A.T. Lynne

Many people believe that feelings are the root cause of our experience.  However, I have been persuaded by my own experience and the the contemplations of scientists and philosophers that thought always precedes feeling.  In essence, “In the Beginning was the Word.”

The Danish Science Writer Tor Norretranders, in his book The User Illusion, wrote a fascinating and illuminating essay,  ”The Half-Second Delay.” The essay discusses studies of the brain’s operations performed in the late 20th century and is centered on the research of neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet.  Libet’s discoveries, and those of Charles Bennett, Bertram Feinstein, and others, reveal that the nonconscious brain receives information or stimulus – both decisive (from within the mind) and sensory (from the body and its environment) – a full half second before the conscious mind becomes aware of this activity.

What that means is, the conscious mind requires this half second delay in order to process the stimulus.  As Norretranders writes, ”The task is to reduce eleven million bits to sixteen bits so that the sixteen bits can be used as a map of the eleven million.”  Yet, as a presupposition of NeuroLinguistic Programming asserts, “The map is not the territory.”

According to Norretranders “Consciousness occurs when we have discarded all the information we do not need.”  The key here is in how our brains decide what we do and do not “need.”  In order to discard as unnecessary or accept as worth keeping, we must make sense – our own personal sense — of the stimulus.  And, the tools we use for that selection are not feelings, but thoughts, which are formed by the words of our inner dialogue.

It is from those thoughts, formed by those words, that our feelings blossom.

For example, a child whose father often picks her up by her feet and swings her around and around in the garden, so the world goes spinning by in a colorful whirl, may experience, or feel, the resultant disorientation and dizziness as fun and being loved.  However, another child whose father sometimes, or even once, picked him up in anger and flung him across the room where he collided with a wall, may experience, or feel, the resultant disorientation and dizziness as fear and being hated.

Now, imagine taking those two children to an amusement park and putting them on a roller coaster — a merciless contrivance specifically devised to generate disorientation and dizziness.

Can you see how the same sensations could result in two very different feelings.  The stimulus is the same, yet the conscious selection in that half-second delay for discarding and accepting might result in very different words in the mind of each of these children.

And, once those words are chosen and used in the mind, the corresponding feeling arises.  Fun or Fear.

For years, as soon as I woke up, my mind would leap into worry. Whether it was after the alarm clock rang in the morning or in the middle of the night.  My mind would immediately begin to worry about people with whom I was out of harmony, impending events that I considered daunting or projects with looming deadlines.

I dreaded waking up and falling immediately into worry so much, that, as sleep approached in the evening, I would begin worrying about waking up the following morning to a worried mind.  My body would tense, my stomach ache, my heart would feel torn to shreds.  I came to expect and endure the sensation of my entire night’s rest lost and replaced by a massive weariness.

Then, a wonderful new thought occurred to me.  What if my thinking wasn’t really worry at all?  What if my mind went to these topics because it was eager to do what it was made to do — find solutions to apparent problems?  What if my mind was scanning the landscape of my life for places to use its Creative Imagining?

Where better to use creative imagining than on those concerns I had identified as real world dilemmas?  Of course!  This made perfect sense.

Now, as I wake into a brand new dawn, I help direct the energy, talent and wisdom of my sweet mind toward welcome solutions.  I realize that with a proper invitation, the mind will as eagerly look for creative solutions as will look for troubles.  And, as I ask myself the following questions, my mind readily looks for, and sees, where she can be put to best use:

About this current situation, what unique, respectful and imaginative contribution can I come up with today?

What new answers to old problems can I discover today?

What new skills will I develop today, and how will I use them to great satisfaction?

Who can I see in a brighter more loving light today?

What exciting new contribution can I give to the world today?

How can I feel more alive, happy, and thankful today?

This simple shift from labeling the process of my own morning thought from worry to Creative Imagining has made a fantastic difference in my life.  I ardently invite you to give it a test.

