Conversations with The Muse
Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?
Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.
The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.
In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.
In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.
Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.
You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.
These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.
Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?
Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.
YOU ARE WRONG.
Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.
In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.
Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?
This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.
And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.
Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.
This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.
This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.
Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.
It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.
It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.
Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”
Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.
The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.
This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.
**This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.