STRUGGLING

"There are men who seem to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over."
     -- William James
             
I know which one I am and I sometimes wonder why it should be so. I know that everyone struggles with their own particular issues, but some days I feel no one struggles as much as I do and no one has made as little progress as I have. I shake my head and fear there are certain knots in me that will never be untied, that even as I go to the grave I'll be dealing with the same resistances and cravings and negative voices as when I first started out. On champagne days, I think that's a good thing - it tells me there's no end to the depth inside and no end to the work that always leads me to energy and surrender. But mostly I use the fact that I struggle as proof there's something wrong with me. I beat myself up for not being perfect, for being human. In other words, some days I accept my struggles and even relish them, while other days, maybe most days, I struggle with the fact that I struggle.
     Blaming myself for struggling is a way to keep me in the struggle, not making progress. Blame, shame, an anxious focus on self - they're bright shiny objects dangling in front of me, entrancing me, saying, "Dig in. Don't move. You know it's useless to hope so stay in this fog which requires nothing from you, never pushes you to take a risk and create the possibility of change." They keep me from even making an effort; they keep from willingness.
     I can see the process of change has at least two aspects for me. First, I need to get free of my usual culprits so that I am willing to try, and then I have to gather the courage to act. For someone like me, mostly on the wrong side of the pain-threshold, getting free enough to act is no easy thing. And I realize that's the aspect I most blame myself for, having to find a way to surrender shame, blame and self-loathing, even at this late date. Why haven't I banished them, or at least made them into a low wall I can easily step over? Why is my stuff this stuff?
     I've laid out an anatomy, a schematic of my struggle with struggling. These ideas are sometimes helpful but the fact is change never comes to me through rational thought or insight. It comes when something I can't grasp inside me shifts, when grace comes in and takes the veil off my eyes so that I feel new strength and clarity and see I'm in a different place. All the time I think I'll never escape blame, shame and self-loathing, wheels inside are turning; progress on my path is slowly being born. I become willing, ready to embrace my struggles and set free the energy to change.
   
   
   

SOME THOUGHTS FOR TODAY

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally toward whatever way they like.-- Lao Tzu

 Don't go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -- T.S. Eliot

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action. -- William James

We know what we are, but know not what we may be -- Shakespeare

TERMINAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

   The other day something reminded me of what I used to call my terminal self-consciousness. It was as if there was a camera in the ceiling recording my every move and I worried constantly about how I was doing. Sometimes, I felt I was lurking behind my eyes, looking out at everyone and everything, assessing. What did this person think of me? Was this the person I should be talking to, instead of someone else across the room? That person is wearing the wrong shoes so I should get away as fast as I can. 
     The camera in the ceiling, the lurking behind my eyes - nothing happened without my constant worry that I would be seen in the wrong way, or reveal something shameful, or be found wanting by the cool people, whoever they were. It was all about judgment, judging myself and all the rest of you. It was exhausting but I couldn't rest - judging others and being afraid others were judging me kept me very busy. 
     I couldn't be in my body and I couldn't be in the world. In that self-consciousness, I didn't see anything apart from myself. Everyone was an object that revolved around me. I didn't understand it was narcissism; how could I be narcissistic if I was afraid all the time and condemned just about everything I did? 
     I couldn't survive in that place. In a way, it was a matter of life and death - self-consciousness and its friend ambivalence would have taken me down, stripped my life of pleasure, enjoyment, the freedom to create. Desperation made me willing to surrender, just surrender all the anxiety, judgment and second-guessing. You take it, I said to the universe, because this is killing me.
     I can narrate some of the steps in my changing. Surrender created a sliver of space in which I began to understand that my terminal self-consciousness and reflexive judging weren't standing on anything solid; they were habits of thought, ephemeral patterns of behavior that were just passing across my vision. I saw that they weren't "reality," whatever that was, and there was at least the possibility that reality might be something different. Surrender, hope, willingness became my building blocks and their solidity gave the courage to untie the knots inside. A slow process began, one that's still going on, and I hope it will always go on because I will never come to the end of the possibilities of getting free.
     I can narrate the steps of this process, but I don't know why it came to me. It's not because I'm special or more deserving that anyone else. I can see that at every step I made the right choice, the one that would lead me on toward change, and I can see that I was willing to stay in the process, not matter how painful or frightening it was. But I don't feel I can take much credit. I didn't make something happen. Something happened to me.
     I was talking about grace this morning which William James defines as a sudden inrush of energy, energy that seems to come from outside us, beyond the confines of our consciousness. I have felt that energy many times and when it was most needed. The energy of grace has kept me moving on.

