Cogitating about it all afterward, I was reminded of Fritz Perls (gestalt therapist), known for his social rudeness that tended to be passed off as a sign of his great height of vision.  His attitude seemed to be that we deserved his rudeness, as we obviously lived at a lesser height of vision or we would, what?, have no questions?

We were at dinner one night and I asked a neutral, noninflammatory, question.  He looked at me, looked down, blinked a couple of times, and then let loose on me, apparently as my punishment for asking anything of him.  However, in his looking down and blinking, I saw he was reaching for his rudeness response, his way of reasserting that this was his way of being known.

No doubt a brilliant man, he was the originator of the ‘hot seat’ position in therapy, designed to be a no-excuses spotlight where only the down and dirty Truth could be told.  His famous book is In and Out of the Garbage Pail.

However, socially he was a disaster, apparently addicted to his personality (his false ego (see Glossary)) which included, and leading with, this rudeness schtick.  Due to his unavailability, how could anyone be friends with him?  He must have been very lonely.

Through it all, I learned some things from him that have stayed with me and been very useful in my own journey of learning and understanding.  Glad to have been in his circle of influence for a moment; glad the glare of his attention on me was soon over.

It might be fun to create a computer game that is made up of these elements, where the point of the game would be to use color and observation to uncover and experiment with meanings.  Following the path of color to infinite depth as revealed to the non-buffered human nervous system — the hallucinogenic quality of color as both message and meaning.  Painting God/painted by God. 

Our job as meaning-making machines is to find/create meanings in every bit of What Is observed and then placing that meaning into the collective pot and watching while the parts and particles, the puzzle pieces, expand and develop through contact with the other pieces, in constant motion rubbing against each other, attracted, repulsed, learning and, finally, allowing.

Her mother had been my piano teacher in my youngish years, and her house only a block away from ours.  She is a year or two younger than I, so we weren’t in the same classes in school.  However, we had played together a few times, one memory of which I retain as I was so inept at what we were doing.

The house she lived in was made of wood, was old, with small rooms that were full of spookiness and mystery to me.

As soon as I remembered her, a series of memories/dreams of her house came flooding in that had apparently occurred in another lifetime of mine.  Here they are:

On one side of the living room was a steep stairs leading up to a narrow landing where there was one door leading to a room on the right and one door leading to a room on the left.  These were the two bedrooms in the house.  Over time there would be a recurring image of one or the other of these bedrooms being mine, laying on a narrow iron bed and looking at the flowered wallpaper.

The strongest dream/memory is of being in the living room at night looking up the stairs to the landing.  Suddenly there appeared a large, glowing figure of an apparent human with a head, two arms, two legs, and a torso.  There was no detail at all.  The figure looked as if a child had drawn it, but not a stick figure.  I went into total shock and panic.  The figure radiated both light and intelligence, and appeared to contemplate me for a few moments.  It then began to descend the stairs.  I fled, at least in consciousness, and there is no memory of what might have happened next.

The next seems as if it might be a continuation of the above; however, the figure hunting me was dark and almost invisible.  Again I was in the living room at night when I suddenly felt, and barely saw, a figure that radiated ill will.  I, as quietly as I was able, ran into the kitchen and, for lack of a better hiding place, forced myself into a small space between a wringer washer and a concrete double sink.  I crouched down to be as invisible as possible, and prayed for my continued existence.  End of scene.

In this present time when I was a child or young woman, the backyard of this house was largely bare and scrubby.  There was a short line of low hedge slightly to the right of the back door. 

Next scene:  I was sitting on a three-cornered wood stool smack dab in the middle of where this hedge would be, churning butter in a small wood churn.  I might have been a child, as the churn was not very large.  The sense I had was that I was doing useful work as my mother needed the butter and expected a good outcome to my efforts.  My present body retains the feelings in the muscles of what it is like to churn butter.

Last scene:  Suddenly walking down a commercial street in the same small Montana town.  The buildings to my right still exist.  I was following a woman in a hobble skirt.  We were walking on a wooden sidewalk.  Looking at the woman’s highly impractical dress, I thought, “What a really stupid and ugly fashion.  This woman must be crazy.”  My second thought was, “At this time (late 19th century?), what would a woman on the Western frontier be doing in a skirt like that?”  It was extremely unlikely and made me question if I was really there seeing this, although it all seemed completely real.  End of scene.

