This afternoon, a friend reminded me of the great spiritual principle, "Have no preference." Walk through the world and your life without desiring this or that, labeling good or bad, running away or running toward. Surrender all evaluating and judging. Be only a neutral filter of experience.
I understand no preference as something different from acceptance. Acceptance is what I come to after the fact; it's the step beyond experience when I process what has happened. Inevitably I label it as bad or hard and difficult and I work to find a way to be all right with it, with whatever happens no matter what.
But no preference is something I walk with in the moment. It's a constant state of presence. It isn't active or reactive; it's simply the membrane in my consciousness that lets the wind of experience flow through. Residing in no preference means it doesn't even occur to me to put labels on whatever happens in the world or inside me. All simply is.
I'm reminded of Emerson's transparent eyeball, something that doesn't reflect but absorbs. "...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
I like "absorb" instead of receive. To absorb is an action while to receive suggests passivity. I want to take everything in, to merge my consciousness with everything that is, to touch the universe free of my oh so very opinionated ego. In a sense, to have no preference is to have a mystical connection to experience, to exist in that vibrating state of intense clarity, to feel no separation between self and other.
Alas, I am rarely in that place of no preference. The dailiness of life is filled with choices and opinions. I couldn't get through if I didn't value or discount or judge experience as I go. But I often have a deep seated preference that gets me into trouble. I decide which way I want, even need things to go and if they don't I feel disappointed or rejected or inconsequential, some bad feeling that can be the start of a descent down a rabbit hole. I've come far enough to know that the way out of those bad feelings is to find acceptance of what is, and when I fully connect with it, bad feeling goes.
If I could live with no preference, so much of my pain in life would never exist in the first place. But I think the most I'll manage is a few moments of truly being a neutral filter. But I don't forget hose moments and they give me a goal, an ideal to aspire to. I know that it's the journey not the arrival that matters. It's the journey that makes me alive.
"Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay "Self- Reliance."
It isn't an easy thing - coming to trust myself. Years ago, when people said, "Just be yourself...trust yourself," I shuddered. The last thing I wanted was to be myself. My old conviction that I wasn't good enough, my fear of how I'd be seen in the world overwhelmed me.
That belief and fear produced a self-consciousness that inhibited me. I'd put myself out in the world and then retreat behind my eyes trying to assess what other people thought of me. Or I'd be afraid to speak and hate myself after for being intimidated. This happened often in small ways but every once in a while I'd stumble into a swamp and once again there was the old self-consciousness.
Once, I organized a panel with three speakers to talk about Los Angeles and the environment. I prepared an introduction, which seemed fine to me, but when it came to that evening, I left out something I had wanted to say. There was a familiar feeling in my body, as if a chasm had opened up inside me. I paused, only for a moment, introduced the first speaker, and after a few deep breaths I calmed down.
What I wanted to say about ecology in general: In Genesis in the Old Testament there is the story of the Tower of Babel. God punishes human kind; he scatters them over the earth and causes them to no longer speak one language but to speak many so that they can no longer understand each other. The reason he does so is because people have learned how to make bricks and think they will build a city and a tower up to the heavens"so that we will make a name for ourselves." God sees them and thinks if they do this, there is nothing that will be impossible for them. And so he stops them.
No one knows who wrote that part of Genesis, but what interests me is what the story reveals. There is a sense that learning to make bricks and using them to build cities and towns is in some way transgressive and subject to punishment. Even in very ancient times, there was an anxiety about what it means when humans alter the world.
That night at the panel I didn't tell this story and what I see in it because I was afraid that it wasn't cool, wasn't hip to mention the Bible. I was afraid that people would think I was a religious nut. And this even after I'd come deeply to admire what William James wrote: Whether you believe the Bible is the word of God or not, you can't doubt that it's the record of great-souled beings dealing with the crises in their lives.
It's ridiculous to me now to think about how intimidated I was. I didn't trust that what I found interesting could interest others. And why should I care what other people thought? The only thing of any importance is that I be true to myself.
When I remember who I was in the past, I try to be kind to myself. I remind myself that everyone has moments when they prevent themselves from saying what they think or doing something that might draw criticism. Other peoples' memories might be in different categories, over different things, but none of us is perfect. This is what it is to be human.
