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Interested in conversations about the nature of reality, multidimensionality, truth, being, religion, spirituality, life, love, consciousness, and language?
Wondering how to thrive in an uncertain and rapidly changing world?
Do you want to learn about things you've never experienced or heard of?
If so, we might just be for you!
Wendy Frase 0:00
Welcome to Wake-Up Call for the Soul with Bill and Wendy. Hello, Bill.
Bill Frase 0:06
Hey, Wendy.
Wendy Frase 0:06
Well, today we are talking about way of being, and this is very exciting for me, because I really do feel this has helped me immensely in my life, especially work life over the years, and I was first introduced to it years ago with the books by the Arbinger Institute, Anatomy of Peace and Leadership and Self-Deception. And you brought those books to me. It's been a while, but so I am excited about speaking with you today more about this way of being. But for those who have not heard that term, maybe let's get into some basics first.
Bill Frase 0:55
I want to start with this. This is probably going to be a multi-part series here, and because of the subtlety and complexity of what we're working with, I want to talk about way of being. And way of being is an expression of our anatomy of being, like we talked about in the last episode. And so I thought, well, we talked about anatomy of being. And so now way of being is kind of these major categories of how our anatomy of being operates or exists in the world on a moment by moment basis. So I'm I've attempted to define way of being, which is very difficult for these subtle things, but that's what we do on this podcast. So here's what I have. I have a couple of different approaches, and again, most of these things, we're going to have multiple definitions, and hopefully we'll get into some examples of what we mean by these things. So I've got a couple of definitions for way of being here.
Bill Frase 1:48
Way of being is how we are perceiving and responding or reacting to what we are perceiving on a moment by moment basis. Another definition I put in here again? These are kind of looking at the same thing from different angles or perspectives. Way of being is how we are approaching ourselves, everyone and everything in existence on a moment by moment basis. And another word that occurred to me as I was contemplating this is that I have the word approaching in that but it could be way of being is how we are orienting ourselves toward our own selves, everyone and everything in existence on a moment by moment basis.
Wendy Frase 2:30
Yeah, I like both of these or three definitions as you've brought forward. I think that they all go together. It depends on what words you resonate with more but how we approach ourselves and everyone around us. And yes, we're always having interactions every day with people and moment by moment, on a moment by moment basis, right. We can be one way and we can pivot another way very quickly,
Bill Frase 3:04
Right. And so in this episode, we're really going to just address this way of being issue from this kind of 30,000 foot level, hopefully getting some details of people have more of a sense of what we're talking about. Because way of being is what is underneath behavior. It's underneath the doing. It's more of the how, of what we're doing, or what we're being in any given moment. So it's very subtle. Most people talk in terms of behavior, but way of being is more fundamental than that. One way to describe it is you can do the exact same behavior from two different ways of being and the experience of those behaviors will be completely different for yourself and for others.
Wendy Frase 3:47
And it's not just behaviors, but I think even the way we form a sentence, we can say something verbally, and there can be two different way of beings behind it.
Bill Frase 3:59
Words, as words, expressed through speech, is a form of action, and so speaking is a form of behavior.
Wendy Frase 4:07
Okay.
Bill Frase 4:08
Movements of our body is behavior, anything that we express our bodies, non-verbally, paralinguistically, these are all behaviors.
Wendy Frase 4:17
Okay, okay.
Bill Frase 4:18
All right, so. And one of the interesting things is so often in life, we have these polarities, these binary categories, and way of being has two basic modes of expression, and the one that we're all born with, the one that we come in with when we are incarnated into our mother's wombs. So for the purposes of this episode, we will call this primary, or naturally inherited way of being responsiveness. This is what we come into the world with. This is that way of being that is a reflection of all of our parts and aspects working in harmony with each other and us with everything in a more unified kind of perspective.
Wendy Frase 5:04
And I like that term responsiveness, because it indicates how we express ourselves in any given situation, how we're responding.
Bill Frase 5:19
Right? Yeah, no, I really love that word too, for...
Wendy Frase 5:24
I don't know if I've heard of it before reading this book, responsiveness. You have a definition here of responsiveness?
