Liminal Thinking - Wurman and Gray

 Liminal means a doorway, or portal, or threshold,
not this or that, not the old way or new way,
but neither and both.  It's a state of ambiguity or
disorientation that precedes a breakthrough, a
new kind of thinking...

Liminal thinking is a kind of agility that enables you
to successfully navigate times of transition.  It
involves the ability to read your own beliefs and needs -
and the ability to continually change beliefs in order
to better meet those needs, and the needs of others...

Richard Saul Wurman
From the Forward to Liminal Thinking
by Dave Gray

~

Your beliefs inform your actions and your actions are
interpreted by others, and those interpretations become
the basis for their beliefs, which inform their actions...

"Story webs" create a shared world.  They are co-created
by the people who participate in them.  A "story web" gets
created through our own beliefs about an experience and
other people - and we create a shared world based on our
story webs.

Over time, these beliefs become deeply embedded habits
that become invisible; a complex, dense, interconnected
system of beliefs and behavior that become "social
agreements" that go unspoken and are not easy to
untangle.  The more we reinforce the habits [beliefs]
the more invisible they become, until one day they are
just "the way it is."  But - "the way it is" is
something we have created together...

Changing stories can change reality.
So what story are you choosing to believe?

Changing a shared world requires
changing its underlying beliefs...

Dave Gray
Excerpts from - Liminal Thinking

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Imagine a New Experience - Mark Vernon

 Imagination.....reveals the truth of existence and life.  It converts
everyday incidents into rich perceptions that might amount to
a revolution in experience - seeing not with the physical eyes

but through them; seeing beyond the physical realm into the
Infinite realms, if only with our inner seeing, trusting imagination
as the living power of creativity with which we can cooperate...

~

As things run out of control, life is felt to be complexifying at
exponential rates and panic sets in.  It's not really.  It always was
complex.  Rather, people have lost their bearings for lack of
imagination.  The crisis becomes an opportunity to see more.

People cite rules instead of offering forgiveness, resort to courts
rather than reconciliation and, when culture wars break out, ethics
is weaponized in shaming and scapegoating - dividing and 
ostracizing people.

Tweets of hope are drowned out by threads of hate.
It's a dangerous time.

~

[However] It is no longer about the identification and defense
of principles, but the effort to mutually transcend old patterns of
behavior [old patterns of thinking] - laying open the hidden heart;
to understand, not condemn; to liberate, not subjugate.  It welcomes
mistakes as opportunities for the kind of learning that transforms
the soul as well as the mind.
Life has interiority and soul.

It isn't about dissolving the ego but routing out the desire to
possess life and control others.

~

There is a changed meaning to freedom...

There is a shift in consciousness...

In perceiving Eternity one actually 
gives up any struggle...
[We become} transparent to reality...
Time becomes fluid...

We realize we never possessed life to start with.
[We] live because life pours itself into us...
The everyday deaths through which we pass,
as well as the seemingly final death of passing over,
reveal there's a source of life.  It is timeless love,
which include and transcends death.

We are creatures of Infinity...

Excerpts from an essay on William Blake called
The Four-fold Imagination
by Mark Vernon

see the full, in depth essay here

With thanks to Virginia Lonsdale
at Footnote from a  moment

~

"If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is,
Infinite..."

William Blake

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Reflection of sky, clouds and trees in a puddle :)

A Wish for the World - Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear...
Where knowledge is free...
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls...
Where words come out from the depths of Truth...
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit...
Where the mind is led forward...
into ever-widening [inclusive] thought and action...
Let my country [the world] awake...

Excerpt from Verse 35 of the Gitanjali
by Rabindranath Tagore

~

Only the inspired should make decisions
that effect the lives of many,

never a man who has not held God in his arms
and become the servant of unity...

St. Teresa of Avila
(1515-1582)

Culture of Fear - Krishnamurti

We have broken up the earth as yours and mine -
your nation, your flag and his flag,
this particular religion and
the religion of the distant man.
And for it we fight and wrangle,
and the politicians exult in their power
to maintain this division,
never looking at the world as a whole.
They haven't gotten the global mind.
They never feel nor perceive the immense
possibility of having no nationality,
no division...
They maintain the tribal attitude
towards life.
They do not have a mind that
steps beyond the division of race,
culture, and the religions
that man has invented.

We carry on like machines with our
tiresome daily routine.
How eagerly the mind accepts a
pattern of existence,
and how tenaciously it clings to it!
As by a driven nail, the mind is
held together by idea,
and around that idea it lives
and has its being.
The mind is never free,
for it is always anchored
within the radius
of its own center.
It is lost in fear...

