Practicing the Art of Losing: Are You a Good Sport in Life or Just Another Troubled Guest Darkening the Earth?

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” – Norman Cousins

“Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.” – Robert Cody

Yes: Have the courage to truly live and love; anyone can die and live a life that looks like a living death. 

Life is about loss. Loss—at least some losses in life—are inevitable. And most of us naturally try to live our lives in ways that minimize our losses and our potential for losing the things and people that are important to us. And in doing this, we try to create a sense of permanency, or, put another way, a sense of being in control. If we’re going to have to lose things, we’d much rather lose them on our terms than on life’s terms. We’d much rather have some sense of power, some say in when and how we lose something, rather than experience the complete and utter helplessness and vulnerability of having life simply take what we love away from us, and do so forcibly, and realizing how utterly powerless and helpless and small we are in the scheme of things. We don’t want to be stripped or violated by anyone or anything, including life itself. Yet this is just what life will surely do to each of us so long as we insist on trying to live and love on our own terms instead of life’s.

And so our natural reaction is to fight this, to try to hold on, cling to our desire to be in control, to hold on fiercely to some sense of power and say. And in doing so we run the risk of losing some of our humanity and, what’s worse, becoming inhumane and callous to others.

Loss in life is inevitable. But we’re not humble enough and honest enough to admit this and face this; we’re too afraid to put ourselves through getting acclimated viscerally to this truth. We don’t want to be wounded and scarred like this. Yet think about it: Live long enough and you’ll lose both your parents and all your grandparents, you’ll lose friends, family members, acquaintances. People die. You’ll also lose jobs and loves and friendships, perhaps through your own fault, or perhaps through no fault of your own. But because these losses happen sporadically—”into every life a little rain must fall“—because these losses happen infrequently enough, in between typically much longer stretches of not losing anyone or anything, that allows us plenty of wiggle room in playing our games of denial with ourselves and life. Life—by not defeating us more and more frequently and soundly, by not kicking our butts more and more often and severely—is making it too easy for us to indulge our neurosis (our avoidant tendencies) and play our little games of denial and self-deception and turning away with reality.

“Hear the cry of the woman at the hour of giving birth, see the struggle of the dying in their last minutes and days, and then tell me whether that which begins and that which ends like this has been designed for pleasure.” – Kierkegaard

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“One Art” – Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

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“The Man Watching” – Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age;
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we too would become strong, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Life is about loss. About being defeated more and more decisively. This is the source of our humility–it’s what keeps our ego in check.  If we are not being defeated regularly by life–by wrestling with what is extraordinary and eternal in life–we run the risk of becoming soft, spoiled, tepid, weak.  Those little victories of little things make us small, we get too comfortable expecting that life will (almost) always take place on our terms, and we get out of shape in terms of the bigger questions and concerns and taking losses in life. 

But losses in life are inevitable.  And so as such, much of life is really about learning to lose either well or badly. This is the fundamental position we have to decide on in life: to learn how to lose well—with dignity, with some semblance of grace and perspective; or to lose badly—to lose like a child having its favorite toy taken away, to hide away, wall up, feel sorry for ourselves, pitch a fit, spin out, insulate and isolate ourselves, become “control freaks,” and begin shutting down inside and dying while alive—to begin reducing life to survival and staying safe and comfortable (the path of least resistance) rather than growing and enlarging ourselves and learning to live and love on life’s terms.

Everything and everyone will be taken from us. Nothing lasts, nothing will endure; all is vanity. On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything and everyone drops to zero. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dead. We’re impermanent, brief, fleeting, and fragile—so very fragile. We learn to live and survive alongside what can kill us. This is just the basic lay of the land in life; it’s what we’re each innately up against.

And most of us are not very good sports when it comes to dealing with this. Most of us are not very good sports when it comes to losing. We lose badly. Throw tantrums. Act out. Even become vicious and hurtful—”hurt people hurt people,” they torment others because they are unable and or unwilling to metabolize on their own all of the torment they feel, so they spread it around, literally forcing everyone to feel and mitigate their pain. What it comes down to is this: we’re bad sports because we’re afraid, because we’re not humble, because we have things backwards in life—we expect certainty and security and ease where there is actually little to none. Losing terrifies us, and in doing so, usually brings out what’s worst in us. It reminds us of the truth of our situation—that fundamentally life is about loss, that there’s nothing and no one we can cling to; that life is a perpetual groundlessness: we don’t know why we’re here, or for how long, where we came from, or where we’re going. All we have to use to lessen our fear and terror and sense of helplessness are the stories we’ve been told—some passed down through generations; and the stories we invent and tell ourselves.

Our everyday mind has it all wrong, has it backwards. We think that life is supposed to be much more safe and secure and certain than it is—much more. And that’s what makes us asleep, blind, living in denial—that we have things backwards, that we insist on trying to have things our way when it comes to the big questions—”what is extraordinary and eternal.” We each know at some level what the truth is, but because it terrifies us and because we don’t want to fully feel and face all of that and go through getting acclimated to it, we deceive ourselves and typically hurt others in the process of making our fast getaways from reality. We think that loss should be the exception, not the rule—which may well in fact be the case in the beginning, when we’re young; but as we grow older, we begin experiencing more and more losses, seeing those around us die—grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents. And at some level we begin suspecting that we’ve been duped—that life doesn’t go on forever, there’s a ticking clock—a ticking clock for each and everyone of us—and there’s only so much time on it. And this terrifies us. This terrifies the hell out of us. But this new information, this new reality, comes smack up against what we first learned about life, and so it tends to be very difficult for us to wrap our minds around it and integrate it, because deep down we think—and desperately hope—that life is still supposed to be pleasant and safe and secure and cozy. And we desperately clinging to this hope. Because the alternative is too terrifying. We can’t handle the truth. The truth is too dizzying, too overwhelming, too unsettling. We much rather live badly and live as if permanence and security and happiness are things that are owed to us. We’d much rather believe in a God wants us to be happy, that wants us to have a good time here on earth and not have to suffer. . . .

Does God want us to suffer?
What if the answer to that question is yes?
See, I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy.
I think He wants us to be able to love and be loved.
He wants us to grow up.
We think our childish toys
bring us all the happiness there is
and our nursery is the whole wide world.
But something—something—must drive us out of the nursery
to the world of others
and that something is suffering.
– From the motion picture “Shadowlands”

Wrapping our minds around the inevitability of death and loss is no easy task; it’s like learning a new language—a second language, and at that a very foreign and difficult to master second language. Our first language is one of permanence, security, safety, gratification, being taken care of; it’s what we speak naturally and it speaks to what we seek naturally. This new language, this second language—the linguistics of loss, grief, impermanence, uncertainty, death—conflicts directly and deeply with much of what we first learned of life and with what we most desire from life: happiness, permanence, comfort, pleasantness, goodness. But learning to speak this new language well is essential if we are to grow up and learn how to truly love. Not only that, if one is to truly master this second language—and so to grow and learn how to truly love—it will not be enough just to learn to speak it fluently, we must learn to actually think in it—our very thinking must drip with the language of loss, impermanence, death, suffering. All of this must happen if we are to successfully grow up—i.e., put away the things of childhood, that is, overwrite and replace what we first learned of life—our first impressions of life—that life was supposed to be pleasant and happy and safe, that we weren’t supposed to get broken and deeply wounded here, that we weren’t going to have to change our thinking deeply and radically and fundamentally.

Christianity calls this paradigmatic shift, this complete and irrevocable figure-ground reversal in our way of looking at life—as life being something fleeting, impermanent, transitory, uncertain, mysterious, terrifying, immense, overwhelming, instead of something permanent, cozy, happy, safe—a “metanoia.” A metanoia means a radical change of heart and mind, a dramatic shift of one’s life direction and orientation away from the self and narcissistic gratifications (vanity) and permanence, to impermanence, uncertainty, mystery, transcending the self and our conditioning, and living and loving on life’s terms, not the ego’s terms. It is a complete conversion and epiphany rolled into one.

It is clear that when we are still operating according to the idea that life is supposed to be more safe and secure than it is, that we’re not supposed to be broken and deeply wounded here, that not everyone dies, everyone leaves, everything burns, everything is vanity, then we live badly. We are, in essence, refusing the term’s of life’s loan to us. And when we live like this—in refusal—our power in life lies in distancing—in putting up walls and pushing away unpleasant and difficult and immense realities—and people—and keeping these people and things at arm’s (or more, much more) length. It’s how we feebly try to keep our sanity, our equilibrium—an equilibrium that, truth be told, is not worth keeping, because it comes at the expense of us crippling and warping ourselves; it’s the equilibrium of childhood; it’s one based in weakness and denial, of approaching life in a way that is intellectually dishonest, instead of honest. What we most fear will happen to us will indeed one day happen to us, it will get the upper hand on us, so why wait? Why waste life in the meantime, trying to run from life and reality?

The only real foundation for happiness that we can have in life comes from facing life as it is—in all its majesty as well as hideousness and terrifyingness—and facing ourselves as we are, our weaknesses and strengths, and being honest with ourselves—and others—about these, and then heroically trying to overcome them. The only real happiness in life comes from learning thoroughly that what threatens us or most frightens us yet does not kill us or reduce us to a vegetative state and the fetal position is what makes us stronger and wiser and better human beings. There’s no strength to be gained in avoiding and denying what is inevitable and what will one day have the upper hand on us. In fact, denying what is inevitable its rightful place in our lives is the surest way to cripple ourselves emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually. We must be brave—we really have no choice in this. To only be partially brave means to unwittingly consent to allowing ourselves to be crippled. To only partially face the truth means to still lie to ourselves and others. To grow up means to choose suffering, it means to say YES to life—to the full intensity and mystery of life, the full catastrophe of life, and not live as a frightened pygmy. But to choose safety repeatedly means to say no to life, to say no to growing up, to instead choose a slow form of psychological suicide, a living death, the ego and its fear-based ways over living and loving on life’s terms.

