Coherence: The Secret Science of The Work? Practical Fourth Way Guide?

[Cosmos]

Somehow I think you might have been taken in by exactly what good psycho-marketing people do: Manipulation via something that looks easy, practical, rewarding and full of promised success. The way he explains how he got to this research is pretty classical for "successful people". Don't get me wrong, some of them are pretty good and even well-meaning, I think. But this guy's approach is... Well, just not very "coherent", IMO. It sounds like he has either not explored his own psyche very deeply, or that he is talking about having worked with thousands of people at a very superficial level, which is NOT like the Work. You yourself noted that he's clueless about psychopathy, and possibly ponerized by new agey material. So...

At the most I'd say it might give someone a bit of motivation to do better and observe themselves, but applying that to the Work is a stretch, I think.

Take this, for example:

But how we feel is determined by something even deeper in the human system and that is raw emotion, or more accurately e-motion (energy in motion). The reason it is so hard to control or change the way we feel is because of the raw emotion that is occurring in our body without us realizing it. Telling someone not to worry is like closing the barn door when the horse has bolted. The raw energy pulsing through their body is already in transit – it’s too late. And the reason this raw energy is coursing through their body in the first place is because at an even deeper level, down in the basement of the human system, is their physiology or their biological reactions and processes. So what is really driving our behaviour is our thinking. And what we think, and how well we think it, is largely determined by our feelings, which are driven by our emotions, which are made up of our physiology.

Waaaay too simplistic! Each situation is different. Many "worriers" need to be told NOT to worry, and that can bring them back to facts, to what really counts, allowing them to use their intellect appropriately (I should know, been there, done that, and was told NOT to worry. It was exactly what I needed in the moment. It wouldn't have done me nor anybody any good to be told it was okay to worry and all the above.) And I know many examples that contradict what he's saying in other parts of that text too.

So, no thank you... It might work for some people, but the fact that there are some truths in it might also make it more appealing (and dangerous) than it should be.

Thanks for the feedback and luckily you and Laura spelled it out. Taking it together with the warning from Gurdjieff, brought up by bm, I'm glad that you all did so, otherwise I probably would have spend much time and energy to try that stuff out, in order to get to grips with my system to become more productive and of better help for others.

Obviously if Watkins and his team have indeed trained and teached over 2000 CEOs of big global multinational companies (as he said in his book in 2013), to implement this "empathetic approach" to business and people, in the hopes of changing the system, we can see that it had not much of a effect on the system.

Objectively, the system today is as bad as it can get and what Watkins and his team proclaim to do, hasn't changed a thing.

 

[Deleted member 4320]

Yeah. Laura and Chu have right. Previously I think that those similarities between "Coherence" and what we learn till now, can mean that it is something valuable. Beside some crucial information about human nature, there is a lot of "knowledge" which I personally can't grasp.

It looks like that this group present very far-fetched ways of working on the self. And beside some connection between "Coherence" and 4th way teachings, there is nothing really valuable.

I think we better stay with be happy that some interesting details has been noted in the "Coherence" and we remain on this, because further immerse in it is waste of time, especially that we have enough to work with materials and books which we already have.

Today science give us valuable information about human nature. And people like those from "Coherence" also have the internet and can read the books and unfortunately (even like primarily somebody discovered some important information, also for good of people) they use it and put it into "fascinating" luminaires and sell that. But besides some interesting elements there is nothing valuable or can be even dangerous.

I think that it is important to remember that such groups like "Coherence" could be encountered and without deep read it can come as interesting but after research it is just a waffle.

However thanks for the post Pashalis and your engagement in searching and writing.

 

[Mikey]

Obviously if Watkins and his team have indeed trained and teached over 2000 CEOs of big global multinational companies (as he said in his book in 2013), to implement this "empathetic approach" to business and people, in the hopes of changing the system, we can see that it had not much of a effect on the system.

As we have learned from G and from practical experience, it is hard enough and very painful to truly change oneself even a little, and even harder to form a coherent group, let alone change 2000 CEOs and their employees. So, one cannot really compare his work with The Work.

On the other hand, in The Work, we always have to be on the lookout for new useful tools, investigate them, and then report back for the benefit of others. You did that here, and it was informative! However, you described his work in the words "absolutely astounding, brilliant, fascinating, sheer amount of knowledge, ingenious, most presice, simply outstanding, utterly interesting" etc. It is good to be enthusiastic, but one also needs to keep a cool head, otherwise one gets easily sidetracked.

