SPARK 004 DISTINCTION: Everything that happens is neutral.
NOTES: When something is, it just is. Its existence has no meaning. When something happens, it just happens. The event implies nothing. There is no connection between whether something is or is not, happens or does not happen, and any kind of meaning you may want to give to it. The meaning is not automatically attached no matter who or what is involved. Meaning does not exist in nature. Everything is originally neutral and meaningless. It is even neutral and meaningless that everything is neutral and meaningless.
Meaning is a creation of the human mind, one hundred percent independent of circumstances. Any meaning could be given to any incident at any time by anybody. This may not be how it seems. We human beings tend to experience meaning as meaningful.
Here is why: you created your Box as your original survival strategy. Since you are still alive it is clear that your survival strategy works (because if your survival strategy did not work you would be dead!) Therefore, included in the survival strategy is the imperative that, above all else, your Box must preserve itself (figuring that if your Box can preserve itself it can preserve you!) In order to preserve itself, your Box has positioned itself as an interface between you and the world. As a result, you do not directly experience the world as it is.
Whatever you experience has already been filtered, censored, and modified by your Box (‘for your protection’). Whatever you express has already been edited, formulated, and repackaged by your Box (‘for your own good’).
The Box adds spin, slant, propaganda, and most prominently, meaning. The Box politicizes experience, gives things names, and uses reasons, emotions, criticisms and opinions to polarize neutrality into good/bad, right/wrong, friend/enemy, superior/inferior, and so on. This keeps you in your Box, puts everything else in its own Box, eliminates options, and erases possibility from your world.
For a Possibility Manager, options are essential, so a Possibility Manager seeks neutrality. No matter how it seems, everything that happens is without meaning.
EXPERIMENT: Learn the various ways your Box gives meaning to what is happening. Spend some time closely observing your Box’s meaning-making machinery at play. When the next thing happens, slow down. Notice that for most things that happen (clocks ticking, jets going by, phones ringing, someone sniffling, dogs barking, and so on) your Box applies no meaning.
The Box selects certain incidents and then uses little bits of evidence to whip up big important meanings to attach to those incidents as suits its own purposes. Then the Box is justified by the meaning it manufactured to do its usual thing.
Write down some of the sentences that your Box uses to attach meaning to an incident. For example: “How rude!” “How thoughtless!” “What a jerk!” “They do not care about me!” “This is not fair!” “That is wrong!” “How stupid!” “That is not wrong!” etc.
Then arrange to spend 15 to 30 minutes with someone who tends to push rather firmly on your ‘meaning making buttons.’ The experiment is to dedicate yourself to keeping everything that happens completely neutral for that whole period of time.
No matter what that other person says, no matter what they do, apply no meaning. After your allotted time has elapsed, thank the person for being with you and then leave. Afterwards, assess your energy level. By avoiding making meanings do you have more or less energy to use for creating what really matters to you?
Meet you at the zero point, Clinton
World Copyleft 2018 by Clinton Callahan. You are granted permission to copy and distribute this SPARK as long as this author, website, and copyright notice are included. Creative Commons Attribution and Share Alike CC BY SA International 4.0 License. To get your own free email subscription to SPARKs go to http://www.clintoncallahan.org. Thanks for experimenting! Experimenting builds matrix to hold more consciousness.