Becoming part of the solution

13 Minute Listen

In todays podcast Tom Campbell discusses the importance of balancing intellectual and personal thoughts, suggesting that while intellectual engagement is valuable, deeper personal reflection is necessary for overall well-being.He emphasises the need to integrate intuitive experiences alongside intellectual processing, advocating for a dynamic approach to spiritual and personal growth within everyday life. Campbell shares insights on achieving balance, highlighting the significance of feeling and intuition in addition to rational thought. He also mentions the challenges of spiritual development within societal contexts and advocate for robust meditation practices.

Intervierwer

I spend a lot of time in my intellect and I feel that I generally have a positive and productive relationship with my intellect. My intellect is generally happy, positive, efficient, and productive, and I almost always have something interesting and in my view also valuable to process on. Is that really something dysfunctional that I should outgrow, or how should I look at that?

Tom Campbell

 No, I don’t think you should look at it as something dysfunctional you should outgrow.  But you must also allow time for deeper, more personal thoughts to gain balance. You know, eventually balance is automatic.

You don’t have to think about staying in balance. So the problem is that if that’s all you do, is you’re intellect is always churning, churning, churning on problems and they’re interesting problems and they’re fun problems and that works. That’s good. Don’t want to stop it and you don’t really want to outgrow it but you want to keep it in balance. So continue to do that but make some time like I say for deeper, more personal thoughts, things that are more to a tune of who am I and what does it matter? How am I? How am I reacting to things?

How about my relationships I have? Are those relationships primarily me giving? Or are they primarily me trying to get things the way I want them? Those kinds of thoughts, rather than thinking about logical problems, those are the kind of thoughts I mean by personal thoughts, you know, assessing yourself, deciding to spend some time with an intention on getting rid of a fear.  That’s sort of a thing. So just find balance in your life with it. And if you’re balanced, eventually the balance will take care of itself. Sometimes when you need to be 90% intellectual, sometimes you’ll need to be 90% intuitive.

It just depends on what you’re doing in the situation you’re in. And that’s okay. You don’t always have to be 50/50. 50/50 isn’t the right state. It’s just as on a whole you need to stay in balance. You don’t want to be just intellectual for the next six years.

With the promise to yourself that then you’ll do six years of being intuitive. That’s not good. You need to stay generally balanced over weeks or months. You should spend an equal time because the intellectual parts are important too. It’s important to who you are, it’s important to the work you do.  It’s important to you understanding the world. You trying to understand the soft parts, the metaphysics, the understanding, the philosophy, the spirituality, how does that engage with the rest of your life?

And say there’s not two separate lives. Well, I got my spiritual life over here, and I do that on Tuesdays, you know, Thursdays and Saturdays, and then I have my intellectual life, and I do that on Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, you do all of it all of the time.

So don’t be rigid about it, but you’ll know when you feel like you’re in balance. So I say search for balance, but no, it’s not that you should outgrow that intellectual part of you. That’s who you are. That’s what defines you in many ways, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be a really spiritual person at the same time.

I don’t think I’ve ever told this story anybody but this was back. I don’t know. Early to mid, maybe mid 1970s. I got this sense. You know, I got a premonition. I’ve always gotten those kinds of things where you kind of know the future. And I knew that in the future that I would one day be a spiritual leaderand whatever, I was just to told this. And I was told that one of the things that I would bring to the table that others had not was to demonstrate the possibility of being well-developed spiritually and intuitively and still be an everyday normal kind of person with a job and family and children and other interests. That you don’t have to go to a monastery to become, you know, spiritually adept, you don’t have to drop out a society, you don’t have to, you know, what leave your family and live alone in a cave someplace or, well, you know, become a hermit, all those things are not necessary. You can live a normal life doing a normal job living around normal people in a normal culture with all of the dysfunction and nastiness and everything else that’s in there. You can do that and do it successfully. You don’t have to say, well, see all the nastiness in this culture. I need to go someplace where it’s quiet and serene. I will have all that stuff because that distracts from my ability to be aware. It doesn’t, you just have to develop your intuitive side enough that you can do that in almost any setting. You can be that way all the time.

So that was one of my contributions, I suppose, to other people who are here who are well develop intuitively and whoever you want to call them adept to spirituality or adept to whatever.

One of the things I would do, one of my kind of missions was to show that you don’t have to give interaction in your culture and with other people up, not necessary. Now, that may make it easier in some ways, but it also makes it easier to become an actor.

You can’t get one without the other. You know, if it’s easier to become a depth, it’s also easier to become an actor and not do it. So, easy isn’t a point. So, I tell people when you learn to meditate, go sit down on a bench and a mall someplace, sit on a bench near a playground, you know, in a park where all the kids are running around and squealing and meditate. That will make your meditation robust.

And if your meditation’s robust, then you’ll be able to meditate anywhere at any time. You’ll be able to drop into that kind of a state and start healing somebody, even if you’re in the midst of a crowd going crazy, because somebody’s been shot or something else.

Your will mind, will always be yours to instruct and do as you wish, because you learn that discipline of not having to have peace and quiet, or dark or anything else. That will give you a real robust control over your mind. Well, that’s harder than meditating in a quiet serene place, but you learned to overcome that. And to me, that just makes you stronger.

Things that are harder just make you develop to be strong enough to deal with it. So I think that’s a good thing that we do that.

Interviewer

So you made this distinction between intellectual thoughts and more personal thoughts and that one should find a balance between those two, that is not only intellectual thoughts. And I do, I definitely spend a lot of time thinking also personal thoughts, like how are my relationships, what fears are driving me, things like that. But to me, that seems to still my intellect crunching things. I don’t feel like I’m in a particularly intuitive state when I process in that way.

Tom Campbell

You have to not only think about it, you have to feel it because the feeling tends to be an intuitive space.  It’s hard to think feelings. You just feel feelings in there more intuitive. You’re not only have to think, Well, I should work on my meditation skills or this or that, well that’s all intellectual. What is the same time? You need to then slip into that meditation state and feel how solid is it? How strong is it? How does it feel? That’s why I mean mix it up. You can do both that kind of intellectualizing about spiritual things, well that’s okay too. But you also have to do some of the more connected things where you really are in that state doing it and feeling it and a part of it. So that’s what I meant. Not that you should just think about, you know, spiritual things or not think about secular things. Things are things. You know, they’re all structures, rules, the way these things work. And you can think about all that stuff whether it’s secular or spiritual. When I say personal thoughts, time with yourself in a feeling mode, in a feeling space where you are consciousness, where you’re not really engaged in the physical world.