Attitudes

You hold a conceptual realization of something you would call attitude. So we will play a little bit with that conceptual realization. Let us say that attitude is more an element of action and reaction than belief system.

You have a concept of something that you say, “Keep a positive attitude”. If you had any idea at all what a positive attitude is, you might be able to keep that. But for the most part, keeping a positive attitude stands with a small argument inside of you. That small argument is to try to keep a positive attitude you must do it against some adversary, something that seems to be undermining your existence and your beliefs. Something that seems to say you cannot have the thing that you desire to have.

So we will change it a little bit, and look upon it to say, “Keep a beneficial attitude rather than a detrimental one”. “Keep a productive, expanding attitude rather than a defeating and degenerating attitude”. We will also play a little bit with what happens to you.

What you are is not merely what you see. What you are is the summation of the entirety of every experience that your life has held. And it is expressed outward, not so much by your physical appearance but by the energies, these things expand outward and they are tangible. You sense them as they expand and as they contract and they have an affect. Whether it is the desired affect or whether it isn’t does not matter, they still have an affect.

If you approach something with the belief that you can’t have it, what you are expressing outward is a group of energies that touch everything around you in a way that accuses essentially that other thing of being an adversary.

Therefore, what happens is that the reactive element of whoever you are touching with those energies, defends against that supposed attack. You feel that defense and it only confirms your belief system that you can’t have what you want to have. Which means you intensify your attitude, which means it gets felt more by the other person and that intensifies back to you and it becomes a battle.

Sometimes it is a battle of Will and Power, sometimes a battle of Allegiance, many times a battle of everything but what you think, and you find yourself not capable of doing anything to change it, not capable. You’ve found persons who have an attitude that you believe is somewhat defensive. You approach them and their defensive attitude, what does it do for you? What do you feel when you sense them? What do you do?

Most of you will look upon that and perceive that person has somehow accused you of something that you know you haven’t done. Even though you don’t know what it is, you will then try to solve it so that person isn’t defensive. In that case, what you are doing is actually distracting yourself from a place of participation, but you do so in order to try to get that other person to not be quite as defensive.

Or you come into contact with someone who appears to be very angry. With them having that form of attitude, you become the small child having felt that before and you respond to it. All of that takes you into a realm of reactive response rather than active participation and it distracts you as well as the other person. Then you start trying to fix a problem that isn’t necessarily a problem.

Keeping what you call a positive attitude doesn’t help. It actually compounds it because the more positive you try and think of the attitude, the more you get distracted away from your participation. So we will play a little bit with how to adjust that in your own selves.

These energies expand outward because they have to, because they actually have no choice. Usually the first thing that expands is your point of knowledge. When you come in contact with someone else your point of knowledge is usually the first thing that drives you there. It is your belief system, it is your state of reality, it is your view of the world at that particular moment that puts you in contact.

That view has very little to do with any other person around you. It has everything to do with you. It is that view that you start out with your dreams, your knowledge and your desires, and it is where your imagination comes into play. It keeps you participating. Knowledge also happens to be the one energy that is most relatable to your sense of ambition. You know this word ambition?

It is the place where you perceive yourself held back by life and wanting to get ahead. So, you exercise your state of belief that you are held back. That starts you with the place of needing an adversary, an identification of that adversary in order to assure yourself of how you are held back. Something to conquer, which happens to be where you do best as human beings, when you have something to conquer.

If you are coming in contact with someone else who happens to be doing the same thing, those two energies will be the first things that make contact with each other. It is from that place that everything else follows. So, whatever else happens to be out of balance or even in balance, is going to have an affect upon you. So we will play a little with attitude.

Pick an attitude that you have encountered in someone else.

A: Anger, competitiveness, stubborn, critical….Now, if you think of all of those things as being that particular person’s view point, what if their anger is to them seemingly true? What if their life has been filled with the concept that says, “anger works for me”? What if that happens to be a very successful attitude on their part? That they express that attitude because it works. What if you think of it in that way? What happens now when you think of those attitudes that you have encountered?

If you recognize that attitude may have very little to do with you and may have everything to do with that person’s knowledge of what is appropriate behavior, how much do you have to be involved with that attitude?

So, dealing with the business situation instead of the attitude might be very constructive. If you recognize that is merely the other person’s coping mechanism then their attitude does not actually affect you. Then you don’t have to adjust your attitude to defend yourself against the other person’s attitude before you can go on. You simply accept the other person’s attitude, and then you can participate with what is true and go on. That is constructiveness.

Perhaps. You are appropriate in your concept that each of you has your own piece of knowledge that interprets it, but that is where the key to the difference between a destructive attitude and a constructive attitude comes into play. The constructive attitude is one that acknowledges that you have your piece of knowledge and that you could react if you chose, but that you get to act if you choose also.

Giving to yourself a sense of choice means that you get to pay attention to the part that is relevant. If that other person’s anger is not relevant, then paying attention to the anger may be destructive to what you ultimately wish to have.

On the other hand, ignoring that person’s anger may also be destructive because that person may not be able to pay attention to what is the purpose of the joining.

That is the difference, why you give yourself the concept of having a positive attitude is because what the positive attitude always leaves you with, if you could somehow manage to figure out what a positive attitude is, is that it leaves you with the concept that you have choice. It leaves you perceiving yourself as something other than a victim of whatever is going on. It leaves you with a sense of being a participant. And while you may not get exactly what you want, you at least have an understanding that you are a participant, and that is choice.

A: It seems like anger, fear, these strong emotions put structure in our lives.

ST: Yes, and they put boundaries, and that is very much important for you as human beings to have some amount of structure and some amount of boundary that you can have as consistency. But that boundary is best served by being your attitude that allows the boundary rather than someone else’s attitude that enforces it. Understand this?