Today, I cleared away boxes full of objects, files, papers, books, decorations, and other various mementos of my earlier lives, including more than 60 journals written over the last twenty years.  I took those and threw them into a dumpster a mile away, just to ensure I’d not attempt to retrieve them before they got hauled off for good.

After awhile, I stopped to check my email — a behavior that has become habitual with hourly regularity over these last ten or more years.

While looking at the summary of emails in the various folders —  Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam and Trash, I noticed that there were nearly 100 messages in the Spam folder.  So, as I usually do, I clicked on “empty” next to the file.  This activated a pop-up window which asked, ”Are you sure you want to permanently delete the contents of the Spam folder?”  Immediately after I clicked on “Okay”, I then clicked on the Inbox.

A curious thing happened.  The usual confirmation window “There are no emails in your Spam folder,” didn’t appear.  One almost identical popped up instead: “There are no emails in your Inbox folder.”  I hardly noticed… but, then, the word ”Inbox” caught my eye.

An incredible wave of panic welled up in me.  For a moment, it didn’t occur to me that, unlike messages deleted from the Spam folder, these would go into the Trash, thus giving me a second chance to recover them.  However, while I was still in that state of sudden surprise, a second wave, even more powerful than panic, washed over me.

This was a feeling of great relief.  A palpable freedom from all those words, all those exchanges, all those arrangements and confidences and solicitations and long forgotten promises made by people I no longer knew and written to a person, who, in many ways, I no longer am.

And, what I knew then was that, soon, very soon,  I would intentionally wipe out all the Inbox and Sent messages in all my email addresses that are not germane to my work and written within the past two weeks.  And, this is what I am doing, even though the panicky feeling returned as I sat down.  The promise of a greater freedom enticed me onward. 

In the first address I opened, I chose to look back to the earliest email to see how long I’d kept this log of frozen, cryogenic thoughts. I began with the newer of the three addresses I still use, but even that one included emails from 2005.  I read a few: notes from old lovers; multiple threads regarding long-finished projects; and discussions about no longer remembered issues.  Yes, it is the documentation of the transient passages of this singular life.  Yet, none of it is any more valid to this day’s living than the long-silent notes from a concert pianist’s practice scales, played year in and year out between performances.  All of it is irretrievable history; its only worth lies in its influence on the transformation of the performer, the writer and the recipient. 

So, to rephrase the romantic lyrics of Joan Baez’s melancholy song, “Winds of the Old Days,” I choose not to invite the “Ghosts of my history” to follow me here.  Instead, I release those old words, mine and yours, to the winds of the old days where they may blow gently and forever away.

Herefollows a story intended to demonstrate how asking for what you don’t want can bring you exactly that.

My mother, Katherine Faulconer (1916-2000) was an actress in Southern California, performing in local live theater well into her eighties.  She was gracious, talented and absolutely indefatigable.  The directors, casts and crews with whom she performed adored her.  When she departed this plane, thousands mourned her passing.

One of the challenges in Katherine’s career on stage was that she wore dentures.  She did all she could to ensure that this situation never interferred with the clarity of her lines nor with her ability to project her voice to the back of the theatre.  It was very important, therefore, that her teeth stay tightly in place.

In 1980, I had the good fortune to work as Assistant Stage Manager for San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre during a production in which Katherine played a significant role.  The play was Night Must Fall, a 1930′s melodrama by the British playwright Emlyn Williams.  In the play, Katherine played Mrs Bramson, a bitter, self-pitying elderly woman who is murdered by a psychotic schemer.  Mrs. Bramson has a penchant for chocolates, and the role required Katherine to nibble from a box of chocolates throughout her scenes.

And that meant, before and after those scenes, the backstage crew was forever also nibbling from the box of chocolates.  Sometimes the crew’s greediness left the box in definite need of replenishment by the next night’s performance.

