Superpowered Mind with Clare Dimond

I have a question about the home course. It seems like it’s increasing my patterns of social anxiety. On the other hand, the things you say don’t really sink in. The information looks like interesting concepts, but i doesn’t cause me to really experience that i am awareness of intelligence of live etc. So listening to the courses and noticing the thoughts and feelings apparently isn’t enough. 

How does a person comes from the perspective we’re i’m in, to the perspective that you describe? What can a person that is living from the first perspective do in order tot see things in new way? 

I have just watched day 22 video on Aliveness. Your description of your Dad passing reminded me of seeing my Grandad pass, that life of him there one moment and gone the next. He was elderly and poorly and it seems to me that the body couldn’t sustain the life force or aliveness any more.

I’m now piecing this together with the suicide of my relative, where it looks to me that the actions of the body prevented the life/aliveness from being able to be in that form any more. Although the body was sick, he died as a result of his own actions / the actions of the body. The aliveness was prevented by the action taken and there was intention to do so. Whose intention? Does aliveness have intention? I sense not…but there’s something here jarring. 

I was thinking today…I was sat in the chair drinking tea and I asked “who decided to sit and drink tea?” And I thought, the system did, it made sense to the system here given all learning and conditioning…I guess it was the same for my relative in taking his life? 

The Choice by Dr Edith Eger; The Sunday Book 

This is the passage I read out: 

A fourteen-year-old boy who had participated in a car theft was sent to me by a judge. The boy wore brown boots, a brown shirt. He leaned his elbow on my desk. He said, “It’s time for America to be white again. I’m going to kill all the Jews, all the niggers, all the Mexicans, all the chinks.” 

I thought I would be sick. I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. I would have been justified. And maybe it was my job to set him straight, maybe that’s why God had sent him my way. To nip his hate in the bud. I could feel the rush of righteousness. It felt good to be angry. Better angry than afraid. 

But then I heard a voice within. Find the bigot in you, the voice said. Find the bigot in you. 

I tried to silence that voice. I listed my many objections to the very notion that I could be a bigot. I came to America penniless. I used the “colored” bathroom in solidarity with my fellow African American factory workers. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation. 

But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are. 

The boy continued to rant about the blights to America’s purity. My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. 

This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice. I prayed for the ability to meet him with love. I summoned every image I had of unconditional love. 

I thought of Corrie ten Boom, one of the Righteous Gentiles. She and her family resisted Hitler by hiding hundreds of Jews in their home, and she ended up in a concentration camp herself. Her sister perished there—she died in Corrie’s arms. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one day before all of the inmates at Ravensbrück were executed. And a few years after the war, she met one of the most vicious guards at her camp, one of the men who were responsible for her sister’s death. She could have spit on him, wished him death, cursed his name. But she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love. 

I tried to find that embrace, that compassion, in my own heart, to fill my eyes with that quality of kindness. I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love. What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love? 

I had an opportunity to love this young person, just for him, for his singular being and our shared humanity. The opportunity to welcome him to say anything, feel any feeling, without the fear of being judged... 

....I thought of a statistic I read, that most of the members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old. These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter. And so I gathered myself up and I looked at this young man as lovingly as I could. I said three words: “Tell me more.” 

"You don’t have to create physical objects by your speaking. I don’t have to say, ‘chair, chair, chair’ to have the chair exist. It’s here. I can touch it. I can sit on it. But love is different. States of being don’t exist in physical reality. If you want love, you must speak it into reality, every day. If you stop speaking it, it will disappear.” Steve Hardison 

One message some of your podcasts emphasize is that the identity, and what's believed, is in the reactions to things. So when you encourage us to get as close to life as possible by jumping in and doing whatever it is - we can see what's true and what isn't true based on what the reactions are.

Today I received news that I've been hired to receive a short term work situation that will pay me the most money for a single job I've made in my life (thank you for these teachings as I think they've contributed to the receptivity for this moment). What I noticed was a storm of emotions: ups and downs and wild swings. It was almost like a snowglobe of emotions. And lots of crying. Or if you sped up a soap opera and watched it really fast. Yet none of them "stuck" if that makes sense. 

My interpretation of things you've said is that if there's a strong reaction then this is indicative of a lot of identity being believed. What about when the reactions are both strong and also fleeting? That seems to indicate loosening instead? The crying seemed to be healing somehow. Like it's not personal how we get paid or don't get paid. I don't have words for it.

I’m really struggling with what is going on in the world “out there” and how this equates to what we are learning about. Would a universal source allow this to happen? I recognise in my own mind body system a physical (sick) feeling caused by genuine fear and anxiety. Whilst I have done my best to avoid the news, it is everywhere.  I can switch off when I’m working with the children in my class as I enter their world of joy. But I’m finding everything else completely overwhelming.

I suppose my understanding of the universal source or however it is labelled is that it is in charge … it has the control as we as humans have none? It gave me comfort to use this as a point of reference - the universe has your back etc.

Been loving your podcast questions, be great to hear one regarding the minds use once the personal is dropped, and how much fun to be had with it. I was confused about that in respect to its actual use, thinking it had to go and be silent, and it's not like that at all! 

What is the difference between enlightenment and grounding? Listener question

Do we keep questioning the way the mind functions at the same time we keep looking toward what is stable (what you call "true") because seeing the continual motion of thought, feeling and sensation compared to the backdrop of constant presence is what supports the realization of the core "I" as presence, instead of identification as temporary feeling/thought/beliefs?

I noticed today that when there is more identification with a feeling, there is more resistance to the feelings we've been conditioned to view as wrong/bad. So the feeling experience of cranky becomes "I am cranky" and then there's resistance to it and then the body seems to move into default learned patterns that may have side effects that would also be resisted (junk food eating, scrolling, etc) indicating a seeking to avoid the first identification to feeling. cue vicious circle.

And in contrast, in the last few days it seems that when there isn't this identification with a feeling, when there's just "oh here's crankiness again" then there's no resistance to it and therefore no related default avoidance/seeking patterns to escape that feeling...there's just the feeling and whatever else is going on. Yet whatever else is going on somehow ISN'T an escape/avoidance/distraction...it's like they happen side by side. cue virtuous circle.

Oddly there's no efforting or the "I" that does either of these things, it seems to just be flipping back and forth like a switch.

Cracked. Why psychiatry is doing more harm than good.' by James Davies. The Sunday Book.