 

[T.C.]

Somehow, I don't think "coherence" is going to really help a person with needed disintegration of false personality. This appears to be a rather mechanical approach that can help, but only just.

It seems rather similar to the Dan Winter/Vinnie Bridges "heartmath" business.

Q: (Daniel) I have one more. Is there any validity to the information on heartmath.org about heart and brainwave coherence, or is it just a short term fix like EFT?

A: It is total nonsense and inducement to dissociation and destruction of conscience. Navel gazing anyone?

I totally get what you're saying Laura, though I'm having difficulty in reconciling the idea that on the one hand, life and the Work are hard and there's a lot of suffering involved, and on the other hand, we can have only positive emotions (to quote the C's).

Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions?

Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?

 

[Mr. Premise]

Somehow, I don't think "coherence" is going to really help a person with needed disintegration of false personality. This appears to be a rather mechanical approach that can help, but only just.

It seems rather similar to the Dan Winter/Vinnie Bridges "heartmath" business.

Q: (Daniel) I have one more. Is there any validity to the information on heartmath.org about heart and brainwave coherence, or is it just a short term fix like EFT?

A: It is total nonsense and inducement to dissociation and destruction of conscience. Navel gazing anyone?

I totally get what you're saying Laura, though I'm having difficulty in reconciling the idea that on the one hand, life and the Work are hard and there's a lot of suffering involved, and on the other hand, we can have only positive emotions (to quote the C's).

Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions?

Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?

Just a thought, but maybe the key is that "suffering" is not a negative emotion. Negative emotions are things like anger, resentment, etc. I think one can suffer and still maintain positive emotions.

 

[whitecoast]

Thanks for starting this thread Pashalis. :) The breathing method you described briefly sounds quite similar to the slow phase of bioenergetic breathing in EE. Even reading Alexander Louwen's Book on Bioenergetics made me think of there being a connection with "physiological coherence" and emotional clarity, or being deeply in touch with your organism and its wishes.

One thing about HRV though, which was brought up in the recent SOTT radio show about the heart, was that although HRV is associated with many positive medical outcomes, it's hard to determine if that's really a cause or if it's just a correlation. In Stephen Porges' Volyvagal Theory, HRV was associated with vagal activity, so it could be a measure of vagal activity in getting more parts of our body (connected via the vagus nerve) to harmonize their functions with one another. Like Laura pointed out though, sometimes that may not always be the best thing; we did evolve a hierarchical nervous system for a reason, after all. In the case of SIDS in babies with low vagal tone, the drop in vagal tone is actually an adaptation during bouts of abandonment. If an infant gets separated from its mother, first it cries to signal from the environment (sympathetic arousal), but if there is no response the infant stops and immobilizes (vegetative vagus, to reduce energy consumption and avoid attracting potential predators). Obviously flat-out HRV tells us nothing about what specifically the HRV is supposed to be helping with, although there are theories about it electromagnetically synchronizing a variety of electrically-linked processes in our body. If there are times our body naturally reduces its HRV, is there a chance it could be for an important reason?

Like Dabrowski said, someone undergoing positive disintegration will experience a lot of conflicting emotions, incoherence, and general physiological stress. Usually if someone gets in this state we encourage them to do pipe breathing and journaling. Prior to that state though, a person's psyche is usually filled with buffers and false self-perception and generally is more mechanical and conditioned as a personality. In such a state, I'm wondering would it be advisable for someone to seek coherence-at-all-cost? That gets into the territory of self-calming, OSIT. If we understand that our basal programming is designed to keep us dissociated or in feeding loops with others, then I think working on ourselves will necessarily lead to states of incoherence during phases of growth or positive disintegration. Maybe what's actually being meant by all this though, giving Dr Alan Watkins the benefit of the doubt, is that we're meant to get physiologically coherent enough so that we can better endure positive disintegration. I see that as quite similar to doing pipe breathing to relax us before doing bioenergetics to clear away subconscious stress and emotion.

There's certainly a lot of new and interesting data about the hearth and the human electrical field coming to light. I'll definitely be doing my research on this.

Somehow, I don't think "coherence" is going to really help a person with needed disintegration of false personality. This appears to be a rather mechanical approach that can help, but only just.

It seems rather similar to the Dan Winter/Vinnie Bridges "heartmath" business.

Q: (Daniel) I have one more. Is there any validity to the information on heartmath.org about heart and brainwave coherence, or is it just a short term fix like EFT?