One evening during the run, as we were preparing for the show, the prop girl noticed that the box was nearly empty.  She told one of the stagehands to find out what kind of chocolates Katherine preferred, then go to the nearby Long’s Drug Store and buy the cheapest Whitman’s Sampler box of that sort.

The stagehand dashed into the darkened theater and called toward the stage where the cast was doing a run-through.  “What kind of chocolates would you like, Katherine?”

The rehearsal stopped as Katherine called back, “Anything but chews.”

In the echoey empty hall, the stagehand only heard the last word as he hurried out the door. He got back from Long’s just in time to dump the new candies into the prop chocolate box before Katherine went on stage and the curtain rose.

Through the next two hours’ performance that night, Katherine’s words were spoken with a distinctly careful delivery, as she did all she could to keep the tenaciously chewy chocolate-covered caramels and toffee candies from dislodging her teeth.

When you tell others what you envision for yourself and your future, use words and images that speak only to what you desire to see and experience.  Whatever words you use paint pictures into the minds of your listeners.  And, as with the stagehand, when your words include images of what you don’t want, those may well be the images on which these listeners act.

Even when we aren’t aware that others are “helping” us, what we tell them, at the very least, becomes a story about us that they pass along to others.  When we speak, therefore, of the goodness we desire, of the achievements we are working toward, of the outcomes we expect to enjoy, these are seeds that will grow in the other person’s fertile imagination.  And, it is often from this garden within others that we harvest the results of our words.

Despite the prevalence of stories to the contrary, it is my contention that we are not predominantly motivated by the desire to get.  I believe that we are primarily and deeply inspired to give, to contribute something uniquely from us and something that is seen and accepted as precious and worthwhile.

However, for many of us, from our earliest years, the adults in our lives interpreted our petition for attention as a request that they give us something.  And so, they gave us stuff, usually toys and excess food.  And now, attention-seeking children are also placated with excess exposure to the sorts of “interactive” entertainments that engage them, not with other people in real time, but with machines in virtual time.

Perhaps some parents or teachers actually knew, or, at least, had the suspicion that what we really wanted was the opportunity to share our first discoveries, celebrate our developing skills, display the artwork of our awakening imaginations.  However, they, too, were most probably subjected to this idea that children were incessantly wanting to get, which incited them to see us as insatiable takers.  And with this view, they very possible felt we were attempting to take too much of what they’d come to covet for themselves — their own desperately finite time and attention.  It was easier to shut us up with things, rather than give us twenty minutes to demonstrate how we could tie our shoes.

Now, as adults, many of us continue the pattern of adding ever more things, activities, and even people to our lives in the hopes that the yearning we feel will be satisfied.  However, when the yearning is to give more of ourselves, rather than get more stuff, no shopping spree, no accumulation of more things, not even titles and corner offices, can satisfy us, unless these acquisitions are clearly seen in our own minds as evidence of what we have first given to others.

For your own deep peace and sense of purposefulness, whenever you have the opportunity, give.  Give a few minutes of your attention; give a kind word; give a creative idea; and give yourself more accolades for the constructive and useful things you do every day.  Give to yourself the acknowledgement you would like from others for the actions and deeds you do, and you will be satisfied, having given to the world and having given to yourself.

And, when you witness someone else’s contribution, let them know their gift has been noticed.  Tell others how you see their unique ways of doing or being or living as blessings to the world.

Last week, my friend C. asked me for some new ideas for gift-giving at her annual holiday party.  Her guests, all well-heeled and comfortably ensconced in houses filled with things, neither needed nor wanted any more stuff.  And yet, up until now, feeling that a holiday party was not complete without the gift-giving event, they still continue the gift exchange games.

However, the group had also gotten so pragmatic about the uselessness of the tradition and the exchanged items, that C. had actually put a Goodwill donation bag beside the front door into which unwanted gifts could be discarded when departing the party.  Forget even getting it home to put on the “re-gifting” shelf.

