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Wayne's Newest Book,
This
Endless Moment,
is available!
Read what people are saying about the book!
Click!
We've extended the 20% for Into the Centre readers to January 31, 2005.
The code you need to get the discount is
prepub20.
The discount applies to both the Book and the
Bodywork CD-R!!!
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This Endless Moment -
20.00 CDN |
| If you already know you want a copy, go here: |
Buy one now! |
| If you'd like to read samples, then order, go here: |
Have a look! |
Learn
Bodywork
from
an expert!
Wayne's excellent CD-R teaches Bodywork, Breathwork and other
body related essentials.
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Introduction
to Bodywork & Breathwork
- 29.95 CDN |
| Read samples, and watch a sample video |
Have a look! |
Remember to use the discount code, prepub20 |
| Holiday Suggestions |
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Music
Matt Dusk is a Canadian swing and jazz singer - what
my parents might have called a "crooner." His song, "Two Shots of
Happy.." is getting a lot of airplay.
He also has a Christmas disk out!
Can't believe I'm suggesting this, but Kelly
Clarkson's new album is amazing!
Link is to the Music page on this site. There you'll
find links to Amazon USA and Canada. |
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Books
There's a quote from Danaan Parry, author of Warriors
of the Heart, below. Great ideas!
Link is to the Books page on this site. There you'll
find links to Amazon USA and Canada. |
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A Message from
Wayne C. Allen |
Many thanks to those of you who took the time to write and offer condolences in
the recent death of my dad, Chuck. I'm writing on Saturday, and we've invited
people over to talk and visit. Dad donated his body to science, so he's now
"residing" at U of Toronto's Medical School.
I also turned 54 this past week.
I survived.
Wayne, Xmas Bodywork, and
lovely niece Lisa, on the receiving end.
(And she's even smiling...)
Trusting you are making much of the opportunity 2005 brings.
Wayne
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The Fringe Dweller's
Guide to the Universe
Placeholder Theory |
I got to thinking about what I call "Placeholder Theory," as I
thought about the endless cycle of working toward selling our house and getting
on with the Costa Rica project.
Placeholder Theory is something I've heard a million variations
of – sometimes in jest, but usually semi-seriously. I'll give you a common
illustration, and then we'll spend a little time exploring the theory's uses and
abuses.
The normal usage is: some people are (serve as) placeholders for
others. The others, in this case, are "special people who deserve special
treatment or consideration." Oddly, this is always the person
telling the story.
Here's a typical example: Emma Entitlement is late for a
meeting. So she puts out "a vibe," (prayer, intention, whatever) and as she
approaches her destination, someone (the placeholder) backs out of a
parking space right in front of her destination.
I've heard this idea (and specifically the parking spot story)
expressed by many folk. What I've never heard is someone "owning" the
placeholder role: "Yeah, I was going to leave the parking lot, and then I got
this vibe that I should wait a bit. When I did pull out of the parking space, I
looked in the rear view mirror, and the guy who took the spot - boy was he looking
pleased! I'm so glad I could be of service!"
In other words, most folk resist the idea that they are
in the placeholder role for others.
This is the arrogance of the quasi wise.
We who profess to "get it" are often caught in our delusions.
And one of the biggest is the idea that we are special and no one else is (or only our "special" friends are.) We
really believe that we have been working hard to get here (wherever "here" is…) and don't
want to think that our role is placeholder for someone who "gets" more than we
do.
Dar and I have been doing a variation of this regarding the sale
of our house. We've been looking at what we might have been "putting out there"
to slow down the offer (we have a conditional one) until December. I was
laughing about it, as I was standing in the kitchen a couple of days ago, and
suddenly the placeholder story popped into my head. I heard a little voice in my
head say, "I guess the buyer wasn't ready to buy when you wanted to sell, so you
had to wait for them." Oh! My! God! Me??? A placeholder?
Because, of course, my ego wants to tell me that I'm "special,"
it's a hard pill to swallow that others might be even more special, and
manipulating me like a piece on a chess board.
If there are such things as placeholders for me and you
think there are placeholders for you, then we all need to look in you rear view
mirror the next time we exit a parking slot.
My point? You can't have one without the other. You get to have
it both ways. If I create an enlightenment scale and place myself on it, there
are always going to be people "further along." So long as I'm looking "down" on
others, I can feel "special." But as soon as I look "up…" Yikes!
The way out is ordinariness. Dar often mentions the Osho Tarot
Deck. We both play with it.
Here's the card for Ordinariness. It shows a person simply going
about the task at hand.
The message is
also described in the Zen story, below. Ram Dass once described the process he
was engaging in as, "nobody special training." On the other hand he also
described getting caught in his ego and using his "guru status" to get all kinds
of special favours. He told these stories with a rueful smile, as getting caught
in this game is a part of the human condition. I talk about this in my book,
This Endless Moment, in the chapter on Deconstruction.
Ordinariness might be described as, "Having a sole focus on presence
during the walk of life." I say to clients that the real reason therapy (any
therapy) works (when it works) is that the therapist and the client are fully
present with each other. It is much more so the presence as opposed to the
technique. If I am present and focussed, then there are no ups and downs, no
better or worse, no right or wring, no clean and dirty. There are no
placeholders, because there is no difference between me and not me. It is as if
the stuff of the universe is everywhere, and appears in different, unique forms, but is always what
it is at its essence.
Sounds pretty mystical, right?
Nonetheless, it is the nature of the universe, down to its core.
