These conversations were part of a Staff & Volunteer Gathering on March 16, 2019 in Edmonton.
Q1: Can you say something about balancing work and taking care of the practical details of other areas of our lives, including health. Is burnout a real thing?
Just the mention of it already brings attention to it and common sense takes care of the rest. As soon as the subject is opened up like this, a little bit more care is going to be taken in reading if you’re getting close to burning out and not just pushing it to the very end until you do.
Q1: If you know that in your self, you know that in other people also.
Yes. And in hearing this there’s also help from everyone else who’s heard it. In many cases, that does it.
Q1: There are times where there’s a choice around taking a work shift or not, for example a party. How to decide what has the higher value?
If it were me I would side to my responsibility. I wouldn’t go to the party.
Q1: Would it make a difference if your job wasn’t working here?
If you forfeit carrying out responsibility because there’s a party that you want to go to, that makes you unreliable. Then someone else will have to make up for that shortfall. If it’s their responsibility once a month to be working a Sunday or a weekend and they’ve been doing that, I would carry that responsibility or work on a different arrangement.
Q2: For me it boils down to two interconnected aspects. To work here is something not ordinary. There’s a privilege in it. There’s something unique about working in this building and working for everything that’s happening here. I know that some people will really feel that. They feel the pull of that and they know the meaning in it. The word privilege is not a burden in that case. It’s just a joy. And then sometimes balancing that pull can feel like sacrifice. It can feel like pushing our own economic situation to an edge, our health situation. It can bring up those kinds of complexities like the meaning in our lives to stay afloat financially and physically.
It is a privilege to be able to work here, because of the energy in the building and everything that’s taking place here. It’s an unusual place. Working here at the expense of your health, if you’re burning out, doesn’t make any sense. Working here at economic cost if you’re weighing in the privilege of being able to work in such a place with all these people as well – that’s worth balancing in.
Q2: It sounds like each person is following their own sense of meaning, both in their response to work or volunteer here and the practical levels of their life. Each one is working with that how they can.
Yes. And the level of perspective that’s held determines the outcome.
Q2: Are there things that we can do to change our level of perspective. To me that sounds a bit like common sense. Common sense is only as solid as your level of perspective is clear or open.
There’s a lack of perspective if someone is volunteering and they will easily show up or not show up just because they are not on salary, they’re not being paid. That reflects on a lack of deeper character. So there’s a serious lack of perspective in that.
Q2: Can you give any other examples like that, where perspective might be lacking? To flush out blind spots or where we maybe have thought that we were tuning into something deeper but actually it wasn’t clear.
The whole perspective of having a sense of entitlement because of volunteering undermines the value of giving your self to something that you’re supporting. To have a sense of entitlement undermines the value of volunteering.
Q2: Are you able to put some words to the movement of pure volunteering?
That you would carry something, such as the case of volunteering. If it’s clear to you to volunteer then you would carry that, walk in that without any sense of entitlement because you’re giving of your self, you’re giving something. To have a sense of entitlement brings the focus back onto one’s self.
Q2: What’s the connection between walking in responsibility and walking in entitlement?
A deeper perspective would be that if you’re volunteering, you’re volunteering because you’re really in support of what you’re volunteering for. The follow-through of that is that you won’t be referencing your self and what you get out of this. You’re volunteering your self. It’s not volunteering your self so that you can have something for your self.
Q2: I think that’s where in the practicalities it gets blurry. There’s this giving because it’s good and clear to give and because there’s a deeper awareness of what’s going on. You just want to give to that. And then when you’re giving without your self, then it can be so easy to not apply common sense. How do you know the resonance of that walk?
If you’re being really clear and not doing something for your self, common sense comes easily.
Q3: For me, working in this building, this place, the energy here, everything has been an extension of you, of your energy and of your body. In a way a sacred temple, a sacred place. In what I do here, what we do here, how can we hold that and give to that higher purpose in our practical application?
In anything that you do, do for the deepest within that you know the truth of. If your doing is for that, that means that you really are coming from it. When you have a profound value but in the practical you do things for your self, you’re not coming from that profound value. Then you are in your living coming from your self.
Q3: That counts for any place I would be working in.
That applies to every relationship, every thing. When you’re in relationship, in a relationship with someone, you can hold a high value but if you conduct your self in the relationship in a way that’s clear that you do things for your self, then that higher value held in the relationship doesn’t really mean very much. Our belief and our ascent to a particular value only has real meaning if we do everything for that value. If the reference in this is the deepest that we know the truth of, and everything isn’t done for that every little thing in our life, then that deeper value that we think we hold to isn’t real.
In that way, what we believe about our selves and what our self is actually like may not be the same thing. So there, we fool our selves.
Q3: There can also be an overdoing, trying to do it super good that gets out of balance.
If you do things for your self, that means that your doing is going to be out of balance.
Q3: That can be either way: sloppy or overly correct or detailed.
Yes. When you do everything in your life for the deepest you know the truth of, you will in your living be self-balancing. When you live for your self despite the deeper things within that you know the truth of, and despite believing that you live for them, when in the little things in your life you live for your self, you will live increasing your imbalance.
Q3: Working here in this field, this other resonance, I’m more prone to be quiet, processing, listening deeply. At the same time I’m looking at what I need to do and not be spaced out. I’m holding more of this quieter way of being. It’s a certain attitude. Is that something that I got being and working here that has also shifted my way of being and working in other workplaces?
Yes. To live without any negative attitude. Where there is a self orientation there’s irrationality. Self orientation is fundamentally blinding. Where you are self oriented you won’t be clear.