It does put structure in your life to have those boundaries. It does put structure in your life to know that someone else has the capacity to be angry. Where it ruins structure in your life is when you begin to perceive that you have to fix the other person’s anger.

A: What about, there was one teaching where you talked about say there was a server in a restaurant who is in a bad mood and by pointing it out to them, by being thoughtful and kind, “I see you’re in a bad mood, take your time with us or whatever you’re doing”, and it changes their attitude. I did it the other night and I think people are not aware of what they’re projecting, and it gets to be either a habit or…

ST: Yes, an attitude.

A: So, you can ignore it because it doesn’t have to do with you or you can make some changes.

ST: Yes. I will give you a little picture. There is an attitude about an issue which is a self controlling participation, and there is an attitude about life which is a beacon to everyone around you. You have something that you may best be thought of as an attitude that you conduct your life with. It is a major theme. It is partly to do with the way that you perceive yourself and partly to do with the way that you believe others see you, and it has everything to do with what is successful and what isn’t.

If you find that you can be very successful by having an attitude of conciliatory belief and that you have this attitude, it isn’t actually you, it is something you do, it is a coping mechanism. Internally you may wish to blaze out and say I am tired of compromising myself all of the time. But the reality of it is that you have learned to be successful with that attitude of conciliatory beliefs. So every time that you do it, the anger that hides behind it is what is felt not the conciliatory, but the anger. That is what gets felt.

After that gets felt, then the conciliatory comes along and the other person may or may not perceive it for what it actually is but the majority of you as human beings would take that particular attitude of saying, “Oh, that person just gets mad most of the time, but they usually come around to the way we want things to be”. If that happened to be you that had that attitude that wouldn’t actually feel too good, because again you would feel like you had compromised yourself and become the victim of that compromise.

If this happens time after time after time in your life, each time that you do it that it is marginally successful, it is going to be remembered by you as the way to do things and every time you come into a new situation the first thing that is going to be looked for in order to cope with that new situation, is anything that happens to be in your repeatability segment of your group, orders and dependence.

That means your natural reaction is going to be approaching things with the projection that you are the one who has to compromise. Which means before anyone or anything ever asks you to compromise, you’re going to have the feeling that you have to compromise, you are already going to have the anger on its way even before you are asked to compromise. Which means that eventually you are going to not bother trying to get involved with things because you know you are going to have to compromise, and you just know its going to be a failure, and you just know there isn’t any hope, and it takes you to a place where your attitude has actually harmed you.

Anyone that has occasion to interact with you while you happen to be in that particular attitude state of mind, is going to feel a frustration, not because they want to, but because none of you has actually learned how to cope with someone else who is doing that. The frustration then will turn into being something else that says, “Alright, as long as that person’s always so compromising why should I care? If they don’t care, why should I care”? And you have your society.

It is most wondrous these things of attitude. What is the attitude of this [flower vase]?

A: It is filled with dirt.

ST: And upright. It stands upright. What would happen if it were not standing upright? What would happen if it were standing on its side? It would be counter to the productive attitude of its existence, would it not?

A: Unless you had flowers [rest of the comment is unheard]

ST: That might be productive for the flowers, but it still wouldn’t be productive for this. Its purpose cannot be served unless it keeps the appropriate attitude. You understand this?

A: It sounds very rigid.

ST: It is. Its called ethics. Your purpose cannot be served unless you keep the appropriate attitude, and that means in allegiance to the purpose and intention of your participation in life. If you encounter someone who happens to have an attitude that you perceive you don’t know how to cope with, you’re off purpose when you start believing that you should find a way to cope with their attitude. Why not cope with them as a whole, not their attitude. Cope with their participation, rather than their attitude. You understand this?

A: What would that look like?

ST: If you encounter someone who is angry and their anger has very little to do with you or you suspect it has very little to do with you, it might be useful to cope with participating with them, not their anger. So, as they express their anger, pay attention to the actual things that you are participating with them. What does it matter if someone else rages? Truly, what does it matter? When they

begin to yell and scream and be angry and raged, what does it actually matter?

A: You somehow project that they’re commenting on your value as a person or your appropriateness or in-appropriateness…you’re judging yourself, so if you can keep from doing that its better.

ST: Yes, that is so. And that means pay attention to the productive attitude that you could have. It means taking a step of action, somewhere this reverberation back and forth has to stop in order for anything to move differently. It has to stop.

And while you may not be able to get another person to stop their anger, you can certainly stop their anger from having an affect upon you and your participation. Which means it won’t have to be manipulated by their anger.

It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t stop for a moment to determine if you have some participation, if you’ve broken some agreement. It doesn’t mean that you should ignore their anger as if it has no meaning, because it will have a meaning. But it does mean put their anger in perspective. Adopt an attitude of you that is appropriate. The relevance of that issue whether it is anger or not is whether you have anything to do with generating that anger. What agreements have you broken?

The other part is if you are going to look upon it, it might be appropriate to ask yourself, under circumstances such as you have just seen, would you also have anger?

You as human beings by your very nature, have a way that you observe whatever you are involved in at any given moment of your life. You have that and you are entitled to it and you also are respondable to it. Your emotions evict out of you an attitude, this resonance, these energies expand outward from you and no matter how hard you try you can’t hide it, but you can be relevant with it. Relevance is the very important issue. It is relevance that says where you’re going with it and it is that which develops a destructive attitude, a detrimental attitude, it is relevance.

If what you are actually concerned with is making the other person agree with you, it will do you absolutely no good at all to try to pretend it is something else, because this won’t lie. You can tell yourself it is anything else, but if getting the other person to agree with you is what you actually intend your attitude will be the thing that drives that interaction, not your mind.