by Linda Decker
“Who, me, feel and experience? But all my life, I’ve been proud of having my emotions under control! I have no desire to wallow in negative feelings.” This is sometimes the reaction people have when they read about the Avatar Course, and discover that one of the first things we do on Section II of the course is to reestablish a connection with feeling alive.
Hey, been there. I spent 15 years at IBM where most self-respecting, upwardly mobile employees had a slick plaque in their office quoting Tom Watson, IBM’s founder, stoically proclaiming: “THINK.” I, along with millions of other intelligent, educated people in the world, had presumed that the indoctrination we’d received to go into our heads, lock the door, throw away the key, and THINK was always good advice.
And sometimes, it is. Try to balance a checkbook by “feeling” what the correct numbers should be, and you’ll see what I mean just before you dash for your calculator. But the reverse is true as well. When you try to THINK your way through a situation calling for intuition (“Is now a good time for us to start a family?”), imagination (“What innovative new services would thrill our customers?”), or experience (“Boy am I hungry! I’m ready for dinner.”), you’re headed for the weeds. So, it turns out that we abdicate most of our power and effectiveness when we assume that thinking is the only valid mode of operation in life.
When materials that describe the Avatar Course discuss re-establishing the ability to connect with the feel of life, many of us hyper-indoctrinated souls immediately put that through the usual filter and come out with the notion that we’ll be made to experience “negative emotion.” You know, slog through recreating past traumas, publicly display our discomfort, weep, analyze the analysis of our introspection, gnash our teeth or whatever.
Logical conclusion? Yes. Psychological practices of the last century have relied on variations of these techniques with somewhat uneven results. Correct conclusion? No, it’s a semantic misunderstanding. When Avatar puts you back in touch with what it feels like to be alive, without distortion or judgment, we simply and powerfully show you how to lay that weight down, once and for all. Analysis can be quite fascinating or else we wouldn’t be so insistent on keeping it on continuous auto-create. But, if you’d like to be cleanly done with certain aspects of your life, the first step is to willingly experience them, free of the distorting resistance that makes them painful. You’ll learn how to remove those distorting filters, and along with them, the pain they’ve caused.“There is a difference between knowing intellectually and experiencing...To go beyond the limits of the intellect, one must experience firsthand without evaluation. Intellectual understanding is a finished jigsaw puzzle picturing some experience in words. Experience is being present, without definition, expectation or judgment, with one’s perceptions.
There are methods by which one can fluidly move from one (point of view) to another. One can change! The level of idea you look AS determines the level of idea you look AT. ...Relativity. The ability to relocate consciousness is the ultimate form of space travel.
“Getting into and analyzing the content of consciousness is the process known as trying to figure it out. It always comes down to saying that that bubble means this when looked at from this bubble... But life doesn’t come with a meaning—it just is. You can either study the symbols, or you can go out and experience being alive. Either way, awareness waits in the background, totally compassionate, appreciatively watching.”—an edited excerpt from Living Deliberately by Harry Palmer
Or to put it another way: “I’m 44 years old, and I just realized that I’ve spent my whole life either remembering the past or anticipating the future—I’ve never been fully present to experience my own life! Now, with these skills—what an incredible difference!”
— comment from a recent Avatar graduate
Yeah, seems a little like going to a lavish dinner party and realizing that you’ve been sitting at the table with your eyes closed, thinking over what it was or would be like to eat great food. Starving while surrounded by abundance. Good news! The banquet of life is now being served! Any you’re ever so warmly invited.
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