Bill Frase 5:31
Well, I actually have several. Yeah. So again, this is our baseline way of being. It's what we come in with as incarnated souls. And because it's subtle, like I said before, I'm going to have a few different definitions to kind of approach it from different ways, different points of view, in light of the conversations we've already had in this podcast, that will hopefully help give people a sense of, oh, from this point of view, it looks like this. Oh, from over here, it looks kind of like this. Okay. From here, it's this. So in terms of the prioritization of our perceptions, responsiveness is the tendency to perceive things more or less as they are according to the relative development of our perceptual faculties and express love or respond with love, as perceptual faculties expand possibilities for the expression of love expand correspondingly. This is probably the more complex of them, because, again, way of being is subtle. Perceptions are subtle. And so I have to put in all these words to kind of get at that with this particular definition.
Wendy Frase 6:38
Okay, so just listeners hang tight. That's the biggie, complicated definition. We'll talk more about this here.
Bill Frase 6:45
All right, but in terms of our relationship to reality, it's really simple. The definition of responsiveness is, responsiveness is living in reality.
Wendy Frase 6:58
And we've already talked about the real world. So living in reality does not mean our fabricated world, which people think about as the real world. When you're saying responsiveness is living in reality, that's probably different from what some people hear when you say that.
Bill Frase 7:17
Yeah, it's in the context of this podcast and reality, as has been defined previously, is simply what is, not what people think exists, not what people have made up. It's what actually exists that has an existence independent of human thinking about those things.
Wendy Frase 7:39
interesting. So,
Bill Frase 7:42
Yeah. So these...
Wendy Frase 7:42
When you say responsiveness is living in reality, responsiveness is our natural way of being. It's the way we are designed to be.
Bill Frase 7:53
Right. Yeah, we are created to be responsive creatures that we are to experience what happens and to respond to it. And responsiveness in this context is always going to come from a place of what we would call love or curiosity, openness, receptiveness. This is responsiveness as it is intended to be expressed by human beings on this world and on all worlds.
Wendy Frase 8:25
And I like that, because everyone, even today, in the real world, we have ups and downs, we have lows and highs. But the issue comes when you're upset, my way of being matters, because if I respond in a loving, caring, listening way, that's going to change the whole dynamic. So...
Bill Frase 8:53
At least from your point of view...
Wendy Frase 8:55
Right, We're called to be living in a responsive way. We are human beings. We're going to have challenges. But the opposite of responsiveness, you're going to talk about next is resistance.
Bill Frase 9:10
Yeah. And I like the fact that they both start with "R,"
Wendy Frase 9:14
Yes. Responsiveness and resistance,
Bill Frase 9:18
Yeah. And so resistance, and I'm going to have several definitions, and you'll get a sense from these definitions that if you thought that first definition of responsiveness was complicated, you get a sense of how complicated resistance is just in this episode, and then in the next episode, we're really going to dig into that complexity a whole other level of specificity.
Wendy Frase 9:42
Ykay.
Bill Frase 9:42
But yeah, and this resistance, I'll just put this in before a definition. This is the way of being that we have taken on, that we have adopted, accepted for ourselves and for others as required for surviving in the harshness of the fabricated world of human invention. So again, just like so many other things, resistance is a human fabrication. We made this thing up, and we think it's real when it's a temporary construct that will eventually go away, but right now, it's dominating our individual lives and our planetary existence as a species, so that's why we're talking about it. And I guess another way to put it too, is resistance is a defining characteristic of the fabricated world of human invention. It runs through it like a dysfunctional electric current.
Wendy Frase 10:38
And even myself, I'm very aware of it, and I'm aware of it in my own life too many times, not always, but the more you recognize this, the more you become aware of it, and hopefully then you can switch to more of a responsiveness living.
Bill Frase 10:58
Yeah, and that's anticipating us probably a few episodes in the future where we'll talk about, how do we actually get out of resistance? If that's our choice.
Wendy Frase 11:09
I see.
Bill Frase 11:10
All right, so here's my first definition of resistance, the first of, I think three or four.
Wendy Frase 11:14
Okay,
Bill Frase 11:15
Resistance is the tendency to perceive things in systematically distorted ways that generate expressions opposed to love. The greater the distortions, the stronger the opposition to expressing love. Or we can think of resistance in terms of the fabricated world of human invention. Resistance is living in the fabricated world, the world invented by people from a standpoint of separation. So resistance is just, that's how we are in the fabricated world. When we're in the fabricated world, we're in resistance.
