It Is What It Is So Just Be Who You Really Are

When I think about art or other creative projects I sometimes think that it's useless. My wife, June, in contrast, has no problem being recognized. We are both good artists but her work sells my work does not, her words are listened to and my words not so much. We waste a lot of energy comparing ourselves to others not because we do it--for that is normal, but because we want our own selves to be somehow different. We are, in short, arguing with reality. Each of us has a different role that we often have a hard time identifying because our minds are filled with some other person's gifts or tendencies. I have begun to compare myself to others and see it now as a partnership--even to people I don't know. We each have our own gifts and we can't discover them or use them unless we relax our expectations and allow ourselves to be who we are. We can be who we are by giving ourselves room to make bad choices because, then, our bad choices always turn into good choices when we are aware of those choices, that we see what went wrong in that choice. In fact that "wrong" choice will enable you to see, with more clarity, the right choice for you. By continually being open to who you are and not focusing on your conditioning, or what idea you may have about yourself or how you ought to be, you find your path suddenly clearing up. 

It's certainly better to start young in this and I think this sort of training needs to be part of any school curriculum. I don't want to say that who we have been or how young people were trained in the past was wrong or mistaken--and this important. We are as we are because of our collective and individual past. We can't cut ourselves off from our history, our families, or the history of our civilization. We are deeply rooted in all that. We are the current "now" expression of all of that. And each of us has a role of some kind in that tapestry of past and future lives. 

One of the problems we face, collectively, is we misunderstand the nature of the universe. This period of history where the old patterns of thinking, the mythological frameworks, have changed drastically, cannot fail to be experienced as confusing. We can't know who we are without some kind of context. So the source of identity is and must revolve from the inside out rather that from the outside in. Our job is to find ourselves by digging deeper inside ourselves rather than looking to the outside world to find meaning. It was perfectly good to see what society needs and then fit ourselves to that need but because "society" is so unstable and confusing in terms of values, it is giving mixed messages that cause stress in our bodies, our emotions and in our minds. In a sense we have no choice than to become mystics. Indeed the leap we must make can only be made where we start from clearly perceiving who we are on the inside. I've been through this before, but all you have to think about is the situation of our world--a world that seems out of wack. We have achieved great technological and scientific advances yet we are not happier we are actually more stressed and unhappy because our lives have just become more complicated. We are facing some serious existential problems. Aside from having world annihilation staring us in the face for almost three-quarters of a century we are currently running some rather startling environmental risks and not just through climate change. If we continue as we have, and we show no outward sign of changing in our country at least, we could start experiencing some even more profound and physically dangerous situations in the next few years if predictions I've seen come true. How in the world are we going to meet these and other challenges if we just live lives of going along to get along. That time is over because we are in crisis. We can see the cultural poison, the vitriol, violence, and other forms of coercion. Our mood seems angry on the surface but we are hurt, fearful, and sad underneath as the eruption of legal and illegal drugs have shown us. We live in a country where it is very hard to cooperate with each other and many of us feel isolated and alienated from each other and even life itself.

Those who feel this call to the inner life are reacting in a healthy way to the discomfort of this time in history. There are many ways to go to the more authentic part of ourselves that lie in the depths of, usually, of our unconscious--that's where the gold is and has always been. But for most of human history we could safely avoid that and live our lives based on external influences. There was no necessity to wake-up to a deeper reality because we were never that far from the depths. 

