Let Go to Move Ahead: Neville Meets Sedona

The point in this post is to explore incremental and deliberate psychological “deaths”, which is a healthy practice to move forward on the personal path. I covered it before in S01E13, but improved the argument here.

Note: for a review of the first 15 episodes in Season 2, check the podcast audio for this post.

Blake, whom Neville quoted often, seems to have understood this. Somewhere he said (I’m paraphrasing): ‘I was born in such and such a year – and I've died many times since.’ He was referring obviously to his psychological death, which has to be undertaken many times during a lifetime that is reflective and on a growth trajectory.

Here’s a motivating story: My aunt told me of a report in the news years ago: a woman, whose body was ridden with disease, determined to commit suicide by jumping off the back of a ship into freezing waters. But she did not not die. As responders were going about in small boats trying to find her, she felt compassion towards them, signalled to them, and was rescued. Once safe ashore, she was medically checked and found to be completely healthy.

We might say, then, that through the experience, she died to that part of herself that was ill. Can we activate the same skill within ourselves – but definitely without having to enact an emergency?

Let’s explore several ways in which internal movement can rescue us. There is a place for self discipline, but the character of discipline itself changes. These inner shifts seems to depend on curiosity and the development of understanding.

Blankness
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where all of your ideas, everything that you thought you had built up and understood, is spontaneously removed from you? It is almost like a planet on an elliptical orbit which finds itself at the extremity of its path, far removed from source. For us, it could be in the midst of a tense situation, or at some random moment. At that point, it is a test. Where are you now?

A strange and unexpected feeling of flatness or emptiness can descend upon you at the oddest times. There's a good description of this experience in Maurice Nicoll, from his book Living Time. Here is the passage:

Momentary changes sometimes occur. They indicate to us there are other States of oneself. And while they last, one has changed through a new feeling of oneself. All change in oneself comes through a changed feeling of oneself. We have what can be called a natural reality in which we dwell. We move in a small orbit of meanings of notions about ourselves, others, and the world. If this orbit is broken, we are usually in a peculiarly helpless condition, having no idea of anything else. There seems to be nothing to fall back upon. What we actually lose is the ordinary feeling of ourselves. So we become frightened and lost, not so much because of what has happened, but because we cannot recognize ourselves. (Living Time and the Integration of the Life)

Once you remember that everything is a psychological state, the experience need not induce fear, but create an opening.

Check the podcast episode for the full discussion of techniques to put off the old, and to release using the Sedona Method – a valuable addition to our regimen of techniques. S2E016 – see transcript or go to audio.