Fear is not of the unknown,
but of the loss of the known.

One wonders how long it will take
for man to learn to live on this earth
without wrangles, rows, wars and conflict.
Man has created the conflict by his division
of the earth, linguistically, culturally, superficially.
One wonders how long man,
who has evolved through so many centuries of
pain and grief, anxiety and pleasure,
fear and conflict,
will take to live a different way of life.

J. Krishnamurti

(his words, my format)

This is a newspaper clipping from the Boston Globe from the late 1960's
It reads:

There is no mind more open or
heart more willing to love than
that of a young child.
But teach a child hatred and
prejudice and the mind begins to
close, the heart to harden. Until
finally, a bigot is born.
Sometimes what we don't teach
our children is more important
that what we do.

Learning to Live Together.
The Unfinished Task.

Habitual Patterns

As I sit here, the duct cleaning man is reaming out all our ducts - quack.:) There is a loud, whirring, rhythmic sound of a large, industrial vacuum and the buzzing sound of the reamer tool as it goes through each of the ducts, as the duct man makes his way through the house – which could last from 5-8 hours. I expected to hear more clanging and banging of metal. But he showed us the whirly-gig tool, and it’s really pliable plastic spirals that spin as he feeds it down through each vent opening.

Another duct cleaning man actually came Thursday morning and within a half hour there was an area wide power outage! What are the chances that THAT would happen on the same day!? More Karma? – just kidding… :) He barely got started unscrewing the register plates. I called the electrical company and got a recording that informed me that the power would be out for 4 hours! You never get to talk to a real person. So the duct cleaning man packed up his things and left, telling me to call the company, explain the situation and reschedule – which I did and here we are.

A young, foreign speaking man from Niger, West Africa arrived this morning at 8:20am. (Niger, not Nigeria). When I first heard his accent I thought maybe it was Caribbean with that stereotypical happy lilting sound that seems to rise in different places than the English language. I have to listen very hard to understand what he’s saying – which means paying attention, acutely listening. My first thought was - he seems knowledgeable enough – like *I* should know! :) So I have to *trust* that he does indeed know what he’s doing. (I was the same way with the previous technician – trying to micro-manage and make sure he knew what he was doing – how laughable.) Besides it’s duct cleaning, not brain surgery. Still, I want everything done thoroughly. The website assures that all technicians are “certified.” So once again it’s – step back and trust.

But the habitual pattern is to become vigilant, anxious, mistrusting, wanting to be on top of things, making *sure* things are done just “right” – once again – like *I* know… It’s the control issue again. My husband, on the other hand, fell asleep in the chair, perfectly content to let things be as they are. Our brains are wired differently evidently. :) There are years and years of engrained, eroded neuronal pathways in my brain that trigger electrical impulses down the same path every time. And so I am feeling *very* uncomfortable in the moment, edgy. My body is feeling the surge of impulses to try to take charge of a situation that I have no control over what-so-ever. Which actually when I think about it, is most of life! So the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, my little world reflects the greater reality… Why do I keep going down those same pathways? Why doesn’t my brain get this? But it’s like I really don’t have any control over that either, unless I do some heavy weight training I guess, trying to re-pattern the pattern… I know, it’s called "mindfulness practice” - bringing awareness to the pattern.

So I am having a cultural experience this morning – as well as what’s beginning to sound like major construction going on in the house – the closer it gets to where I am. I did manage to find out that Sani (?sp – sounds like “sonny”) has lived in the US for 8 years. His wife is here, but his parents and other relatives are back in Africa. And he lived in Nebraska before he moved to Colorado 5 years ago. And he seems like a very happy man. I envy that. Even though many spiritual teachers say that it is our Nature to be happy, for some reason this “true nature happiness” eludes me. Probably because of all those conditioned, neural responses from early childhood that got laid down because I believed that life was dangerous. I believed the *story* that life was dangerous – and the internal beware signs went up. The dream character here is still responding to the externals of life, to the story, to the content of what’s happening – like events, circumstances and their corresponding feelings, body responses, and such, rather than living from the greater *Context* of Reality itself – Consciousness itself. And so in that respect this little event today brings more awareness to that mechanism that is still very alive here. It’s a multi-relational experience really – seeing how everything relates to everything else – and how I relate to it all – and how sometimes I get lost down those ducts – those pathways of habitual patterns…

Heart Smiles…