Why love if losing hurts so much?
I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived.
Twice in that life
I’ve been given the choice:
As a boy . . .
and as a man.
The boy chose safety. The man chooses suffering.
The pain now is part of the happiness then.
That’s the deal.

– From the motion picture “Shadowlands”

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“There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.” – Alan Paton, “The Challenge of Fear,” in Saturday Review, September 9, 1967, pg. 46

“Dungeon” – Rabindranath Tagore

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon.
I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into
the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand
lest a least hole should be left in this name;
and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” – Dostoevsky

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Hell is self-chosen. Hell has only volunteer residents. The reality is that the gates of hell are locked from the inside, as Lewis wrote. Hell is the suffering of being unable—or unwilling—to extend oneself and to love, to paraphrase Dostoevsky. Hell is being trapped from the inside because of oneself inside one’s neurosis or illness and being too afraid to truly love and be loved. It is to be a prisoner, locked within the dungeon of oneself, one’s ego, where the only purpose left in life is to fiercely defend one’s freedom to stay locked inside one’s prison cell. Hell is to be too afraid to risk being vulnerable, open, intimate, to afraid to risk living and loving on life’s terms instead of the ego’s manipulative and self-serving terms. Hell is to prefer the suffering of being unwilling to love to the sufferings involved in loving anything or anyone (after all, they may die or leave you or reject or betray you). Hell is to prefer the sufferings inherent in running away from the full intensity of life and backing down from the full catastrophe of living to the sufferings inherent in living and loving on life’s terms. Hell is to prefer the sufferings and crippling one brings upon oneself rather than the sufferings inherent in waking up and truly living.

On Truth, Personal Responsibility, Love, and the Face of God: Lessons from the film “Dead Man Walking”

(Warning: Contains spoilers!)

If you’re not familiar with the movie, “Dead Man Walking,” watch it. It’s an incredibly well-acted and beautifully written and moving film; a film that will likely linger with you (long) after it’s over.

In the film, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), befriends a death row inmate, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), who reaches out to her by mail initially under the auspices that he’s not guilty of the horrific crime he’s been sentenced to death for. But as she continues getting to know Poncelet and his story, she soon begins to suspect that what he’s told her about his part in the crime is not the truth. And so as the last minute appeals are denied one after another, Prejean’s task becomes one of helping to redeem Poncelet and help him to die well—that is, to die with dignity, with a clear conscience, with no hatred or lies in his heart.

It’s a beautiful film, with a message for all of us, meaning that even though most of us have done nothing even in the heinous ballpark of what Poncelet did, we all have our “sins”—meaning, bad, even wicked conscienceless hurtful things we’ve done to others in moments of weakness and fear, that we probably ought to own up to before we die/before it’s too late. Because the reality is we’re each dead men (and women) walking. We all owe a death; it’s the final installment or payment on being alive—and likely the costliest and most difficult installment to pay well.

And part of living a truly meaningful and dignified and decent life means taking responsibility for our actions. It means not get sucked into an easy out—an “easy out,” meaning, a path of lessor resistance, a path which curses the effect on us of our past actions and yet at the same time sows more seeds of future suffering. And the easiest easy out is to get sucked into continuing to blame others or society or even our upbringing for the quality of our lives. As Bruno Bettleheim put it: “Blaming others or society is the child’s privilege, but if an adult continues to abnegate responsibility it is yet another step in personal disintegration and destruction.” To live a meaningful and dignified and worthy life, we have to begin living more consciously, more honestly and self-awarely, stop making so many excuses for ourselves, and begin facing the reality that all along we have been making choices—and that oftentimes the choice was to blame others and pretend like we didn’t have a choice or make a choice. And this is perhaps the most damning lie that we can tell ourselves—that it wasn’t possible for us to choose otherwise—because it absolutely brings to an immediate halt and undercuts any attempts at personal growth and changing one’s life for the better. As Stephen Covey put it, “Until a person can say deeply and honestly, ‘I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,’ that person cannot say, ‘I choose otherwise’” (from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”). More to the point, that person cannot change and truly grow and heal.

From: “Dead Man Walking“—this is my slight rewrite of the movie, I have done so in order to help translate the film to print

The scene: Near the end of the movie, a cell on death row, about 28 hours before Poncelet’s scheduled execution the following night. Poncelet and Prejean are alone in the cell.

Prejean: Let’s talk about what happened. Let’s talk about that night.

Poncelet: I don’t want to talk about that.

Why?

Because I’m pissed off! I’m pissed at the kids for being parked. I’m pissed at myself for letting Vitello (his accomplice) get them kids. . . . And I’m pissed at their parents for coming to see me die. . . . Oh l got a thing or two I want to say to the Percys and the Delacroixs.

You want your last words in this life to be words of hatred?

Clyde Percy wants to inject me himself!

Well, think about it, Matthew; think of how angry he must be. He’s never gonna see his daughter again. He’s never gonna hold her, love her, laugh with her. You have robbed these parents. They have nothing in their lives anymore but sorrow and unimaginable pain; no joy. And that is what you gave them. . . . So why were you in the woods?

I told you, I was stoned!

Don’t blame the drugs, Matthew. You had been harassing couples for months before this happened. So what was it?

What do you mean?

Did you look up to Vitello? Did you think he was cool? Did you want to impress him?

I don’t know.

You could have walked away.

He woulda went psycho on me.

Don’t blame him! . . . Matthew, you blame him, the government, drugs, blacks, the Percys, the Delacroixs. You blame the kids for being there. But what about you?—what about Matthew Poncelet? Where’s he in this story? What?—is he just a victim?

I ain’t no victim.

But you’re not taking responsibility, Matthew. Time’s ticking away. You’ve got death breathing down your neck and you’re still playing your little con-man games and looking for loopholes.

The scene: It’s the next day, the same cell on death row, only hours before Poncelet’s scheduled midnight execution. Poncelet is alone in his cell, Prejean enters. She looks at him, Poncelet looks different, and he is looking at Prejean differently.

Prejean: What, Matt? What is it?

Poncelet: (thoughtful) Earlier today when I was saying my goodbyes, my mama kept saying, ”It was that damn Vitello.” She always regrets that I got involved with him. But I didn’t want her thinking that—that it was him and not me. Something you said got me thinking, Sister. . . . I could’ve walked away. . . . But I didn’t. I didn’t. . . .. I wasn’t a victim; I was a fucking chicken. He (Vitello) was older than me and tough as hell. And I was just boozing up and trying to be as tough as him. But I couldn’t. He was bad; but I didn’t have the guts to stand up to him. I told my mama this—that I was yellow. But she kept saying, ”It wasn’t you, Matt. It wasn’t you, Matt. It wasn’t you.”

Your mama loves you, Matt.

But it was me, Sister. It was me. I had a choice. I made a choice. You know that boy—

Walter?

Yes, Walter—　

What? What Matthew?

Well I killed him. I shot him in the back of the head. I shot him like he was nothing. I shot him because I wanted to prove how tough I was. I shot him because I was too scared to stand up for myself. I shot him because I was a coward. I treated him—Walter—like he was nothing at all because I was a coward.

Oh Matthew. . . . And Hope?　

No, ma’am.

No? . . . Did you rape her?

Yes, ma’am, I did. I did horrible things to those kids.

Then you’re taking responsibility, Matthew?—for both of their deaths?

Yes, ma’am. (Sobbing) Yes ma’am, I do. (Sobbing) . . . . When the lights dimmed last night, I kneeled, and I prayed for them kids and their families. I ain’t never done that before. I felt so alone. I feel so bad for them. How could I have done what I did? Why did I have to do it? Why? . . .

Oh, Matthew. There are spaces of sorrow that only God can touch. You did a terrible thing, Matt, a terrible, hideous thing. You ended two young innocent lives and you robbed those two families of their children. You treated those kids—those human beings—like they were disposable to you, you treated them like they were here for you to do what you wanted with them. But they weren’t. . . . And now you’re facing the truth, Matthew, and doing so has set you free—the truth has made you free. You’ve known the truth all along, but now you’re admitting it, facing it finally, not lying any more about it. And because you’re doing this and taking responsibility for your actions, Matthew, there’s real dignity in this: You have a dignity now. And nobody can take that from you. You are a son of God, Matthew Poncelet.

Nobody ever called me no son of God before, Sister. I’ve been called a son of you-know-what lots of times, but never no son of God. . . . l just hope my death can give them parents some relief.

Maybe the best thing you can give to the Percys and the Delacroixs is this is to let them know this remorse and regret that you feel—to feel their pain, and not hide from their anger—the anger that you brought into their lives. You can give them that, Matthew, and a wish for their peace.

If I could, I would do things differently; I wouldn’t do what I did. I’d be stronger, you know. I never had no real love myself. Never loved a woman or anybody else. I would want to love. It figures I’d have to die to find love.

Matthew, I want the last thing you see in this world to be a face of love. So you look at me when they do this thing. You look at me. And I’ll be the face of love for you.

Yes, ma’am. Thank you, for loving me.

Thank you, Matthew.

 

“To truly love another person is to see the face of God.” – Victor Hugo, “Les Miserables”

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Confession—a truly heartfelt and thorough confession—what in recovery circles is referred to as making a full and searching and fearless moral inventory—is the first step to real personal growth and true mental health and healing. The truth will set us free. But only if we face it and confess it fully. To confess the truth partially is to still to lie, and lying will not set us free.  But admitting the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth, and taking personal responsibility—ceasing to grumble and blame society, others, our upbringing, et cetera, but instead focusing on ourselves and the choices we’ve made and are making, becoming conscious of these choices instead of denying them—is what will set us free.

