10) COMMITMENT CREATES THE SPACE
FOR KEEPING YOUR WORD TO
HAPPEN
What happened:
Undermined by fear, the force of my intention to jump out of the door
had waned considerably. Nonetheless, in the instant it dawned on me that
I was already committed to BREAKTHROUGH SKYDIVING, I jumped.
Abstract:
Commitment is that quality which, by virtue of its presence alone,
creates the space in which keeping your word can happen.
Observation:
Even when I was as close to actually skydiving as wearing two parachutes
and sitting in the doorway of a Piper Cherokee 6 airplane over two
thousand feet up in the sky, I was startled (and wryly amused) to notice
that had there been a way of avoiding skydiving, I might have taken it.
My intention began to fade, and with it my original hypothesis (that
conscious intention is that quality which, by virtue of
its presence alone, creates the space in which keeping your word can
happen) began to fade too. When my conscious intention to skydive had
faded away to the point where it was virtually nil, I gradually became
aware of another quality which had been there all along, ever since the
beginning in fact. I had not noticed it before because although my
intention had been directed towards it, I had not had my
attention on it. Then it dawned on me that I was already
committed to BREAKTHROUGH SKYDIVING, and in the instant I got that, I
dived out of the airplane.
Conclusions:
Commitment is not an act of will but rather a condition which exists by
virtue of you considering it to be. The
stand called commitment comes from a completely different source than
intention. While a physical situation encountered intentionally,
on purpose, may yet instill intense distrust, there is a
natural, absolutely unshakeable trust in the source from whence
commitment springs. No intention is ever totally materialized without
commitment. Commitment, by virtue of its presence alone, is that quality
which will determine whether you will keep your word and make happen
what you said is going to happen, or not.