Hi Helcat

Early you mentioned how Sam was based on a soldier that selflessly came to Tolkien aid suggesting that Frodo in some ways was Tolkien. The image that came to mind was how ‘tired’ Frodo remained after the quest, not defeated but his youth replaced by profound knowing that aged and weighed on him. I wonder if Tolkien felt similar. Again, the word bittersweet comes to mind.

I admired Sam, though not called to carry the weight of the evil he was able to carry his friend. Sam saw what his friend saw and suffered yet at the end of his quest, he maintained a wiser innocence that allowed him to continue to engage with life. Where at the end of Frodo’s quest Frodo couldn’t fully re-engage with Life.

I recall now that Frodo parents drowned. so at a young age Frodo had a glimpse of life as it is. Perhaps this is why Frodo doesn’t have the same youthful inherent innocents that Sam had. There is always something sad in Frodo. I suspect it was this difference of experience that made Frodo the one able to carry the ring… But not destroy it.

Purist of heart…. Frodo I think had a heart that had been broken and perhaps healed by the kindness of Bilbo taking him in. A healed heart stronger because of its scares… than perhaps only such a heart that has been broken is Pure?

It took everything Frodo had in him to get the ring to the place where it could be destroyed but not the step further. Here Tolkien shows his wisdom as such an evil is not for us to destroy, we are only called to carry our part. Its a theme throughout the story as the hero’s never assume to try to change what was not theirs to change.

I think I saw Sam as the Hero because I wanted to be him. To emerge from the quest with the kind wise innocence needed to continue to engage in life after all the hardships.

In hindsight it makes sense to me that I saw Frodo as failing and Sam as the hero. I wanted to be Sam and knew I wasn’t.

Hi Anita

What a lovely breakdown. We seem to have come to a question which I will ask near the end of this post.

In my old journal writings, I also noted that I would try to do no harm. Next to it was a thought that if wisdom teaching weren’t leading a person towards compassion they were on the wrong track. I feel we are on the good track.

Over the last week I’ve falling into the shadows feeling stuck. Going over the post in this thread I wrote the following.

I’m tired of retelling myself my stories.
I’m tired of the emotions the retelling trigger,
I’m tired of the shame and sense of failure and hopelessness the retelling trigger,
I’m tired of trying to grasp at some inspired hope that the stories seem to call for…

A part of me still attached to the original shame that I’m bad… A shame reinforced by the retelling of old stories….
One might wonder if I’m out to punish myself and so deserve even seek out the shadows… oh

Unskillful reasons I retell and hold onto my stories of hurt?
I re-tell my stories in the hopes that by retelling them I can change them.
I re-tell my stories with a thought that I need to hold onto the hurt to maintain boundaries.
I re-tell my stories as away to imagine I’m hurting those that hurt me.
I re-tell my stories to punish myself.

As we have explored we have noticed, if only peripherally, the Eternal. Realizing the relationship between the temporal and eternal is the sense of life. This realization itself isn’t hope but that the realization is possible maybe…

So, the question is. How do we go from ‘knowing’ to living and resting in what we have learned?
How do we go from knowledge to wisdom, to making what we ‘know’ to be true to How we are?
When does the seeker get to be also the one who has found?

I think I’m asking why do I continue to fall into shadow?

As the words of Tolle, Seneca and Watts indicate this wisdom is known… just not KNOWN. How is it we see but do not see?

“What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” ― Eckhart Tolle

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” ― Seneca

“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.” – Eckhart Tolle

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax, and float.”― Alan Watts

Hi Helcat

I’m see that its been a tough week.

Its seems you, Anita and I struggle with a similar deep wound of having been told who we where and believing it. Even with all the positive work we have done to return to that ‘stillness where no work is required’ we can still slip into depression. Wounds can heal but forgetting and transforming memory is another thing. Even the transformed memory remembers its source. Memory is a trickster indeed.

Sandhguru argues that Karma is memory or intimately connected to memory, as it is memory that we tend to filter though and base our actions on and view the world. A beginners mind would then be a mind free of Karma, free of attachment to memory. Easier said then done. I am reminded of that quote – that we see the world not as it is but as we are – now we have the other hurtle that how we see ourselves is so tied to how others defined us and how they saw the world…

Hope it seems is not for wimps… something we also share is that we care and see that their is goodness in ourselves and others even when we sometimes doubt…

“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” Tolkien (I cannot grasp the creativity of a mind such as Tolkien’s)

Pinkie and the Brain… Rocky and Bullwinkle… we have I think given clues to our ages

Glad your feeling better Anita

I read a book way back ‘Surprised by Joy’ and thought their should be a book ‘Surprised by depression’ as it tends so sneak up on me. I’m never quite sure why but their is is.

Hi Helcat

Reading your comments I didn’t feel you were trying to fix me. I see this kind of dialog as an exploration. Both you and Anita have shared thoughts that brought me back to earth and push back. (we need tension to become conscious)

I like how your meditation helped you pause and notice the small things that reconnected you to your true self, and how that help you though the chaotic times. (I suspect that in a dialog on hope we could, and maybe even should, end here…. But I’m going to type 5 it and confuse things. )

“I don’t necessarily agree that hope comes from despairr” – I wrote that badly. In the present moment of the experience I agree while in detached hindsight I think there is a connection.

The connection to hope and despair is the idea that in times of discomfort or despair, when where ready and able, we turn to hope to help us pull through. In the exercise of looking back I think we can trace a hope to the experience that called it forward. (Language is going to get in the way…. I view hope as a something exercised in the temporal realm of experience which means it has a opposite from which it is intimately connected. Sadly the ‘needle’ between opposites can be one sided. As you mentioned balance is a key. Happily, if skillful, this tension of opposites creates greater self awareness and consciousness. )

This had me asking the question:
At a sub-conscious level is it possible that an unskillful hope unintentionally reinforced the experience I was seeking relief from? I’m leaning towards a yes.