MAKE THE ANGELS WEEP

(The realization that none of us owns the truth) is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious and political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their peculiar ways...no one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
     William James in his essay, "What Makes A Life Significant." 

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

"Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves...But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea..." -- William James

Human history is filled with paradigm shifts, those insights that change forever our sense of who we are in the universe. The earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round. Humans are the result of eons of evolution. Time and space are relative. We have a sub-conscious.It seems impossible that another shift won't come along. The desire for discovery and insight, our burning need to know, is part of our DNA.

     I usually sneer at all the people walking around texting, talking on their phones, checking in. But lately I've been wondering if what I'm seeing is the beginning of the cosmic consciousness James is talking about. Most of the world is now connected, communities form almost instantly, everything travels by and through us. Maybe I shouldn't shake my head at the woman in the market who is choosing a tomato at the same time she's discussing a bus schedule with the person at the other end of the line or the man on the street who nearly runs me down because his head is bent low over his phone, at all the people who have grown up with social media and smart phones and have a need to be in constant touch. Maybe that need is the first sign of the birth of a single organic human consciousness, a vibrating net of points of light that are both individual and strung together. I'm thinking of a game theorist I read about somewhere. She talked about some of the problems humanity is facing and how it may be possible that if thousands of people turned on their computers and worked at a particular problem, they would together find an answer, one that may be greater than any one of them could achieve on her own. 

     Another way to look at human history is to see the slow march to valuing the individual, recognizing every individual's right to dignity - each person's freedom to create his own life, to know liberty and to pursue happiness. It's been such a long slog to any sense of individual dignity and there are so many examples of the ease with which collectivization slips into fascism. Well, none of us can see the future so I think I'll choose to be optimistic, despite everything I know about the dark side of the web and the problems we all face. Why not choose optimism. It certainly a more creative attitude than pessimism. 

     I'm sure all this is very old hat to futurists around the world. But I'm going to listen for the foghorns that sound between James's islands and the rustle of the trees' leaves as the wind blows through. Those are comforting sounds. They let me know I'm not alone.

PERCHINGS AND FLIGHTS

I have a story I tell myself.  It's the story of myself, the one on which I build my identity. "I'm the on who...." and "this is who I am, that is who I am. These are my beliefs, this is the group I belong to, I never....I always..." It seems silly to say, "Isn't amazing that I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning I know who I am?" But it is amazing, that from moment to moment, I carry forward everything I mean when I say "me." William James described what he called the stream of consciousness, the internal continuity of "me-ness."  He uses a wonderful metaphor of birds both in flight and perching - our conscious thoughts are the perchings but the flights, the connections, are always there, not rising to be known, but running beneath and unifying all that we mean by "self." "I" am the stream with all its eddies and whirlpools and still surfaces, always in the flow.
     It also sounds silly to say how amazed I am that I can have a new idea; I can revise and redefine who I feel I was and who I feel I am now and who I think I'll be in the future.  I can learn something new about myself, see things in a different way, have a lifetime of epiphanies. I am able to reflect on myself - I can change my mind.  That ability is the glory of consciousness, that ideas and opinions aren't set in stone but are part of the great stream that is always changing, never the same stream twice - such a simple thing, that I can come to see things differently.
     I know why I remind myself of all this.  This view of my reality tells me I can change, that I can bind up all the fragments and shards inside that I don't understand, and come to feel myself whole, brimming with energy from that stream, constantly moving, reveling in the flow.
     I need to keep reminding myself of the possibility of change. All of it ephemeral and also a solid rock to stand on.
   