Yes, to be sure, external things as well as the past certainly exert an influence on us and have-wired us limbically and even intellectually a certain way. But they do not get the last word in who we are—they do not get the last word in who we become.

We get the last word in who we become if—if—we take responsibility for ourselves, for our choices, and face the (potentially terrifying) truth about how we’ve lived, what we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, and who we’ve become. —And the worse and less courageously we’ve lived, the more terrifying the truth will be for us. As John wrote in his Gospel (paraphrasing): “The light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light because their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and is ashamed, and so in his shame does not come towards the light, but instead hides from the light so that his or her deeds may not be exposed. But whoever lives truthfully comes to the light so that his deeds may be seen clearly. . . . ” (John 3:19-21)

We’re all dead men and women walking. We all owe a death. The problem is that unlike Poncelet, for most of us the hour of our death is unknown. And that uncertainty as to when—not if, but when—is what gives us the wiggle room that allows us to live badly, to lose perspective and live and make choices as if life goes on forever (or at least a lot longer than it likely will). Castaneda said that death is the only wise advisor we have. I would revise that statement and say that death is one of only two wise advisors we have—the other being God or God’s point of view—what’s best in us, what does our conscience say, asking honestly what is the Loving and truly mature and courageous thing to do. If we learn how to consult both of these advisors more and more in life—and more and more when we’re making decisions—especially potentially big decisions, then we’ll be crafting a habit that will serve us well. We will be learning to begin with the end in mind—the end, meaning death and what will be important to us at that moment. And thus we will be living and making decisions more truthfully—and honorably.

　

“Let death and banishment and rejection and misfortune and every other thing that appears dreadful and that you’d rather ignore, be before your eyes daily, but most of all death, and you will never again think anything petty or cowardly or mean, nor will you ever desire anything discursive or extravagant again.” —Epictetus

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“You know, Westmoreland made all of us officers write our own obituaries during Tet, when we thought The Cong were gonna end it all right there. And, once we clued into the fact that life is finite, the thought of losing it didn’t scare us anymore. The end comes no matter what, the only thing that matters is how do you wanna go out, on your feet or on your knees? I bring that lesson to this job. I act, knowing that someday this job will end, no matter what. You should do the same.” – from the motion picture “The Kingdom”

　

There’s no way out of this alive. No one gets out of here alive. We all have to die. And all of those we love and depend on also will die. And we must not let the uncertainty as to when we and others will die provide us with the wiggle room to live and love badly, pettily, to use others, to run from ourselves and our fears, to lie, to live and love like we’re not dead men walking and like we and those we love will never die. Because once we lose perspective and start living a life unmindful of the end—a life of denial, avoidance, dishonesty—we become shameful creatures and we leave the door open in ourselves for evil, for real inhumanity and abuse and cruelty—and all in the name of preserving our comfort and not having to face our fears and be overwhelmed by them—by what will one day unavoidably have the upper hand on us. Carpe diem—seizing the day—isn’t about living a frenzied life, ramping up our living in denial and living more hedonistically and superficially. Just the opposite, it’s about facing reality, beginning with the end in mind, and not living superficially, not living as a coward, not tranquilizing ourselves with what is trivial and will not mean anything to us as we’re dying or when we get the cancer diagnosis or one of our children has died. Carpe diem—living deeply and sucking the marrow out of life—means living very consciously, deliberately, mindfully, with gratitude, appreciation, kindness, openness, honesty, depth, substance. It means not worrying so damn much about our own comfort. It means getting out of the shallows and into the depths where life reveals its secrets (Rilke).

Confession—his level of honesty and perspective—is a huge part of being reborn, of a metanoia—of a profound change of heart and mind and life direction—or, if you don’t want it to sound so biblical or religious, then just call it growing up and being a better human being.

Confession—confessing our sins, really feeling the pain in others that we’ve put there because of what we’ve done, making our amends, correcting the past, sincerely desiring to exchange places with those we’ve hurt (meaning genuinely being willing to take the bullet or the hit, instead of making someone else take it for us)—is a sign of real growth, real psychological and spiritual health and strength. And it’s a sign that we’re not lost—that we haven’t lost perspective, but instead have found it, that we’re finally putting ourselves on some really truly solid ground, instead of the fleeting groundlessness of living in denial and living superficially.

How to Begin Liberating Oneself

O Slave, liberate yourself.

Where are you, and where’s your home,
find it in your lifetime!

If you fail to wake up now,
you’ll be helpless when the end comes.

Listen, O wise one, says Kabir:
the siege of Death is hard to withstand.

Nearly every morning I get up and marinade my brain with this sort of stuff.

I have to. I choose to. But the truth is that thinking like this—that needing or wanting to think like this—has become as essential and necessary—and effortless—as breathing to me. It’s something I do oft and repeatedly throughout the day.

Fact: If I don’t open myself up now, while I’m alive, while there’s still time, death will do it eventually for me and in spite of me, and then there will be no time left on the clock. And all of the Love I could have given, all the tenderness I could have shown and received, all of the Love and insight I could have shared and left of myself on this earth to possibly brighten it, will go in the ground or up in flames over the pyre.

And my one chance at living and loving will be over.

It will be gone. Finished. Finito. Never to be repeated.

And billions and billions of years will come after me and wipe away all trace of me and whatever I did with my life—whether I played it safe and lived out of fear and clung ruthlessly to any sort of security I could find; or whether I let myself be fully opened and not play it so damn safe, and live and love on life’s terms.

So what am I waiting for now? And you reading this, what are you waiting for?

What are any of us waiting for?

A day without reflection and contemplation, a day without love, a day without loving others and being good to them, a day without facing our fears and stretching ourselves beyond them, a day without the depth of love we know we could have if we were just a bit braver, more open, more daring, in need of less security, is a wasted day.

And yet this is what so many of us do. Gotta work more, gotta earn more, gotta save more, gotta get more security and safety, gotta anesthetize myself more, gotta avoid life more, gotta avoid what frightens me more, gotta numb myself more, gotta live on autopilot more, gotta read crappy books more, gotta drink more, gotta daydream more, gotta escape more, gotta get more comfort.

And day leads on to day and turns into weeks and then months, and more and more time (and life) gets wasted.

And then of course one has to justify all of the wastefulness and start fighting for it; one has to dig in one’s heals, twist one’s thinking, and start compounding the mistake, and begin the process of heaping error on top of error.

Why do so many of us live on so little and live such small sheltered frightened lives and want so little that is real for ourselves?

Why are we so afraid of our own emotions and of being overwhelmed or flooded by them?

News flash: What we fear is going to happen one day to us is going to happen to us one day. Later or sooner. We each owe a death. It’s unavoidable. Inevitable. We each have to play out that scene. And when that time comes, it’s too late for us to really become all that we could have become earlier, in our prime, if we had lived with greater courage and steadiness and composure. And love.

I see all of the fear in others and myself, how much we flinch and tremble, how we shut down and run away from life, from love, from others, but most of all from ourselves and from growing up and facing ourselves and our larger life situation (life’s inevitables) honestly. And it breaks my heart. Why do we (some of us? most of us?) do this to ourselves and to each other?—torment each other with ourselves and our pettiness and avoidance? Why does something—life, love—that began so beautifully and with so much promise and passion and possibility have to end so badly and scatter in debris on some loveless shore? Why do so many people do indecent things to each other? Why do hurt people hurt people? Why? Why? Why?

　

“The Crunch” – Charles Bukowski

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAIwmHt2PRc

too much too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody.

laughter or
tears

haters
lovers

strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks

armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.

an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.

there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners

it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to.

people are not good to each other.

I suppose they never will be.
I don’t ask them to be.

but sometimes I think about
it.

the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.

too much
too little

too fat
too thin
or nobody

more haters than lovers.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.

there must be a way.

surely there must be a way that we have not yet
thought of.

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.

it will not say
“no.”
　

If you really think about it—if anyone dares to really think about it—no other way of living really makes sense other than this: than to live as courageously and honestly and openly as possible, to love and be loved, to grow and mature emotionally and become less and less beholden to or controlled by our fears and weak points. Sure, others might take advantage of us and our openness and use it against us. So what? Do it anyways. No one gets out of here alive. We’re all caught in ticking traps. We’re all going to turn cold and one die—even those we love and cling to will eventually die on us. So what are we so afraid of? Why aren’t we all living with greater openness and honesty and courage? And Love? (The real stuff.)

“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. Instead we let ourselves be distracted by nonsense, terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We’re eaten up by nothing. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fucks. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”
– Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship (1998)

First Thoughts This Morning: What Does it Mean to Lead an Examined and Eyes-Wide-Open Life?

“It is only in the face of death that man’s real self is born.” – St. Augustine

It is not enough in this life to be born only once; we must be born again, and from or into something higher and wiser and more stable than all of the accidents and contingencies that make up our first self—all of the fears and unchosen conditioning (“karma”) and things that others have done to us when we were young and defenseless, and that have set our basic wiring in place.

Dag Hammarskjöld wrote—

“At every moment you choose yourself. But do you really choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one—which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy out of curiosity or wonder or greed or your need for security, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life—is your ‘I’.”

Gurdjieff put it this way—

“Human beings are attached to everything in this life; attached to their imagination, attached to their ignorance, attached to their fear, attached even to their own suffering—and possibly to their own suffering more than anything else. A person must first free himself from attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things, keeps alive a thousand false I’s in a person. These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die? . . . It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, as well as one’s complete and absolute helplessness. . . . So long as a person is not horrified at himself, then a person knows nothing about himself or life.”