You may recall the number of times I’ve written the question – ‘

How will you respond to Life as it is?

’, only to get lost in a secondary question – Am I seeing life as it is?

I agree that we can choose to accept or reject reality… though at the same time I’m not sure we always see/know reality as it is. My own experiences shows how I fill the space between the observed and the observer with my expectations, the trickster that is memory, fears, discomfort, hopes…. which often distorted reality and in hindsight, leaves me wondering about choice. (though not responsibility).

Question: Can a distorted view of realty fool us into believing that we are choosing happiness or despair?
(I have wondered if sometimes I weren’t happy being miserable.)

Looking back in my journal its clear in hindsight how among other things unskillful hope hid and distorted my reality which I don’t feel was a ‘conscious’ choice. As Anita noted – childhood happens so fast only in the context of an adult looking back that we begin to see clearer. This is where I see the exercise of removing measuring labels from our stories as being helpful as it allows the space between observer and observed – that I now realize are both me – smaller.

Looking back I note a tendency of getting stuck in the retelling of stories of something that happened where in hindsight I see a nu-articulated thought or hope that if I repeated a story enough times the outcome could be different. Writing that I also note the tendency to mistake a wish for hope. (“That trick never works!”… “This time for sure!” – LOL a memory of a carton i would watch over and over as a young boy. A lesson on never learning the lesson… unskilled hope or healthy optimism??? – 10 points if you get the reference.)

From that I note the following thoughts about unskillful hope
– it’s not fully conscious – perhaps the reason it can unintentionally reinforce its opposite, though in the moment
provide relief.
– a desire to change what happened in the past, a hope to change what can’t be changed and is not ours to change.
– a desire to control the future and create what is not ours to create.
– a desire that life be other then what it is…
– a desire to avoid and or hide from reality.

Humm… the word desire is showing up quite a bit.

Hi Anita

“My thoughts: generally, we live in the Eternal Realm and in the Temporal Realm. it is not possible to live, as humans, in one or the other… It’s about living in both, letting go of attachment to one or the other. Not labeling either one as superior to the other.”

Well said. I agree and sometimes imagine it as the yin yang symbol in motion. I know when I’m in anxiety mode both feet are firmly in the temporal (the spinning image goes all wonky) as I’m measuring/labeling like “crazy”. In those moments I need to notice bring myself closer to the Eternal, centering and slowing the spinning image.

“If you ask peter the young boy: “what do you hope for?” What will he say?”

Funny Sad that just reading that question I feel a tightness in my lower abdomen as my hope as a young boy came from a place of fear and anxiety or you might say discomfort and the Hope was to for comfort because discomfort was not only bad but ‘sin’.
I’m afraid my Hope was not for Life but to change what cannot be change. In other words as a young boy I was unknowingly saying a big NO to Life while believing I could fix it by being good and following all the rules. ( I think you had a similar experience with taking on the label of bad, if for different reasons? I wonder if most children do?)

Krishnamurti made an argument that most of our hope really represented a fear. And that one hoped when one was in despair.
“Hope means you are in despair. Being in despair, you look to something to give you hope. Have you understood the nature of despair, why you are in despair? Have you ever looked at your despair, why it exists? It exists because you are comparing yourself with somebody. It exists because you want to fulfill, become, be, achieve…” – Krishnamurti

Years ago I determined that if one was to hope unskillfully it was best not to hope at all which I still think, only I didn’t give up on the notion of learning to hope skillfully.

Its why I want to revisit my relationship with Hope – Krishnamurti not wrong but surprising myself, my gut says there is a Hope that, yes, we might turn to in times of trouble, but isn’t about fixing that trouble, or comparing, or even becoming…. Though I feel such a hope would bring one closer to a ‘true self’. Kind of the Joy and sorrow relationship? Maybe? Language is going to get in the way, but think I’m in a space to explore it.

Last night I happened upon the following.

From Youtube channel – Like Stories of Old – Interstellar’s Hidden Meaning Behind Love and Time
“Listen to me when I say that love isn’t something we invented, it’s observable and powerful, it has to mean something…maybe it means something more, something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” — Dr. Brand, Interstellar.

Then book I’m reading at bed time – ‘A Soldier of the Great War’ – by Mark Helprin
Old man: Do you know why you walk slowly when you’re old?
Alessandro: No
Old man: Because with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the more slowly time moves even as it races ahead. (a good description of how I’ve been experiencing time lately)
Alessandro: The less time, the more friction, difficulty, and viscosity. Time expands. Is that correct?
Old man: Yes
Alessandro: At the end, when no time is left, it will pass so slowly that it will not pass at all.”
Old man: Correct
Alessandro: Then, at death, time stops?
Old Man: Old men on their deathbeds call for their fathers not because they are afraid, but because they have seen time bend back upon itself… When I was your age I was skeptical and quick. I made fast work of the myths of heaven and hell and of the vastly deficient idea of nothingness. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen that the world is made of perfect balances and exact compensations. The heavier the burden and the closer you get to the end, the more vicious time becomes, and you see, in slow motion, intimations of eternity.

Then this morning as I woke I had the intuition to step back and let these notions we’ve been exploring go for – their is a time to think and analyze and a time to treasure up and ponder in ones heart.

That said looking back at some old journal entries I noticed that I’ve struggled with my relationship with the notion of hope so I might explore that in my next posts.