## Metadata - Author: [[Eligio Stephen Gallegos, Edith Wallace, and Stephen Larsen]] - Full Title: Animals of the Four Windows - Category: #books ## Highlights - That which we have been calling mythology so far is actually an archeology of mythology. We have spent our time digging up the mythological bones of past cultures and have failed to recognize its living presence and essential nature in each of us. We view mythology as something that emerges out of the past, like an old belief system that was held by entire cultures. What we fail to see is that mythology is potentially alive in each of us, and that the true source of mythology is something intimately personal and fundamentally essential to the fulfillment of who we are individually. Mythology grows us back into our natural relationship with the universe, but only if we honor its unique emergence in our selves. ([Location 1126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1126)) - If some distant future culture, after having long lost the ability to read, were to discover a cache of books and began to revere the books and speculate about what they may have been about, without ever realizing that they them selves had the capacity to read, they would be in a situation analogous to where we presently stand with mythology. ([Location 1131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1131)) - The narrow dimension that we usually presume to be the foundation of our individual nature, namely, the sequence of motivated memories that we call our personal past, is in fact, the skeleton of our emotional crystallization. The individual memories are the places where our energy has become embedded in a limited number of experiences. As we work with the animals this energy is melted, the memories cease to have their particular emotional pull, and the energy is freed to return to the general energy reservoir available for being present with whatever situation arises NOW! By then, drawing an understanding of who one is from the events of one's personal past also melts into a general pool of imagery and one comes to understand much more fully that one is present now, and that the mythological dimension is a much more adequate description of the foundation of one's being than those overworked frozen memories of what once had been. ([Location 1135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1135)) - Whereas thinking and sensing are the scientist's primary modes of knowing, feeling and imagery are the primary modes by means of which the shaman knows. He recognizes imagery as foundational, preceding and transcending knowing through thinking and sensing, although definitely overlapping with those modes. He knows feeling as the energy of aliveness and as a means of perception. To enter the dimension in which he is effective, he shifts his attention to the windows of feeling and imagery. Interacting with another being, he can touch their deep imagery and energy in such a way that it begins to help them move toward greater wholeness, toward greater health. ([Location 1292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1292)) - Meditation developed as a technique for bringing thought to the place where it will release attention from its grasp and allow aware ness once again to flow freely. ([Location 1573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1573)) - Identity always embodies a constraint of the totality of who one is. An identity is always a limitation. An identity always involves exclusion, separating oneself off from one's continuity with the Universe. ([Location 1590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1590)) - The events of one's personal history melt into that much larger sea of the dynamics of one's deep imagery. The remembered events of one's past, are, after all, but small bits of imagery themselves. To hold them separate and structure an identity in terms of them is to divorce an energy that should be whole from its wholeness. Delving deeply into one's depths causes the boundaries of the identity that is sustained by the events of one's personal history to melt back into that sea of the deeper dynamics of one's Being. ([Location 1604](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1604)) - As a culture we are just now emerging from the emotional dark ages. We are emerging from a time when feelings were to be performed (or suppressed) by rote, without individual attention, style, uniqueness, without the freedom to explore that dimension, that window, as a way of knowing the universe. And the same is true for imagery. The imagery that was allowed has been a standard imagery, an imagery having to do with the origins of one's nation or one's family, and with one's relationship to the universe, to God. Not a freedom to explore one's own imagery, as it presents itself, as one discovers it to be, uniquely individual, but an imagery that was standardized and approved, an imagery that was dictated and dominated by thinking and control. ([Location 1614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1614)) - Let us hope that the opening of the windows of imagery and feeling will be as fruitful and as freeing of our natural humanness as opening the window of thinking was for our natural creativity and invention. In fact it will probably be more so, because it will also entail our corning into balance, where our four windows will all be open, and so our center will be true, and we, for the first time as a living organism, will enter into our true fullness and aliveness. ([Location 1620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1620)) - the problem is not with the thinking, the problem is that we are unaware of the thinking, and we think that our thoughts are true. They are not; they are only thoughts. ([Location 1646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1646)) - Crushing a child's spirit begins early and with the best of intentions. Furthermore, it begins in a place where the parents are already fully unaware: with control by speech. Who has not seen a young child bombarded by commands from parents to perform some sound, some gesture, some behavior, for the admiring others or as a convenience to the parent? "Smile for grandma." "Say goo goo." 'Wave bye bye." "Close your eyes and go to sleep now." "Eat your food." "Go potty like a good little boy." "Stop crying." Absolutely no concern is given to the child's experience, whether the child is predisposed to do such a thing, or even whether it is in the child's best interests. ([Location 1651](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1651)) - My wife and I have never required that our daughter eat what she is not disposed to eat, so there are times when she eats very little at a meal. But we have noticed that there are times that she absolutely devours whatever is put before her, and that these periods of devouring come in cycles. Furthermore, each period of devouring precedes a period of sudden growth. Something within the child anticipates when a period of growth is going to occur and ensures that she consumes the appropriate food and takes in the energy that will be needed for that growth. I often think that if we were the kind of parents that demanded she eat whatever was put on her plate, and if she in fact did this, that it would override that subtle mechanism that actually knows what she needs, and this fine tuning of her appetite in relation to the needs of her body would be demolished. She would then be eating for some other reason: to avoid our wrath, to not feel rejected, to appear as a good little girl, acceptable and lovable, and so forth. ([Location 1655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1655)) - Once I have abandoned the awareness of my own bodily state, what we could call my inner feelings, and attend instead to the words of someone else, I have given away responsibility for myself to the other. This is the beginning of war! War can only happen when people follow the demands of another, to invade, to kill, to overrun, rather than listening to their own deep feelings and inner voice. An army can never happen until we have made this breech. ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1674)) - Balance knows itself and is always available potentially as something to come back into, just as health knows itself and there is a recognition when we are not healthy, however subtle. Awareness of the imbalance is itself the be ginning of a return to balance. ([Location 1694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1694)) - So, my orientation is not one of beliefs or holding to them, but it is that certain beliefs can possibly interfere with our experience. The important thing is the experience itself. It is this experience that the animals are capable of leading us back to. Coming into the experience that is the energy of our most profound core of aliveness is what is important. So, I am not putting forth a theory. I am inviting people to explore for themselves and see what the results are for themselves. ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1733)) - The ultimate understanding is that I am the energy myself. And all that I have been put through has shaped and sometimes deformed that energy. Can we allow ourselves to come back to that original energy and let go of those shapes into which we have been molded, the shapes that in fact keep us from being in contact with that energy? We mistake ourselves for the imposed shape when in fact it is the problem. It is what keeps us stuck to the surface. I am the problem to the extent that I believe myself to be in control of this energy core. The only control we could have over it would be to diminish and restrain ourselves in relation to it. In doing that the ego comes into existence. Any belief system is a rigidification of orientation. And any belief being more important than experience is a detraction from the experience of this profound energy core. My task is to align my aliveness with the aliveness of the Universe. ([Location 1736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1736)) - True maturity evolves from the encounter with the totality of who we are and losing the battle, allowing who we have been to melt into the experience of the totality of who we truly are. ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B089FSBBG4&location=1748))