Report 24

.

SM: Moving along, I wonder if the consequences of holding on to the usual old “me” are fairly clear … this is another area to look into, another aspect of the codependent arising issue:

Learning is integrated as we live/play/act it out. If not, then knowledge may be obscured…not because some ‘other’ has obscured it to ‘punish’us, but because we have distanced by closing off our hearts to the world and others “around us” by being protective of perceived ‘outside threats’. The more we realize and 'play out' that there are nothing but empty threats to “ourselves”, the more ‘freedom’ is uncovered?

So right now that’s close to what ‘karma’, or the consequences of codependent origination, means to me. It has to do with capacity for clarity, and how comfortable we can get in that clarity which seems at first so inconvenient to the way we’ve been living out our lives. And it has to be instant to instant?

For me the examples which come to mind clearly are quite personal, my life being composed of people and situations I have in many ways ’set up’ by compromising in just such a way as mentioned above, for long enough that it now ’strange’ not to continue… especially with regard to deferring making tough decisions which might cause overt conflict. Abdicating responsibility. 

It will take time to play out.

One comforting thing I have begun to see is that it plays out in a more instantaneous way. Meaning, I’ve been looking at obstacles as being composed of long term decisions which affect a million smaller ones, and not that it isn’t true in its way, but there is less and less a distinction to my mind between small and large/short and long term, with regard to these things.

Okay, that’s my best shot of articulating what I understand the question to be. :)