Ideas, Gravity and Spin

1 THE IDEAS IN OUR HEADS
One of the ideas behind basic principles was that they could be used to help understand any relationship, even those we have with another human being. As a result of that I find that I’m trying to understand my current relationship in the context of basic principles.

As an example, just recently my girlfriend and I had a fight and we didn’t talk for a few days. Then we kissed and made up. From my point of view, the issue had been one of trust and assumption. I’d left my cell phone at her house and when I went to pick it up she wouldn’t talk to me. I later found out it was because I still had pictures of my old girlfriend on it and she’d seen them. Oops.

I was a little put out in part because I don’t use my cell phone for looking at pictures. It’s a tool for talking with. I was upset that she thought that those pictures meant something to me when I actually forgot they were even there. And then she didn’t even explain why she was angry. I later assumed that she had looked at the pictures on my phone with jealous intentions. I thought she had been deliberately looking for dirt.
Later on when we did start talking she told me the only reason she looked was because she had wanted to see a photo that I’d taken of her. Oh! And then she’d seen the other pictures of me with someone else. She hadn’t been deliberately looking for dirt after all.

I thought that I’d been wronged, first because she’d looked through my phone, secondly because she believed those photos meant something. And I thought that the reason she had looked at my phone in the first place was because of jealousy. But then when we actually talked, I found out that my assumptions were all incorrect. I had an idea in my head, an idea that she was a jealous person. Instead of connecting to her I connected to the idea of her as a jealous person. Then when we did connect and talk I found out that she was something else instead.

In a relationship with another person there are different ways of connecting. One of those ways is through talking and listening. When we do that we find out the idea of who the person we are with actually is. When instead we assume something about a person then the idea we are connecting to is that assumption.
The thing about assumptions is that they pull actual relationships with another person apart, and instead we create another relationship with the idea that is in our heads.

Now in the future, if I’ve truly learned from this experience I will understand if I am making an assumption or not and I can recognize that by the fact that I don’t want to talk to my partner. And so that I can banish the assumption the thing I will have to do is the thing I don’t want to do and that is connect and talk and find out who she really is.

2 GRAVITY AND SPIN
When ideas connect they form a relationship. Two qualities that I attribute to ideas so that they can connect are gravity and spin. Although we normally associate gravity and spin with planets in this instance I’m going to use the metaphor of two people choosing to dance together.

Connecting to each other they pull each other inwards using their hands as a substitute for gravity, but as they dance and spin around each other they radiate outwards. We can think of the two people pulling each other inwards or we can think of the idea of the dance pulling those two people towards each other so that they can connect and radiate outwards, making the idea of dancing real.

In the case before the idea that pulled me towards itself was that of jealousy, me believing that my girlfriend was acting out of jealousy. As a result that is the idea that I danced with. But when we she and I connected, when we talked, I connected to the idea of whom she really is and so I danced with her instead and then we became a new idea, the idea of her and myself together.

I associate ideas with gravity but it’s a special kind of attraction because we can choose the ideas that pull us towards themselves. The more attention we give to an idea the greater its power to attract us. And so the more attention we pay to ideas we like the more likely those are the ideas that we will pull into our life and help make real.

So for myself what that means is that if I like the idea of being in a loving and caring relationship then that is the idea that I should focus on. As a result that will be the quality of the relationship I have with my girlfriend. If the idea I choose to focus on is that I have a jealous girlfriend and that I don’t like jealousy then that will become my reality.