A: It is total nonsense and inducement to dissociation and destruction of conscience. Navel gazing anyone?

I totally get what you're saying Laura, though I'm having difficulty in reconciling the idea that on the one hand, life and the Work are hard and there's a lot of suffering involved, and on the other hand, we can have only positive emotions (to quote the C's).

Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions?

Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?

Laura, It's hard for me to understand why the C's say that. At least superficially, Hearthmath is attempting to accomplish a lot of the same things Eiriu Eolas is: helping us gain control over our stress/physiology, improving our self-regulation, and healing the body-mind connection. Is the real crux of its disdain here that they use so many measuring tools, to get people to constantly check up on themselves to see the condition of the HRV? I could see that definitely as a distraction or navel gazing. But on the whole I don't think the scientific research that's gone into understanding the heart-brain and its role in attuning our physiology, mind and those of others can be dismissed based on the approach of one implementation of that knowledge (Heartmath). Am I missing something here?

T.C., I think the distinction also has to do with understanding what a negative emotion is. Emotions people like to avoid (like anger or fear or sadness) are not necessarily negative, because they are part of an instinctive way we represent the world. So they can and do perform useful functions in the right context. Many times negative emotions do nothing useful, but that depends on context I think.

For example, if I hear news that makes me angry because of people hurting others, I could use that anger to punch pillows, or I could repress and bury it so I don't have to feel it. I could also imagine the aggressive person dying a gruesome death to make my body feel like the problem's been fixed. Another thing I could do is share the information with others to warn people. I could also donate money to a cause that tries to fight against the hurt. I think the last choices are the best, because the emotion is used to help others.

So I guess ultimately a negative emotion could be an emotion that has cannot be used to help others or ourselves in any way. The only purpose that emotion would have would be to train our willpower and our ability to resist automatic action (or in the failure to do so, feed the predator). Even the C's suffer, by hurting on behalf of us and the world, so we'll always experience unpleasant feelings. What we do with those feelings, however, is up to us. OSIT.

 

[dugdeep]

Somehow, I don't think "coherence" is going to really help a person with needed disintegration of false personality. This appears to be a rather mechanical approach that can help, but only just.

It seems rather similar to the Dan Winter/Vinnie Bridges "heartmath" business.

Q: (Daniel) I have one more. Is there any validity to the information on heartmath.org about heart and brainwave coherence, or is it just a short term fix like EFT?

A: It is total nonsense and inducement to dissociation and destruction of conscience. Navel gazing anyone?

I totally get what you're saying Laura, though I'm having difficulty in reconciling the idea that on the one hand, life and the Work are hard and there's a lot of suffering involved, and on the other hand, we can have only positive emotions (to quote the C's).

Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions?

Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?

Laura, It's hard for me to understand why the C's say that. At least superficially, Hearthmath is attempting to accomplish a lot of the same things Eiriu Eolas is: helping us gain control over our stress/physiology, improving our self-regulation, and healing the body-mind connection. Is the real crux of its disdain here that they use so many measuring tools, to get people to constantly check up on themselves to see the condition of the HRV? I could see that definitely as a distraction or navel gazing. But on the whole I don't think the scientific research that's gone into understanding the heart-brain and its role in attuning our physiology, mind and those of others can be dismissed based on the approach of one implementation of that knowledge (Heartmath). Am I missing something here?

Just to put it into context, if I remember correctly, at the time that question was asked, Heartmath was encouraging people to force themselves out of bad emotional states by diverting their thoughts to something positive. In other words, ignoring all the bad stuff to focus exclusively on the good. I think this is what the C's meant by navel gazing. I admit I haven't looked much into the Heartmath stuff, but I wonder if their sole focusing on brain-heart coherence makes them blind to what the actual goal should be. It kind of reminds me of doctors looking exclusively at cholesterol numbers without actually thinking about what makes a person healthy. Obsessing over coherence is really just looking at a symptom (like high cholesterol) and finding ways of tweaking it may not actually be getting to the root cause of the issue.

 

[whitecoast]

Just to put it into context, if I remember correctly, at the time that question was asked, Heartmath was encouraging people to force themselves out of bad emotional states by diverting their thoughts to something positive. In other words, ignoring all the bad stuff to focus exclusively on the good. I think this is what the C's meant by navel gazing. I admit I haven't looked much into the Heartmath stuff, but I wonder if their sole focusing on brain-heart coherence makes them blind to what the actual goal should be. It kind of reminds me of doctors looking exclusively at cholesterol numbers without actually thinking about what makes a person healthy. Obsessing over coherence is really just looking at a symptom (like high cholesterol) and finding ways of tweaking it may not actually be getting to the root cause of the issue.

