conflict

Understanding My Interpreter Through My Intention

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Within the First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble, I have an interpreter that defines my reality based on my intentions. Intention may be the aspect of mind that divides right from wrong – duality. My interpreter may be that aspect of mind that seeks to validate my intention. Providing meaning – by comparison – and making sense of – by defending – my resulting experience.

How can ONE experience division without fragmenting Humpty Dumpty-style? What if, by interpreting itself in terms of separation, ONE could experience fragmentation without being fragmented? No pieces to put back together again – and no need for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

Perhaps my inner interpreter – that applies meaning to intention – provides me with this appearance of separateness without separating me from all that is – ONE.

An illusion, I grant you – though a useful one that I experience as sensual feedback, attention, awareness, and purpose. Much more than this, I suspect it may also involve imagination and intention.

Thus, my interpreter presents my ONE consciousness with meaning that appears as individuated consciousness, from which sense of separation causes conflict, the desired effect.

In this duality, an interpreter offers me a means to choose what, how, and why I experience, deepening my belief in who I am through my intention.

This conflict may not be within my interpreter, rather, with my intention.

Does my interpreter define everything based on my intention?

In the order of my creation – What, How, Why, and Who – it is the Why of my creation that tends to hold the intention of judgment, the basis for interpretation of Who I am.

For example:
What = a person. How = feedback about that person from my senses. Why = my intention to judge them to validate… Who = I believe I am based on my intentions.

Creation may flow according to cause and effect: Cause is in the intention, Process is in the interpretation, and Effect is in the experience. Through continual feedback, the flow becomes self-sustaining.

When I want to understand my interpretations, I must question my intentions, the source of those interpretations. By following my creation backwards from effect to cause – Why, How, and What, I inevitably come to my intention.

Example questions to back-check my defenses of past truth from effect to cause:

  • Why am I defending this particular interpretation?
  • How am I defending this particular interpretation?
  • What intention am I really defending in this particular case?
  • Who am I that needs to defend these things?

Measuring Values Creates Polarity

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In a First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble, values rule! Values and comparisons seem to work well together. I don’t think I would have the ability to choose without them.

Comparing values may be an ambiguous, non-standardized way for measuring what deserves my attention. To make a measurement, one needs a scale upon which to make a comparison. Scales involve polarity.

One type of scale requires polarities that define the outer limits or extent of the most extreme expected measurement. Another requires a balance point between two polarities. Each type of scale requires common content and context in which to make a measurement. Hence, the old saying, “You can’t compare apples to oranges…”

I seek what validates my preset values. The amount of attention I invest in a thing is the measurement of its value on that preset scale. In this way I can compare worthiness in terms of threats and benefits to my survival on a scale I understand.

Chronic value measuring keeps my mind occupied in creating and maintaining a standard, a quick reference guide to survival. At the top of my standards list is the greatest threat or benefit to my survival.

My need to be right creates polarity and a lifetime of measuring values

I believe I know how I should understand my reality. I have learned to trust my ability to measure values and accept them as accurate and true.

Polarity demands certitude

When I get close to certainty of my value judgments, I’m getting dangerously close to valuing myself at one end or pole of that scale. The closer my attention is to the poles of my value scale, the less likely I am to be fluid with my measurements, and the more likely I am to become certain and immovable. Certitude tends to lock down my scale – including its polarities.

To investigate this phenomenon, I like to get quiet and ask my inner wisdom:

  1. What do I value?
  2. How do I measure it?
  3. Why do I measure it?
  4. Who am I as I move towards polarity?

By asking these questions within, my deeper mind can search for its truths and help my conscious mind…

  • know and understand the real me.
  • reveal misunderstandings I’ve created that have supported a false me.
  • stop measuring myself, knowing I need no setting of values.

Conflict and the But Opportunity

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Within my First-Second Degree of Illumination bubble, I perceive a world in conflict. I don’t notice my inner dissonance until discomfort prompts me towards awareness and gives me feedback towards resolution.

When I pay attention to my internal dialog – a form of feedback – I may imagine using words such as “but” to shift my focus from one need to another. Ex: “I love cake BUT it makes me fat.” I’ve created an internal battle between my own beliefs. Due to a limitation of mind in which I can entertain only one thought at a time, my imagination must choose one side of the issue at the expense of the other. Hurray! I am at a Third degree of Illumination choice point! What I do with that point of choice ultimately determines the direction my awareness takes. Typically, though, I breeze over the opportunity, choosing the default option – returning to the bubble – without any more thought than that.

What if instead of breezing by it, I seized the opportunity? What then?!! And how might I turn a “but” conflict into a resource? Hmm…

Read more Conflict and the But Opportunity ›

Who’s Accountable?

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Who’s accountable? I am… of course!

Yet, do I truly believe that?

I know that my perceptual,  conscious mind defines, labels and creates its reality.

My conscious mind can turn its decisions about life’s threats and benefits over to my reactive, responsive subconscious mind to defend. Over time and with practice this process becomes automatic.

Once the transfer of belief data is complete from my conscious mind to my subconscious mind, the orders are in place to protect and defend what, how, why and who I believe I am.

Read more Who’s Accountable? ›

My Dualistic Nature

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As one being, why do I feel so divided?

In my dualistic universe, oneness is represented in two aspects:  heart and mind. Each aspect understands and perceives life differently than the other. Their interaction produces a certain amount of conflict that I experience as perception and define here as “ego.”

Ego, therefore, is a metaphoric representation of the conflict I experience in the interplay between the two different perspectives: mind and heart. Ego also represents my strategy for resolving the conflict in order to return the system to balance, which balance cannot exist in my dualistic universe – in which mind and heart offer separate perspectives of the same thing, each believing it is THE perspective. Thus, my universe constantly appears to be in a state of conflict seeking resolution – ego, my agent of need.

Metaphorically, ego represents an imaginary border between mind and heart. I say “imaginary” because a 2-dimensional surface divided in half by a 1-dimensional line is still a 2-dimensional surface. 1-D lines can exist in a 2-D world only as imaginary concepts – not as real characteristics. Mathematically, the number of slices do not determine the toppings or size of a pizza.

I experience my ego by way of projection, which appear to me as thoughts, sensations, perceptions of my body, and its environment. I define projection here as a presentation of ego (conflict between heart and mind) onto the 2D (dualistic) surface of my consciousness in order to have an experience of separation from oneness that, though imaginary, seems real.