"It doesn't matter".  This morning I spotted this attitude, this mechanism that I have often employed to distance myself from those parts of life I could not comfortably experience.  What that attitude does is create a flatland in which everything has the same value, the same interest, for none of which you need take any responsibility.  It can perhaps be "justified" in terms of non-attachment, but this is a misreading of non-attachment.  The type of thing non-attachment guards against is compulsive cravings, compulsive avoidances.  The "it doesn't matter" attitude is actually a covert case of compulsive avoidance: it flattens out a whole area and covers it in a gray fog of indifference. Until eventually you sit, bloated with resentment, staring dully at your tv life.  Seeing this attitude for what it is, permeating that gray fog, allows dynamic interest to return to life.  Things come alive.  All things matter, and yet you are free to choose to invest your energies and attention into some and not into others, and thus live dynamically as a particular viewpoint upon the universe.

I was asked about "weak links" in that spiritual network I'm envisioning, and what would be a skilfull approach to dealing with such links.

What is it that would make someone be a "weak link" in a spiritual in a network of spriitual beings?  Of course, they might just not want to be in that set of relationships, playing that game.. But assuming they do want to be there.. then what makes someone a "weak link"?  Basically they are not functioning optimaly in the role they occupy in that game, in that network. Usually this manifests itself as a low level of contribution, a low mood level, and low self-esteem.
And what are the fundamental reasons for that? 
They may not yet have fully developed the knowledge and skills needed in that role. 
They may also be holding themselves back in various conscious and subconscious ways. 
The first is a matter of effective education, internships, etc.
The second is more complex, but a lot of that complexity can be undercut once the person arrives at being fully present here and now in the role they occupy in this particular relationship. 
And the one thing that accelerates such presence immensely is the person finding and recognizing my main dream in life, my own sense of what it is that I really want in this life.

So I don't see it so much as a matter of "alleviating the weak" or" rallying around them", rather, on a personal level it's friends helping friends see who they really are, what their prime dreams are, and what is the next obvious step to take in realizing those dreams.
And on a social/cultural level, an understanding of who we are and how we manifest life, and institutions which support that understanding and support our attempts to manifest our dreams.

 

Death is the ceasing to actively be here and create the present.  It is just the other side of creation, its natural inverse.  In the acute case, when we suddenly cease to create, or find our creation destroyed, we experience the phenomenon of a "collapsed universe" and the resulting mass. 

But we can also just gradually reduce our knowing creation, and begin to experience the feelings of dread and death. This feeling of dread is the experience of resisting the end of that game.  There is also the elegant letting go of creation which results in a graceful death and does not produce dread. Every exhalation is an end of a cycle.  It is when we resist it, thinking we are drowning, that the feeling of dread comes.  The normal exhalation is a graceful emptying, allowing the next inhalation to manifest. 

This can apply to a body, a job, a relationship... any kind of a game.

It's definitely not an "all or nothing" type of an affair: Rather many games are part of the whole drama of manifestation, and they each go through the cycles of creation and cessation of creation.  It is easy to have the feeling of cessation, of death, in one area spread to color other games: Thus the death of a relationship may feel like the death of everything.  But in fact, only the one game has ended, though our fixation on that ending may lead us to cease creating other games also.

 

When you look at, it is obvious that all fear is fear of the future.  Fear is basically one of several possible reactions to a present mockup of a state that we project into the future. Which is to say it's a reaction to a mockup to which we have attached a "future" label. 

It's not possible to fear something in the past. We can be proud of something in the past, or regret it, but can't really fear it. (If there is fear in contemplating a mockup labeled as "past", it's usually because we fear it happening again in the future.)

Nor is it possible to fear something present:  We can take pleasure in something present, experience it as painful, interesting, whatever.   But we can't really fear it.  (If there is fear of something present it's usually because we are mocking up possible futures evolving out of the present situation and fearing those.)

Now it becomes very interesting to take a feared mockup, and simply change the time label on it:  Mock it up as something in the past.  Mock it up as happening right now.   As I do this with some of the things I fear most, the fear seems to dissolve.  The whole subject of fear begins to look silly. 

Chronic fears seem to be mockups stuck on the future time track.  That is to say, they are mocked up situations with a "permanently" attached "future" label.  In most cases that label never goes away, since most of these feared situations never materialize, thus never move into the present.  Switching labels seems to unstick them.

But while they exist, these chronic fears are one of the things that keep us in our box:  All movement towards outside of the box is a movement into a possible future.  And if we fear these futures, the movement is aborted.  (The other thing that keeps us in the box is, of course, not seeing that a particular future is even possible: it's a piece of tacit, but wrong, "knowledge").  Thus if I know the world is flat, I'll never even intend  to circumnavigate it.  And I won't go too far from the shore, because I've mocked up the scenario, with a "future" label on it, of my dropping off the edge.

It's not that we still don't have to consider possible future scenarios.  But all we can do with one if it arrives in the present is to deal with it more or less skillfully.  So an appropriate approach to the future is to develop those skills which would allow us to skillfully deal with situations whose expected value (their value times the probability of the situations coming to pass) is high

One of my main interests is in the things which keep us in our boxes and effective methods for allowing us to break out of our boxes, and live a more authentic, larger life.