Heading Out and Heading In

It is common in the sometimes bizarre world of therapy to find an individual feeling wonderful one day and depressed the next. There are numerous explanations and terms depending on which paper you read, but one of the common traits in these roller-coaster rides is the difference between extroversion and introversion, feeling exterior to the body and able to freely look outward, versus feeling sucked into the massy dark shadows of the soul and drawn itno a fruitless wrestling match with the apparent forces and arguments of interior darkness.

Heading out, looking further into the world and the worlds of others, and the further reaches of one’s own polyphonic universe, is adventurous and bold.

Heading in, wrestling with the unfathomable gravitic balls of unresolved meaning in the interior, is sobering, serious, saddening and often induces apathy and helplessness.

This is a strange state of affairs, really; it would seem that in a naturally healthy and free state, the being should be perfectly comfortable cruising the interior and the exterior, and in fact see little boundary between these two landscapes, seeing clearly that both are composites of his own creative energies blended with the apparent inputs from the physical universe and the datasets he/she assimilates from the whacky fun-ride world of Others.

But there is a trick, or perhaps several, which gives the lie to this clear exploration of these conjoining territories, and which gives rise tot he sense of being within the imprisoning pale of one’s own difficulties, or being free to explore outside them.

One form of this trick stems from space-time in the physical universe, and another from the tribes who emulate matter in their approach to being in the world.

The first such trick is the entropic condensation of space, which appears to be an inherent attribute of space-time in an energy-driven universe. Absent the intervention of intent, space-time tends toward condensation, solidification, gravitic in-drawing and the gradual dissipation of energy differentials, idling towards a flat plain of no-event in which no forms may be sustained. This tendency toward uniform distribution of energy levels is entropy. Systems once erected start toward it if left to the clutches of the material realm just as a new house starts growing dust, mold, and decay under the weather from the day it is built; barring the intercession of life’s intent to bring order, for example by scraping and painting, or vacuuming up the dirt, the thing falls slowly apart and returns to dust. Let one fireball of a creative designer or a determined char-person come along and the entropic inertia is countered firmly by intent.

The secret behind this rather stupid mechanism of material systems in the final analysis is the apparent sourceless, causeless, automatic nature of mass and space, which offers no direction of change except to be the effect of gravity, erosion, implosion and condensation. The core belief about such things is they are not caused, they are mechanisms, operating on their own inherent devices.

This is well and good for our little sandbox; but notice too that some folks who have been overly exposed to this drearty machine like to espouse these traits as necessary, and even in a perverse way virtuous. They will persuade you, a living source of all creative possibility, that you should, like mass, comply with conditions around you rather than seek to improve them. They will invent logical tricks which make it seem inescapable that you are eternally in the grip of apathetic machinery, careless of feeling, blind to seeing, callous to all knowing, and indifferent to preference. Buy these considerations, and you will find your own powers of creation being suborned by the Masters of Massiness. You will find your desires to be constantly reined in by gravity and inertia, your creativeness endlessly undermined by quicksands of groundless apathy and sucked dry by the black holes of Thinginess. The lies you buy will reinforce the patterns of the material world and give you a mind married to mortar, stone, black matter and the decay of stars into cold iron. And inherent in this sad transition will be the belief throughout that these things cannot be understood, are not permeable by thought, and have no insight to offer, being the solid and intransigent darks which they are.

Thus, the decadent and battered souls you meet will inspire you toward death and the rejection of your own nature. This will tend to make a ball of wax with strong gravitic properties, which calls you back to wrestle with its lies every time you start to look outward and see further beyond the apparent normalcy of the usual frames of existence.

Thus, the conspiracy of matter and mind will show you there is an inuperable pale beyond which travel is harsh and hard to do.

It is worth bearing in mind that these two sources, the mass of an entropic mechanical universe and the mocking messages from life beaten into compliance with the same mode of being, are lective, not mandatory. If you learn to discriminate themessages offered, and select with true preference those you will take on board as your own, you can unwind this winding sheet and find yourself free to look out or in at will.

All it requires is to understand that the truest Self you can be is also the freest, highrest, best and most aware Self you can be.

The material universe and those who elect themselves as its dark-faced hall-monitors will both tell you otherwise; but you, in the final analysis, must choose who and what you prefer to believe. From that choice, all the experience of the universe will follow.

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