   

FLEXIBLE AND STRONG

"Plasticity then, in the widest sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.  Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits."  -- William James

Substitute flexible, malleable for weak...plasticity, able to be shaped, molded, able to change. Not all at once, dramatically, but step by step, gradually so that equilibrium can be maintained. When it is you find yourself in a new place, acting in a new way.
     A slow transformation...I picture an old fashioned scales with suspended plates (or whatever they're  called) on either side. Add a weight and then another to one and slowly the plate that was high becomes low. There's a tipping point, a moment and it's elusive, impossible to discern. 
     The only physical exercise I genuinely like is walking uphill. I used to walk up one of canyon trails that begin where the pavement ends in Griffith Park.  This particular trail was steep for the first ten minutes or so.  When I first began walking up, I'd stop after those ten minutes, out of breath, my muscles sore.  
     One day, I found myself feeling bad because I stopped. It seemed like a wimpy thing to do. Nonetheless, I continued stopping but day by day the bad feeling deepened, the sense that I was letting myself down. You know what comes next - a day came when as I took my first steps I said to myself -- no stopping.  If it kills you, you're going straight to the top. Reader, I did.
     I think about that walking very often because I see in it the slow transformation of self.  For a while, I choose to stay put rather than take the risk of changing. But slowly wheels turn inside, the scales tip, the line is crossed. I realize I can't stand the pain of staying put and I take the risk of change.
     I no longer wish I could will myself across that line. I no longer believe that if only I could find the right words, ask the right questions, have enough information, change would come in a minute. 
     Flexible and strong, change coming in small increments, slow but from a very deep place. I'll take it.  Gladly.
     
     

THE VITAL CENTER

In his essay, "What Makes A Life Significant," William James begins with a wonderful example of differing perspectives.  Jack falls madly in love with Jill and she becomes extraordinary to him. He grasps her "essence," sees and understands all her thoughts and feelings, marvels endlessly at the marvel she is. But we can't imagine what he sees in her; to our minds, she's dull, ordinary, hardly worth thinking about. Yet Jill, knowing how Jack feels about her, blossoms not only in his eyes but in her own. She responds by seeing how extraordinary Jack is. They take each other completely.
     Who is right here?  Is Jack a "maniac" filled with delusion that he sees Jill in that way?  Or is it we "dull clods" who are missing the true essence of both of them?  In fact, there is no right or wrong.  What matters is what happens to Jack and Jill as they perceive all the little joys and disappointments, the thoughts and feelings each of them has - everything that is a hallmark of each other's humanity. Those intense, reciprocal perceptions add up to the significance they feel in themselves and in each other.
     The rest of the essay is filled with examples of how easy it is to miss the vital center, the deep and complex humanity at the heart of us all.  I often think of this as I move through the day - passing so many people without registering anything about them, or murmuring "excuse me," or "thank you" to faceless shadows passing by. Even the way I sometimes listen with half an ear to a good friend while my attention roams.  All the ways I don't pay attention.  
     By missing the vital center in other people, I keep my own center buried in my consciousness.  I go along skimming the surface of all the possibilities that exist in the world. But if I pay attention, sympathy, empathy, projecting imagination into the heart of another - they make me feel connected, in touch with a deeper source of energy. They bring me alive.  Then anything can happen and the new, the creative, the expansiveness of the world can come in.  
    The cliche holds: to give is to receive.
     

FLOODS AND WATER SPOUTS

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.  In this state of mind, what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.  Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

That's William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience."  He was, in his way, as fine a writer as his brother, Henry and it's hard to think of a better description of the transcendent spiritual experience.  "A willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God..."  To surrender will and the desire for control and what we most dreaded, the surrendering of ego, has turned out to be our one true refuge.  Our moral death...the death of all our concerns with right and wrong, our views and opinions, with everything which inhabits our rational mind.  Fear isn't defused by thinking.  It ceases to exist.
     I keep returning to "to be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God..." That image of water washing over me, and my submerging myself in it, taken completely out of my fearful defensive ego, floating in an eternal present.  No words, no ideas in that beautiful water, only the oceanic tides of transcendence.