Wow, seriously? Thanks for clarifying that. If you really think about it, I think telling someone to ignore or suppress emotions is really telling someone to actually move to an incoherent state, because they divide the unconscious process (the negative emotion) from the conscious one (trying to switch to a positive emotion): to be at odds with one another and actively create buffers between i's. That's infinitely worse than, say, taking ownership of an emotion and validating it as a piece of our essence, while using willpower to act in a different and more externally considerate matter just the same. Like you said, it really seems there's A LOT under the iceberg that HRV cannot capture, if Heartmath is walking away from the research with conclusions like THAT.

 

[Turgon]

Just to put it into context, if I remember correctly, at the time that question was asked, Heartmath was encouraging people to force themselves out of bad emotional states by diverting their thoughts to something positive. In other words, ignoring all the bad stuff to focus exclusively on the good. I think this is what the C's meant by navel gazing. I admit I haven't looked much into the Heartmath stuff, but I wonder if their sole focusing on brain-heart coherence makes them blind to what the actual goal should be. It kind of reminds me of doctors looking exclusively at cholesterol numbers without actually thinking about what makes a person healthy. Obsessing over coherence is really just looking at a symptom (like high cholesterol) and finding ways of tweaking it may not actually be getting to the root cause of the issue.

Wow, seriously? Thanks for clarifying that. If you really think about it, I think telling someone to ignore or suppress emotions is really telling someone to actually move to an incoherent state, because they divide the unconscious process (the negative emotion) from the conscious one (trying to switch to a positive emotion): to be at odds with one another and actively create buffers between i's. That's infinitely worse than, say, taking ownership of an emotion and validating it as a piece of our essence, while using willpower to act in a different and more externally considerate matter just the same. Like you said, it really seems there's A LOT under the iceberg that HRV cannot capture, if Heartmath is walking away from the research with conclusions like THAT.

Yeah, that's exactly what the issue with heartmath was. Before asking the question, I had read just about every study that was available on their site, and I came across a few "exercises" on how to deal with negative emotions and transmute it into positive ones, which basically consisted of focusing on a time or place when you were grateful or happy, in order to dispel that state. And I think it's good to look for things to be grateful for, but in the context of most situations, if you are faced with negative emotional states, it could be caused by someone or something in the environment, even childhood programming that is being projected onto a situation. So instead of trying to discover the root cause of the state, such as a possible tyrant, manipulative person or unresolved childhood programming, they were basically encouraging people to dissociate and think about something else.

So say you're in a situation where you are dealing a petty tyrant of some kind and because they are manipulating you in some way, you are in a negative emotional state, do you really want to be dissociating thinking about times when you were happy in order to get into a positive state again, or do you need to be taking stock of the situation and yourself and gain an understanding of actions that need to be taken.

Also, I ended up buying their heart-wave coherence CD that's supposed to entrain connection between brainwave and heartwave patterns (with studies on their website to show the differences it made) and didn't notice anything from it. It was the most expensive CD I had ever purchased ($50.00 CDN) and it was mainly synth music that seemed reminiscent of the soundtrack's to 80's fantasy flicks like the Neverending Story and Labyrinth.

 

[bjorb]

[quote author= T.C.]Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions[/quote]

The work of awakening conscious involves much suffering, but by persisting you will experience moments that are a foretaste of the Joy of a clear conscious. After each realization you see how worth well it is to keep going. All what one has to do is to look back and see how unconscious she/he was and what is accomplished.

Positive emotions could stem from the lower or higher centers. Lower are based on those you experience for the self. (Ego, self importance) Higher are based on those you experience through conscious interaction with others and reality.

There is Joy in helping others, There is Joy in seeing others learn, there is Joy in seeing Creativity flourish.

If you are looking for truthful positive experiences, Aim for those. And while you do try to understand and feel how positive emotions based on the lower centers are in truth not positive at all, but soulless.

If you do that and make this transition in mind, body (hearth) and soul. You transmute.


PS
If you can enjoy something in a healthy way. (positive dissociation) Hold true to that. You have to be able to relax properly otherwise nothing can be achieved.


[quote author= T.C.]Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?[/quote]

Great deal of conscious suffering is necessary. You pay in advance, but like said earlier. Clear conscious brings clarity in life. More clarity means less confusion, less confusion entails less suffering.

