EXTERNAL/INTERNAL/ETERNAL
As a training foundation for understanding where a person is in their understanding I have used these three (external/internal/eternal) practical ideas for many years in my assessment of not only where the practitioners are on the mat, I have applied them to my daily existence when I am interacting with the societal environment in general. I want to make it clear that I am not locked into these parameters, but they can specifically help with the feedback about the person or person’s I am encountering.
This approach has evolved out of my involvement in martial arts, yoga and meditation which have synergistically brought together many of their principles into an inner active format to assess where a person is in their training and be able to help them keep up with themselves as they cultivate a greater understanding of not only their art practice, but more importantly a greater connection with their inner growth of expansion and transcendence of the external.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the external, we all have learned many lessons on how to live here which is mainly based on how to survive better, our parents input, schools, how to relate to others, and our profession which provides us with financial confidence as a medium of exchange with the societal marketplace at large.
I see that the majority of individuals live from this level and most can live from this level their whole life. My view of this is that this is a tendency to live from the sympathetic nervous system in a predominant expression which typically is based on unconscious conditioning that seems to form itself in an ego minded personality which may never be questioned or changed.
Our art of Aikido which is based on Principles helps the individual to see where they are in a self reflective way as to reveal to them through practicing these Principles and kata with another individual what they are up to in a resistance, force orientation and how they are living this condition in their daily lives.
I have had many practitioners say after months of practice how much they can see about themselves in respect to trying to do things with so much effort and force they had bypassed a lot of their efficiency because of the way they had “always done it.” This is ego driven habitual familiarity that is not for most ever examined as to what one is up to and whether or not to continue it.
Since most of this external expression is done from a habitual, assumed life in motion, in order for a person to change there needs to be a reset of the nervous system which can be herculean endeavor for most because to experience change is what most avoid. Since in order to change we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expects different results, we need to we will say “distract ourselves” by doing something different so we can possibly bring about change internally.
This can be a challenge, but through practicing Principles in relation to another individual there seems to be a breakdown of resistance because through this intimate relationship we foster greater understanding of one another’s intention through a greater Awareness through non resistance.
As an individual fundamentally allows themselves to relax, they are allowing a different input into their life, many do not know how much unconscious physical tension they hold. Again, this is a combination of their life conditioning, inherent genetics, and for pretty much most of us how nature has given this superior survival brain and physiology. In order for us to move beyond these powers we need to set them aside for awhile so we can experience ourselves from a more conscious, aware place that is practiced much slower than what we are usually living.
As we move from the sympathetic nervous system which is the basis of the fight/flight mechanism as part of the limbic and reptilian brain and how nature has endowed us with an amazing survival default defense instinct, then we can start to see and understand that this system is based in an automaticity expression which most of us are not conscious of. To allow this system to be investigated consciously through becoming more relaxed and open, we can access alternate systems that may have been dormant or not functioning the way they should in our life up to now.
One of main ones is the parasympathetic nervous system and mainly the vagus nerve which is considered the wanderer throughout the body organs which controls relaxation, calmness or the opposite of an over hyped adrenaline cortisol laden sympathetic input. One of the reasons for mentioning this is if we don’t bring these systems into balance we may not be able to cross over into our internal communications more effectively, because as long as we are out of balance especially in the sympathetic, we can remain focused on the external and not realize we are over immersed in it.
In coming to a more awake understanding of our actions, we start to have a more internal agreement with the functions within that we take for granted. Finding out how uptight we may be on the external we can start to loosen up and start to gradually loosen these tensions consciously so as to start our internal investigation of our inner knower. Like I mentioned earlier we may have had brief glimpses, intuitions, and insights that are there but through our concentration on only the external they never seem to reveal where they are coming from and as such we don’t stay as connected as we could because of obvious external and internal distractions.
The inner knower is not a thing, but a connection to Universal Spirit that needs to become more of the relied upon source of being communicated to us in a more consistent manner. At a practical level this would be the practice of opening our fascia so that our energies that have been stagnant for so long start to move through our whole body mind being more efficiently, this facilitates a step over into our internal from the external enamoring of unconsciousness and habit.
Most of us need an alternative modality to step out of our ego mind mode and The Arts of Aikido, Tai Chi, Yoga and meditation can help us to open ourselves to the internal where we can slow every thing down to the present. The present is an aspect of the Conscious Presence that allows our inner knower to come forth so we may begin our transition to a greater understanding internally.
If the external is dominant we can’t hear anything on the internal that could be speaking through Silence Stillness which is the still point of the listening inner knower. These Arts help the body mind come to internal communication convergence in a natural way because we can finally hear from the inside and see the external as a default so as to be able to bring about a comparison like the Tao internally. This gives us insight into where we are in the understanding of the frequencies of power vs force which are step downs of yin/yang.
Upon starting to realize that we have an inner knower that has connection with the vaster territory of our whole energetic understanding we may begin to listen more subtly internally, Silence Stillness will convene and we start to see how much we have been mostly hypnotized by the external and upon this re connection and a more constant recognition things that seemed compelling before now start to shut down because they were mainly a dependency on what we considered reality.
This recognition is an important gesture in that if it is continuous we start to see through our structure of what we have created on a conditioned life based in the unconscious, this is a beginning of what I would term transparency. This is like a two way mirror in that you can see where you have been and now since you are becoming more aware and present you move more into the unknown which can produce apprehension because it is a place that you may have not visited very often.
Conscious Presence is the open eyed transparency of Clarity of Spirit that is the Universal hinge so to speak of living from your Spiritual connection with Source. Spirit seeing with clearer vision instead of ego/mind distortions of the Freedom of Existence as it is, not through the filters of the distractions that animal ego notices as being so important that it focuses all ones attention and intention on to mostly the survival agendas that the senses tend to shut out anything else that could possibly open one to their intuitive, open Spirit connection.
The Unknown can be aligned with the Eternal in the sense that life has become recognized from a non structured perspective in contrast to living only as a body mind ego personality. The basis for the Unknown Eternal is moving more into a Universal openendedness that has become more alive as we learn to let go of what we thought was so Real.
Again, as transparency frees us consistently from a clear consciousness we don’t default back to patterns that seemed so solid and dependable to open ourselves to reality as it is and so we are no longer deluded into creating further energetic obstructions because in the end we see our new beginning from a fresh reset in the Eternal which is where we were all along.
Since we can now experience our existence from the other side of the mirror I mentioned earlier we can look both ways from the perspective of our inner knower which is our me from the me of understanding which is not attached to things as they arise in consciousness and we are more in tune with allowing things to be as they are without thinking any of it is Real. We can participate in the world but see that it is no longer that compelling because we see through it from Source and not from the point of view of survival only, Truth is always already the case, we just haven’t been in connection from our inner knower, our me of understanding.
This is not a rejection of the manifest world but a further fulfillment of being here and understanding that this realization accepts and yet transcends and includes all of it from the awakening of the impermanence in that it changes constantly so we need to see how we are keeping our mirror clear in our moment to moment existence.
In this consistent gesture of staying present and aware, we can start to listen in more succinctly as to what is emerging internally at the moment and whether or not it coincides with the spontaneous flow that is a possibility that is congruent with one’s expressive action in conscious choice. Transparency has emerged as a realization of our true nature that reveals understanding as our essence from which we can now see our Existence from a whole, more vast, open ended, creative field of possibilities that emerges spontaneously from the Eternal.
Sincerely, Will Gable