analogy is powerful. Because it really is what’s happening, and it is so easy to see once we are reminded to look at it. Keep comparing the coming out of the illusion into reality to the way it feels when you have to snap yourself out of your night dream state to realize you are here in real life. There is really no difference. You are just here in real life all the time, and it is there for you to see, just like walking into a Victorian room in some mansion and seeing all the dinnerware in its appropriate place, just sitting there. You can even extend it to include all the people in their chairs as if you were watching a movie. See them there, as whole bodies, solidly in their chairs that are on the floor. Really stare (in your head) at the people, the chairs, the tablecloth, the plates, glasses, knives, spoons, forks, centerpieces, serving dishes, etc. (include as many objects as possible) and then switch to your own physical placement right now in relation to all the things around you, leaving nothing out. That is your real-life scenario right now. Well, right now is constant, because it is always right now. So, this table setting analogy never wears thin. It is as true in one moment as it will be for your entire life. Your whole life is just one table setting. That’s it, nothing more complicated than that.
And now we get to that word complicated. I would like to state that in reality, there can never be anything that is complicated except for this inner fight-or-flight muscular contraction, that puts us into a state of other worldness (our head story) that generally instills concern and worry for situations in our life. But this can be released out of (including the tension in the face head and neck). That is, the feeling of things being complicated, especially if there are circumstances in one’s life that are mentally troubling. When you come out of that whole-body tension, that full-bodied stress reaction, momentarily, you can tune in to your table setting, the one that has always been there in every moment of your life. You see through the illusion of complicatedness to the simplicity of all the material objects in the room, on some surface, on the floor (which of course is on the ground or some beam in the building you’re in, connected to the ground outside). What you must not forget to do is include yourself as a material object on the surface you’re on, just like all the people sitting in their chairs in the Victorian house.
On the contrary, the complicated world scenario, which is what feels familiar and right to us all the time, consists of a quality of belief that there are things we can do in our life that will make things better for us, our loved ones and our nation and world at large. However, this idea of doing is a myth. It doesn’t mean that humans don’t act, we of course are in a continual state of activity all the time. But I differentiate between the words action and doing for the purpose of clarifying what is illusion and what is real. Real action gets back to the table setting, i.e., the physical reality of existence as opposed to the dream state of our mental introspective narrative. Let us say that “doing” is part of the fictitious inner recording that relays a story of things being wrong and needing to be fixed. This naturally infers a fixer who can take charge and steer our personal boat away from danger. There is nothing that feels more natural than this belief system. The tale is skewed though because the way things in our life get done, improved upon or resolved is not through voluntary doing. The concept of voluntary action is unsupported by the reality of how any organism functions.”
Jill Eng 