Q4: Being with you and aiming to have a deeper orientation while being functional could have us do any job to pay for meetings and seminars. It’s a simple fact that we need money just to get by in the world, to pay rent and come to meetings. Can you comment on that?
If you have a worldly perspective on working and making money, and what your money is for, then the truth within is going to be a category in your life. It’ll be a category in your self that’s all part of a worldly, conditioned perspective. If you have the perspective of living for the deepest within that you’ve awakened to, then being in this world is a part of that instead of the truth being part of being in this world. It turns it around. If you’re truth oriented your perspective on money isn’t going to be a worldly perspective. Your perspective on time and time for your self isn’t going to be a worldly perspective. If you live being truth oriented you’ll live in all regards with an unusual perspective. Where that would really show is in the areas of your life where there’s pressure. That’s where the life of your perspective shows.
Q4: I don’t need a bunch of stuff, but I do need to be at the seminars and need to be able to pay for those and food. Working because that’s what is needed to do to pay for what we know we need to take of and are responsible for, is that a worldly perspective?
No. That sounds clear, but that’s different for each person. For some that involves a particular standard of living. That’s different for each person and that part may not be real. If you’re upholding a particular standard of living at the expense of something that you more deeply know the truth of, then your relationship with your standard of living is not real and you’ll have a posturing in it. Doing what we need to do could be everything from clear to blind.
Q5: You said something at one of the EST parties last year that really impacted me, something like ideally everyone would be a volunteer here. That really went into me. Immediately my mind started to try and figure out how I could do that. I do volunteer here and I also work here in a paid capacity. I love working here and earning some money from it is amazing because it supports me coming to meetings and seminars. I was trying to figure out how to get a better paid job so that I can volunteer and don’t have to rely on the money that I earn here for certain things. I haven’t figured it out practically yet.
If you’re truth oriented, you would be volunteering your self, everything you are, your life, your time, everything you have, to what you deeply know the truth of and that would form your choices, your decisions. It would form your whole perspective. It’s easy to have accustomed ideas of how much you work and what you do with the rest of the time of your day and your life. Because there’s a certain worldly standard of what that is, we automatically adopt that and it forms in our psyche what’s reasonable and what’s unreasonable, so it governs our behaviour.
Q5: In other countries, seven people might be living in one room and that’s just fine. We don’t have that and it’s an entitlement thing in some ways. It’s an extreme example, but is that what you mean?
That plays into our conditioned perspective.
Q5: It brings up personal space and ideas around all of that.
And beliefs of what’s in balance. In our culture, to live below the poverty level is out of balance and something’s wrong. That perspective is not very old. If you were to look at what below the poverty line is, for thousands of years most everyone lived that way – just making ends meet – and that’s not with any kind of lifestyle.
Q5: I grew up in Africa where that was normal. Something that landed coming back from Nordegg was to live as though I’m always camping. To live from that real, simple, bottom line simplicity.
It’s easy to take a habituated lifestyle for granted and to not be really conscious in what lifestyle we hold. If we’re unconscious in it then we’re driven by a belief. If we’re conscious in it then we’re clear.
Q6: You made a connection between perspective and what’s seen.
Perspective really shows where there’s pressure: time pressure, emotional pressure, physical pressure, financial pressure, mental pressure. Where there’s not a truth orientation, it’s under pressure where we really betray ourselves, reveal ourselves, reveal our actual beliefs regardless of how we mentally ascend to other beliefs, deeper beliefs that we think we live for.
Q6: If there is a deep perspective that goes through all the way it will show in my behaviour. And if there is a favouring of my self in a moment of pressure it will also show in my behaviour. It shows and it’s seen either way.
If there are core beliefs at play in what governs ourselves and our lives, that always becomes clear when we’re under pressure. f we have core beliefs that govern us, they don’t easily show in fair weather. In fair weather we can put on our good side. We can fool ourselves. What we really live for shows much more in the really difficult weather.
Q6: Is it possible to be aware enough to see in that very moment of pressure?
Where there is in fact a self orientation, that’s a self blindness. So even under pressure it’s difficult to see that blindness. It’s difficult to see under most circumstances what we don’t want to see. It’s difficult to know what we don’t want to know. It is so deeply different to be fundamentally truth oriented within. That means that you live in the little things of your life wanting to know the truth so that you can be it. But that’s not conducive to comfort and getting and going after what you want. To live in a depth of containment within so you’re not leaking out into the use of emotion and mind, not leaking out into having stories about anything, if you’re not used to it, brings up an extreme level of discomfort.
Q6: The willingness to burn in internal pressure as well as in external pressure without leaking, sometimes in the midst of the discomfort of containing conflict: what’s the clear line?
That clear line is living with a plumb line inside where what you do isn’t aligned to what you think and what you feel in your self. What you do is aligned with this plumb line that goes all the way down to the deepest that you know the truth of, and everything else that you know is true is coming up along that line. And you live in this plumb line. That’s a very non-worldly life. You won’t think and see like most others.
Q6: That’s why we are here together. It helps.
Maybe. It depends who we’re leaning on, leaning into, being with. It depends on what we talk about, why we talk. It depends who we go to when we’re feeling one way or another. If there’s self orientation, from where does it get it’s support? If it’s occurring here, it gets its support from here. It’s very easy to find support here for core beliefs that are holding together a self orientation.
Q7: Is that here, as in within the community?
Yes.
Q6: If I really want the ultimate, what I really love is no voicing, depending on what I want to support, bring out.
Yes.