purpose of the work (pt. 3)

(cont'd) and you can say that's a living tree, or if it dies the leaves wilt in a matter of a few minutes and they all fall off real quick and the wood dies and it rots out and it all dries up. So we can see that very quickly and I don't think anybody here would have any difficulty seeing whether something was dead or alive, would you Neil? You can usually figure that out, okay? So whatever that is, is life, and I don't know what life is, except that I can see it function. I can see some of the things it does but I don't what it is that does that. Life has certain signs that always follow it. One thing it eats. It always gotta have some food. It has to have an ingestion of certain products or it doesn't keep going. It adapts to various and sundry things like environment to a jillion other things it adapts to some of them very unpleasant. Now there's also always a function going. You cannot be in the case of doing nothing. Every once in a while I say to someone 'What are you doing?' and they say 'Nothing.' But they obviously are doing something, they're breathing, they're having various and sundry chemical functions going on in the body, they're usually thinking something, possibly not very pleasant stuff, but they're thinking anyway. And, each one of us exists in an environment. And each of us is the center of our own environment. Is that right? It's the center. Everything's out from you. So from the environment, everything from the environment, we receive impressions. We get various sense reactions from the environment. I sense a person there I say Hello. I sense the light turns red in front of me,and  I stop the car.  I sense there's a black and white car down the road and I check the speedometer to see it's somewhere between 55 or 60. There's all sorts of impressions we receive constantly, some of them we put a little value on and some we don't.  So let's say there's an impression come in that I put a value on, and I have a feeling about it. Now this is man as he can be. Drawing the picture of man as he really is we put feeling and or emotion there. But right now we're sticking with feeling. 'Cause we're talking about a picture of a person who is all in one piece. So that goes to X, life. And life immediately decides the appropriate thing to do for this feeling. And it sends an impulse to the physical body and we have an action that comes out of it. So if I picked up this eraser and I throw it at Bill over here, and he saw so something and he's known long enough to know I probably would throw it, and clobber him with it, he  put up a defense immediately because that would be the appropriate thing to do. So this is the message from X to the physical body to do something and the function comes about. Now that function is always appropriate for this feeling. Those are the ones that go together. Now for instance if someone was playing a little trick on you and  put a toy or a make believe snake down here in the corner of the room and you put a little buzzer on it like a rattlesnake and you came up on it. At first glance what kind of feeling would you put on it, huh? (fear probably) Fear or an anxiety or a desire to protect yourself. Is that right? And no doubt you would jump to get away from it. Now that's the appropriate action for the information received. Now it wasn't the appropriate action for a rubber snake is that right? But it was for what you perceived. Now what we perceive is colored by certain ideas that we've had all of our lives, that we refer to as conditioning. That you've been conditioned that snakes are dangerous, right? So you dodge 'em a little bit so they can have all the space they want and you won't intrude upon their space. Is that about right? That's one thing you don't get in their space with. So we have a cycle that we could put in a little (inaudible) form that looks something like this

Purpose of the work (part two)

It happens now and then. So, we're going to look at some of the emotions that people generally have. We will keep them to a minimum of what we talk about. Anger, guilt, fear, and insecurity, and then there are a jillion synonyms. Now, on top of that there are lots of feelings. Feelings are pretty nice things to have, right? You have one of those every now and then. And we would think that possibly that if we acted upon some of the ideas that we have today, you would not have emotion, you might have lots of wonderful feelings. And I don't think that anybody complains about having nice feelings. They enjoy those and that's what everyone's workin' to have in one form or another (tells folks to come right in who came late)So, as we look and see that when a person has a bunch of emotions, frequently you don't feel physically to good, because there seems to be a connection between some way or other. You get sick. And sometimes everything in your business goes topsy turvy. Your work goes off in tangents when you get emotions involved in it. By the same token while you have emotions going on, your personal and interpersonal relationships get kinda tangled up, to say the least. I hear more about that probably than any other item that we receive calls about. That about 98% are about personal and interpersonal relationships that are not going smoothly. You might say they're a little rocky here and there. And they seem to cause a considerable amount of difficulty in peoples lives, that they're unable to work, they're unable to enjoy themselves because they're totally involved in this relationship situation. So as we go along we're going to find out what is happening in those, and what brings it about. The first thing we generally hand out is a little drawing called the picture of man. Now I know many people here think they're very familiar with it, but I also know they haven't acted upon it. They can memorize it possibly, but let's look at it with aspect that we can do something with it. Now the first drawing I will make is a drawing of of man as you can be, not as you are today but as you can be. We hope that a few people are in the state which we will describe, and everybody tries it now and then, but we can also see that we could have it all the time if we took a little effort. Now seemingly nothing in this world comes for free, it always requires a bit of effort, a little work, and a little work has to come along now and then. So we'll draw a picture of the general function of man as he is put together. We're all familiar with the physical body, we'll put P.B. there that means physical body. Then there's awareness here, we'll put X here which means life. I don't know a definition for life except that we look around and see that these are alive. They're breathin', and several other things. And uh, it's also that most of us have seen dead ones. Now you can look at a tree out here..
Note: more to come on this. Please check out the picture of man at marshasummers.com or there are other places, a picture is worth a thousand words after all....

Purpose of the work

So for a minute or two we'll talk of the purpose of doing all this exercise that we get involved in every now and again. I work and you work by sitting here. The general idea is that there is a group of ideas and a group of actions. Now the ideas by themselves is probably totally worthless. You can have them all and it wouldn't change a thing in your world a bit. However if you take the ideas and act upon them it can be quite a revolutionary thing in your every day affairs. It can produce quite a transformation. So the whole reason for putting on these exercises is that you act upon these ideas. Now you don't have to act upon every idea we talk about because, if you act on one of them, it will work.  Now we give many different ideas because one thing works on one person and one works on another and maybe none of them appeal to you. In that case, well, you came. That's all we can do about it (laughs). But I will try to dish out some and if I don't get one that appeals to you, call me one day, and I'll try to give you a tailor made one for yourself. We don't mind huntin' up a new one or one that I forgot to talk about today. We'll give you an action that you can act upon. I won't give you any more ideas, but you can call me and I'll give you an action that you can act upon, and produce considerable change in your world. Now your world is quite different from everybody else's I'm sure, isn't it? Because everybody else is in your world and your in mine. So that makes it totally different. So we will give some actions along through the day, and remind that you don't need to act on everything we bring up. Just one. If one appeals to you, you take that and act upon it, and it'll do everything as though you put all of it. I find some people get very nervous by trying to do 15 actions and that'll make you jumpy. If you did do one it will work out adequately. You won't have to do anything extra. Now we'll also talk about the general condition that everybody has that possibly here but maybe everybody here has got a different set of conditions but, I'm in contact with considerable number of people every week, they call from all over the country, from the east coast to the west coast, from the Mexican border all the way up into Canada. So we hear from a lot of people and most people have a lot of emotions runnin' around. So, does anybody here have emotions? Once in a while. There called anger, guilt, fear, and insecurity and an umpteen synonyms for all of those. Does anybody have any of them? Then you know what I'm talkin' about. At least a few of you do. And so as long as we have emotions workin, especially in our personal and interpersonal relationships, things get a little chaotic to say the least.