Serenity Two Ways (021) Transcript
<voices overlapping, music in background>
Hey!
Oh! Good morning — oh! Do we have to get up?
Keep it down; I’m trying to sleep.
Yeah, we want to make that recording.
What are we going to record today?
What? What recording?
You know, the one about multiplicity.
You know, the usual — we’re trying to make a difference in the world or something.
Oh, yeah.
Well — I just really wanna help people!
I have no idea what to say.
I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have really good questions, and need really good answers.
Why talk to them? It’s not like anybody gives a shit.
Well what makes us an authority?
I don’t really think it matters how long we’ve been multiple, or how long we’ve known we’re multiple — we’re multiple!
<Aliessa laughs richly>
Episode 21: Serenity Two Ways. Hi, everybody. Today, I thought I would read a modernized version of the serenity section of James Allen's 'As a Man Thinketh'. I did a little translation of that, from 'As a Man Thinketh' I think of it is 'How an Adult Thinks'. And I put this up on my life coaching blog, because it's tied into a lot of the work that I do on changing panic and anxiety into being passion-based and living a better life from the inside. Changing all the emotional turmoil of anxiety into passion, so that the energy shifts. So that you you live your life in a more positive, generative energy state, instead of in being kind of sunk into negative energy cycles. If you're interested in that type of stuff, I did write a first book on it called Surrender to Passion: Worried to Wonderful in 28 days. I'm reworking that in my mind. First, I'm going to actually rework that into a book on passionising and make it more, more centered on exercises of developing your passion. The whole idea of passionising is practicing the art of following your heart.
Serenity, by James Allen, modernized.
Tranquility of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom. It is the result of long and patient effort in self-control. Serenity's presence is an indication of mature experience and extraordinary knowledge of the laws and operations of thought.
You become calm to the degree that you understand yourself as a being evolved by thought, and the understanding of others as the result of their thoughts. As you develop a correct understanding, and see more and more clearly how you allow your internal relations and reactions to emotions due to the external actions of cause and effect, you can stop reacting, stop being anxious, angry, worrying and guilty, and remain balanced, firm, and serene.
The calm person, having learned self-control, knows how to adapt to others; and others, in turn, revere your spiritual strength, and feel that they can learn from and trust you. The quieter a person becomes inside, the greater your success, your influence, your power for good. Even an ordinary business owner will find that their business prosperity increases as they develop greater self-control and equanimity, since people will always prefer to deal with a person whose behavior is very stable.
The strong and calm person is always loved and revered. You are like a tree that gives shade in a thirsty land, or a sheltering cave in a storm. Who does not love a calm heart, a sweet-temper, or balanced life? It does not matter if it rains or shines, or what changes around you when you have these blessings, since you are always sweet, serene, and calm.
That exquisite balance of character we call serenity is the last culture-developing lesson; it is the flowering of life, the fruiting of the soul. It is precious as wisdom, more desirable than gold — yes, even precious gold. How insignificant is the mere search for money in comparison with a serene life — a life that dwells in the ocean of Truth, under the waves, beyond the reach of storms, in the Eternal Calm!
How many people we know who waste their lives, who ruin everything that is sweet and beautiful with their explosive temper, who destroy their balance of character and make enemies! This is a question of whether the vast majority of people no longer ruin their lives and spoil their happiness for lack of self-control. How few people we find in life that are balanced, that have the exquisite grounding of the finished character! Yes, people as a whole surge with uncontrolled passion, are tumultuous with uncontrolled pain, are shaken by anxiety and doubt. Only the wise adult, only the one whose thoughts are controlled and purified, makes the winds and storms of the soul obey them.
Souls shaken by the storm, wherever you may be, under whatever conditions you may live, know this: in the ocean of life, the islands of Blessing smile, and the sunny shore of your ultimate incarnation awaits your arrival. Keep your hand firmly on the wheel of thought. In the cockpit of your soul reclines the Captain; it only sleeps; wake it up. Self-control is strength; Right thinking is capability; Calmness is power.
So I came across this years ago. And one of the things he recommended was saying this passage out loud every day. And instead of doing that, I recorded it, so that I could play it every day and hear myself say it to myself. And I decided, hey, you know, maybe other people on my podcast would love to hear it. And I recorded the original version, which I'll play in a moment. But I decided, you know, some people may just be resistant to the word man being in there too much, or to the male pronoun being in there. And some of the language is a little awkward, a little bit archaic, so let me modernize it for the contemporary listener. The original is beautiful, you know, and not much changed between the two versions, it's just that it was written in 1903, with 1903 thinking, and could use just a little tweak so that it's more accessible to people. So you'll have my original version, if you like that better. And you can choose whether or not you want either of these recordings to play frequently or not. You could just listen to this particular podcast and then say, oh, I never need that, again. [Laugh.] What might be slight sticking points is that it may feel like "Well, if I'm not calm, and I'm not stable, that there's something wrong with me." But this is more acknowledging that so few people are calm and stable inside, that it's a goal to reach, that it's, it's an extraordinary person who can achieve that. But it also says you can achieve it. So it's not shaming people who can't. It's more saying, this is a laudable goal, this is something that will serve you if you can achieve it.
