Not ready to graduate

Craig was here last night; He went with Gary to take Connor to Lacrosse. So I have some bonus time to myself.

Here’s last night’s dream:

College, and it’s final exam time for everyone. I have a math final that I can’t find. I realize I haven’t attended this class the whole semester, and it’ll only be the wildest of luck if I can—if this is material I can reason myself through, and therefore arrive at the correct answers, though through this unorthodox channel (figuring out the problems and formulas that have been taught in class that I’ve not attended, and doing it during the final exam. I seem to remember now that I did have a strong feeling I may be able to get through and pass the test just on the basis of the skills in reasoning I had—but that was tempered with a feeling of panic, too. It seems the panic became my predominant awareness, filled up my experience. I couldn’t see how I could possibly do it. And furthermore, I was having trouble finding the class! Walking hallways and trying doors, to see lots of students at desks, heads down, writing. So I had a strong feeling of being unprepared.

I guess it’s reasonable to say that my Sub-Conscious is telling me that it’s indeed not time to leave therapy. But there is that hopeful note, of having a feeling that paying close attention to my Self during this experience would get me through and help me to succeed, even if I didn’t know the stuff academically.

Because it’s not just about learning, it’s about learning HOW to learn, and then applying that to all subsequent experiences.

A break to pet the dog.

Something brought to mind an image of how the pieces of a puzzle construe an experience, and the experiencer’s part in it. I can’t remember the specific image right now, seconds later, but it did remind me of the insight I’d gotten about creating our experience when we were on our trip. I think it was somewhere on the leg home that Connor was complaining bitterly about how this was the worst trip and he wished he hadn’t come. It was during a fight he and Scott were having about when Scott should talk and the noises he can make. Connor takes nearly everything that Scott does as being directly insulting (and I think Scott’s picked up on that subtlety and has developed the ability to play it close enough to the line that it’s hard for me to justify stopping Scott, and feeling that Connor’s feelings of offence are unreasonable.) So we’re having yet another variation of that fight, and in the aftermath Connor is very angry—feeling that we’ve allowed Scott to ‘taunt’ him, but he’s called on things that he does to Scott in retaliation.

So this brings me to the understanding of where Connor is cooperating with Scott to get angry. Scott is about defining limits…if I tell him he can’t do something he will do an approximation of it and ask if he can do that. If I say no, he’ll do an even milder version of that until at some point it’s ridiculous to say he can’t do it. I have a feeling he’s playing with that line with Conner too, and there is a point where he’s only doing a microscopic version of what was irritating Connor before. And Connor, at some point, is having to make a decision as whether to count that as an insult, or not. So in that sense Connor IS creating his experience with Scott. His active participation is required. And as we drove, a very beautiful day through the mountains, I could see how his mind was selecting certain experiences and being oblivious to others, in determining how he felt. So I saw how it is true that we create our realiity, through seeing his participation in the creating of his. There’s always a decision point of where you can release ‘right’-eous anger. I know that is true, because I know I have had a point where I could consider myself insulted or slighted before. Less concentrated versions of that event might still make it seem reasonable to feel insulted or slighted, but at some point I can see that to keep feeling righteous or insulted, I have to make a decision about whether it’s worth it or not to feel insulted or slighted. And if there is that point of decision where I participate, why not move it out further on the continuum? Why not decline to take part, even at the far end of the continuum, even where people are being blatantly insulting. And not just in my ‘experience’—they do in fact intend harm…a perpetration is what Smothermon’s book calls it: any act that decreases someone else’s experience of aliveness.

Anyway, Connor was living in a context of anger and contentiousness. And he didn’t like it. I guess the goal is to deep matters from getting needlessly more complicated once an event happens. Like 9/11: where the damage done by the terrorists was compounded by the ineptitude of our systems on the ground. I guess in any given context—being with a child, say, who’s context is unhappy, there are a lot of decisions about how to act in order to limit the damage and not exacerbate it. And not sacrifice my context for his. I haven’t thought of it that way before.

It’s interesting, because the past few days, or weeks, I’ve had a sense that maybe I won’t be writing much longer, in the diarying sense. Smiling, remembering how I often mentioned in early diaries that I’d grown up enough that this would be ‘my last one’. I quit doing that. But, my sense is, the writing has always been motivated by a desire to understand my experience. (Writing down the particulars of each day helped to lay out something I could examine as a whole. I needed Shannon to enable me to tell myself the truth about things I’d self-censored before.)

So for the first time in years I have this sense that ‘this’ might be my ‘last’—though I’m really not sure I can stop writing. I think it’s more that the purpose may change…before it was to exorcise pain. If this is true the level of decision that I can have over my experience, emotions and all, I won’t need to write that way any more because the things that troubled me before I see and respond to differently now, with this new skill—of working consciously with this Mind who is behind my life. Because the possibilities seem really big.

Anyway, the dream tells me I’m not ready to graduate yet. I think I felt that those were the stakes in the dream: that I had to pass that math test in order to graduate. Otherwise I didn’t have enough credits to pass.

~ by kaleidoscoperefractions on May 30, 2009.