messages, thoughts, and beliefs

I am ruminating about Shambhala, tumbling the words over and over in my head, which seems to resemble a rock tumbler...  complete with rocks.

There is a section in Chapter Nine: Celebrating the Journey, the part about the bow and arrow, and messages.  When I read it the first time, I had great trouble with this section, but it seemed very rich and full even though I didn't understand it, or know how to incorporate it in a practice.

I was thinking about messages, and thoughts and beliefs today.  I verbalized for myself the idea that it is not the thoughts that are troublesome.  According to this book, you just label them "thoughts", and allow them to float away.  To this end, I like to visualize my thoughts being written on little scraps of some sort of melty paperlike substance, and I catch them and pin them on the inside of my skull and let them dissolve, rather than let them float around.  It gets clogged in there if I don't pin them down.

But I have the habit of letting thoughts solidify.  They become rock hard, then immoveable.  Or sometimes they become brittle and then they break and become shards and stab me with their little sharp edges.  It's not the thoughts that are troublesome.  It's my habit of making them solid. They become beliefs.  Big, beefy, heavy, sharp, brittle, rocklike beliefs.  Even if they aren't true. Then I eventually do something neurotic because of them.

So, thinking these things, I went back.  I looked up "messages" in the index of the book, and found that section again, and there were these words that leapt out at me:

"You want to look at every situation and examine it, so that you won't be fooling yourself by relying on belief alone..."

Maybe I am absorbing some of this book after all!  That whole section now makes a kind of sense to me.  And it's great.  I love these kinds of books - so rich, and so deep, and you can go back to them year after year and discover something new.

In case anyone is wondering, this book does have something to do with creativity.  I'm not sure exactly what yet...  but I was originally introduced to it by one of my art teachers.  She assigned it as the text for a previous jewelry-making class, two or three years ago.  If I remember, I'll ask her when I see her next week (I am currently in another of her classes.)

If nothing else, I am hopeful that it will prevent me from making neurotic art.

To that end, work progresses; here is the lil boat today:

lil boat

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