Those Annoying Transitions of Life.

Fall is one of my favorite times of year.  It's so full of action both seen and unseen, and is the place holder of a new beginnings as well as a fading of what was and will never be again. 

Plants in my garden have been frosted and some will die and the seeds are being spread around.  Other plants are only losing their blossoms, stems and leaves but when I pull those up I see nice fat tubers that I am storing away in the cellar for that new beginning I spoke of.

Change and progression are one of the basics of living life but as humans we tend to fear the changes of life.

Not only does our conscious fear the changes often but according to what I learned in a seminar on the dynamics of the brain, our brain fears change!

If I am about to change myself there are ways that support change and ways of encountering that that sets up a reaction in the brain.

The brain can experience a direct attempt at changing it as a threat.  As such, the fight/flight reaction is triggered and chemicals are released that among other reactions tend to shut down the prefrontal lobe to focus on the "battle" at hand.

So thus the way to encounter my brain with a new habit or new way of being is to simply in peace, and with love for myself, start to learn a new way of living life or being and ignore the other unwanted habit or habits and thus not activate the reactive responses of the brain. 

So, living in peace become not just a way of being with others but a way of "living" with ourselves.

Gently and in fact lovingly noticing those habits or way of living that may have supported us in the past but are not working well now.

Often we need others around us to be with us in this process.  A friend or a community can support us in the upset and confusion that may result from suspending certain ways of thinking or acting and integrating new ways of thinking and acting.

Those friends can love us through those wintery seasons of change and casting off until there is the new birth of something else fresh and new on the other side.

Guess you ran afoul of this, Rob Bell

"lacking god's power to create tangible things, the false self creates by use of ideologies, definitions, social myths and words. The false self give it's own name to life and then like a self-proclaimed demiurge, demands that all of life conform to it's wishes.

What is enacted here is the tragic error of naming the elephant and then trying to ride home on the name given, instead of on the elephant itself.

This whole process frequently occurs in religion as well. We give God a name. We than equate God with the name we have given him, and in doing so we make ourselves, in effect God's God. Instead of acknowledging God as the source of our identity and existence, we make ourselves the self-proclaimed source of God's identity. God then becomes the one made in our image and likeness.

Those engaged in the undertaking of naming god see themselves to be participating in a holy work. They are the God-definer, the definition makers. They give shape to the ultimate perimeters of life.

Of course, one of the procedural principles is that God is everything and we are nothing. But they define what this means. They mark off those who properly grasp it from those who do not. Thus, while maintaining that they are nothing, they turn their nothing into a nothing that defines itself and thereby make that nothingness into a kind of everything to which all who which to know the truth must listen. This is a far cry from the true theological inquiry but it is not a far cry from the stance of the Pharisee who is always with us in the form of a deep-seated universal tendency within ourselves, It is the false self expressing it's futile, odious outcry against the Creative sovereignty of the divine freedom.

Once the false self gives birth to it's own dark gossamer existence as cut off from God, it begins to function as it's own God by passing final decision and judgements upon everything under the sun. A whole system of formulas, laws and ideologies is created to form not only one's relationship to others but to God as well. Both self and God become equated with the definitions given to them. Both God and self become cogs in a smoothly running system of self-creation."

From Merton's Palace of Nowhere, James Finley.