Monday, May22: Chapter 21: Three Choices

THREE CHOICES
We can either be functioning at the level of a well adjusted robot. Here the inner chatter is upbeat most of the time (“beautiful day,” “wonderful town,” great friends and children”) and we are keeping ourselves busy doing things we more or less enjoy doing. Children are great to help people elevate to high functioning robot, since they actually do the new and the unexpected occasionally and thus can spark us into realizing that sameness isn’t all of life. Vacations can provide a change of impressions which serves again to stimulate us with something out of the ordinary, and a variety of books, movies, activities again provides a counterfeit experience of living in each moment as it is new and fresh.

Or least appealing choice is to function at the lower level of robot life. Here the inner chatter is all about how people don’t treat us right, our situation is so tough, things are bad and they are going to get worse, terrible childhood, bad marriage, bad health, bad luck, all sorts of victim talk. Continually stressed, full of blame, feeling unhappy or angry, stuck, trapped, depressed, frantic, these folk aren’t happy campers and are good suckers for hating foreigners or communists or terrorists or Arabs or black people, but a mother-in-law or noisy neighbor can often do the trick. Numbing out with fats and sugar or television or buying crap are all popular activities here.

The third alternative is awareness. To wake up to this moment and then this moment and then this moment. This is a beautiful place to be and can be written about and talked about and extolled either from a state of awareness or the state of a high functioning robot repeating words and ideas about the here and now, while not being totally asleep to the present. Witness the Power of Now phenomenon. .