The problem with this is that, however little one invests in the requisite gift, and, however fast one wraps it up, there is something deeply disconnecting about seeing a gift you have just presented to someone being discarded so casually.  Despite the maturity and social conditioning that would probably override any overtly expressed disappointment, to see even this merest essence of our efforts cast off so insouciantly registers within us.  And, even worse, the giver, seeing their gift cast away, might make some self-deprecating remark about their own poor taste.  And, therein, the gift and the giver are minimized.  No, this is not the best solution for a holiday ostensibly devoted to celebrating the symbolic birth of love and goodwill.

The first idea that I offered C. was to invite each guest to bring a talent to share.  Each one could recite a favorite poem, bring an instrument and perform a favorite piece, or even bring a CD of someone else’s performance of their favorite music or recitation.

C. quickly dismissed this as unacceptable for her group.  She said the location, in the back room of a popular restaurant, was not conducive to this sort of solo performance.  She also felt certain that her friends would be embarassed, not inspired, by the invitation to share in this way.

I agree that there are many – too many – people who, for years and years, have denied themselves this sort of bold and playful self-expression.  People with fine minds, and perhaps even great innate talent, who have hidden away their light and who, as Thoreau warned, may die with their music still in them.  These are the ones who have not yet risen to embrace themselves nor come to understand what Marianne Williamson put so beautifully:

“You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And, so, I left C.’s house with her resigned to the same old game of name-drawing, cheap gift buying and wrapping for an exchange that will end in the give-away bag.

Today, however, another sort of gift exchange occured to me when I looked up a friend’s business online.  When I found her small company listed on Yelp, I saw that there are currently only three testimonials.  Each one raves about her service and her knowledge of the products her business supplies.  And, I know for certain that she and her business are highly valued by the small community she serves.

I, also, know she may soon be in the market for a buyer.  How influenced would a prospective buyer be, I wondered, if there were fifty, or a hundred, postings about the value of her business to her town?  Seeing the paucity of endorsements, coupled with this question gave birth to the following new idea.

The Priceless Gift is a written testimonial to the wonderful qualities of the gift recipient.  Begin with a few quiet moments to call the person vividly to mind.  Scan your memory for those qualities you truly admire in this person.  Jot these ideas as quickly as they come, just a word or two. Then, return to your mental picture of the person, allowing every good thought you have to come to the surface.  All you really need for this part is just five or ten minutes.  You are collecting snapshot impressions and noting them with just a word or two.

Now, give yourself another five to ten minutes to frame the best four or five of those images into the following sentence structures:

I am so thankful that I know ________ because….

______’s understanding of/skill with/talents in [area of expertise] have inspired me to learn more about [______'s or your own interests].

Many people benefit from ________’s [quality you genuinely perceive in the person].

I admire ______’s way with [people, animals, auto repair, etc]

______’s [wisdom, kindness, tenacity, courage, etc.] has made a difference in my life and in the lives of others.

Four or five sentences are all you need.  Now, here are some of the ways you can deliver this gift.  The most intimate way is to hand-write this celebration of the person on specially selected stationary (not a pre-printed greeting card) and send it through the Post Office.  You could take it along to a gathering where you both will be and hand deliver it.  Or, you could call the gathering to attention, and, when everyone is quiet, you could read your appreciative statements out loud.

If the person is a co-worker, you could address the letter to his supervisor.  If the person is your instructor, you could send it to the school’s administration.  If the person is a service worker, the bus driver, a barrista or sales clerk, you could send the letter to her employer.  And, if the person is your friend, you could send it to their spouse, their children or their parents.

You can think of this as the eulogy you get to write while the person is still here to receive the blessing of your appreciative words.

And, back to my friend’s company on Yelp, you could do what I intend to do as soon as I complete this essay.  You could go to a service like Yelp, to your favorite social networking site, or directly to the individual’s website and post your letter there.

With or without a holiday to prompt your giving, consider giving The Priceless Gift often, and let your own loving light shine, Now.