BTW, STO still suffers but differently. It only suffers when others are suffering.

Suffering will only end when the Grand Cycle is complete. Because at that point, All will become One. And when everybody has less learned there lessons. There will nobody to worry about anymore. But that's something for another time. For now, we intent to be good STO candidates. :)

 

[Yas]

Somehow I think you might have been taken in by exactly what good psycho-marketing people do: Manipulation via something that looks easy, practical, rewarding and full of promised success. The way he explains how he got to this research is pretty classical for "successful people". Don't get me wrong, some of them are pretty good and even well-meaning, I think. But this guy's approach is... Well, just not very "coherent", IMO. It sounds like he has either not explored his own psyche very deeply, or that he is talking about having worked with thousands of people at a very superficial level, which is NOT like the Work. You yourself noted that he's clueless about psychopathy, and possibly ponerized by new agey material. So...

At the most I'd say it might give someone a bit of motivation to do better and observe themselves, but applying that to the Work is a stretch, I think.

Take this, for example:

But how we feel is determined by something even deeper in the human system and that is raw emotion, or more accurately e-motion (energy in motion). The reason it is so hard to control or change the way we feel is because of the raw emotion that is occurring in our body without us realizing it. Telling someone not to worry is like closing the barn door when the horse has bolted. The raw energy pulsing through their body is already in transit – it’s too late. And the reason this raw energy is coursing through their body in the first place is because at an even deeper level, down in the basement of the human system, is their physiology or their biological reactions and processes. So what is really driving our behaviour is our thinking. And what we think, and how well we think it, is largely determined by our feelings, which are driven by our emotions, which are made up of our physiology.

Waaaay too simplistic! Each situation is different. Many "worriers" need to be told NOT to worry, and that can bring them back to facts, to what really counts, allowing them to use their intellect appropriately (I should know, been there, done that, and was told NOT to worry. It was exactly what I needed in the moment. It wouldn't have done me nor anybody any good to be told it was okay to worry and all the above.) And I know many examples that contradict what he's saying in other parts of that text too.

So, no thank you... It might work for some people, but the fact that there are some truths in it might also make it more appealing (and dangerous) than it should be.

I agree with you Chu. When watching some of his videos I thought that he might have some interesting things to say, which can be found in other places too and he makes it all seem as if he created this 100% effective method that works for everyone, although it is too simplistic and does not account for all the possibilities.

In one part he says that he saying that he can get you to feel happy all the time and have no negative emotions whatsoever. I reckon that that could be appealing, but for me, it's unrealistic. As the discussion brought above about shifting negative emotions to positive ones... it's all good to strive to not dwell on negative emotions but it is important to recognize them and to not run from them as well. In that sense I think that the idea of "sitting with the emotion" is better, but not just sitting there and navel-gazing. Instead, I think it is an approach of seeing it is there but continue to do what is necessary to do despite of what you feel, as some have said previously in many other threads. Sometimes there's need to reflect on those emotions, but sometimes is good to acknowledge and move on, to no let it close its grip on you, so to say. Well, maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's kind of my understanding so far.

Maybe, as we came to realise with the subject of diet and health, there is no "one size fits all" approach here. There are general guidelines which are more or less the same for everyone, but there is also specific things that are necessary for each one. I would say that one general guideline is that we must do a lot of effort, gather and apply all the knowledge we can, and that there are no "10 easy steps to become a fully integrated, self-aware and completely conscious human being".

Anyway, I do think that some of the the things these business people talk about are interesting to add to the pool of information that can become knowledge; such as the concepts of proactivity, response-ability, self-awareness, self-control, setting goals, etc... but they need to be taken with a grain of salt and crossreferenced with all the other information we are gathering and applying, since they are also normally presented withing a narrow perspective of the reality and there are just so many other things to consider in reality.

OSIT...

 

[beetlemaniac]

I guess more feedback is needed, about the actual contents of his work, since it could be that I got to invested in a number of the things he said, that kind of exited me, since they sound so similar to the different mechanical parts of us humans (as described by Gurdjieff and others), explained in neurological terms.

Watching his videos made me very excited and hopeful as well, he is very charismatic and pulls you in -- the energy he puts into describing certain behaviours we collectively share but are not very aware of, it gave me a sense that he was on to something.

However, Chu's analysis brings to light certain flaws in his iceberg model, that, when applied to real life -- do not provide an adequate framework to explain certain phenomena. For example, the iceberg model seems to imply that everything starts from physiology upwards, when we see that our interactions within the forum, through the realms of intellect and emotion (not physiology per se as he describes it), do create changes in the system of the persons whom are Working.