So what does it mean to lead an examined and eyes-wide-open life?

It means to get up every morning (or nearly every morning) and think and reflect and contemplate for a while—and perhaps even write/journal/blog for a few minutes—on the idea that nothing in life is certain. Nothing, except death. Except loss. Except change. It means to think about our shared place in the scheme of things—the lot or predicament we all share. It means to be able to think about more than just our own personal problems and unhappiness, but the larger problems and unhappinesses and sufferings that all of us as human beings are heir to—sickness, old age, death, loss. It means to think about impermanence, how fleeting life and health and even wealth and love can be, how quickly things can change from good to bad. Or from bad to worse.

Thinking about such things—while perhaps on the surface appearing depressing or a “downer”—is the only true source of our humanity and humaneness. Our inhumaneness, our inhumanity—to ourselves, and, what is more often the case, to others, because it is almost always those around us who pay the greatest price for our shortfalls in courage and grit and goodness—lies in running away from these sorts of thoughts and considerations. In fact, running away from such considerations is the definition of what it means to be asleep or blind in life.

Yes, it’s human to run, to avoid what is unpleasant, difficult, distressing, but it’s also human—and much more human and humane—to stop running and to begin facing what we most fear.

What’s worst and weakest in us wants an easy life, a life free of suffering, a life of comfort and security and soft gentle touches and caresses. And when life stresses us out and or shows us its not so soft and warm side, that part of us spins out and pushes us (seduces us) to run—to break and sell out and run.

And so the more we do this, the more we set this precedent within us, the more we grease and lube those neural networks and make it all the more likely we will run all the more quickly and for even lesser reasons than we just did.

And if we do this frequently enough, not only do we cripple ourselves and hurt, even harm* those around us in our flight from ourselves and from life and reality and truth, we eventually damn ourselves, render ourselves irredeemable, become a ghastly flinchy, neurotic, largely conscienceless creature that no longer recognizes anything or anyone outside of itself and its own insatiable need for safety, security, comfort, avoiding stress, tension, pain. We become locked into a prison of ourselves, unable to stretch ourselves beyond our own most basic wants and needs. We may look human on the outside, but on the inside, we are regressing, living with less and less dignity and uprightness, becoming less and less of an adult, and more and more weak, crippled, asleep, living on our knees.

This is what life is like when we refuse to think about more than ourselves and our own fears and hurts and likes and dislikes. We become petty tyrants, little petty unjust despots, little devils, little banes in the lives of others. Partly human, but often hideously inhumane and atrocious to others.

But life looks different—much different—the more we slow ourselves and allow ourselves to reflect honestly on life’s inevitables—the inevitables that we are all heir to—loss, sickness, old age, suffering, death, impermanence, fragility.

As we begin to shift our thinking from me to we, from my own personal neuroses and misfortunes to the sufferings we are all prone to, then we begin deeply humanizing our thinking and ourselves. As we move from me to we, we begin to allow such things as genuine appreciation, gratitude, forgiveness, magnanimity, personal responsibility, mindfulness, wakefulness, Love (the real stuff—http://realtruelove.wordpress.com) to take real root in us.

We can begin (finally) asking ourselves—and more and more often—”Knowing that death cannot be avoided and that I (and those around me I love and care about) owe a death, do I still want to cave right now and run away from this lesser difficulty /fear and thus weaken myself even more in regards to my ability to live and die well?” And we can begin living this question—this very humane and humanizing question—and see what effect it has on us and how we show up to life—especially the difficulties inherent in everyday life.

Our essential “I”—our true self, our authentic self—lies in not running away from what most frightens us, but from struggling honestly and heroically to learn how to more truthfully face our deepest fears and compassionately integrate life’s unavoidables and inevitables into our daily and moment to moment decision-making apparatus. 

And one of the best ways to begin doing this is begin a habit of thinking about life’s inevitables compassionately and honestly when we wake up and before we get on with our day.

If more and more of us would do this—would spend 20 or 30 minutes reflecting first thing in the morning on Life, death, Love (the real stuff), impermanence, interconnectedness, suffering, loss, or reading something soulful and of substance, or writing/journaling/blogging on these themes—it will help to change things for the better and make us more humane and honest and awake.

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time
before death.

If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will rejoin with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten—
that is all fantasy.

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the
City of Death.

If you make love with the divine now, in the next
life you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that
does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

– Kabir “The Time Before Death,” translated by Robert Bly

———————–

* Just because we don’t see the long-term cumulative effects that our repeated acts of weakness and cowardice have on those around us, doesn’t mean we aren’t harming them, doing to them similar what was done to us and what has rendered us as we are—weak, dishonest, ashamed, hurt, wounded, flinchy, avoidant, cowardly, impulsive, ungrateful, parasitic.

Your Personal Philosophy—the Examined or Unexamined Life in Action

Your Personal Philosophy—the Examined or Unexamined Life in Action

I suppose I could have also titled this post: “The Truth—will it set you free or will it cause you to break cleanly with reality and go bat-shit crazy?”

We all have a personal philosophy. Our personal philosophy is simply our approach to life—our way of approaching life and dealing with what we encounter. There are really only two ways to approach life: either we approach life—all facets of it—in a thoughtful and examined way; or we opt not to. —Meaning, at some point we unconsciously decide that thinking will open up too many painful doors and bring up too many terrifying and unanswerable questions, and so we decide to limit that part of ourselves (the thinking and conscious part) and we try instead to lose ourselves in work, play, relationships, Facebook, et cetera. Essentially, it’s the “any port in the storm” approach to life—a life of hiding out from what we fear most—the emotions that most frighten us—terror, panic, anxiety, shame, inadequacy—and the thoughts and experiences/situations that will likely trigger these emotions—these intense and overwhelming emotions.

And sadly, such an approach limits our humane-ness as well as our growth and development. It is the ultimate act of self-limiting—to opt to curb one’s awareness and one’s thinking and instead lead a timid and an unexamined life and hide from what most frightens us.

Yet it’s what almost all of us instinctively and naturally do. It’s our default. A default that’s been bred into us through thousands upon thousands of years of natural selection. Self-preservation—the will to survive—is our default. And nothing helps us more in this than automatically seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Thus our personal life philosophies have been instinctively built around avoiding and retreating suffering and difficulty and discomfort and anything that might cause us mental anguish or unsettle us, and chasing after good vibes and good feelings. . . .

But . . . there tends to be a problem with this approach to life . . .

“The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”

― Thomas Merton, “The Seven Storey Mountain”

There are certain sufferings that likely cannot be avoided—sickness, old age, loss of love, death. But in our youthful exuberance, ignorance, naiveté, and feelings of omnipotence, we think we actually can play hide and seek with the dark parts of life and avoid suffering—at least for a very long time into the future.

And so part of doing so involves automatically limiting our awareness and our thinking—not exposing ourselves to thoughts and ideas that might cause us to suffer. Who in the spring or summer of their life wants to think about the inevitable coming winter? Who wants to think about death and loss and sickness and old age and poverty and the pains and sufferings of one’s upbringing?

It’s easier to just sweep all of that stuff under the psychological carpeting and out of our conscious mind, and keep the party bus approach to life rolling.

We’re all afraid. That’s a given.

And certain amount of suffering is inevitable; it’s unavoidable; it’s part and parcel of being alive and living.

Thus our dilemma.

Either we approach our lives very honestly, in fear and trembling, and with eyes and mind wide open; or we do so with eyes and mind frightened and quickly closing and shutting down, always squinting, always nervous and apprehensive about what they might see around the next bend or read in the next book or blog post.

In my early-teens through my early twenties I used to routinely avoid TV shows like “Cosmos” or anything that mentioned the Big Bang and the ultimate fate of the Universe. If the Universe began and ended like this, then what’s the point? Everything comes to naught. Why live? Why live for anything other than as much immediate and overwhelming pleasure and ego-gratification and enlargement as possible? Why not try to lose oneself in pleasure and the stream of life and try to lose oneself completely—after all, the alternative is too much to face, too much to bear? And as for God, where is there room for God in such cosmology? 13 or 14 billion years ago, the Universe blasted itself into existence, and millions and millions of years of evolution took place and have all come to this point—this point where I am alive, aware of myself, aware that I will die, aware that before me there was an eternity of nothingness, that before the beginning of the Universe there was what?—and that I will die, perhaps in a hideous or random way as will those around me, and then everything will fade to black, and there will be an eternity—an eternity upon eternities—after me; the Universe will turn cold and motionless, or it will perhaps collapse upon itself—and perhaps start again and everything will repeat itself exactly, again and again; or perhaps everything will be different the next time through. Or perhaps the Universe won’t start again, and me, my life—whatever I am, whatever I make of myself and my life—will be swallowed up and lost in the folds of all of this, just like everything and everyone else.

Those were the questions of my youth and young adulthood. And they still are, except they don’t fill me with me as much terror; things don’t seem as bleak and or grim. I still don’t hold out much hope for an afterlife—not that I wouldn’t relish being proven wrong.