Nothing we tell another person is ever a brand new thought.  It has already cycled, at least once, through our own minds; welled up in response to sensations to formulate first in our imaginations.

And as we prepare to let these thoughts escape our lips, we choose the genre of story we will make them.  Choose then, mindfully, before you speak.  For you shall reap the harvest of your words through the response of your listeners.

Are you telling anecdotes of an action-adventure, fables of a morality play, cautionary tales of a tragedy, lessons of a historical drama or  confessions of a femme fatale in a romantic comedy?

Notice that with every genre you choose, you automatically cast yourself into a role by which your audience may hence forward be tranced into believing is really you.

Last weekend, a dear friend’s daughter, K., took her own life.  She was a lovely human being who blessed many lives, including those of her partner and her partner’s three children.

K. was also someone who idly toyed with the idea of suicide since her middle teens.  I know.  She and I had talked in this idle, hypothetical manner about this “option” from time to time for decades.  And, sometimes, when times were weighing heavily on us, the talk we confided to one another was less idle, less hypothetical.  We spoke of “taking ourselves out” when it got too bad, as though it were the right of any sane person.  With life-wearied cynicism, we used our creativity to discuss the various ways we might exit this world, should things get just too bad to bear.

K. and I aren’t the only ones I’ve known who have talked idly, and not so idly, this way.  “Exit strategy,” “Final plan,” “Getting out with dignity” are some of the terms I’ve heard other people use.  Rising from bitterness or ennui or self-loathing, these plans were embellished, finely detailed, envisioned in technicolor.  All the while, the authors of them would, at the end of the exercise, insist it was only a way to reduce the stress of the moment, to relieve the pressure or despair of a passing challenge.

And yet, as the Biblical prophet Isaiah is quoted as saying, “So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper [in the thing] whereto I sent it.” As alternate to that archaic King James language, here the statement also is from the New Living Translation (2007) “It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.”

Yes, our words, idle or not, do not fall away behind us with the dregs of yesterday’s coffee.  No, they are the very seeds we plant that grow into our tomorrows.  And, the life we are living now is the harvest of what we, ourselves, have planted in the distant or recent past.  We are both sowing and reaping every day of our lives.  And, everytime the mind, idly or intentionally, dwells on an idea, we act upon it in some small way.

In order for K. to meet the end she did, she had to build up her tolerance and consumption of alcohol.  She had to convince herself of a terrible outcome to what was, generally, a fine domestic union.  She had to shop for, buy and rehearse using a hand gun.  And, she had to put those three ingredients together over and over in her mind, in order to override her own well-practiced problem-solving capacities and overcome the fantastically powerful human will to live.

K.’s brutal and, to some, seemingly unpremeditated departure, is to me a wake-up call of the highest authority.  As I said, I was one of the people with whom K. had had this conversation, this sowing of a future harvest.  And K. wasn’t the only one who was embellishing the vision with details.  Yes, even through my recent successes, even while involved in the most companionable and mature relationship of my life, I had also unwittingly and recklessly toyed with suicide as a door I had the legitimate right to consider walking through, should life turn sour and things get “unmanageable.”  Even more, I believed, up until last weekend, that sustaining this idea in my imagination was actually an act of loving self-care.

Yet, within a heartbeat of hearing this news about my friend’s daughter, my mind was changed – irrevocably, I hope.  To entertain thoughts of suicide is neither an expression of loving self-regard nor is it an option truly sane people allow to linger in their minds.  I have been long and deeply mistaken in this.  Although I have known and put great faith in that promise from Isaiah 55:11, I simply was blind to what dangerous work I was doing with my own idle thinking.

Perhaps there is another way, or many other ways, to neutralize the effects of that work.  However, the best and most grace-filled one I know at this moment is forgiveness.  Forgiveness is a sword that truly and permanently severs our attachments to ideas, attitudes and visions we have unwisely nurtured about ourselves or someone else.  For me, this fabulous gift does indeed uproot even the most tenacious and viral seeds.  Forgiveness saves us from having to suffer the full consequences of both our idle and dreadful imaginings.

