Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  52. How important is politics

  53. How much effort to use recycling

  54. Where to go for a good restaurant meal

  55. What makes a good melon

  56. What makes a good man

  57. What should a functional desk look like

  58. How to organize the tax papers

  59. What to do about writing Christmas thank-you cards

  60. What about the children’s school grades

  61. When is something dusty enough to require dusting or vacuuming

  62. Who to call to personally wish them a Happy Birthday

  63. Do we say a prayer or not say a prayer before meals

  64. Do we get married; what last name does the wife take; wedding rings

  65. What is a good movie

  66. How late is too late to stay up

  67. What is a funny joke

  68. What is good sex

  69. What is too much or not enough sex

  70. How much is too much television; how many televisions to have

  71. Who decides how we drive there; who reads the map

  72. When to shovel the snow; how perfectly should it be shoveled

  73. What to keep in the freezer

  74. Where to clean the fish

  75. How many packages of chips to buy

  76. Where to shop for the best grocery deals

  77. Floss teeth before or after brushing; floss teeth at all

  78. Where to put the dirty clothes; when are clothes actually dirty

  79. When to fill the car up with gas; where; who checks the oil

  80. How many pairs of shoes to own

  81. How many movies are too many movies; buy or rent

  82. Where to keep notepaper and pens

  83. Where to keep the keys

  84. To color or not color the hair; makeup or no makeup; how long hair

  85. Sexual apparatus or not; sexual stimulants or not

  86. How much sleep is really needed

  87. To go to church or not; to belong to a church or not

  88. How many vitamins to take

  89. How much time to spend exercising

  90. How long to stay on the telephone

  91. How late should the kids stay out

  92. Should our daughter have an older boyfriend

  93. What clothes are decent for a teenager

  94. How much money to owe to banks or other people

  95. How much is too much alcohol, gambling, or drugs

  96. How much emergency food or supplies to keep around the house

  97. How much insurance to have

  98. When to mow the lawn; when to cut the shrubbery

  99. Are potatoes and carrots better peeled or with the skins on

  100. What constitutes flirting

  Once you know that nits are nits and “there ain’t no arguin’ about nits,” you can start using your Box’s sensitivity to nits as an irresponsibility detector. If you find yourself overreacting to nits it can indicate that you are low on tolerance because you are not taking care of yourself. It is your responsibility to take care of yourself. If you do not take care of yourself you become overly sensitive to nits and a needy burden to the other people around you. Your Gremlin may get a big “kick” out of being needy, because then he or she can manipulate all the rescuers and nice people around you; but being needy is not a basis of extraordinary human relationship.

  Take Care of Yourself

  A clarification is necessary here. Taking care of yourself does not mean always making sure that you are comfortable. Taking care of yourself means making sure that your decisions and actions are resonant to your true purposes. Being resonant to your true purposes is not stress free. The stress that arises through being resonant to your true purposes provides useful nutrients needed for building matrix.

  In this section I am not talking about this kind of stress. I am talking about the kind of stress that results from deceiving yourself and trying to look good instead of taking responsible care of yourself. Ignoring your true purposes throws you into a self-perpetuating stress cycle: try to look good – behave out of alignment with yourself – feel stressed out – try to look good. This cycle is a direct highway to ordinary human relationship.

  Start using stress as an irresponsibility detector. Instead of denying stress, numbing out to stress, or complaining about stress, recognize and accept your stress with gratitude as useful information. Signs of stress such as crankiness, sleeplessness, overreacting, nervousness, illness, accidents, or psychological breakdown are signals pointing to exactly where you are being irresponsible. Follow the signal back to its source. Where you are being irresponsible is where you can start taking care of yourself.

  To experiment with responsibly taking care of yourself, try this. Creatively change your circumstances to alleviate stress rather than playing out the role of being a victim of the circumstances. Be proactive. You can feel stress coming long before it arrives. Take action immediately, before you are forced to act. Lower your sensitivity bar so that you become more perceptive of your environment and its impact on your body, mind, heart, and soul. Say yes or say no to make decisions and boundaries before the stress gets so high that your nervous system goes into breakdown and makes the decisions for you. For example: Take a nap. Turn off the cell phone. Take another nap. Drink water. Draw pictures for no purpose. Lie in the sun. Have a carrot juice for lunch. Say no to houseguests. Take a long bath. Go to bed at nine o’clock. Get rid of the dog. Walk barefoot in the grass. Do twenty-five pushups. Talk with a trusted friend and ask them to give you a stress interview where they repeatedly ask you what causes stress in your life and you write down the answers. Immediately change the top three items on your list by vanishing the stressful circumstances, or creating a more responsible story for yourself about why you have involved yourself in these circumstances. For example, if you are stressed out about your husband watching too much television, either throw out the television or decide that you love your husband more than the television, and insert your ear plugs, sit down next to your husband, put your feet in his lap and read a book.

