It sounds as though Prometeo has just passed a lump of something hard and further notes might be redundant at this point, but having spent the last few hours thinking and writing them down, I can't see that it would hurt to share them, particularly as they don't address his own journey, but rather one of his questions, which I thought was a very good one.
I thought, "Well now! What IS the Work exactly? How would I describe it to somebody?"
The Work, as I understand it is...
In a large part, the Work is about disagreeing with our little Ego. -The part which wants to be the center of the universe, the mostest, the bestest, and smartest, the already-donest and which wants to fight anybody or anything which has the gall to suggest otherwise. For some reason, we all have one of these egos. It represents every lie we tell ourselves to avoid doing the Work. It's so much easier to tell ourselves that we are already perfect and therefore don't need to lift a finger than it is to, well, lift a finger. It's the voice of addiction seeking to convince us that it's okay to indulge in just one more dose of feel-good ease. Just another ten minutes of snooze. It might even represent where we came from, an umbilical cord dragging through the clay behind us, back to the great sleep from which we emerged.
Okay. That's rather poetic... Try again..
The Work is about making the hard internal examinations and changes we don’t want to make, because they hurt and take effort, but when made, put us into better tune with the Creation. -Make us less dickey, make us stronger, more flexible, more capable. Make us more real, more conscious of reality and our place in it. Make us more able to receive information. To understand and conduct Love, (whatever Love might really be; I think we get hints from time to time...)
Part of the Work, is fighting to recognize our own automatic behaviors and blind spots, the parts of ourselves which sleepwalk, and how they affect our lives and the lives of others, and then deciding what to do about them.
The Work is anything which leads toward these goals, and as such, the Work can be considered a direct result of living. "All there is is Lessons!" -In that every decision we make leads to results, some painful, some not. Some which diminish and some which increase the substance of our souls. The world teaches with direct bio-feedback what happens when we act abruptly, thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, when we react with inappropriate vigor to stimuli, real or imagined. -When we let ourselves function on automatic without realizing it, thinking our mechanical self is our true self. -When we believe in lies and reject Truth.
The Work is about paying attention to this feedback, collecting and understanding it, making alterations and explorations, using that information to inform our future decisions, and then learning from the fallout of those.
The Work is increasing that part of ourselves which is self-aware, self-conscious, knowledgeable and in harmony with Objective Reality.
The Work is this...
If we all started as unconscious clay and stone, then the Work is, through whatever means and practices, whatever definitions we find most useful, transforming ourselves through acts, large and small, of internal will and choice-making, into the opposite. Into, perhaps, hyper-aware beings of light and high energy. -We don’t know exactly what because we’re not there yet. But we know what we’re moving away from; The Work is the act of moving in the opposite direction from thoughtless cold clay. From nothingness to somethingness. From Death to Life, spanning the spectrum between. The Work is doing that which is necessary to put one foot, one thought in front of the next to keep that journey going.
If that sounds hard, well, welcome to reality. For whatever reason, here we are, somewhere midway up the mountain trail, with the mud and stone we once were behind us, and the something bright and hyper-aware, hyper-alive up ahead which we are trying to become. And the climb never gets any easier. It takes a ridiculous amount of effort to transform the Clay into Light. Lead into Gold. (Alchemy is just another metaphor for The Work.)
So that’s a pretty general definition. Language is imprecise, so it’s just an attempt to get across my understanding. For the most part, the true understanding is going to have to be found on your own through direct interaction and practice.
Now this “Ray of Creation” thing is just somebody else’s attempt to understand how reality might work. It uses a bunch of definitions and internal logical axioms in its efforts to make sense of reality and describe it to others. To listen to that theory and see how well it jives with your own understanding of reality, and with objective reality as a whole, you have to make an effort to align your mind with those which came up with it, and play around with it a bit. It might help. It might not. Personally, I haven’t taken enough time to go through it at length, and its flavor doesn’t really appeal to me, so it might not be a particularly useful tool for describing reality for me. But exploring it can only deliver more of that informational feedback which is so useful in the Work, teach me more about myself by showing me how I might be limited where others are not. It might spur new ideas, crack open new concepts, make it just a little easier to put one foot, one thought in front of the next.
that was funny, because it happened close to the day a storm tored down their trees, very very close to that time. But I've come to terms with it, probably I'm not a STO candidate, which I don't think forbids someone of this so called "objective perception", and end up being one demon. Which doesn't make me agree with those 4th STS guys anyways, I actually dislike anything that might appear to be STS, the more STS the more ridiculous things are, including all of humanity. But anyway heaven has never been a place for me, if I am an STS dude that will achieve a higher state this way, so be it. One can always find ways to come to terms with it.
