20th Jan 2012

Nine of us today on a dry relatively warm day for January. First of all we watched a video of a woman who spoke of her time when she divorced her husband and proved her self reliance by not seeking any money from him. She has since bought a home together with her new husband. She spoke about giving up fear letting it go, giving her guardian angels a chance to help her achieve peace and success.
Some of us found it relevant to their own life, other people were more hesitant to accept that it was the spiritual aspect that helped, more the practical work she put into it.

I asked had anybody heard about Plato's cave analogy apart from when it has come up in previous meetings and surprisingly none had. I then outlined what he meant and its meaning today, our reality is the shadow world. We hopefully will attain the the ability to see the spiritual underlying truth.

We then looked at the following:

Thoughts and Thinking
We collectively glorify our ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; we personally and mistakenly glorify our thoughts as the distinguishing pattern of who we are. From the inner voice of thought-as-words to the wordless images within our minds, thoughts create and limit our personal world. Through thinking we abstract and define reality, reason about it, react to it, recall past events and plan for the future. Yet thinking remains both woefully underdeveloped in most of us, as well as grossly overvalued. We can best gain some perspective on thinking in terms of energies.

Automatic thinking draws us away from the present. We wistfully allow our thoughts to meander where they will, carrying our passive attention along with them. Like water running down a mountain stream, thoughts running on autopilot careen through the spaces of perception, randomly triggering associative links within our vast storehouse of memory. By itself, such associative thought is harmless. However, our tendency to believe in, act upon, and drift away with such undirected thought keeps us operating in an automatic mode. Lulled into an inner passivity by our daydreams and thought streams, we lose contact with the world of actual perceptions, of real life. In the automatic mode of thinking, I am completely identified with my thoughts, believing my thoughts are me, believing that I am my thoughts...............