Q: John, some people seem to be affected less by horrific situations or physical trauma than others. Why is that? They write a book about their experience, for example, and it seems they are already completely over it. For me, it seems that much smaller things affect me more. Is that a personality difference?
John: The more spin someone is in, in a circumstance like that, the more damaging the circumstance. If there’s no spin, it affects whatever it affects and the deeper level of the person is fine.
Q: I feel perhaps they didn’t experience it on that level, and that’s why they have this ability to be like that. Is that so?
John: If that person were to engage an emotional spin in their circumstances, their experience would have been really different.
Q: So they did something that was good and right?
John: Yes.
Q: Does it also have something to do with sensitivity? This person just wasn’t so sensitive?
John: No.
Q: So an emotional spin can have something to do with a judgement about what’s happening?
John: Yes.
Q: Is it also an emotional spin if you say that it is not right that this is happening? A judgement seems more like something from the mind but it’s emotional also.
John: It’s the emotional aspect of it that does the damage. If it’s just simply clear in your thinking, ‘this isn’t right,’ it’s not a spin. That’s just you realizing this is not good, it’s not right.
Q: What about taking it to heart? Is that an emotional spin?
John: Yes.
Q: But then you might not experience it.
John: You may not realize that you’re throwing a spin.
Q: So an emotional spin isn’t just where you go over something again and again?
John: An emotional spin is emotionally fed by a need to go over and over. That’s a spin.
Q: But even if you don’t do that and you just take it to heart is that also an emotional spin?
John: You can’t take something to heart without emotion. When you take something to heart, your emotion is engaged and your will is engaged. A judgement is not a thought. When you see someone and you have a thought that they are such and such and there’s no emotional input to that thought, then that thought is not a judgement. What turns a thought into a judgement is the emotion behind it.
Q: So how would you classify a thought that has no judgement in it?
John: Just a presentation of a thought, which could come from inside or outside of you. If there’s no emotional input to that thought then it’s just a thought. The thought itself is fine; it gives you a possibility to move in a direction or just look at something and realize, ‘no that’s not it.’
Q: There’s a real difference, then, between having thoughts and just having thoughts passing through.
John: You can generate thought, and the place from which you generate determines whether such thinking gives spin, or whether it’s just clean thinking.
