Hi,

Maybe someone out-there/in-here, has something to say - some opinion, or insight or story of their own, about how our friends can help us find genuine solutions to our problems.

Several meaningful conversations arose this last few days in talking with friends - just sharing what's going on in each other's lives, and saying what is on our minds lately. We are all so much more interesting than we may realize or give ourselves credit for!

One of the questions that came up was about how to actually use Speaker Material ideas in our lives. I've often found that when talking to each other we can use our conversations to clarify our own thinking. For, as we hear ourselves express and expand our ideas, we often discover - on the spot - something about our own beliefs, thinking or feelings. Sometimes we'll even catch ourselves starting to say something, and suddenly realize that what we were about to say isn't exactly true or isn't exactly how we feel or what we believe! (I have read that an honest, truly caring, meaningful friendship is as helpful as any therapy!)

One of the ideas under discussion, albeit with various wonderfully individual concerns, was the recognition of how Speaker Material gives us a principle or basic view, and then, when we "plug in" our own particulars - our own life's personal experiences, we can make the connection between the ideas/concepts and our personal situations. This sort of "plugging in" of our own particulars that leads us to see something we didn't see before, can give us a different way to "think about" our own private concerns and problems. It's as if, once we "plug in" our own lives questions, puzzles, frustrations, aggravations, challenges, to the larger concepts or principles we can hear new questions, see a broader view, and find a new direction to explore.

It can often be like a light bulb going on, where we suddenly see the connections between our thinking, feeling, actions, attitudes, ideas, beliefs, behaviors - and our private situations/experiences/circumstances. It's a wonderfully mysterious moment of growth and expansion, when we can explain, from one part of our Self to another part of our self, something we didn't understand. It's as if our consciousness suddenly opens its' eyes to see something more than it did only a moment ago. This Self-to-self awareness arises from the inward processing or interchange that is Self-to-self interaction - Self-to-self conversation, and comprehension.

This linking of invisible ideas to visible experiences, is a method - a specific procedure-of-doing as a re-usable template-of-understanding about how thought is tied to action. To link our actions and outcomes back to our own thinking and emotions, helps us make sense of ourselves.

One friend said she found her daughter had a book titled something about "how to stop hating yourself". When she tried to have a conversation with her daughter about this, the daughter said she didn't know why she sometimes felt hate for herself! In other words, she couldn't explain her self of feelings, to herself of thinking, and then the other way around. She didn't know where these feelings came from or how to explain her inward turmoil - either to herself or to anyone else!

If I were using Speaker Material in this kind of situation, the appeal would be to the "thinking mind". Using the basic process of weighing the facts in one hand and the fictions in the other, personal experiences can be used to demonstrate how often that "thinking mind" does, in actual fact think entirely clearly; and using the same process of honestly examining the facts and fictions of our experiences, it can also be shown that there are occasions where that mind may not have been thinking so clearly. So the appeal is to the mind's ability to recognize that these experiences are both true.

The issue here is not about convincing ourselves that either of these experiences is true or that either of these experiences is false - since there is good evidence for both sides. The point is about recognizing that we are the ones supplying the significance, deciding the value, imposing the importance, empowering the experiences, to arrive at that crossroads of polarized belief. The concern is to be able to recognize our personal power of thinking, in order to use our thinking - either responsibly and honestly, or not.

Through the choices we make about what goes on inside our own minds, we choose to support our own self's efforts to understand, self-to-Self (why we feel as we do, or what it is that's upsetting us, or how we can change our situations, etc...); or we can choose to support our own self's efforts to not understand (!) by convincing ourselves that our abilities and choices are limited to only the conscious, human self's thinking. Either way, Self-to-self is a supportive proposition - what we support is up to us. We can approach life either as a Self-to-self undertaking that doubles our power through expanding our ability to see more choices/possibilities, or we can decide to use only the conscious mind's thinking and self conscious choices, void of the inward assistance and information of our Self that allows only half our own power/ability/choices. This is the difference between ego centric creation and co-operative, mutual,reciprocal creation.

Such a generalized deconstruction of these sorts of problems moves the power of our thinking, from patterns of confusion and frustration into patterns of empowered self-directing and self-acting, as co-operative self-to-Self approach. We can "actually" experience clarity of thought - clearer thinking that can be built upon, towards self-understandable solutions, as re-usable self-knowledge. We can actually, intimately experience our power of choice by making a different choice about HOW we think, directly linked to WHAT we think.

If we can de-confuse and demystify our personal power-of-mind, we can de-power - STOP getting sucked down this thought-vortex of powerlessness; then, we at least stand a chance of creating real solutions. Maybe we can discover new understanding within our mind and heart - different sorts of thought patterns, clearer questions that would lead us to personal, knowable, new answers.

To me, this is the meaning of Speaker Material - a living method of empowering ourselves to help us find our own solutions using our own thinking minds. This sort of real life situation is an illustration of how a completely invisible concept (as the thinking about a situation) can be linked to our more visible life's experiences (as how we feel and grasp or understand a situation). This "line-of-reasoning" is a usable, understandable method or "process of thinking" that shows me clearly how my individual, private, personal experiences are tied to specific sorts of principles of mind, consciousness (as expanding awareness) and inward processes of self-and-Self as the matrix of experience.

A few years ago another friend gave me a wonderful phrase for sorting out the difference between those experiences and ideas that are to do with broad, general concepts of the mind, and the private, individual experiences and thinking that have to do with our intimate interpretations-of-personal-mind. In a rather complex discussion about this subject, her mental light bulb went on and she intoned "OH - it's not about the Ducks and the Geese!"

Speaker Material is about understanding that our life's specifics; recognizing that the ducks and geese of our lives are a microcosmic view of a macro cosmic picture - an interactive, personal reality that is wrapped within a universal reality. While we are here as human selves those ducks and geese of personal everyday experiences serve as our connection - as our personal intertwining to our larger Self's reality and the universal reality of all living things. Through our existence as the one (our human self-identity)we can come to understand more completely our part, our meaning, our value, in the other (our psychic-spiritual Self-identity).

So, what does anyone think about this idea of "plugging in" our own life's personal specifics to the broad general understandings or comprehensions within the Speaker Material philosophy - or any other over-arching belief system as a philosophy, psychology, or spirituality or religion? Please share your investigations and discoveries! Does anyone else have their own example of how you have transported, transposed, interpreted, plugged-in, and understood any particular larger conceptualization (be it a training of some sort or a belief system of some sort or...) through making the connection to a private, individual concern?

I'm looking forward to some interesting in-put!

See you later,
Spinfo