Wendy Frase 11:45
Right.
Bill Frase 11:46
So then this next definition of resistance is really looking at it in terms of our anatomy of being. And so this definition is going to get, I think, all of us, a sense of the complexity of what we're talking about here. Resistance reflects a relative disharmony between the aspects of being, in particular, the material mind and the soul mind, as we've talked about in previous episodes. In resistance, the soul mind, through its more expansive perceptions, perceives potentially loving responses, but the material mind's limited identity is threatened by these loving responses, and the material mind pushes for limited choices that reinforce a more limited identity than the more expansive beingness the soul desires to express. This generates an internal conflict that is resolved through a systematic distortion of the material mind's perceptions to justify or make the choice that's out of harmony with the soul's desire to make sense to the material mind in some way. In resistance, one's view of oneself, of others and of the world, and even our emotions become systematically distorted to help one feel convinced that the choice made was the best possible one under the circumstances.
Wendy Frase 13:10
Bill, Wow. Very impressive, however, very confusing if you're not understanding what you're talking about. So I gather from that, resistance reflects a relative disharmony. That's what you said at the beginning. And so then there is some sort of internal conflict to make sense. So I like also what you said distorted, because when we're resisting someone, what I see is we're not seeing people's humanity. Because if, people don't make us mad, we internally become mad because we're resisting what's going on with them. That's how I kind of see a simple example here. Resistance is seeing people as objects. "Ooh, they're making me mad. They're doing this. They're causing my life difficulty. I have to deal with them." I even see it in customer service. People come at me. I've worked a lot in customer service. Some people are getting angry. That doesn't mean really, they're angry at me. They're upset at the situation. And instead of thinking about, "Oh, I have to deal with this person." No, I'm there to serve, I'm there to help, I'm there to listen. That's what I think of when I think of this resistance, because this disharmony is causing something inside of me to view them differently when they're just a human being stuck in the moment, upset. So that's my simple way when I'm when I'm starting to think about this. But I like your big words systematically distorted, disharmony, pushing people away, internal conflict. Great definition here, just hard to absorb in one listen.
Bill Frase 15:13
It's a lot. And so you hear that definition, and then I have a definition of responsiveness, in terms of our way of being.
Wendy Frase 15:21
Okay.
Bill Frase 15:22
I think you, me and our listeners will appreciate this one much more than that last definition I gave. Again, this is responsiveness viewed through the lens of our anatomy of being, which is what we talked about in our previous episode. Responsiveness reflects a relative harmony between the different aspects of being, where the different parts are largely in agreement. This allows love to flow freely, as one is seeing things without significant distortion.
Wendy Frase 15:49
Yes, and that is hard to do, and especially in certain situations. If someone I'm going to take the customer service again. If someone's yelling at you, it's hard not to resist them, to back away, to get angry back, to get your temper going. It's hard to do that, but even I think for myself, understanding the responsiveness shows a lot more love, calms the situation, often, not every time, and it's just, it's just a better way to live. Really, overall.
Bill Frase 16:32
The challenge is, in the harshness of the conditions on this planet, we have all been traumatized, and so when someone yells at us, most people in a lot of circumstances are going to be triggered by that.
Wendy Frase 16:43
Yeah.
Bill Frase 16:43
They are literally going to be triggered into a somewhat familiar trauma response. And what that does is is we're not really centered in our hearts or our souls. We shift more into our midbrain, kind of the amygdala, where we are then seeing this person or this situation as a threat to our being, to our identity, maybe even to our existence. And so in that moment, we become much more concerned about ourselves than the other person, because a responsive way of being, when someone starts yelling at you in a responsive way of being, there's lots of ways you can approach that, but the primary one that you're going to engage in is curiosity. Will be saying, "Why are you so upset? What's wrong?" And sometimes that can cause someone to have a V8 moment, or whatever kind of wake up and be like, "Oh, well, I'm upset about this." "Oh, okay,
Wendy Frase 17:48
Let's see if I can help you."