There are some interesting things in the passage that I love as imagery and maybe on some level help to inform my decision in United Front on using a spaceship. At first I started out, you know, a pirate ship and changed my mind because there's so many bad connotations for pirates, but I meant more swashbuckling, kind of Three Musketeers, kind of... the, the sexy trope pirate, not the reality pirate. And so I decided to take it completely to the realm of sci-fi and fantasy, to take the baggage out of it and make it more like, you know, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, you know, whatever, whatever your favorite is, Star Wars. Where you have your body as a ship, you're going through human space, and you're interfacing with all these aliens. You know, either singleton humans or the other systems out there. You're interfacing with others, in an attempt to exchange commodities, generally speaking - friendship, or companionship, love, romance, sex, money, whatever, whatever it is that you're exchanging with others, it's commodities that you and your crew need. You know, your body needs food, so you have to go to the grocery store, and you have to deal with these aliens who have these food commodities that you can bring on board, right? So I just kind of play with that metaphor, and how we have to deal with external life and trials and travails and navigating parking lots in our, in our cars and things like that. Just kind of give it a little fun twist - not to go off into fantasy, you know, completely and escape reality. But, why are we interfacing with the world? What are we doing here? You know, why do we work jobs? Why do we do this? Why do we do that? It's an exchange - it's, we're giving friendship and receiving it, we're giving love and receiving it, we're exchanging time for money, and then money for food, or whatever it is we're doing in the world. Even if it's just dealing with caseworkers, and re-upping our benefits, or going to see a doctor or a therapist, these are all interactions between systems -either a singleton system, which is still a system, or a multiple system, or a dog system, or a cat system, or you know, whatever, or school system maybe. You know, we're dealing with all these other systems. So we're a system within this milieu of many, many systems in the world. And and if you look at the human body, and you think of digestive tract being a system, and the circulatory system and the neurological system, there's constant exchanging things with each other, there's commerce constantly going on. So it's interesting when James Allen mentions business owner, because he says that even business, business owners, people will prefer to interface with a business owner who is calm and stable. Anybody who has self-control and seems, let's say, I'm not gonna say predictable, I don't like that word. But at least placid to begin with, is easier to interface with. And I think we can all agree, actually, no matter how unstable we are inside, isn't it nice when you have to go to a store, and the cashier is just grounded. You can just tell they're like, they're, they're all there. They are 100% present, they say hello to you, they look you in the eye, they smile, they seem very calm. It brings that to you, it actually is a little bit infectious in a way, in a good way. When you're dealing with somebody who's really got it and you can feel they, they are where they want to be right now, you kind of get some of that from them. That's I think the point that James Allen is making is, you can be the center of calm in everybody else's storms. And remind them on some visceral level that it is possible that even though you have all these troubles in your life, you're still the shelter in the storm, that you are still the center of calm, that you're still fully engaged and present in whatever it is you're doing right now. How do we get there, when when we have all these people in our head, is to start inside the system. You, whoever you are, if you're interested, you can be the calm in your internal storm. You can make sure you stay grounded even if others in your system are not. You can be the one that everybody else goes, "Wow, they really got it. There's something different about them. They're fully present. They're really here." And you can start adopting that within yourself. It gets infectious when you do it. Other people may be like, "Hey, what are you doing? How are you doing that? How can I do that?" And you can hand them. James Allen's 'Serenity'. It's like what eight paragraphs or whatever. You can hand it to them and say "Here, this is how I'm doing it. And if you need more help than that, I will bridge into..." Little tiny ad for myself - I am a life coach. I teach people how to get along better inside. I teach people how to handle stress. Those are the two things that I specialize in for people. Stress and anxiety throws everything out of whack - any disability, any disease, any any disorder that somebody has is buffeted by anxiety and stress and exacerbated and all the symptoms get worse. So I help people find calm and peace. And then once we find peace, then I actually take it up a notch. Because panic energy is so addicting - pounding the caffeine, whatever stimulants, or even just being in panic, you have panic energy in your body, epinephrine its adrenaline. So when you're hooked to your own adrenaline, you're, you're using this very depleting kind of energy. So when we get to peace, pitstop, you know fill the tires, check the gas. But we take a pitstop in peace before we start working on passion and building into passion actually brings you energy that's not depleting and not making you sicker. It brings you more energy from the oxytocin side, the love side of the equation, from the universe. I you if you have an external power, that relationship can bring your energy. If you have only your internal power, you can have a heart-centered life, you can live through the power of love and passion and grow it. I's a muscle. Love is a muscle - it takes a little workout, and if you slip back into panic again, then you just have to find your way to peace for a moment. That's kind of like the map. Okay, so the map, you know, sometimes you can only see so far ahead. Well, you can see your way back to peace. Get to peace, and then you can switch back over into passion. So peace is kind of the pitstop between the panic side of the spectrum, and the passion side of the spectrum. So you always make your way back to peace for a moment, meditate, ground, get back into your body, get back into the here and now. And then focus on what you love, and what you need in your life. So that said, if you want to find more information about my coaching business, you can go to liberatedlifecoaching.com. You'll find the hand-written, you know, the typed out versions of both parts of the Serenity, the modernized version and the the original. And that's in my blog under Serenity Two Ways is the post. And borrow pieces of this podcast episode and use them in your own daily practices. I really do hope that you find the serenity passages to be very helpful for you. And I'm going to end the episode with my original recording of the original Serenity, which I keep in my iPod, so that I could play it every day. I don't always play it every day, but I ought to. [Laugh] So I've started doing it again. But you now have your own version of my recording. Peace, be still and whatever you do, take good care of yourselves.
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