As have become more confident of my interest in the depth I find I am no longer fighting reality or arguing against it--at least not to the degree I was. I felt ashamed at my interests in going within, in having visions, in my intense spiritual feelings and inspirations. I wanted to be like everyone else and not as sensitive. I hardened my heart to fit in. I toughened up somewhat but the part of me that was more authentic easily sabotaged my efforts to be "normal." But I now see that my sensitivity was so very much important and I regret, deeply, not allowing it to develop more fully. As I open up and allow my authentic self to emerge and integrate or process the parts of me that were more fragmented and inauthentic the world itself seems to unfold not as a static concept but a living being. For our science is also pointing to a reality where everything is alive there is no such thing as inert matter and the conceptual and sensory dimension we live inside is not all there is. We live, in fact, in a multi-dimensional reality or "multi-verse" where even past, present, and future can co-mingle or at least something very much like it. Otherwise we could not even begin to explain the reality experienced by human beings. Whether it is the existence of altered states of consciousness, magic, "aliens", spirits, fairies, sprites, angels, demons, succubi or the existence of spontaneous combustion or a rain of frogs and all the other "impossible" things people have experienced, reality is not limited to what the authorities say it is. They describe reality in ways that work for them by helping them control our states of consciousness.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality" comes from T.S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton" and it says much of what we need to know. We seek mythological frameworks first and only those facts that fit within that framework. Why? Because frameworks are a requirement for human life. All cultures have them and they are a requirement for human life and for our civilization. As a practical matter frameworks exist so that we can get on with our lives so we don't have to occupy ourselves with philosophical pursuits or long periods of contemplation about the meaning of life in the middle of trying to make a living, raising kids, to keep and establish relationships. Human beings, correctly, expect society to have sane frameworks just as we expect a solid house so we don't have to worry every time there is a storm the house will collapse or that the plumbing will go haywire at any time. Mythological frameworks are our conceptual houses that, I believe, are even more important than physical houses. We live at a time when mythological frameworks have broken down or no longer work for the lives we live. Some people can easily move from one framework to the other if their original one had room to grow. But on average our frameworks from the past have been strained to the maximum. Many of us our faced with deeply contradictory values. For example some parts of our society tell teens that they should have sex as almost an initiation process--others say we shouldn't have sex and if we do we shouldn't have it with a lot of people. Some say it's ok to like members of the same sex, other people say we shouldn't and so on. Some say we should focus on making money, others say that there are higher virtues but aren't clear about what they are. Our society rewards, selfishness and "winning" and punishes compassion and "losing." At the same time, what many of us accept as a major source of information about the world, science actually has come to the tentative conclusion that that sort of culture is deeply and hopelessly going to lead to disaster. We have discovered the general parameters of what makes people happy, what makes society and cooperation work well and our way of life almost completely continues to move in the opposite direction.

Recently, I posted something about the fact that money is what people pursue and value over other values by pointing out that in our society money is, for most people, the final arbiter of all moral value. Of course, almost nobody will admit that because it violates other moral ideas but, where the rubber meets the road and when push comes to shove the choice is always to make more rather than less money even if it stresses us out and we justify it to ourselves and others. Corporations, the institutions on top of our social pyramid make their decisions almost always on the basis of money whether it is sacrificing money today to make money tomorrow or whether they decide to squeeze all of the money out of their market, their company that they can and the Devil take the hindmost.

As I've written often, because we have competing and often contradictory moral values two things have happened. The first I mentioned about--money becomes, by default our ultimate value--we may sense that there are other more important values but we're not sure. Money has the benefit of being tangible--it is something you can put in your hand to ultimately change the reality you live within so it is hard to argue with. The second response to our dilemma is the increase of fantasies. We spend a lot of time with fantasy worlds created by fiction writers, TV shows, movies, all which move us into an imaginary world that may or may not have anything to do with our world but, increasingly, are completely divorced from our world and the realities we face. Fantasy is useful to paper over contradictions, a hard to locate synthesis, feelings of being uncomfortable emotionally and morally with our lives and so on and of course money can buy is ever more realistic fantasies. We can move from the screen to fly-off to a fantasy destination and stay in a hotel with all the conveniences we can imagine or to hire service workers to give us the feeling of being valued. We can get a massage, we can hire a sex-worker, we can eat great and interesting food, good wine, and friends will naturally be drawn to us often on the basis of the money we have even if we are obnoxious or socially tongue-tied. 

We could say, and not be so far off, that we live for money to buy fantasies. For example, people often say, they want to "make" memories like fulfilling bucket lists, visiting places, taking pictures of those places to live inside some memories for some future time. When that future time comes, the memory of doing something really interesting somehow provides continual relief from what? Well, from the undesirable moment. It is the moment we live in now that gives us meaning, that makes us feel good without any need for memory, money, status, and it does not require a fantasy of any kind. If we look closely at what is directly in front of us in this moment now--there is always enough as long as we are fully present and not thinking about the future or the past. This idea is part of what we could call "the perennial philosophy" for it is present in most great mystical traditions across cultures and has recently become more well-known through the work of teachers like Eckhart Tolle and many, many others who say basically the same thing with various degrees of sincerity. 

And here is where we stop. And here is where we begin.