I never get any real satisfaction out of thinking I am better
than "Joe" and worse than "Sally." My ego desperately wants me to play that
game, and much of life is wasted on comparisons, but to use a contemporary
experience, "In a tsunami, everyone is equal." Nature is there to remind us that
the cosmos really does not play favourites. You see, we live in an essentially
neutral universe. We all put our pants on one leg at a time, all are born and
die alone.
We are on the walk until we aren't.
The quantity of the days is totally out of our hands. Ah, but the quality…
that's another story, and totally about focus.
Yet, because each of us is fighting with our sense of specialness (entitlement,
the ego voice screaming in our heads, whatever) we get caught in inertia. Some
variant of either helplessness (see the last Into the Centre
article) or stomping our feet and saying "It's not fair," or looking for
rescue are common.
Whenever I find myself in that place, I remind myself of a Zen story. A man goes up the mountain,
looking for the Master. After 6 months of looking he's about to give up. He sees
an old man coming down the hill, carrying a bundle of firewood on his back. He
asks the old man if he is the Master.
The old man nods.
The seeker says,
"What
is Enlightenment?"
The old man drops the wood and says "Ahhh!"
The seeker is instantly enlightened.
Then he asks,
"What comes after
Enlightenment?"
The old Master bends, picks up the wood bundle, and
continues down the hill.
What comes next? Living. Until we aren't.
Learning. Growing. Understanding.
Enough.
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Intentional Slip of the Mind
I subscribe to an e-zine from Dr. Douglas.(http://www.realhealthnews.com/)
Here's a really interesting one from this week. Scary stuff!
Memories are powerful things. In many ways, they make us
who we are. Without them, we'd have no frame of reference,
no context. And we'd have no sense of our own history and
place in the world. Without our memories — even the bad
ones (especially the bad ones) — we'd be doomed to repeat
the same mistakes over and over again, or we'd all just be
sailing blithely through life simply converting oxygen into
carbon dioxide instead of learning, growing, and working
toward things our life's experiences have shown us we
desire.
In other words, memories are what drive us. Without them,
we aren't human.
And until now, we've assumed that our strongest memories
are unassailable — that they're locked up tight inside the
fortresses of our minds. I say "until now" because according
to a recent Washington Post online article, scientists have
developed a pill that's the first step toward SELECTIVE
ERASURE OF MEMORIES.
That's right, tinkering with our memories is no longer the
sole province of science fiction (as in The Manchurian
Candidate). If a certain branch of science has its way, we'll
soon be able to pick and choose our memories. Early research
on laboratory animals shows that injections of certain drugs
into the brain can completely eliminate the response to
certain targeted stimuli by blocking some key proteins
necessary for memory storage.
These experiments haven't been limited to lab rats, either.
Both U.S. and French researchers have tested a pill on human
"guinea pigs" that blocks stress hormones in the amygdala —
the center of the brain that forms and processes exceptionally
strong memories. These studies show that people who take
the pill — a variation of an existing drug called propranolol
— after a traumatic experience exhibited fewer symptoms of
what psychiatrists call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD).
Some of us call this NRTF (Normal Reaction To Fear)...
The bottom line is this: Whether we CAN manipulate
memories is no longer the issue. Clearly, we can, and we'll
no doubt be able to do so more completely in the near future.
The question is: Should we? And if we decide that we
should, how do we keep the technology under control — and
away from the drug makers, who'd undoubtedly market it as
a "bad day" pill?
Proponents of this research argue that controlled memory
erasure (or modification) would help people recover from
traumatic experiences like accidents, crimes, or combat. They
make a compelling argument. After all, who wouldn't want
to take a pill to help them forget something terrible, like a
rape, for instance...
But where do we draw the line as to what constitutes a
"traumatic" experience? And WHO will make that decision?
Psychiatrists? That's more than a little scary. These are
questions that will definitely need to be answered before this
technology proliferates.
Is a bad date or lousy day at work cause for popping a
memory erasure pill? It's easy to scoff and say "of course
not" now — but once this technology becomes more
effective, well known, safer, and more affordable, you know
darn well people are going to want to take if for less and less
severe instances of "trauma."
And what about the ethical dilemmas: In the case of true
trauma, like rape, do we kill the painful memory of it right
away, or must we let the victim relive their terror until after
the trial (assuming the accused is identified)? After all, the
accuser has to have a sharp memory of the events to perform
as a witness...
Look, not to wax philosophical here, but all of this simply
shouldn't happen, in my opinion. We NEED our memories
— good and bad — to maintain our very humanity, to learn,
grow, teach, and contribute the fruits of our experiences to
the human condition.
And if this technology becomes an unchecked mainstream
reality (along the lines of, say, antidepressant drugs), it's
conceivable that soon, we'll be nothing more than a race of
smiling, euphoric zombies who's heads are filled with only
pleasant memories and who know nothing of strife or
struggle. Characterless, clownish clones of each other, with
no frame of reference of experience to differentiate us one
from another...
And that's something I'd prefer stay the stuff of Orwell
novels, thank you very much.
Always remembering to separate the science from the fiction,
William Campbell Douglass MD, II
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About our recommendations: books, music or whatever we recommend are linked either to The Phoenix Centre Web Store or to Amazon.com. We are affiliates of Amazon.com, and make a small referral fee if you buy a book from them, using a link from this newsletter, or from our web site. If you use the "search" link in the column to the right, you can buy ANY book from Amazon.com and we benefit from your purchase. As almost everything we do through the web site (except my books) are free, this one affiliate program allows us to offset a small portion of the expenses of publishing. If you're looking for books, tapes or anything else (pretty much anything these days!) please go to Amazon.com through our site.
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Costa Rica Updates!! |
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