The Twelve Tools by Natti Ronel

Author:Natti Ronel [Ronel, Natti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

TOOL 7

Finding within Ourselves

The world outside us is a challenge on the way to ourselves.

Let’s take a moment of silence. … let’s go deeper into the silence, leaving everything behind and just looking on from the side, without any response. … let’s call to mind things or situations that usually bother us, or perhaps distress us. We’ll look for three such things, one after the other. Pictures of life in moments of vexation, dejection or distress about something. … Let’s return to the silence and allow these things and the feelings that perhaps arose with them to melt away into the void from which they emerged. Without any judgement or criticism, we’ll watch as our consciousness returns to the silence. We can be helped by being aware of our breathing. … Now let’s call to mind three things or situations that attract us, that are pleasant for us, that we crave, things that can satisfy us if only for a moment. Again, we’ll watch ourselves from the side, as we face these things or situations. We’ll examine, be impressed for a moment, and then leave them behind. Completely. Let’s return to the silence in which everything can melt away. … Thank you.

External and internal influences

Let’s look at the things that we called to mind earlier. They can be divided, as I have suggested, according to our response to them -- those that in our experience are negative, vexing, threatening, or distressing, and those that in our experience are positive, attractive, and that afford us a certain satisfaction. Division according to pleasant or unpleasant is acceptable and it’s also useful. But -- it leaves us in our variable subjective experience, without offering anything else.

Another possible distinction relates to things and situations themselves, those that are external to us and those that are internal. Among the things that came to mind earlier, it’s easy to see that some of them represent something that is external to us -- perhaps connected with another person, perhaps with circumstances external to us or with something else that is situated in the world. We can see how things external to us influence us and we respond to them out of positive or negative experience. Unless we’re granted the gift of living in total freedom from dependence, being influenced by things external to us is a natural situation for us, and we must come to terms with this. But any external influence can confuse us, and the external world can dominate us through its influence on us; sometimes this is pleasant, especially when drawing on experience that we’ve described as positive, and sometimes it’s unpleasant for us, out of negative experience. Sometimes a positive experience is liable to run out of control, and then there’s an influence which isn’t so desirable. For example, when we surf on the internet, and it seems we’re incapable of stopping the surfing and doing something else with the computer, something that we undertook to do, or that we should do. There

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