I think that what’s changed for me—or in me—are two things. Firstly, I tolerate the questions better—I think that a bit of “desensitization” has taken place—not that I still am not occasionally filled with terror at all of the above and spin out in panic; I just don’t spin out as dramatically or for as long—or as easily. So a bit of desensitization has taken place. Plus, I’m 44; I’m “over the hill”—I’m likely past the halfway point in my life—and perhaps well past it. I’m less afraid across the board than I was 10 or 20 years ago. I’ve watched firsthand as my mom wasted away and died from melanoma a couple of years ago; I watched as my grandfather wasted away and died of old age and some age-related disease that I can’t recall the name of; I’ve had a woman who I thought was my best friend betray me; I’ve experienced other break-ups and losses and betrayals and disappointments in love. In other words, I’ve taken my fair share of dings and nicks and dents in life. One headlight. My nerve-endings and emotions are generally just not as sensitive and raw as they used to be—they’ve been broken in; I’ve been broken in. I just don’t get as surprised as often as I used to (not that I still can’t be surprised!) The blinders are largely off—I know how hideous and weak people can be and what they can do to another because I’ve been on the receiving end of this several times. I’ve watched people do to me and to others unconscionable horrible things—all in the name of illegitimately avoiding their own suffering—and things I was powerless to stop. Live long enough and honestly enough and that’s just the way it is—life does this to everyone—tries to break us each, or at the very least, it breaks our engine in. The question for us is: do we join in the decline of western civilization and start mistreating others because we have been mistreated and so pass on our pain onto others? Or do we take a stand against this way of life and try to metabolize and soak up some of the pain and misery in the world and make something decent of the suffering that is given us—do we try to make art, wisdom, something beautiful of it and or ourselves? Do we become one of life’s works of art—whether others appreciate it or not.

In my late teens and early twenties, I had no problem passing my pain onto others—I was running from myself, from life, from the big questions in life; I was afraid, weak, underdeveloped, out of shape psychologically, ill-equipped emotionally for life (not that I still may not be; just perhaps a bit less so, hopefully!). I had no problem hitting the bars, mistreating my body with cigarettes and alcohol and fast food, and looking to meet a woman who was mistreating herself similarly and see if she wanted to go home for the night and metabolize a little of our avoidance and stuffed down existential pain together. . . .

That’s a snapshot of me in my late teens and early twenties—just going along with the prevailing winds, doing whatever the other largely mindless, soulless, unthinking nitwits around me were doing. Basically I was leading an unexamined life; I wasting my mind—at least trying to—and perhaps wasting my life.

And then I went through a very painful break-up and betrayal. And the best way I can describe it is that the pain of that experience—the pain of those months of my life (the summer of ’97)—was worse than the rest of the pain I had been running from. And those pains that summer turned out to be labor pains—or perhaps I turned them into labor pains. I’m not sure how to attribute it. Either way, I had a Jerry Maguire type birth of conscience and a different way or level of thinking and of seeing the world. Something clicked in my mind and I could see very clearly that I had been running from a lot of things in my life and that that running was all in vain; I saw myself very objectively, very clearly, and I saw very clearly how all of my previous ways of trying to deal with pain by not actually dealing with it but by passing it on to others and spreading my misery or emptiness or unhappiness around had rendered me as a pretty weak and cowardly little shell of a person.

I had unwittingly been participating in my own demise; I had unwittingly been making myself in many ways an emotional wimp.

But, during my twenties I had also done some things that would ultimately save me from all of this—save me from myself, from what’s worst and weakest in myself, and from living like a weak little nitwit who reactively tried to eschew everything difficult and uncomfortable and ultimately unavoidable in life from his plate.

One of the things I did was to go to college and get my degree—degrees actually. I got my degrees in two fields that interested me the most—philosophy and psychology; and I almost got a third degree in religion/religious studies.

In the course of my studies I took a course on Buddhism where I learned about a way of life where people actually (!) faced life and faced honestly what was unavoidable in life—sickness, old age, death, loss, parting.

I also took two English classes where I was required to keep a journal and write 5 or 10 handwritten pages a week (this was in the olden days!) on anything I wanted to write about. It was a habit I would return to frequently throughout my schooling and after I graduated—and I’m so thankful I did!

I also took a class on poetry—a class where we were forced to write a poem every few days if we wanted to pass the class—that was the seeding of another fortuitous habit/hobby!

I also started reading Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and a little of Kierkegaard and Rilke (though I didn’t start really “reading” Rilke until I was in my late-30’s after another painful break-up/betrayal. All I really got from Rilke in my 20’s was that immortal line: “You must change your life.” I knew that for sure. That line hit me over the soul with a sledgehammer).

I also was trying to read M. Scott Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled“—but by and large, the books that have impacted me the most were not books that I came across in college, but were books that I read after I graduated. Nevertheless, along the way, some seeds of conscience and intellectual and emotional honesty and courage and self-awareness were replanted and re-nurtured through some of what I was introduced to in the course of my studies in psychology and philosophy and a few of the teachers I had during those years.

And then everything that had been planted in me—or that I had helped plant in me—all came to fruition—into bloom—and how fortunately!—in the summer of ’97, in the midst of all of my inner turmoil and agony over the ending of a 3.5 year relationship.

In the midst of all of that pain, I read and wrote and thought voraciously—I read and wrote and thought for my very life! And after about 3 months of doing this—and getting very little sleep each night—something clicked for me. I had what the Buddhist’s term “a moment of satori“—or great insight and clarity—about myself, my life, life, and how flawed my up till then approach to life and difficulty and suffering had been. It was for me the psychological equivalent of what in Christianity is termed a “metanoia“—a deep paradigmatic shift, a radical figure-ground reversal, a complete change of heart and mind and life direction.

And since then I’ve found my soulmates—the books that have more than their fair share of tell it like it is / in your face truth—M. Scott Peck (anything by him); “How Could You Do That!?” “Ten Stupid things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives”; “A Return to Love”; anything by Krishnamurti; Rilke, Rilke, Rilke, and more Rilke; “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”; C. S. Lewis—his essay and nonfiction books; Thoreau—especially his section on reading in “Walden”; Emerson; Kierkegaard; Jacob Needleman; Gurdjieff; James Hollis; David Schnarch; Murray Bowen; Maslow; “The Denial of Death” by Earnest Becker; Simone Weil; “The Little Prince”; Pema Chödrön; Chögyam Trungpa; the Buddha; The Gospel and First Epistle of John; the Old Testament Wisdom books; Montaigne; “The Nicomachean Ethics”; Roger Housden. And the list goes on.

Our lives are the way they are in large part—if not wholly—because of how we think / the way we think—about ourselves and our lives. Our lives bear witness to our thinking—as well as to our lack of thinking and thus our fears. What we are afraid of—what scares us, terrifies us, threatens us, stresses us out, might potentially undo us—we don’t think about—we don’t permit ourselves to think about.

But some of us having something in us that likes to play with this fire—with this fire of truth—that knows that we need to get a little bit closer to this fire and even get burned by it—perhaps even risk getting annihilated by it.

This fire—the fire of truth—is the only fire worth playing with. It’s the only thing that will really warm us. And it’s the only thing that will potentially save us—from ourselves, and from the sufferings inherent in life.

Philosophy—the real stuff, not the stuffy academic nonsense—is fundamentally about wisdom and creating the conditions that will allow for the transmission of wisdom. Meaning philosophy at best is about learning how to think—both logically/reasonably, and also humanely. It’s about learning to have the courage to ask and perhaps even to try to provisionally and tentatively and humbly even answer the big questions in life—why are we here? for how long? what happens after we die? why is there something rather than nothing? is there a God? and if so, what is he or she really like and what does he or she want out of me? how am I to live so that when I come to die (or when get a terminal diagnosis) I’m not filled with terror and fear, or I don’t look back on my life with regret, and realize that I have wasted my life out of fear and convention and servicing other’s expectations of me (just filling a role)?

Our lives are the way they are because of our personal philosophies—our beliefs and ideas about what is and is not worthwhile in this life, what will make us happy, and what we need to avoid or eschew in order to stay safe and content. And how thought-out and examined or unthought-out and unexamined these beliefs and ideas are.

Our lives are philosophy in action. Each of our lives is either the examined or unexamined life, the heroic and courageous or the avoidant and timid life in action. And thus as a whole or in parts it may well serve as a cautionary tale to the dangers or the excesses of one or the other way of life.

The Buddha said, “All we are is the result of what we think; with what we think we make a life.” Something along those lines.

There’s either the more or less examined life, or the more or less unexamined life; a life of learning and growth, or a life of fear and comfort and avoidance.

There’s really no neutrality in this.

There’s no avoiding this choice—try as some (or many) of us may.

Either we think and deal heroically with the pain that comes from thinking honestly and seeing life as it is; or we live thoughtlessly, forsaking thinking and the largest part of what makes us most fully human and potentially humane, and we try to pass as much of our fear and suffering and cowardice onto others and make them pay, in place of us, the cost of our living.

The Truth—Will it Set You Free or Will it Completely Fry Your Ass and Undo You?

Your life is the mirror of what you are. It is in your image. You are passive, blind, demanding. You take all, you accept all, without feeling any obligation. Your attitude toward the world and toward life is the attitude of one who has the right to make demands and to take, who has no need to pay or to earn. You believe that all things are due you, simply because it is you! All your blindness is there! Yet none of this strikes your attention.

None of this strikes your attention because you have no measure with which to measure yourself. You live exclusively according to “I like” or “I don’t like,” or “I feel like” or “I don’t feel like.” You have no appreciation except for yourself. You recognize nothing above you—theoretically, logically, perhaps, but in actuality no; you submit to nothing except your own desires and subjectivity. That is why you are demanding and continue to believe that everything is cheap and that you have enough in your pocket to buy everything you like. You recognize nothing above you, either outside yourself or inside. That is why you have no measure and live passively according your impulses and likes and dislikes.

