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Member Posts / Re: Bang-a-Rang!
« Last post by Zara Songull on July 08, 2023, 01:20:15 am »Just because I hit the APPROVE button on your post, please don't interpret that to mean that I approve of your response. I'm glad you can feel the affection in my disapproval, because I'm about to offer you some more of it!
I found your response to be tremendously entertaining. I literally laughed out loud (LLOL). But that's too much entertainment, in my opinion, and not enough slowing down and finding the heart of the matter. I appreciate you sharing about the crushing pressure you once experienced in the presence of disapproval. That sounds rough, and I'm sure it's nice to have relief from it. I can't help but wonder if that kind of fierce energy comes from something trying to break out, or break through. You've clearly been around the block in terms of your work on yourself, so I suspect you've done your share of cathartic emotional release. That's a step some people try to skip. But I don't know if what wants to emerge is fundamentally emotional.
So you've dreamt into this a bit, and you've discovered that infinite approval would actually be boring, and that infinite disapproval would be as well. That seems to make the two similar in some fundamental way. Can you take that further? If, on a macro scale, they're the same, why, on the micro scale, does approval feel different than disapproval? If they are the same, and I think they are, why does one feel good and the other feel bad? Is Calvin purring better than Calvin hissing? Is encouragement from me better than discouragement? If so, why? Or, as a different way of probing this, could you somehow apply what you discovered in the macro to the micro? Could individual instances of both approval and disapproval become equally boring?
When you conclude that the "just-right tension" between approval and disapproval is right where you want to be, that looks to me like what I'm calling "spiritual bypassing". Yes, of course everything is exactly perfect as it is and couldn't be any other way. But that's irrelevant to an investigation at the level of identity and conditioning and your situatedness within a social matrix. At that lower level, things are not already perfect. Going up one level, so you can tell everything is just right, is certainly better than feeling crushing pressure in your chest. But that chest pain may hold the key to whatever makes your identity's preoccupation with approval persist.
If you want to keep playing along, drop back down into the dream. That's where the drama is playing out. Let's assume approval and disapproval are boring, or at least that they're the same thing. What in your chest keeps them from feeling that way? What does that pain want before it will be done with you?
I found your response to be tremendously entertaining. I literally laughed out loud (LLOL). But that's too much entertainment, in my opinion, and not enough slowing down and finding the heart of the matter. I appreciate you sharing about the crushing pressure you once experienced in the presence of disapproval. That sounds rough, and I'm sure it's nice to have relief from it. I can't help but wonder if that kind of fierce energy comes from something trying to break out, or break through. You've clearly been around the block in terms of your work on yourself, so I suspect you've done your share of cathartic emotional release. That's a step some people try to skip. But I don't know if what wants to emerge is fundamentally emotional.
So you've dreamt into this a bit, and you've discovered that infinite approval would actually be boring, and that infinite disapproval would be as well. That seems to make the two similar in some fundamental way. Can you take that further? If, on a macro scale, they're the same, why, on the micro scale, does approval feel different than disapproval? If they are the same, and I think they are, why does one feel good and the other feel bad? Is Calvin purring better than Calvin hissing? Is encouragement from me better than discouragement? If so, why? Or, as a different way of probing this, could you somehow apply what you discovered in the macro to the micro? Could individual instances of both approval and disapproval become equally boring?
When you conclude that the "just-right tension" between approval and disapproval is right where you want to be, that looks to me like what I'm calling "spiritual bypassing". Yes, of course everything is exactly perfect as it is and couldn't be any other way. But that's irrelevant to an investigation at the level of identity and conditioning and your situatedness within a social matrix. At that lower level, things are not already perfect. Going up one level, so you can tell everything is just right, is certainly better than feeling crushing pressure in your chest. But that chest pain may hold the key to whatever makes your identity's preoccupation with approval persist.
If you want to keep playing along, drop back down into the dream. That's where the drama is playing out. Let's assume approval and disapproval are boring, or at least that they're the same thing. What in your chest keeps them from feeling that way? What does that pain want before it will be done with you?