Bill Frase 17:50
Yeah, resistance always, in its own way, it takes things personally. It takes what is outside of me. And I am much more concerned about what is going on outside of me than what is going on within me. Responsiveness is much more concerned about what is my impact on those around me, the world, the planet, other human beings. "What what is my impact on them?" is more of the question, as opposed to, "how are they impacting me?"
Wendy Frase 17:50
And that's why you have your simple definition of responsiveness, living in reality. So I like what you said, the curiosity, "Oh, what's going on here?" And I have found and learned from you that when I have negative emotions inside of me, because a lot of times we can have that even judgment. We see a situation. We see someone walking down the street, maybe they're cutting through our lawn, and we're ooh, get a little bit angry. But the curiosity is, "Why am I responding that way. Why am I taking it personally? Why? What is going on inside me?" And that's a more responsive, as you said, the curiosity, not just about why they're doing that, but why I'm feeling these feelings for things that maybe they're just doing something simple, but we get a little bit resistant.
Bill Frase 19:22
Yeah, again, we're taking things personally that have nothing to do with us,
Wendy Frase 19:27
Right? That's not what...
Bill Frase 19:30
They're doing. They're being the way they're being. And responsiveness is going to be curious. Responsiveness is going to tend to ask questions. Now you can ask questions resistantly, but there are these other questions that are more like, "Oh, why are you doing that? Or what is going on with you?"
Wendy Frase 19:49
And in fact, I think we might have had an example this morning when I was making you pancakes and you were cutting with a fork on your plate, and I was just became finally curious, because all these years, you scrape that plate so hard with your fork cutting those pancakes. And I think hopefully I responded responsively just asking you, "Why do you, why do you do that?" And you realized it stemmed from your childhood.
Bill Frase 20:21
Yeah, that's how I was taught to cut french toast, and I applied it to pancakes indiscriminately.
Wendy Frase 20:29
Because your dad, you said, did not let you use a knife, so you had to, like, really scrape the plate with your fork.
Bill Frase 20:37
Yep, that's my recollection.
Wendy Frase 20:39
So I don't know if that's even an example, but I think all these years, I don't know if I was upset by that, but I was just curious as to why you cut pancakes with such force. It's like you're angry at the pancake, but you're really not. That's how you learn to cut. So I learned something new about you today, Bill, after all these years.
Bill Frase 21:04
Right. And that that is a more responsive way to go. Because if you were resistant, you'd be like, "Why the hell are you cutting your pancakes that way? That's scraping is driving me crazy," Right. "Stop doing that now!" That would be resistance, but even subtler forms of "Bill, you know, you're messing up the plates when you do that, right?" right, or whatever. I mean, there's so many different these guilting responses, the controlling there's so many ways you could kind of come out, but because you're responsive, you actually learned something about my childhood, right? And I how I learned to cut...
Wendy Frase 21:43
Yes, and I had a good laugh.
Bill Frase 21:47
And I am going to endeavor to cut my pancakes with my fork more gently, because they don't require the same force as crusty bread that is used for French toast.
Wendy Frase 22:00
And you did look at those plates, and you're like, yeah, "These are really scraped up, aren't they?" Because those are the plates I use for pancakes, because I know you scrape them up big time. All right, sorry, listeners, but that's an example. It just hit me this morning.
Bill Frase 22:15
That is an example.
Wendy Frase 22:17
Responsiveness versus resistance,
Bill Frase 22:20
Right. And then and see what, and we're going to get into this in future episodes, but you're kind of preempting that a little bit here, in a good way, I think, that we think in the conditions on this planet, that resistance is the only way to get stuff done. It's the only way to make progress. Again, going back to our ideas about religion and sacrifice. Resistance always...
Wendy Frase 22:44
Or it's the only way to protect ourselves from getting hurt.
Bill Frase 22:47
Yeah, right. We think that resistance, right? It's our only way to stay safe, to protect our identity, to make progress. Whatever these things are, and it's it's all a lie, because what resistance does is it just causes the situations and circumstances to persist, but because you approached my pancake cutting with my fork in the way that you did, because there's more love in that, more curiosity, it gets me to be like, Oh, because I don't know if listeners get it yet, but Bill does not want to run automatic programs. So since Bill doesn't want to just run programs that I took on as a child, I said, "Oh, I want to be different." And so responsiveness is the invitation for change. Love is always an invitation for change. Lots of people don't believe that's true, but it is the most effective invitation for change. Resistance almost always triggers other people just to resist more. They just run their programs, and so we just keep running around in loops, blaming each other all the while we're the ones making things worse, while we tell ourselves we're making it better, which we'll get much more into in our next episode on the dynamics of resistance.
