Kim Y of the blog Mouse Medicine, at the Portrait Gallery. Portraits of portraits. Oh yeah.
Some days when I'm meditating I "hear" chatter, all kinds of stray thoughts layered one over another. It's such an annoying thing to have to sit with. Some people believe, when this happens to them, that they are listening to the ongoing busy-ness of the personal mind. Some days it feels like I am tuning in specifically to the cacaphony of my own relentless storymaking machine, but some days it seems that if I'm quiet enough during my sit, what I'm "hearing" is the faint soundtrack of all the other minds on Tennessee Avenue, on Capitol Hill, in Washington DC, etc. - all of those minds busily thinking thinking.
Which is why I'm always curious about new age teachers who are convinced that if I employ the law of attraction, for instance, I can acquire everything I need or want. I'm not saying that intentionality isn't powerful, oh my it is so powerful. But on its way to me, wealth, health, love, etc. has to negotiate a million intersections in which the needs and desires of everyone else are rushing to and fro. Sometimes I think that what I pray for doesn't arrive because it's stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, or has derailed in another direction.
Perhaps I'm being too literal here. But if it was as easy to work with the law of attraction as the "new thought" people say, wouldn't everyone be healthy, wealthy, happy and wise? People talk about diets as if they work, but clearly they don't. If they did, no one would be one pound overweight. Right?
I suspect that the powers of the mind in practice, and in the greater community of minds, encounter far more complications than we can imagine. The world is not a simple place and as citizens of this reality, neither are we. If it was that simple, though, wouldn't that be nice?
Surreal, science-fictiony courtyard at the Portrait Gallery. It smelled like plastic in there.
10 comments:
My problem with the law of attraction paradigm is that it implies that we actually KNOW what we need or is good for us. The universe is far wiser than we in what it sends to us.
Instead of trying to attract what we think we want, I believe it's better to learn to see everything that comes as a gift: A gift of opportunity to become free from our attachments to the thoughts that create desire for things that won't in fact make us happy or free.
Damn, you are so smart. THANK YOU! Of course the ego thinks it knows what it wants, but that isn't the wisest aspect of us, is it?
Oh yeah. Thanks for this, Polly.
"it smelled like plastic.." Ah, those senses of ours are soooooo smart. We have an intelligence of which we are not conscious, that helps us navigate nevertheless. Example above, that plastic smell is a tell all of what you are experiencing here.
akimbo!!!
love the shadow play on the second pic.
It would be nice if it were simple. No poverty. No war. No starvation or illness or lonliness. No death.
But it is complicated. And a constant practice to maintain a high vibration. Being human, the waves fall and rise. It sometimes takes a bit to get unstuck from the lower frequencies. To me, the law of attraction means observation of the frequency level at which I'm operating and raising the bar when I drop.
Love the photos.
Oh my - they put a lid on it! Such a sad thing to happen to the place where I saw the Judy Chicago exhibit.
oh, for some simplicity! I agree - if it was THAT easy we'd all be thin, rich, and gorgeous!
For me, the difference between prayer and the "power of positive thinking" is that the prayer activity (or mindfulness, or the Quaker "holding xxx in the Light") puts the whole activity into a different dimension, one that might have positive effects that are different than our imagination can dream up at any given point. I have had the feeling myself that I'm getting brain chatter from out on the brain-net. Nice to hear it happens to someone else!
It's nice for me, too, Mary Ellen!
Hmmm... maybe "that simple" would be too boring for us, though. At least eventually. (Late response--I'm catching up after a while away!)
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