The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I astonished myself yesterday by listening to an interview with Neale Donald Walsch, author of the Conversations With God books of a decade or so ago.

I never read the books because I'm not much for God, and have spent a good portion of my adult life on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, with a recent sojourn in the spare, dry country of Absolute Determinism sans even the smallest parasol of spirituality. But it's harsh and depressing there, and I've been flirting with the ineffable again lately because dammit, it just feels better.*

So anyway. In the interview, Walsch discusses "three secrets to ending the struggle and making your life work," and it was so refreshing that I was able to do some hand-waving around the God stuff and just absorb it. I took lots of notes.

( Secret Number One: Your growth process is complete. )

I propose to test the efficacy of this theory over the next few days and report back. I got off to a good start, feeling peaceful and joyous and full of grace, but then the whole wide world started annoying the crap out of me--a phenomenon I've often noticed when my inner defenses are feeling wobbly, so it's probably a good sign, since the inner defenses need to come down.

I'm beginning to see that I need far more stripping-away than I need adding-onto. The accretion of decades' worth of false beliefs, negative images, and general crust will require some serious spiritual exfoliation before the real me shows through. Hopefully there will be no need for a volcano.


*"Why are you so happy all the time?" someone reportedly asked the Dalai Lama, who reportedly answered, "Because it feels better."

In a comment on one of my Project Empty posts, owzers said, "I'm still cleaning my house. I've been feeling this urgency to give stuff away - like maybe I'm not going to be around much longer or something. Kinda of freaking me out a little."

Groping for something useful to say, I replied that I'd had similar feelings, and that I was pretty sure they were a reaction to the death of an old way of life, and not a premonition.

Since then, I've started reading Eckhart Tolle*. In The Power of Now, Eckhart says something that accounts for owzers's decluttering panic better than any half-baked psychological theory I could come up with, and explains my own feeling that Project Empty is much bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

( The Act of Radical Decluttering Is Spiritual. )


*Clutter-free reading: The Power of Now as an audiobook, and A New Earth as an ebook.