Later:  At the time I wasn’t aware there was a name for this ridiculous fashion.  At some point, in this or that time, I saw a drawing in a magazine or a book (the publication had an appearance very much like a Godey’s Lady’s Book.  This publication named this fashion the Hobble Skirt.

However, love is like inches; it’s hard to run out of, and takes a major act of imagination to pretend that there is not enough.  Love is like air; if you want more it’s necessary to breathe more deeply.

They talk about this in Christian Science as the way in which when healing occurs; the whatever-it-was that apparently required healing simply disappears as if it never was,  as, in Truth, it never did; we just made it so for a time.

We humans constantly forget this.  It’s probably too simple and too profound for the Reactive Mind (RM) to handle.  So, having forgotten it again, when we relearn this it always appears as a revelation.

The Universal Solvent is Forgiveness, which is a special function of Love.  It’s also the Key to the Kingdom, and we, each of us, hold this key in our hands and hearts.

This is the whole of the Law of Healing.

I highly recommend going outside to look at the sky and the cloud patterns, smell the air, raise your hands to the elementals, and request the weather you want.  What I say is:  “Elementals of the Earth and of the Sky, of the Air, the Water, and the Fire . . .”  Envision the weather you desire in order to give them a template for understanding.  Say, “If it is possible and you are willing, please bring ______.”  Feel the weather you want and draw it toward you.  At the end, fill your heart with gratitude and thank them deeply for whatever they do.

The image is of humanity standing in a circle, one of us holding a ball that symbolizes Happiness.  The context is that we have all been taught that all, or any, of the Others is more important than are We, and therefore more deserving of Happiness.  So we pass it out of our hands and into theirs, for if we were to keep the ball of Happiness what would we be?  SELFISH!

But, aren’t we, each of us, one of the Others to all the other Others, and therefore, by definition, deserving of Happiness?

What if we just made a whole bunch more balls of Happiness, enough for at least one each?  Then, would we allow ourselves to keep our own or would the low self-esteem that we, most of us, seem to have taken in with our mother’s milk, compel us to keep trying to give it out of our own hands?

In Transformation Counseling, one of the precepts is that the greatest gift any of us can give is our own elevated sense of self-esteem.  This constitutes the gift of permission to all others to also inhabit their own high self-esteem, and thereby pay forward our intrinsic gifts, those that are ours alone to Be and to deliver.

Here in a nutshell is the whole story of Scarcity vs. Abundance.  ‘I’ don’t deserve (for some made-up reason/set of made-up reasons that mostly escape our conscious attention).  ‘They’, by reason of being ‘not me’ automatically deserve.  And so we hand over not only our personal Happiness and joy in Being, but our personal power, our power of discrimination, our ability/willingness to choose Life and Love for our own lives.

Another precept of Transformation Counseling is all experience of Life is the result of Point of View (see Glossary).  As we easily move through physical space, thereby automatically changing our physical point of view, we can equally easily change our inner point of view.  As with everything, Desire/Intention is the key.

All experience lies within you.  Your job is to choose from this treasure trove of possibilities.  After all, it IS your life.  You don’t need anyone’s permission other than your own, which is, of course, the hardest permission to get.

Context is the key to the contents of the box.   The ‘box’ is constructed of our beliefs and includes point of view (POV is the point in space from which we view that determines the angle at which we view content).

The construction of beliefs around content, and establishing a more-or-less fixed POV regarding this content, is the means by which we build our personal reality.

We are unable, in the most literal sense, to move (think or act) outside this box as there is, for each of us, no ‘outside’ to our personal box of beliefs.  That is, except through imagination.  Imagination is the trying on of another reality than the one we now project and inhabit.

Imagination is the possibility of the construction of a new context and therefore a new key to content.  It changes the POV of the box’s content and may thereby change, simply or radically, that content as resource.

‘Transformation’ is the epiphany that allows a new or different seeing of the content and contexts of our lives.  Every thing may be as it was before the transformative moment, and then every thing is seen differently and all content becomes newly perceived as resource and holder of meaning.

Imagination is the Rainbow Bridge, our connection to our larger Self.  Imagination is our Jacob’s Ladder of ascension to any higher and wider level of understanding.