Igor: Remember I promised you the seven rules of
Flight Club?
Well, here’s the first one of them.
All of you are doing it, so we may as well start to talk about it.
The first rule of Flight Club is: Discover, don’t create.
What the difference between discovering and creating?
Student: I think it’s already there.
Igor: Exactly.
Think about your mindset.
If you’re creating it, then you’re consciously choosing it, and there are times
when that’s, of course useful.
When you’re discovering, you’re letting your unconscious mind do the work
for you.
So, not only is it easier but, importantly, you’re showing trust in an
unconscious process.
Also the things you discovery tend to be more meaningful or important to you.
It’s all the stuff that you’ve not been paying
attention to in the first place, so when it comes out that’s where the payoff
tends to be.
There are a couple of corollaries to this idea of discovery, to answer your
question here.
What do you do if a portion of your experience isn’t the way
you want it to be?
You have two choices: 1.
You can leave.
In other words, if it’s too much for you for some reason, you can always leave
and that’s a skill that we’ll be developing tomorrow.
On the other hand, the choice is:
2.
Just sit with it.
Notice I’m not trying to do anything with it.
For example, if there’s a hazy area, if you try to fill in the blanks consciously
all you’re going to do is start creating something, and it won’t necessarily
be what you need it to be.
If you just hang out there and are okay with it being hazy, just sit there – you
don’t try to make it more hazy and you don’t try to change it – then what is
that saying in terms of your relationship with your unconscious?
Let me give you a scenario.
Let’s say you’re tutoring a little child in math – a
lot of kids have math phobias nowadays – and you ask them what’s two plus
two, and the little kid just turns almost to tears and says I don’t know, I don’t
know, what is a more useful approach?
Come on, think, think.
You can do it, think.
It’s four.
What we just did there, or say, it’s okay, I know you don’t know yet.
Take your time.
Relax.
Which of the two approaches is more likely to be useful for the relationship –
not necessarily with the math skills but just for the relationship you have with
that child?
The second one, right?
Are you beginning to understand the idea behind just sitting with something?
This is very easy.
This comes onto the fifth rule, which we’ll talk about now,
so we’re going to jump around a little bit.
The fifth rule of Flight Club is the Equanimity Rule.
In other words, whenever you have an emotion, sit with it.
If it’s a good emotion, sit with it, enjoy it and appreciate
it.
If it’s a bad emotion, sit with it, appreciate it and let it be the way it is.
This takes us back to one of the other sayings or the rules we talked about
yesterday: What you resist will persist and what you accept you gain the power to transform.
Now you’re getting to that point where you’re beginning to sense the
boundary area between the conscious and the unconscious.
You’re beginning to sense the veil in terms of some things are hazy, or something’s
going on, or I had an intuition, or this came up but it
wasn’t good enough.
Are you beginning to get a sense where that boundary is starting to lie for
you?
Of course it will change on a daily basis depending on your mood and so
on, but over a period of time you should be getting better and better at
sensing that boundary and better and better at moving that boundary
backwards just by the nature of the relationship you’re having.
Let me ask you this.
If you had a friend and that friend can never be
angry, upset or depressed around you, do you really have a friendship or
is it an acquaintance?
Student: An acquaintance.
Igor: When it comes to your own mind, would you
like to have a friendship or an acquaintance?