  Extraordinary human relationship does not come from finding someone who has nits that harmonize with your own. Finding the perfect man or woman is a mental-fantasy construct that has no relationship to reality. You can count on your Box persistently reacting to some of your partner’s nits no matter how profoundly you love them. Extraordinary human relationship comes from familiarity with your Box’s nit-picking habits, and letting the Box do its own thing without believing your Box’s propaganda about what it is doing. Instead, you notice your Box’s reaction and think to yourself, “Ah, the Box is nit picking again. Fascinating.” And then go on about your business of navigating to extraordinary human relationship.

  Consider Forgetting Your Rules

  Through your every thought, feeling, word and action you choose which quality of relationship to establish in any moment, ordinary or extraordinary. Many formative actions are so subtle that you might not even regard them as actions. For example, presenting logical thinking to explain your point of view may seem irreducibly necessary in your interactions. It may take some time before you would grant that logic is not particularly suited for creating extraordinary human relationship. If you have developed the most inarguable sequence of logic to explain why something should be done a certain way and why your nits are right, you may consistently win in a battle of nits. But, when you win, your partner loses. And when your partner loses, what have you really won? Rationality has its uses but not necessarily in building extraordinary relationship.

  Those times when a nit is screaming logical arguments in your head are good times to remember your priorities about what kind of relationship space you want to navigate into (and also good times to remember your Voice Blaster!). You declare your priorities through your actions. What you say and do will declare whether you have chosen to be right or to be in relationship. You choose either the Box’s
survival purpose or your soul’s life-enhancing purpose. Logic will not help you make that choice.

  One day, as my partner was washing the breakfast dishes, I picked up a towel to dry them. She had just rinsed the frying pan and I intercepted it on its way to the drying rack. “No, no, no, no, no!” she said, refusing to let me take the frying pan from her hand. I said, “Okay,” and started drying the other dishes. She realized that her Box had freaked out about me wanting to dry the frying pan and she started inquiring internally as to what it was about. She discovered a nit, a logically supported preference that was self-made into a rule about how to dry the dishes. Probably she copied it from her mother. Finally she said, “So what do I do? For me, after years of experience, I have found the best method for drying the dishes. Let me explain it to you. Start with the glasses and silverware. This way the towel is driest, absorbs water more efficiently, and leaves no streaks or water spots on the glasses or silverware. Next, dry the dishes. Then, afterward, dry the pots and pans. It is very simple. I always use this method.”

  As we discussed the circumstance, we started to realize how pervasively nits rule our lives and kill with logic the possibility of other possibilities. Nits that we have hardened into rules prevent us from navigating into spaces that serve purposes other than logical expediency. In the case with the dish drying, only two people ate breakfast. There were so few dishes that the dish towel could not possibly have gotten wet enough to leave streaks or water spots, no matter what order the dishes were dried in. Using the dish-drying method as a rule, killed the tender physical intimacy of passing the frying pan from her to me. What was killed was the opportunity for a direct experience of nearness in a space that was not exclusively dedicated to intimacy. With her sharp degrading, “No, no, no, no, no!” I was treated like a little boy being scolded by his all-knowing mommy for doing something wrong. The rule killed the possibility of extraordinary human relationship. That is, until we started honestly investigating what was going on. The conversation about the conversation opened up intimacies that took us directly back into the extraordinary.

  The point is that the Box has nits. The Box having nits is unavoidable. The Box is made out of nits. But you have the choice of deciding whether or not a nit is treated as a rule. When a nit gets triggered, all the Box’s defenses react. Now that you know that the Box is reacting to an internal self-created nit, you know your reaction is not caused by the other person. Your feelings of rage or fear or sorrow come from the Box’s story about what is happening, not from what is happening. This clarity gives you the chance to notice your nit’s rule with objective neutrality and the possibility of letting the whole reaction bypass you in three seconds while taking no actions. You stay in the present. The reaction fades into the past. Then, you can start over, unhooked.

  Notice your nits. Regard them as just nits. Consciousness creates freedom. Nits are neither right nor wrong. They are nits. Just nits. You do not have to make your nits into rules that cement you into certain rigid, logically-defendable patterns of behavior. Instead, you can live. You can float in a luscious, fluidic, reciprocal, responsive relationship to what is needed and wanted in the abundant life happening around you.

  SECTION 6-N

  Meta-Conversations

  One way to create greater authenticity for yourself, your relationship or your organization is to navigate into a liquid state through having a conversation about the conversation, as was described in the dish-drying example above. Having a conversation about the conversation is called a “meta-conversation.”

