(Section 7)
The expansions and contractions are the natural cycles of growth. They are life breathing. Each cycle is different in length, depending on what is happening in the life.
Both the expansion and the contraction phases have their own dangers of illusions. In expansions, things open up and become easy. Opportunities and people are attracted to the student by the chero. When this happens, the student is tempted to throw away her framework, or to go outside of it, to pursue, to run after these opportunities and people. If she does this, she loses both her base and what attracted these things to her in the first place. She finds herself out of power.
Another common reaction to expansions is to think one is not worthy enough, not able or strong enough to handle all of the good that life suddenly offers her. Such a person destroys the expansion, her framework, and sometimes even herself to avoid having her “unworthiness” be found out, to avoid the responsibilities that being happy and creating a full life bring. This reaction is more widespread than one might think. The student usually has little problem accepting criticism from the teacher. But when the teacher starts talking about the student’s strengths, abilities, and potentials, the student very often forgets her pact of trust, and starts arguing with the teacher. This is because if the student accepts her worthiness, her strengths, abilities and potentials, she is admitting her responsibility for creating her life and reality, and the effect she has on others. The student should trust the teacher even when the teacher is praising her, although this praise may be rare.
In contractions, the student faces a different set of illusions. In contractions, everything seems, appears to be falling apart. What the person thought would be a direct path to what she wants falls apart. People start flaking out on her, leaving her. Things get hard and difficult. Things seem to stop happening for her. Her life sphere gets small. The pace of living becomes slow.
Most people panic in contractions. They feel trapped, penned in. They feel like they are losing everything, going backward, dying as who they thought they were. When this happens, they grab onto things and people to save themselves and to get what they want; or they give up, thinking they are not strong or worthy enough to get to all possibilities. They usually tell themselves they really do not want all possibilities, they really want less. They lie to themselves to make their settling for less more livable.
In reality, contractions are periods in which the old phase is being rearranged to prepare for the new expansion that is coming. Some old stuff has to be burnt away to make ready for the new. Some valuable stuff is stored away to be used later. This feels like losing. This loss is not real. The creative progress in contractions is far too complex for us to rationally, logically understand or try to rationally plan out. Evolution is an automatic process when you let go into it. When you know that after every expansion comes a contraction, you will be less tempted to break out of your framework to pursue some glamorous or exciting avenues that appear to be more direct routes to what you want. You can be sure they are not.
When you know that after every contraction comes an expansion, you can better practice active passivity, which is the key to using contractions as a quiet building of creative potential. In this way, in both expansions and contractions, you can maintain the even focus that puts you in control of your reality. By knowing the cycles of expansions and contractions are irregular, you can relax, not holding on to anything, but not waiting in dread for the next contraction to hit. This is one of the aspects of erour, the vulnerable power.
The student is the creator of her framework. The main part of her framework is now the apprenticeship. She created this by deciding to be an apprentice, to trust the teacher, to take on the responsibilities and the forms of the rituals. The apprenticeship as a ritual has been formed ages before this teacher and this student were even born. But when the student took on the role of the apprentice, she recreated the ritual as every student has since the beginning of time. She created the teacher. She created the student-teacher relationship and the other forms of the rituals. This gives the student erour in the ritual.
But some students give up their erour by starting to think of the rituals as the teacher’s rituals - the forms, the rules, the ways - as his. So they start feeling limited by these things, resent these things, rebel against these things. This consumes them, blocking out their power. These students become victims again. Apprenticeship is a powerful metaphor of life, and of afterlife, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I took the EST training a long time back. By doing it, I was agreeing to do whatever was required in the training. Three or four hours into the session, the trainer said we would take a break after we covered a certain amount of material. I settled in, not because I gave my power to the trainer, but because I had agreed to do whatever. But other people argued with the trainer, rebelling, shouting. This took two hours, after which we still had to cover the material, which took just five minutes. Those people gave up their power, and they kept themselves from what they wanted. I kept my power by surrendering to what I (not the trainer) had created for myself. I made the rules my own so that I could create within them. I did not do it out of duty, or guilt, or pressure. I did it because I had created the framework for myself. In this way, the person is never a victim. He is always vulnerable, but he uses his vulnerability to create.
The student should use the first break of the apprenticeship to reaffirm her creative power and focus in the apprenticeship. The apprenticeship break is like salmon swimming back to their birthplace after their life in the ocean, to give birth. This upstream swim has always been hard. But now man has put more dams in the way of the student’s path. But if the student makes it back, there will be a new birth. The apprenticeship is an automatic nonlinear process. If the student stays in it, she will get all she wants.
(Section 8)
Almost anything can be used as a model to show how the cherotic life works, even computer games. My kid got a computer game “Labyrinth” a few years back. It is a maze game with ever-changing walls, with monsters bent on eating or shooting you if you don’t shoot them first. You have to rescue four men from four different cells and reach the door to the next level before you get killed three times. It, like life, appeared to be an action game requiring speed and quick reflexes. My kid has quick reflexes, so he was very good at this fast, high-action game, full of tension, stress and glamour. He reached level 8 (of 12 levels) very quickly. But then he got restless and bored; so he quit playing.
Even though I could operate the controls to the game, there appeared to be no way for me to play the game successfully, because I did not and will not ever have speed and quick reflexes. But I started playing the game just to have something to do. I did want to reach the higher levels, but I put that want in my backbrain and forgot it. (We will use this backbrain in creating our reality later.) I accepted the framework of the game and started to absorb it into my body. I made it my own, even though it appeared I was a helpless victim of the game. For months I did not rescue even one man. But my body absorbed the rhythm of the changing walls. I began to feel where to move to avoid death and to get nearer to my objective. I did not try to understand because the events in the game are randomly nonlinear. But I tuned in on the reality of the game. By doing so, I changed the game into a slow strategy game. I did this by not resisting the structure, but by taking it on as my own.
This slow game offered much more fun to me than the fast game offered my son. If we measure the fun in time, my son played the game semi-regularly for only a few months, while I have played it now for a few years.
Every time I am about to move on to a new, higher level, I get stuck. I keep just about getting it, but then “failing”. This is because I let my wanting to get to the higher level out of my backbrain, letting it become the goal that I am focused on. This raises the stress level to the point where I cannot do anything right. I get nervous and fearful.
I have learned to put my wants and goals away in my backbrain - to not focus on my wants and goals while still having them. I have learned that once I have my wants and goals in a priority order in my backbrain, it sets the automatic process in motion to get what I want. If I tried to plan, plot, manipulate to get what I wanted, it would get in the way. I always get what I want, but rarely in the way I thought I would get it.
Once I get my desires back into my backbrain where they belong, the stress, fear, and nervous levels go down. The getting to the new level loses its special glamour, becoming just another state which I will some day get to, if not today, then maybe tomorrow. When this attitude is firmly implanted, one day I am guided into the new level. I cannot take credit for this. I am just let in. After this high point, my average score usually plunges. (A contraction.) If I stay calm and committed, my average score slowly climbs past the high point towards the next level. I have gone from not being able to get a single man to being on level 3, going for level 4. I went from being totally limited to being in the state of all possibilities. This was done not by anything I did or because of any skill I developed. It was done by enjoying playing even when there was no reachable goal. Enjoying playing unlocked every possibility.
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