Yet, is this sowing and reaping of suicide stories the only mythology that leads to dangerous contemplations of death?  Are there different seeds that people unwittingly plant which lead to the same premature and painful harvest?  Yes, I believe there are.  These are the seeds sown by news headlines, which fill a mind with terror about an incessant barrage of unavoidable dooms coming over the earth. These are the seeds in unfounded gossip, which passes along partial truths and amplified lies about the misfortunes of others, embedded always with the suggestion that those misfortunes are contagious.  These are the seeds of marketing, which first convinces you of imagined or unnecessarily-amplified frailties, then addicts you to their products’ antidote.

If you recognize in yourself, patterns of thinking, imagining and visualizing an unpleasant, early or desperate end to your own magnificent life, I encourage you to practice forgiveness.  Forgive yourself for being caught by the words and pictures the media flashes before you from every quarter, day after day, with the devoted intention to frighten you.  That is simply their job.  Forgive yourself for being ensnared by juicy gossip.  This is one of the most seductive and prevalent persuasion tactics, and we all have used it.  Forgive yourself for being entranced by commercials.  Those who want to sell you things invest billions every year to pull your attention toward their products.

Forgiveness of others will free you to go about your own business.  With neither condemnation nor judgment about what you see and hear, you will consider these diversions with complete indifference.  Yet, forgiving yourself, completely and often, is the act that can truly release you from that bitter harvest.

We do not move; we rematerialize.

At the moment of outward physical expression, that expression in form which we think ourselves to “be” is actually the remnant and static manifestation of imagination in form as are the elements of paint on canvas or words on a page.  Life exists in the blink of imagination before manifestation, and from that blink, from the brushstroke or keystroke, the next instant’s materialization of physical self emanates.

According to Bob Toben and Fred Alan Wolf in their seminal work on theoretical physics, Space-Time and Beyond, “every action in ‘real time’ is an indefinite sequence of materializations and dematerializations on the microscopic quantum level. They occur faster than the speed of light and in such great numbers that perception of this action is continual.”

Through the ubiquitous use of video and film,  this perception of stop-action-as-continual-movement is an incessant experience of our 21st century lives.  These familiar “materializations” pass in front of our eyes at much slower rates.  Film runs at 24 frames per second and video, at 30 frames per second. Yet, even at those slower rates, they are fast enough to fool us into believing we are watching movement.

Each instant of life is a static composition of atomic matter that in the next moment has dematerialized and rematerialized or  reconfigured itself into something entirely new.  Regardless of how similar that moment may seem to the one that preceded it, it is brand new.

So, what determines this reconfiguration?  It is not as you may think, some ebb and flow of chemistry.  The impetus for all reconfigurations of things which can be perceived is the ebb and flow of the electrical impulses of your brain.  In other words, it is thought itself, imagination, from which your corporeal existence and your perceived world arise.

Before you devote your allegiance to a thought, any thought, consider that the thought holds no allegiance to you.  As with the sponteneous birth of other virus, thoughts are simply spontaneous constructs born at the confluence of streams of mental activity.  And thoughts, like viruses, have life only as long as they have a host.

That host can be conscious and welcoming, happy to live by the thought’s intent and eager to offer the thought to others.  Or, the host can be an unconscious repository for an idea which is decidedly antithetical to the host’s own desires and well-being.  In these instances, the host may only be aware of the thought’s occupation in the wake of arguments and alienation resulting from wars with friends and foes alike, wars fought in unwitting service to spreading a viral invasive thought from one vulnerable mind to the next.

Just as one-night lovers aren’t aware of the transmission of deadly viruses between them, so the person occupied by crankiness may never know that she is infecting others with her disheartening attitude.  However, by this human vulnerability to viral thoughts, the person who gives a smile to a passing stranger may well implant a virus of uplift, though he may never witness its long-term affects.