Wendy Frase 24:05
Yeah, and once you understand this concept, it's, I think it's so easy to even notice things, because I know when I worked in an office and I worked with and for someone else, there were sometimes challenges, and I could sense that I was upset with this person because they weren't getting me what I needed to do my job. So I would get annoyed. Yes, I don't have what I what I need to get my deadlines or to serve other people well. And oftentimes, this person would come in and then they'd ignore me because they can sense that I'm upset. You know, it's a back and forth, and sometimes when that happens, I was in a good frame to realize, "Oh, this isn't helping." And I became more friendly with this person, and then it was, everything got better. So just even simple like, "Hey, how are you doing today?" instead of hiding in my little cubicle, avoiding people. So there's so many examples that I see out there. Now, I know that there are some people in very challenging situation. They're being physically harmed, and that's a different situation. I don't think I can even address something like that, but I can look at myself with these little situations. How am I being resistant to people" And getting curious. And how can I make a different, responsive choice?
Bill Frase 25:38
Hopefully at least somewhat from our conversation from this episode, one of the key takeaways for me in this conversation is that responsiveness is simple. In responsiveness, I am doing my best just to perceive what is going on and then to respond to it, in love, in curiosity, in openness. In resistance, things get very complicated, because now I have a sense within me which we'll get more into in the next episode of maybe what is the right thing to do. But then other parts of me, particularly my material mind, are like, "Oh no, no, no, no. We're not going to do that. That's not safe. We're going to go in this direction which we've done before and has quote, unquote, worked for us, or at least we can fairly well predict the outcome." And our material minds love to predict the future. They love to feel like they know what's going to happen. So even if the material mind anticipates that something is going to be unpleasant, it feels like it can at least gauge that unpleasantness to a degree where it says, "You know what, that's an acceptable level of unpleasantness," as opposed to a completely unknown level of everything from complete unpleasantness to complete awesomeness. It would rather have familiar unpleasantness than an unknown, potential, infinite upside benefit.
Wendy Frase 27:01
Okay, I don't know if I quite understood that, Bill, but so I don't even know how to ask a question there.
Bill Frase 27:09
The material mind loves familiarity. It loves to have a sense that it knows what's going to happen. So this is way more desired by the material mind than doing something it's not familiar doing.
Wendy Frase 27:25
And is that asking a question like, "Well, I'm curious why you're feeling this way?'
Bill Frase 27:30
Yeah, because if it's used to running the program of criticizing people when they do things it doesn't like, and seeing that, I kind of know what I'm going to get when I criticize someone. Yeah, that's actually, it would prefer the unpleasant response to the criticism than if it's not as familiar with being curious and asking questions. Yeah, it would much prefer the more resistant option in that case, which, when you think about it, at least with some detachment, it seems completely insane, which it is. But again, the material mind loves familiarity, wants predictability, and it's going to tend to go in those directions, even if those are not the best or highest ways to go.
Wendy Frase 28:10
So, it's almost like too in this reality, what really is, we're each living in our own individual boxes, and we think we know what is best. So that's kind of the resistant too, because I'm better than, I know what's best. The way I do things is the correct way. You have to do this for me. That's the resistance. So we're actually putting ourselves in a box. We're not seeing reality, or at least, I like what you said in the beginning, openness, openness to be responsive to other people.
Bill Frase 28:51
I mean another key factor which has been embedded in the definitions here with resistance is that resistance systematically distorts things. And this is how it relates to are we living in a simulation.
Wendy Frase 29:02
So our mind is distorted, so when we are resisting, we're not even realizing what's really going on.
Bill Frase 29:07
No, we don't have a clue as to what's really going on. All we have is what we think is happening.
Wendy Frase 29:11
Yes,
Bill Frase 29:12
Which is very different from what's actually happening.