  The way to enter a meta-conversation is to place your attention outside the limits of the original conversation, turn around and look back where you came from, and then speak from outside the conversation about what you observe happening inside the conversation. Start speaking together about the way the speaking is happening. Talk about how the talking is going. Change the topic of the conversation to the conversation itself. Find the purpose behind the original conversation.

  Developing the ability to create meta-conversations takes practice. The first step is the most difficult: placing your attention outside the limits of the original conversation. We are so easily hypnotized into the present story that we occlude our responsible ability to extemporize alternative and perhaps more productive stories, which are possible in every circumstance. When the kids are screaming at each other, or the husband is complaining, we tend to believe the reality of their feelings, their reasons and their perceived behavior options. The “possibility wand” that gives you the power to go nonlinearly outside of the limits of the present conversation is a declaration that you make. The declaration is: “Something completely different from this is possible right now.” In both the ordinary and extraordinary human domains this declaration is always true. (In the Archetypal domains this declaration is not always true, but we will get to that later.)

  It requires a samurai’s relaxed alertness, and a pirate’s “Rules? What rules?” attitude to extend what is possible for you personally beyond any conversation limits that are proposed. A conversation limit is only an offer. You don’t have to accept that offer unconditionally. Ever.

  Having a meta-conversation lets you ask questions that are not permitted from within the original conversation. Your extracurricular inquiry generates clarity and possibility that were not previously visible or allowed. It is the new clarity itself that initiates the liquid state. Clearly seeing the organizational force field behind the Box’s perspective disorganizes the force field. The perceptual prison is left behind and suddenly we can see from a new perspective.

  MAP OF CREATING A META-CONVERSATION

  A three-step procedure for navigating to the liquid state where change can happen.

  1. Place your attention outside the limits of the original conversation.

  2. Turn around and look back where you just came from.

  3. Start speaking from outside the conversation about what you observe happening inside the conversation. This is a meta-conversation.

  Step 1 is the most difficult because we are so easily hypnotized into the present story that we block our responsible ability to shift to a different story. The idea is that totally new and perhaps more productive stories can be extemporized in every circumstance.

  Starting a meta-conversation can change the purpose or the context of the original conversation into a purpose or a context that would never have otherwise been reached. This makes meta-conversations an excellent tool for shifting ordinary human relationship into extraordinary human relationship.

  Meta-Conversation Starters

  • Why is this thing that you are talking about so important to you?

  • Why are we talking about this anyway?

  • Twice now you have failed to answer my question. What is going on for you about this?

  • My Box is freaking out about what you just did. Did you notice that too? I must have an expectation or a belief about this. Could you help me track it down?

  • What is your purpose in saying that? What is it that you are trying to accomplish?

  • I notice an undertone of some feeling in your voice. Can you say more about that?

  • It seems like you are trying to create an argument with me. I am not interested in arguing. Can you say what you want to say in another way?

  • Do you realize that you have interrupted me three times in the last few minutes? Is there something you do not want to hear from me?

  • Where are you trying to go with this? Is there another way we could get there?

  • I noticed your jaw muscles clenching. Are you feeling something?

  • You have just changed the subject of the conversation. I am not ready to change the subject of this conversation yet. Are you willing to complete the original conversation with me?

  • Could it be that you are trying to prove yourself right? Would you be willing to have another purpose in this conversation?

  • Could there be something in this that frighten
s you?

  • What is it that you really want to say to me? Where are you going with this?

  • What if we stepped back a bit and checked in about our individual desires?

  • It seems that you are saying two things at once. Could you please say them separately?

  • We seem to be having an intellectual discussion about what we already know and I am more interested in exploring something that we don’t know. What would you say to that?

  • I hear what you are thinking. I would also like to know what you are feeling.

  • I think you might be using an assumption that is not true. What do you think?

  • Could it be that you are claiming to be a victim of these circumstances?

  • Perhaps you do not realize that I agree with you.

  • I am grateful for the passion with which you speak about what really matters to you.

  • It seems to me like what you just said is a manipulation and disrespects our relationship as partners. Could you share about how that was for you?

  • Tell me something that would help me to understand you better.

  Meta-conversations are started with meta-conversation starters. That sounds simple enough, except that the Box has a strong bias against us having meta-conversation starters in our common vocabulary. I personally have had to make specific efforts to memorize meta-conversation starter-phrases so that they were available in the moments when they would be most useful. Without memorizing them, I would have completely forgotten that meta-conversations existed. What is astonishing is that, if you can remember to use meta-conversation starters, they do their job very well. The resultant intimacies and authenticities can be well worth the risk you take by asking such questions.

  Many of the meta-conversation starters listed are completely foreign to our ordinary ways of speaking. For an experiment, choose three of these sentences and memorize them so they are on the tip of your tongue at all times. Then, use your selected meta-conversation starters during the next few days and see what happens.