Yes, this lack of appreciation for anything and anyone except for yourself blinds you. It is by far the biggest obstacle to a new life. You first must get over this threshold, this obstacle, before progressing even one step further. This crux alone is what divides human beings into two kinds: the “wheat” and the “chaff.” No matter how intelligent, how talented, how gifted, how brilliant a human being may be, if he does not change his appreciation of himself, there will be no hope for real inner development, for a work toward honest self-knowledge, for an awakening. He will remain such as he is now for his entire life.

The first requirement, the first condition, the first test for one who genuinely wishes to work on oneself is to change his appreciation of himself. And he must not do this theoretically—he must not imagine, not simply believe or think; rather he must do this in actuality: he must see things in himself which he has never seen before—which he has never had the nerve or courage to see before. And he must see them fully. A person’s appreciation of himself will never change as long as he or she sees nothing new and untoward in himself.

Today we have nothing but the illusion of what we are. We do not respect ourselves. In order to respect myself, I have to recognize a part in myself which is above the other parts. And my attitude toward this part should bear witness to the respect that I have for it. But so long as I treat all parts of myself equally, I think too highly of myself and I do not respect myself, and my relations with others will be governed by the same caprice and lack of respect.

In order to see oneself, one must first learn to see. This is the first initiation into genuine self-knowledge. In order to see ourselves realistically, we must see all the ways in which we habitually over-estimate and over-appreciate ourselves. But you will see that to do this is not easy. It is not cheap. You must pay dearly for this. For bad payers, lazy people, parasites, there is no hope. You must pay, pay a lot, pay immediately, and pay in advance. You must pay with yourself; you must pay with sincere, honest, conscientious, disinterested efforts. And the more you are willing and prepared to pay without economizing, without cutting corners, without cheating, without falsifications, the more you will receive. Because from that moment on you will become acquainted with your nature. You will begin seeing all of the tricks, all the dishonesties that your nature resorts to in order to avoid paying with real cash, real effort, real expenditure, real sacrifice, real cost to oneself. Because up till now, you like to cheat, you like to cut corners; you like to try and pay with your readymade theories, your convenient beliefs, your prejudices and conventions, your “I like” and “I don’t like”; you like to bargain, pretend, offer counterfeit money.

Objective thought is a look from Above. A look that is free, that can see. Without this look upon me, seeing me, my life is the life of a blind person who goes her own way, driven by impulse, not knowing either why or how. Without this look upon me, I cannot know that I exist.

I have within me the power to rise above myself and to see myself freely—and to be seen. My thinking has the power to be free.

But for this to take place, my thinking must rid itself of all of the garbage that holds it captive, passive, unfree. My thinking must free itself from the constant pull of emotions. My thinking must feel its own power to resist this pull—its objective capacity to separate itself and watch over this pull while gradually rising above it. For it is in this moment that thought first becomes active. It becomes active while purifying itself.

If we cannot do this—if we refuse to do this—our thoughts are just illusions, something that further enslaves us, that we use to numb and avoid ourselves, a snare in which real thought loses its power of objectivity and intentional action. Confused by words, images, half-truths, fantasies, falsehoods, it loses the capacity to see. It loses the sense of “I”. Then nothing remains but an organism adrift, a body deprived of intelligence and seduced by any- and everything, and wholly at the mercy of “I like” and “I don’t like.” Without this inner look, without this inner seeing, I can only fall back into automatism, and live under the law of accident and nature.

And so my struggle is a struggle against the passivity of ordinary thinking, being seduced and led astray and obliterated by it. Without struggling against ordinary thought, a greater consciousness will not be born. At the heart of this struggle—to create order out of chaos—a hierarchy is revealed—two levels, two worlds. As long as there is only one level, one world, there can be no vision. Recognition of another and higher level is the awakening of thought.

Without this effort, without this struggle, thought falls back into a sleep filled with seductive and consoling words, images, preconceived notions, approximate knowledge, dreams, fantasies, and perpetual drifting. This is the thought of a person without any real intelligence. It is a terrible thing to realize that one has been living for years without any intelligence, without a level of thinking that sees what is real, with thinking that is without any relation to the real world. It is a terrible waste to think this way.

But without realizing this—without realizing that perhaps one has been thinking for years without intelligence—there is no hope for awakening.

Try just for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life. And that this lying rules you to such an extent that you cannot control it any more. You are the prey of lying. You lie, everywhere. Your relations with others—lies. The upbringing you give, the conventions—lies. Your teaching—lies. Your theories and art—lies. Your social life, your family life—lies. And what you think of yourself—lies also.

But you never stop yourself in what you are doing or in what you are saying because you believe in yourself. You never doubt or suspect yourself. You must stop inwardly and observe. Observe without preconceptions, accepting for a time this idea of lying. And if you observe in this way, paying with yourself, without self-pity, giving up all your supposed riches for a moment of reality, perhaps you will suddenly see something you have never before seen in yourself until this day. You will see that you are different from what you think you are. You will see that you are two. One who is not, but takes the place and plays the role of the other. And one who is, yet so weak, so insubstantial, that he no sooner appears than he immediately disappears. He cannot endure lies. The least lie makes him faint away. He does not struggle, he does not resist, he is defeated in advance. Learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born. You will finally be born.

– Jeanne de Salzmann, abridged and adapted and at points modified from “Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teachings,” pp. 2-6.

We MUST Choose, Part 2: Conscience and Reality and the Dark Side of Daydreaming and Fantasy

We MUST Choose, Part 2: Conscience and Reality and the Dark Side of Daydreaming and Fantasy

The opposite of sanity is insanity.  The opposite of truth is falsehood, which includes self-deception, lying, half-truths, rationalizations, denial, scapegoating, transference, projection, i.e. the vast majority of our defense mechanisms. 

Truth—insight, self-knowledge, greater self-awareness, clarity—though perhaps very painful at first, will not only (eventually) make us free, it will make us sane, because the more we lie to ourselves and others and avoid reality, then the more mentally unhealthy or less sane we are.

Thus one of the best ways to become healthier and more sane, decent, and loving, is by beginning to nurture our conscience and to focus on developing our character and our reality principle (three very interrelated things).

Because one of the other marks of not very healthy or decent people is that they really don’t have a healthy and functioning conscience—or the conscience they have is very twisted and malignant—meaning, their sense of right and wrong is very twisted and subjective and not open to any real investigation and or scrutiny (what they say goes, just because they think or feel it, and without any real discussion or deliberation).  And thus they are able to freely warp and spin things and lie to themselves and con themselves into believing at some level that their maladaptive (bad) behavior is actually secretly really good or decent or noble.  (This is one of the things about mentally unwell people—they love their secrets and abhor accountability and transparency and honesty.  In order to maintain their self—their sick self and current level of mental unhealth—they need to live in the dark and avoid the light—the light of disclosure, openness, transparency, scrutiny, feedback, and critical thinking, questioning.)   What bad people and not very good people and unhealthy people share is that they are just not that dedicated to truth or reality—which is a large part of why their conscience continues to be skewed and warped, and which is why they prefer alternate fictional fantasy pseudo-realities to the real world—often elaborate fantasy worlds replete with intricate yet absurd and irrational metaphysics and beliefs.  They prefer to exist in these fantasy worlds because at some level they find the real world too demanding, difficult, stressful, painful, complicated.  The real world terrifies them, stresses them out, makes them anxious, makes them feel too vulnerable, makes them feel out of control, insecure, exposed, inadequate, inferior, insubstantial, without purpose or meaning.  The real world is not meeting their basic needs—their needs for survival, esteem, uniqueness/specialness, love, belonging, safety, security, meaning, purpose—and so they are faced with a choice—the choice to grow and become stronger and attune themselves and their thinking and their conscience to reality and to truth, or escape into denial and fantasy and in doing continue doing damage to their psyche/soul. 

And the vast majority of people opt for some degree of the latter—always have, and still are doing so. When reality becomes too painful or too demanding it is denied or otherwise avoided.

And the less mentally healthy and the more neurotic and less sane they or we are, the more we/they will opt for this solution—opt for escaping into a world of fantasy and unreality instead of attuning ourselves to reality—in order to survive and self-preservate. 

“I believe that the root of evil, in everybody perhaps, but certainly in those whom affliction has touched and above all if the affliction is [psychological], is day-dreaming. It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted; the only solace to help them bear the fearful burden of time; and a very innocent one, besides being indispensable. So how could it be possible to renounce it? It has only one disadvantage, which is that it is unreal. To renounce it for the love of truth is really to abandon all one’s possessions in a mad excess of love and to follow him who is the personification of Truth. And it is really to bear the cross.

“[I]t is necessary to recognize day-dreaming for what it is. And even while one is sustained by it one must never forget for a moment that in all its forms—those that seem most inoffensive by their childishness, those that seem most respectable by their seriousness and their connection with art or love or friendship—in all its forms without exception, it is falsehood. It excludes love.  And only love is real.”

– Simone Weil, from “The Simone Weil Reader, “ Letter to Joe Bousquet“, pg.90

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” – John Kenneth Galbraith, “Economics, Peace and Laughter” (1971), p. 50.

And this proof is often an escape into some alternate fantasy world/universe.  The proof that there’s no need to change one’s mind or to grow and mature psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, comes in the form of the false-growth of conspiracy theories and concocting elaborate new agey fantasy worlds to inhabit with one’s mind and to believe in.  And for the sake of these false-realities and in the name of these elaborate fantasy worlds—in the name of helping to build some imaginary fantasy utopia—all sorts of bad and even evil things can be perpetrated and rationalized (rational lies) away.

Why do sane people allow themselves to be duped like this—by their own least healthy thinking, by what’s weakest and worst in themselves?  Why do they actually opt to dupe themselves in this way and cooperate in pulling the wool over their own eyes?