Wendy Frase 29:15
Right. Because even going back to the plate in the pancake. I had no idea that you were told as a youngster that you had to cut your french toast like this, and then that all made sense to me, why you were doing what you were doing,
Bill Frase 29:30
Why I'm attacking our pancakes and our plates. God, help us all.
Wendy Frase 29:35
Well, it's and that's why, I guess the curiosity is the most important thing, because we really don't know how other human beings are coming from in there, how they grew up, how they approach, you know, their life circumstances, their environment, what is really going on at a deeper level? And so that's why, once again, it all comes back to love, being loving. We're all human beings.
Bill Frase 30:00
Yeah, and the opposite of love, pretty much, is judgment.
Wendy Frase 30:04
And some people are naturally responsive to people, even though they don't even realize that they're doing it. We can see those people all the time in the world. I often interact with them, and you do see that bright light energy curiosity coming from people. It's so refreshing. So this is all about way of being, responsiveness versus resistance.
Bill Frase 30:26
Right. And obviously our interest in going through these episodes is an invitation for us to become more aware of our resistance and of responsiveness, and then to learn more about well, how can we grow in our capacity to choose responsiveness more and more over what might have been more typical reactions in resistance? Because that's that's one of the distinctions too, is that in responsiveness, I am responding. It's part of the word in resistance. I'm resisting. I'm reacting. I'm just doing a thing because I've done it before and it's familiar. It's like running a program over and over again. And again, the material mind, in its current condition of separation from love, it really likes to be able to predict things, and the best way to predict an outcome is usually to just run a program, to just say, this is the program I'm going to run. I'm not saying we're consciously aware that we're doing it, but our material minds are very invested in creating a particular level of consistency in our experiences, and it associates that consistency, that familiarity with safety, with security, familiarity, reduced risk, higher possibility of survival in the harshness of the conditions on this planet.
Wendy Frase 31:43
And the conditions are harsh, because I do, even though I'm aware of this idea of way of being, I have been aware, as you said, Now, I guess 15 years with responsiveness and resistance, and still there are lots of times I am resistant every day, in even subtle ways that maybe don't even affect other people, but just in my mind and my way of being with myself and the world. Yeah, I have a lot to work on too.
Bill Frase 32:17
Yeah, same here. I mean, that's the thing. It's it's a very human thing to do in the conditions on this planet. But if we don't become aware of it and of alternative possibilities, then it's hard for me to imagine, how are we going to change? How are we going to move from this world, such as it is, into one that's much more pleasant, enjoyable, beautiful, loving, true, kind, peaceful, on and on?
Wendy Frase 32:47
So in our next episode, you plan to give us some more tools in our toolbox here to help move from responsiveness to resistance?
Bill Frase 32:58
So, in the next episode, the focus is really going to be digging in much more into the dynamics of resistance, because resistance is very complicated. It is part of the simulated reality that we're creating,
Wendy Frase 33:11
The matrix.
Bill Frase 33:12
Right at this personal level, it is part of the illusion. And so we're going to talk about the matrix in terms of its actual gear works, how it works within us in a psychosocial way, so that then, because, if we don't have that awareness of of how it works, because a key aspect of resistance is self-deception, we actually lie to ourselves, thinking that we're telling ourselves the truth. This is kind of at the core of the illusion of the fabricated world of human invention. So the next episode is going to be digging in to the minutia of the fabricated world of human invention as an attempt to increase our awareness of these things, so that then, once we have that awareness, then in the episode, after the next one will probably move more into problem solving, like here's how we get out of this resistance, here's how we wake up to reality, here's how we respond, how we become more curious, how we become agents of positive change in the world, instead of just perpetuating these infinite cycles of resistance, violence and awfulness.
Wendy Frase 34:26
Sounds good.
Bill Frase 34:28
Here's hoping.
Wendy Frase 34:31
Well, it was great talking to you today, Bill.
Bill Frase 34:34
Yeah, it was good talking to you too, and we're really going to dig into it next time. So yeah, thanks, Wendy, this was this was wonderful, and I look forward to our next conversation.
Wendy Frase 34:44
Until next time.
Bill Frase 34:45
Until next time. Thank you so much for listening to Wake-Up Call for the Soul with Bill and Wendy. We hope you'll join us next time.