Experience Without Reacting
The next time the same experiential pattern appears, we approach it from a mountaintop consciousness, because we have conquered those instinctive elements. Our intellect has been trained by family and friends, schoolteachers and business acquaintances. We have to build a new intellect, an intellect from the soul out into the intellectual mind, rather than from the instinctive area of the mind into the intellect, to be successful on the path of enlightenment.
If we look at the past and we look at the future as both a series of dreams, and the only thing that we are concerned with is our immediate reactions and what we carry with us now, we see that the past is there to test us and the future is there to challenge us. We cannot change the past, but we can change how we react to what has happened to us in the past, and we can change the future, anytime we want to.
The soul builds a body around us in this life. That’s what’s happened to all of us. This body goes through the same experiences, year after year; the emotions go through the same experiences, year after year, until we build up strong enough within ourself to face the experience without reaction to the experience. Then we go into a new series of experiences.
Give yourself a test to prove this out. Go to a movie, one that will make you laugh and make you cry and make you suffer, right along with the players. And that’s how we live our life. We laugh, we cry, we suffer, we have joy, we have peace, like actors on a great stage. Then go to the same movie the next day, and go through the same emotions again, another cycle in the same life pattern. Then go to the movie the day following that, and go through the same emotions. Then go the next day, and you will find you will go through the same emotions, but not quite as well. Then go the next day. You will find your mind begins to wander into how the film was produced, just where the cameraman was standing when he filmed this emotional shot. You’re becoming mystical. That is how the mystic faces his experiences. “How was this produced? Where was the cameraman?” Go the next day, and you will again be distracted and may wonder about the voltage that runs the carbon arc light that penetrates the film! Then go the next day. You won’t be involved in the picture at all, or the emotion. You could care less. You had that experience, you lived it through, and you lived it out. It was neither good nor bad. It was neither high nor low. But you’re completely involved in the cameraman, the actors, the personalities of the actors. You begin to get perceptive, and you see that a particular actor was saying something and going through something but thinking about something entirely different. You didn’t catch that the first time. You were blinded by emotion.