Because of all of the pain, difficulty, suffering, complexity, and stress, of life in the real world—meaning the full intensity of life, the full intensity of truth and reality and the demands that true mental health and growth require and would make on us—and all of the ego-threatening negative and anxious feelings they (which is to say that many of us) are hoping to avoid and evade.

And because what’s best in them—their conscience, their reality principle, their inner truth-detector, their character, their core self, their capacity for reasoning and for looking at things (especially themselves and their own behavior!) fairly and objectively and impartially—is so weak, so malnourished and underdeveloped, that it doesn’t offer much in the way of protest or defense or objection (dialectical thinking), or its objections and protestations cannot be heard above and distinguished from of all of the internal blather and incessant inner chattiness and discursive thinking.  Their conscience is just a fleeting, unidentifiable voice or very occasional strand in their discursive, unorganized inner monologue.  They may have a very healthy or noble or sane thought here and there, but because there is so much falsity also zipping through and monopolizing their inner monologue, they no longer really notice it or pay attention to it.  It’s in one inner ear and out the other and quickly followed by something that is less demanding, less truthful, and makes them feel better, happier, or is more familiar, even if it is unhealthy and discursive and unrealistic.   

The Buddha said that most people’s eyes are so caked shut with the dust of denial and self-deception that they will never be able to awaken or grow.  Most people’s thinking—their inner monologue—is so cluttered with falsehoods, unexamined thoughts, escapist thoughts—that there’s no hope for them to ever wake up from that degree of sleepwalking or inner shame and denial.

We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts we make the world
Speak or act with an impure mind, and trouble will follow you, as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart
We are what we think
All that we are arises with our thoughts
With our thoughts we make the world
Speak or act with a pure mind, and Happiness will follow you, as your shadow, unshakable
How can a troubled mind understand the way?
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded and unexamined
But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.

– Buddha

Slowing down and really paying attention to and examining our own thoughts and thinking and really listening to what we’re saying to ourselves (the deeper implications, the underlying assumptions in our thoughts, the escapist/avoidant/self-numbing tendencies that are likely rife in it, et cetera) is one way of trying to break the cycle of mental unhealth.  (Why would anyone want to do that though!? Especially when it is paying off in some way for a person. . . . ) And consciously beginning to try to see at least two points of view with our own thinking—to begin thinking more dialectically and scientifically and logically—in terms of thesis on the one hand, and antithesis or what would disprove our thinking or prove it to be fallacious, on the other hand—and to begin playing devil’s (or God’s) advocate with our own pet theories and fantasies and start trying to see the other and less ego-flattering and more difficult to emotionally stomach side of things is another way of kick-starting our journey to sanity and mental health.

Peck defined mental health as “an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs” (“The Road Less Traveled,” pg. 51), meaning that in order to get healthy psychologically and truly grow we must start choosing truth over our own comfort, waking up over a comfortable life, the difficult rights over easy wrongs, reality over fantasy and daydreaming and other forms of escapism, and that we must doing so ever more consistently and heroically. 

Only truly mentally healthy individuals—or those truly on the path—can or will dare to do this.

Those of us who are not very healthy (and those of us with a lot of internal pain and wounds we’re trying to avoid dealing with and facing [because of shame]) will spend much of our free time avoiding reality instead of facing it.  And the more we do this, the more we make ourselves sick, or if you will, psychologically out of shape and gluttonous—it’s like doing to the mind what a steady diet of fantasy—cheeseburgers, chocolate, potato chips, fast food, French fried, friend foods, Twinkies, and a lot of time on the couch in front of the TV and no exercise—does to the body. 

Again, there’s no neutrality in life.  We must choose our allegiance—to one side or the other—to either growth and mental health and truth and reality, which apparently will set us free; or stagnation and regression and escape and avoidance—i.e. falsehoods, denial, self-deception, discursive thinking, the unexamined life, excessive daydreaming—which will put us more and more to sleep and make us less healthy, less sane, less fit for life, less good, less loving, and eventually may even seal our fate, damning us, making us unredeemable.

We must choose: sanity or insanity, truth or lies, mental health or pathology, growth or comfort, growth or familiarity, what’s best for us v what tastes/feels good right now.

There is no middle road in this; there may be a middle road once we choose one side or the other, but there is no middle road or balanced way beforehand.  There may be, and likely is, a way where we exercise our mind, stretch ourselves, and then gives ourselves some time to recover and lock in those gains, before once again stretching ourselves, growing, taking on more truth and reality, but doing so little by little, as we would if we were working out and slowly adding more weight or resistance to our work outs over the course of weeks, while cutting back on the fatty escapist comfort foods and not watching as many escapist TV shows, et cetera.

We MUST Choose

We MUST Choose

“This above all: to thine own self be true.” – Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

Yes, but what part of thine own self to be true to?  What’s best in oneself?  Or what’s less—sometimes even much much less—than best in one’s self?

“For human beings, there is a possibility of making a choice of influences; in other words, of passing from one influence to another.  It is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another.  All work on oneself consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and then actually falling under the influence of or submitting wholly to this influence.” – G. I. Gurdjieff, quoted in P. D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” pg. 25.

There’s no neutrality in life. 

There are only two possible states of being, two ways of orientating ourselves. 

One is complete submission to God or to God’s will or influence, the influence of the Tao, the Dharma, Truth, goodness, virtue, Love.

And the other is incomplete submission—or the refusal to truly submit ourselves—to anything, to any influence, beyond our own will—beyond our own narcissism and our own scattered disorganized impulses, desires, and feelings—a refusal which automatically opens the door to the forces of evil. 

Because at every moment we ultimately belong to either God or the devil, to good or evil, to one influence or the other.  Paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch around us and every split second of our lives is up for grabs, to be claimed by God or the devil, and to be claimed by us for either God or for the devil.” 

And to attempt to avoid this dilemma by trying to stand exactly halfway between the two—halfway between God and the devil, uncommitted to either—to either goodness or utter selfishness—is to risk being torn apart and split forever into two beings, to become a house divided, permanently at war with ourselves, vacillating forever between two influences, forever fighting ourselves, fighting within ourselves, and having that infighting spill out of us into the lives of those around us.  Because, ultimately, even trying to choose not to choose and to not align ourselves with one influence or the other is still to choose, it is still to choose not to submit to anything beyond the self, beyond one’s own will and wants.  

Christ expressed this paradox when he said: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25).  

Yes, we are always free to choose, but ultimately we are free only in this sense: in the sense of choosing which influence, which form of enslavement, we ultimately will submit to: God’s or the self’s, God’s will and influence or ultimately nothing more than our own; what’s best and highest and noblest in us or a free-for-all where we give into and submit to any impulse or desire that occurs to us.  

We must choose: —One form of enslavement or the other. (The previous eight paragraphs were abridged and adapted and elaborated on from M. Scott Peck’s “Glimpses of The Devil,” pg. xvi)

And most people do not so much choose their form of enslavement as they just go along with what happens to them and what feels natural without questioning much, without really thinking much or examining themselves and searching out their own heart and mind and conscience and paying much consistent attention to themselves and what path they’re really on and why.

This is our fundamental choice in life and to make each day and at every moment—who and what to live for and why?  To live on the autopilot of emotions and impulses and desires and wants and pet ego-projects and whatever gets us through the day and anesthetizes us, numbs us, titillates us, distracts us, momentarily makes us drunk*; or to live more mindfully, more deliberately, with more grace and composure and perspective and order?  To live for ourselves and nothing greater or more than the self and our ego and aggrandizement and survival (narcissism); or to live for something more, something that transcends the self—some ideal, principle, path or way (Tao), some force or Spirit—God, Love, Truth? 

Again, there’s no neutrality in life. Every day, in every moment, and with every choice we make—of what to do with ourselves in that moment, with how to spend that moment—we are declaring our allegiance and we are doing something to ourselves . . .

 

“[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.

“And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.

“To be the one kind of creature is heaven: That is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power.

“To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.

“Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.” – C. S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity,” pg. 87

 ——————————————————————-

 

* “There are thousands of wines
that can take over our minds.
Don’t think all highs are the same!
Drink from the jars of saints,
not from other jars.
Be a connoisseur,
taste with caution,
discriminate like a prince.
Any wine will get you high;
choose the purest,
one unadulterated with fear.
Drink a wine that moves your spirit.
– Rumi

Growth, Change, & Death

What will it take for you to change and grow?—for you to become what God or the gods intended?  What will it take for you to manifest what is godly or divine-like in you and to live from that place?  For example, immature people, as well as bad people, do not know how to take good care of the things in their life.  They don’t know how to be “responsible”; they do not know how to love and care for what life gives them (or brings into their life) that is good and decent.  They are too invested in their pathology or immaturity and laziness to change.  They are too use to always taking the path of least resistance and or having things handed to them (again and again). 

So how does a person like that “change their stripes”? 

God’s Grace?  Luck?  A teacher or guru?  A book? . . .