I think it's safe to say that following his program in the long term may promote neurosis. Without a deeper way to understand our being like the Fourth Way and TPD provides, people may find that they reach a kind of plateau where things don't progress. Like Laura said, it's too mechanical and doesn't provide the needed struggle that leads to the disintegration of the false personality.

What you posted here was a good experience in thinking about Work concepts for me, so it was not in vain, I think. And, it was still a good reminder of HRV and polyvagal theory.

 

[Cosmos]

Obviously if Watkins and his team have indeed trained and teached over 2000 CEOs of big global multinational companies (as he said in his book in 2013), to implement this "empathetic approach" to business and people, in the hopes of changing the system, we can see that it had not much of a effect on the system.

As we have learned from G and from practical experience, it is hard enough and very painful to truly change oneself even a little, and even harder to form a coherent group, let alone change 2000 CEOs and their employees. So, one cannot really compare his work with The Work.

On the other hand, in The Work, we always have to be on the lookout for new useful tools, investigate them, and then report back for the benefit of others. You did that here, and it was informative! However, you described his work in the words "absolutely astounding, brilliant, fascinating, sheer amount of knowledge, ingenious, most presice, simply outstanding, utterly interesting" etc. It is good to be enthusiastic, but one also needs to keep a cool head, otherwise one gets easily sidetracked.

Yes I went over board here, which made me blind to the information selection and substitution I was engaging in, after I went "enthusiastic". A good lesson for me to try to keep a cool head.

I think bm summarized well, to what Watkins method eventually could lead:

[...]
I think it's safe to say that following his program in the long term may promote neurosis. Without a deeper way to understand our being like the Fourth Way and TPD provides, people may find that they reach a kind of plateau where things don't progress. Like Laura said, it's too mechanical and doesn't provide the needed struggle that leads to the disintegration of the false personality.[...]

 

[obyvatel]

Somehow, I don't think "coherence" is going to really help a person with needed disintegration of false personality. This appears to be a rather mechanical approach that can help, but only just.

It seems rather similar to the Dan Winter/Vinnie Bridges "heartmath" business.

Q: (Daniel) I have one more. Is there any validity to the information on heartmath.org about heart and brainwave coherence, or is it just a short term fix like EFT?

A: It is total nonsense and inducement to dissociation and destruction of conscience. Navel gazing anyone?

I totally get what you're saying Laura, though I'm having difficulty in reconciling the idea that on the one hand, life and the Work are hard and there's a lot of suffering involved, and on the other hand, we can have only positive emotions (to quote the C's).

Even if the answer is something that I wouldn't quite be able to truly understand, where should my priority be? Should I be working on coming to terms with suffering and pain or should I be working on how to 'transmute' those into positive emotions/only have positive emotions?

I would go for understanding the how and why I am suffering. In my experience, doing so helps at multiple levels. Often times, understanding the mechanics of suffering takes away some of the sting. It helps sort out what is in my control and what is not.

[quote author=TC]
Is it that one can have only positive emotions, but only after one has gone through the enormous suffering first?
[/quote]

From one perspective, anyone who has gone through a lot of suffering and survived would have a different threshold of pain so to say. What would bother someone else inordinately would not even register as a suffering causing event on the radar of an experienced person. This can be verified through experience easily.

I do not know about others, but I am usually skeptical of people who appear to have positive emotions all the time. That could be because I am far away from such a state and so subjective. More objectively, I would ask what the person is doing with all these positive emotions? Behavior is usually a good first level indicator of what is going on.

 

[Deleted member 4320]

[quote author= August 12, 1995 ]A: Learning images is the process that is ongoing throughout all existence, and is achieved by one action or another. Any and all actions, any and all possible actions, any and all directions of actions facilitate continued learning. Therefore, it is not possible in the ultimate sense, to make mistakes. But, one must experience whatever is karmic to its full extent. The choices made reflect choices made prior to entering the physical plane of third density, combined with the opportunities that present themselves with the variability of reality in its fluid state. Therefore, the decisions to be made will present themselves when they are to be made, and it is only one's ability to accept interpretation objectively that determines whether the learning process will deliver greater or lesser degrees of pain.
Q: (L) Why does learning have to be painful?
A: It doesn't.
Q: (L) Well, it seems that it invariably is for me.
A: That is according to the perceptions of the experiencer, not according to any absolute criteria.