The True Nature of Integration - Paragraph 5
In this paragraph Roberts remarks on the pitfalls of intellectualizing integration cautioning against it. Here’s our text:
“The reason for pointing this out is that on a purely intellectual basis, people are always attempting to integrate their experiences with a bookish knowledge of the journey. The inevitable results, however, is a hodgepodge of misconceptions and wrong conclusions. This is what I call “forcing the fit.” Like pouring a liquid quart into a pint container, not only will most of it be lost, but we end up with the same pint container we started with. Nothing has been gained while the new or further revelation has been totally lost - spilled out because it didn’t fit.”
Roberts begins this paragraph by saying “the reason for pointing this out is”, so let’s review what she is referring to when she alludes to “this.” In this subsection titled The True Nature of Integration she states that “God’s revelations are different, yet equally True” and that we “cannot envision the outcome ahead of time” meaning we can’t know where the revelation will take us until we have experienced and integrated it. Another way to say this is that we “cannot incorporate what we do not know.”
From this recap we can understand why “bookish knowledge of the journey” will not suffice. It ties back to the “two different modes of human knowing” that were laid out earlier in her text. She classified these modes of knowing as “thought and experience” and it is her position that these ways of knowing are of “two totally different dimensions.” Roberts’ “this” then refers to the human propensity to miss the mark, the inclination to stay on the surface of things where we feel we have control over the outcome of things. Not to trivialize the surface, but there is a whole lot more under the surface of almost everything.
I understand Roberts to be cautioning me against surface dwelling, particularly when it comes to the inner journey. She calls it “forcing the fit.” I might describe how I experience this forcing as my own propensity to try and understand this transformational journey as it is contextualized by another person or by a certain recognized path. This contrasts to what Roberts is cautioning against, which is to experience the journey without a need to be affirmed by an outside source.
I know for myself this is a difficult stepping off point. I will interject here that this stepping off does not mean I should go the journey alone without fellow journeyers, we naturally need others to journey with and accompany us along the way, but these others should be exactly that, supporters. Even our supporters can not tell us what certain ahas or revelations mean for us. At this point in the journey it is part and parcel of the growth to surrender to the unknowing aspects of both the journey and ourselves that we come up against.
It boils down to relying on and distilling, even discerning, finer and finer levels of subtlety, we might even say Reality. There is meaning in each experience I am living. Each moment offers a knowing, a newness that was previously unknown to me if I am willing to show up. My desire is to become more attuned to the experiences and the messages that are all around me. This is not to say every moment is filled with some grand revelation, no, it isn’t. But when I am attuned there is more and more aware of the quiet stillness that pervades everything. It involves a great learning to be content with what feels like nothing yet I know is everything.
As is typical, some days of noticing, learning and attuning are better than others and there is cause for celebration on either type of day. If I am attuning and aware that is wonderful, and if I am not attuning and aware that is also wonderful because I now understand that even when I am not attuning I am, in fact, attuning by the very nature of the awareness of not attuning. It sounds more complicated than it is! Here’s to another day of practicing attunement and to my lived experience of this wonderful life.