Most of us are born this way—in a fallen or “less than” state—as cute and cuddly and smiling as we are, we’re also born with the tendency to be irresponsible, selfish, lazy, to take without asking, to whine and complain and blame and lie, to be exploitive; many (most?) of us seem to come into this life without a work ethic, acting like the world owes us, as if the world was made just for us and revolves us and our wants and impulses—no discipline, no giving back, no real charitable impulses.  Paraphrasing the movie “Shadowlands”—Most of us “think our childish toys will bring us all the happiness there is and that our nursery is the whole wide world.”  This tendency or possibility is what seems to be within all of us.  In fact, the tendency to be either good or bad, to awaken or to sleepwalk through life, to manifest virtue and compassion and psychological health and great mindfulness or to manifest disorder, selfishness, impulsiveness, greed, thoughtlessness seems to be possible within each of us, and it’s up to our environment, especially our parents, to determine what we will become.  This is what immature and emotionally/psychologically stunted people manifest—immaturity, selfishness, chaos, confusion, greed, grubbiness, pettiness—this is how they act; and it’s also what bad people do.  Immature people and bad people set fire to the world around them—they exploit, manipulate, lie, confuse, use—they exploit the world and use those around them—they treat those around them as props, not as real fellow human beings just like themselves and deserving the same consideration and care as themselves, but as props—props in their own personal sick dysfunctional psychodramas and unconscious patterns.  No personal responsibility.  No real care or concern.  Just the self-centeredness of looking out for number one.  Just “me first, everyone else a distant second—unless I want/need something from you and you might serve my pet ego projects or suffice as a pleasant distraction for a while.”  But no real love.  No real affection.  No real giving.  Just a long trail/pattern of exploitation, using, lying, deceiving. 

And Gurdjieff knew this.  He knew it well.

Which is why he had “Only he who can take care of what belongs to others may have his own” inscribed high up on the walls of his study house—his dojo—the place where his students would travel to from all corners of the world in order to try to awaken.  Waking up—real change and growth—was not possible for those who were irresponsible, exploitative, self-centered, lazy, without a work ethic—those who were bent on drugging themselves (anesthetizing and numbing and distracting and dissipating themselves) on silly books, TV, frivolous soulless relationships (Gurdjieff knew that the interpersonal was the ground and the path, and that there could be no separation).

Gurdjieff had looked into the heart of man.  He knew that most people we exploitative and irresponsible and had been raised by people who were the same, and who themselves had been raised by some version of the same, et cetera.  He knew what we was up against—how difficult it is to teach irresponsible and exploitative and poorly-parented people to actually have a work ethic, to wake up from their sleep of unawareness and running on the botched and chaotic programming of their upbringing and their innate selfish and impulsive and reactive and avoidant tendencies.  Gurdjieff knew how extraordinarily difficult it is to re-parent people and help them overcome both their nature and nurture.  Gurdjieff knew very well how “effed for life” most people were.

And he knew how difficult it would be for them to wake up and for him to help them in that—for all of his learning and sagely advice not just to be water down their lovely little dysfunctional drains.  He knew that deep down the vast majority of people were not going to be loyal to him or his teaching or “The Dharma” or whatever you wish to call it, but rather were going to be most loyal to what is most familiar to them—that that would be “home” to them—no matter how dysfunctional or toxic or twisted that original home was.  It would still be home to them.  And getting them to leave home—i.e. grow up and leave those dysfunctional parts of themselves—would be a severely arduous and uphill battle. 

Gurdjieff knew the deep meaning of these words of Jesus—“If anyone comes to me without hating his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—and even his own life—he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).  That without this level of deep dissatisfaction with oneself and one’s life and what one grew up in, there could be no real openness for something new and healthy—that whatever Jesus had to say, whatever Gurdjieff had to say, whatever any great spiritual sage or teacher would have to say, would just be water down the drain and be drowned out by all of their listener’s pathology, faulty and warped programming and upbringing, closed and frightened heart and mind.  Gurdjieff, like Jesus—and like Fromm— knew that most people never really leave home and break what Fromm described as the incestuous psychological and limbic ties to family and what is familiar and what they grew up with.

Moreover, Gurdjieff knew, like M. Scott Peck (see “People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil” pp. 138-149—“The Case of Spider Phobia” [The case of Billie]) that most people were destined/doomed to become modern day Maguas (“The Last of the Mohicans”)—an imitation of what had twisted them—that they would, even in spite of themselves and their best intentions (if they had these), twist themselves even more fully into the shape of what had first twisted them and becoming living monuments to those who first and most deeply wounded them.

Gurdjieff knew that waking up from all of this dysfunction and conditioning and pathology as well as innate narcissism and immaturity would be for most a fate worse than death, because for most people it would be a death—the death of so many parts of themselves, the death of their ego, the death of their personality, their first self—which most people are attached to neurotically, pathologically, “egosyntonically”—meaning even if that self is pathological, sick, wounded. 

“Human beings are attached to everything in this life; attached to their imagination, attached to their stupidity, attached to their fears, attached even to their own suffering—and possibly to their own suffering more than anything else.  A person must first free himself from attachment.  Attachment to things, identification with things, keeps alive a thousand false I’s in a person.  These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born.  But how can they be made to die?  They do not want to die.” (Gurdjieff, quoted in P. D. Ouspensky’s “In Search of the Miraculous,” pg. 218)

Changing oneself is the last thing people will willing do.  It’s a case where cure that is worse than the disease.   Most need the threat of execution, the threat of imminent and painful death, before they will get serious about “changing their ways.”  Most people would sooner live in the squalor of their own disease and amputate themselves from everything and everyone around them, even family, even children, than face and deal with themselves and make some real changes inside the self and to their patterns of thinking and perceiving and reacting.  Most are hoarders when it comes to the immature and dysfunctional parts of their psyche—and they are not going to give up these parts without a fight—without kicking and screaming and firing off all of their many defenses frequently and grandly and throwing others under the bus, et cetera.  Most people would simply rather hack away idiotically and self-centeredly at the branches all around them and prune this and that and try to make their pathology livable (“Each human being must keep alight within him the sacred flame of madness. And must behave like a normal person.” – Paulo Coelho) or even gussy it up a bit and make their dysfunctional patterns and tendencies look like some sort of Bonsai tree than get busy hacking away at the roots and really start growing up and become who and what they were intended to be, and to do so passionately and joyfully. (As Gurdjieff wrote, “The energy spent on active inner work is then and there transformed into a fresh supply, but that spent passive work and distraction is lost forever.”  And M. Scott Peck speaks in his books how therapy becomes a joy and even sometimes playful when the patient [disciple] allows him or herself to become open and trusting and vulnerable [pregnable] to the therapist; it’s then that the real work of healing and growing begins in earnest and the preliminary work of getting [seducing] the patient to this point is over. [See “People of the Lie” pp. 158-9 and “The Road Less Traveled” pg. 55.])

Which is why Gurdjieff eventually become quick to cut to the chase and put things in no uncertain terms

“The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant into their presences a new organ of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can destroy the egoism that is now completely crystallized in them.” – G. I. Gurdjieff

He didn’t say one way, he said the sole way, the only way.  This is his ax for the frozen sea within us, strictest attention-getting, whack us with a sledgehammer, in your face, cut to the chase, no bs equivalent of Luke 14:26.  If you really want to change, you have to know, not think, but know, feel viscerally, emotionally, in a white-hot terrifying searing way, that you—and all the people you love, and all your pet ego- and immortality-projects, and all of the pet rats you keep (a reference to an episode of “Hoarders”— http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsITgqGQgj4)—are going to die, and that there’s no getting around this, that death is certain, that loss is certain, and you and your little groveling pathetic inner control freak cannot do thing one to change it—not will all of your bs, escapist reading, self-numbing, et cetera.  There’s no place for you to run or hide.  You will die; someday you and all those you love will play out that scene, and so what are you doing right here and now to prepare for that—for that greatest of partings?  “Only he who has freed himself of the disease of ‘tomorrow’ has a chance to attain what he came here for” (Gurdjieff), and “the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment.  But first you must learn how to keep it in mind” (also Gurdjieff).

There’s no real change, no real growth, possible for us without facing our own mortality and really feeling now what it will feel like some day when we’re told we only have a week or months to live, or that, God forbid, one our children or a parent has died.

Otherwise we’re just wasting time.

As Augustine put it, “It is only in the face of death that man’s (true) self is born.”

Short of this level of honest and open relationship with our own mortality, we’re living the false life of a false self.

The Last Taboo—Thinking Honestly and Deeply About Oneself and One’s Life

We arrive here with few clues as to where we came from, and even fewer clues as to where we’re headed.  Our time here on earth is but a fleeting tiny little stopover; the only certainty before us is death.   Whether we claim to be religious or nonreligious matters little.  I think what matters more, much much more, is the extent to which we have reflected on our lives and acted upon the fruits of those reflections with sincerity, commitment and courage.

Dealing directly with philosophic and religious issues of death and dying and the meaning of life brings us face to face with what may be the last and greatest taboo of American life.  These subjects are seldom the topic of conversation at the typical American dinner party, or even in intimate discussions among friends, where people are much more likely to focus on work, family problems, the economic and political issues of the day.  Discussions about moral and spiritual questions are seldom encouraged; and if you do bring them up, you run the risk of offending your host or putting off people.

This aversion to spiritual and existential matters makes sense.  We want answers, not problems; and we certainly do not want uncertainties.  And I think we realize—even if perhaps only subconsciously—that when dealing honestly with spiritual and moral questions we are dealing in mysteries, the insolubility of which we find deeply discomforting and unsettling.

And much of what we call daily American life is about this discomfort and the manifold ways we seek to deny or avoid it—a problem that is further magnified by the many subtle and not so subtle ways that our capitalistic advertising-driven society discourages reflection in order to promote impulsivity and spending and encourage consumption.   As Roy Walsh, a psychiatry professor in San Francisco, put it—

“[Y]ou can see that basically our lives are, to a large extent, spent in avoiding confrontation with ourselves. And then you can begin to make sense of the enormous amount of our culture’s daily activities that attempt to distract us from ourselves, from deep reflection, from deep thinking, from existential confrontation. There’s a wonderful phrase by the philosopher Kierkegaard, ‘tranquilization by the trivial.’ And I think our culture has mastered this better than any culture in history, simply because we have the wealth and means to do so.”

(Abridged and adapted from Phillip L. Berman, “The Search For Meaning,” pp. 5-6)