Should I?

Long time since my last posting, and Ms. Sparrow hasn't written anything for a while. Granted she is traveling, perhaps there will be a summation of her trip.

In the mean time Charles Tart is asking for submissions for his YouTube series about his consciousness research. I was saying to a friend that it would be interesting to know the origins of the idea of 'should,' the feeling that one 'must,' 'has to.' She echoed the Buddha: 'let go.' Yes, of course, it is about letting go. That isn't the question.

My question was stimulated by that one of Ms. Sparrow's: 'Why can't people fully let go?' So my question about 'shoulds' is explicitly about expectations. Just telling one not to have them is redundant: don't have expectations, let go, don't should, etc., -- all the same thing.
Let me rephrase it so as to be absolutely clear.

What is the mechanism of sticky, expecting, shouldy, non let go-itivness?!

Why does it happen? Saying shouldy non let go-itiveness happens because of expectation, is like saying that rain is caused by precipitation. If you say 'desire,' as a blanket cause, what about hunger, and needing sleep? Ah, but those are natural, it is just the sticky desires, you say: ergo 'stickiness.' See above question.

Anyway, I have an answer to this. The chakras are ways to 'see' the world. I put 'see' in quotes because each chakra is rather more like its own unique sense, as sight is to smell or hearing. Now if you hear a tiger from a recording, you have trained yourself to not need the congruity of having to see a tiger as well. Think of each sense as an opinion about what is happening. A sense of what is happening, we say. So it is with the chakras. You have seven different opinions about everything you experience. Because they all channel through the feeling-mind we think they are the same. Our brain makes the experience seamless, just as with our other senses, giving us a 'whole.'

Just like the physical senses, the energy senses can encounter circumstances which are not coherent. So while your first chakra may enjoy the hollywood blockbuster, your third-eye sees it as boring. So was the film exciting or boring? It was both, and five other senses of it as well.

Where 'shoulds' come from is the chakras trying to get each other to agree with them, or the attempt to sum these into a coherent picture. Why can't the world be bittersweet, full of love-hate, and dangerous-opportunity? Agree to disagree with yourself. You contain different worlds of experience.

In ecology, the greater the number of 'ways' that different species of plants and animals can co-exist is the system's strength. In economics, having greater numbers of producers allows for choice, without discrimination. The strength of democracy is having many people see an issue from many sides, its weakness is that it leads to arguing instead of agreeing to disagree and a celebration of our differences.

This ecocracy starts with our own inner arguments. Each chakra has an equal say about any experience. Even in the most horrific there can be the beautiful, even in the most beautiful there can be darkness. If we can't agree to disagree with ourselves who can we?

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman

Yet there is something beyond tolerating our own difference from ourselves. I do not contradict myself, I contain a divergence of valid opinions. Multivalent cohesiveness requires more than tolerance, more than putting up with what you don't like. It is easy if we all agree; if we disagree then there is tension so long as I think that you are misguided.

Reiss would suggest 'self hugging,' as the problem. Our motivations, what we want, are the right ones. In other words, "What I like is erotica; what you like is pornography." Remember I am talking about ourselves' desires, the desires that become 'sticky' when they are trying to implicate that another way of our loving is getting it wrong.

Walk on Walt Whitman, walk on.

Mr. Kingfisher