In our last session we learned some fairly fascinating facts about how there are parts of us that are actually attracted to stressful thoughts and feelings.
And in this next session we're going to discover how we can begin to separate from these stressful states and those parts of ourselves that are in fact drawn into that kind of world.
Hi,
This is Guy Finley and we're going to look at something that most of us never consider because it's not part of the way in which we conceive the world around us,
Let alone within us.
But together we've been touching upon how the degree of our identification in any moment of stress,
Those thoughts and feelings that appear mechanically,
Are actually a condition of our individual past and how this psychological body of our past tends to be drawn to any such moment in which it recognizes something of itself.
It's this internal process of attraction that sets the stage for our next phase in this study of success without stress.
We can call this the separation principle and the way that we can begin to look at the principle itself is to understand that there is in us a kind of an alliance.
Not unlike adding one frame after another to a film enhances its efficacy to sell the illusion it's created to produce.
Our own mind puts together certain thoughts and feelings that when they are constructed in a certain way create a very specific kind of stress for us.
Let's take an example.
Perhaps someone says something unkind to us.
Now the effect of the separation principle,
The one we're looking at now,
Is to take what is really a very small moment,
Perhaps just something set off of the cuff by someone completely unconscious of what they've done,
And turn that little moment into a monstrous one where all sense of proportion is lost.
In no time at all the traditional molehill turns into a towering mountain and our stress the same size.
The outcome is inevitable for the self drawn into it nothing else matters let alone even exists and as this event becomes ever enlarged in our mind so is our attention increasingly drawn to consider what it means and what we must do.
These considerations all in thought not only obscure the rescuing entrance of any other reality but one that actually makes what has happened and the stress in it appear as if there is no other way we can experience the moment.
At this stage our stress begins a steady escalation because the more the mind struggles to release itself from what really amounts to its own unhappy conclusions the more it looks to its own perception of the same event for why it's experiencing the event the way it is.
The circle of self is closed and the stress grows and it's right here in a moment such as I'm describing psychologically speaking that we can begin to prepare ourselves to study the third of these principles so that in beginning the study of what we're going to call the dark illusion of isolation we can see how this attraction produces the separation and then how the separation makes us feel alone with our stress and seeking ways to free ourselves from what we're beginning to see is a condition created by ourselves.
I'll see you in the next session when we talk about this illusion of isolation.
