Alan Steinfeld sent this to me.
It is from something I wrote in December 2007.
It is still relevant, and I like it, so resending.
“As soon as something is unfamiliar our brain tries to put the event into
a known category, or at least use a known category as a basis for
appraisal. That is the job of the brain. But when something is really,
really new the mind does not have a reference — so it makes one up. From
the old.
Then there is the phenomenon of the unknown itself. The unknown we can
handle to a certain extent, but beyond a certain point fear and panic can
set in. When all the usual references are not valid we think we are going
crazy. Often it is at this point when we are going sane.
Our view of what we call reality is distorted to the point of being
virtual. For the new to happen we need to let go of the past. Totally.
The past is our hindrance. ‘Unless we die and be reborn’… Trouble is,
what is reborn is not the us we knew. It is new. When we look at the new
through the past, the new is distorted. We need to dare to not know step
by step… ‘as though walking upon thin ice.’
For you all, when the new happens you will be ready. What you have been
reading and hearing has gone deep inside and it will pop into your
consciousness with very little drama. You will then be available for other
people. The unformed is within all of us. And as Jesus is quoted as
saying: ‘When the up becomes the down, and the down becomes the up, when
the inside becomes the outside, and the outside the inside, when you see a
woman as a man, and a man as a woman, when thine eye be single, then will
thy body become full of light.’ That sort of thing.”