nicklebleu said:
So it seems to me, that you already have LEARNED the lesson - or haven't you?
Well, when it comes to the Work, you are never "done". Learning about your mechanical responses and uncovering the real "I" is a never-ending task, a life-long process. It's like peeling away the layers of an onion; just when you think you have discovered and corrected one mechanism, you find another, and another.... Think of it as a process of refinement. Or like learning to play an instrument. A pianist who strives for musical purity is never "done" learning his craft, is never fully acquainted with his instrument, there is always more the learn....
nicklebleu said:
That's the missing bit for me: The transition from the "purely intellectual" to the "consiously" applying of what you learned. Maybe an analogy helps taken from psychology: You can talk all you life about a certain feeling, but how do you get to really "feel" it, to incorporate it into your "soul" ...
Well, the Work is not about learning to "feel" certain emotions, it's about learning to recognize the programs that cause your Machine to produce certain emotions and behaviours . Once you see the connections, the emotions dissipate, because you come to see them as not actually "real", but mechanical in nature. And that allows the real and authentic "I" to emerge.
An example: You compulsively make jokes whenever your wife is angry at you, which only makes her more angry because she thinks you are not taking her seriously. You don't know why you do that, it's just an automatic response. If you begin to practice "observing" yourself in those situations, in an objective manner, over time you will start to see connections; that just before the "joking" begins, you actually feel fear, which is the emotion you are trying to avoid with the "joking". If you follow that feeling of "fear", it will eventually take you back to the circumstances in which you first learned the behaviour. You will discover that, say, as a child, whenever your father became angry, he became violent, and that your mother used to try to prevent that by attempting to change your father's mood, by being "light" and joking, and trying to make your father laugh. She taught you to do the same. So, as an adult, whenever someone close to you gets angry, your "Joking Program" takes over, without any thought on your part. Once you come to recognize the mechanism involved, however, you can begin to let go of the Program as mechanical in nature, something that stands in the way of your real "I" interacting with your wife in those situations.
That's an example of just one Program that might be operating in a person's life, one that might take months of disciplined, conscious observation of one's Machine to identify and eliminate. But it is only one of hundreds, so the Work is never ending. But through the daily, patient, and consistent practice of Self Observation, you are able to identify and eliminate more and more, to behave less and less mechanically; and with each peeling away of the "skin" of your mechanisms, you are able to reveal more and more of your real "I", and become more and more authentic in your daily behaviour.
I hope this begins to help.
