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June 13, 2007
ON THE QUESTIONING OF COMPETENCE
Shame can get very subtle. When (1) someone criticizes us for something that we are sure we did not do, and (2) our saying that we didn’t do it simply frames us in their eyes as being being unwilling to admit that we were in error, we need to tread very carefully, for the ground underfoot is more treacherous than we might like to think.
When our competence in an area in which we are highly skilled is called into question, despite no evidence of incompetence on our part, we are being shamed, however obliquely or slightly. If someone is a master of their craft (for example, a top-level carpenter) and is working for me and appears to have overlooked part of what their job entails, I don’t call their competence into question, but instead simply point out my concern — while remaining open to the possibility that their original choice in the matter at hand may be the correct one — so that they can, if truly necessary, correct their course.
I would, in other words, not tell them that they’ve missed the area in question bigtime, nor otherwise put them down (however nicely!) for their apparent error, but rather would simply give them the necessary information so that they could, if necessary, correct the situation.
If a recording engineer doesn’t get my song quite the way I want it, I let him know what needs changing, so that he can do it (and I, being aware of his competence, know that he can do it). No need for questioning his competence — just allowing my input to be factored into his already-established competency, so that he can do his job.
Shame can get in through the tiniest cracks. And once in, it can spread with poisonous ease throughout us. We can be shamed not just for falling short, but also for not admitting that we may have fallen short, even when we clearly have not fallen short. We can be shamed for not showing shame. We can be shamed for simply being alive. We can be shamed for having qualities everyone has.
(And if fear gets under the covers with shame and the lights are sufficiently low, guilt is spawned, and guilt has the capacity to keep us small, stuck, and split — one part of us, fixatedly childish, grabs for the candy, while the other, fixatedly authoritarian, wields a parental whip, beating us for our transgression, thereby giving us tacit permission to once again do the “bad” deed. Shame may or may not do damage, but guilt does.)
When first realizing the role that shame has played in their lives, many are astonished at how pervasive, deep-cutting, and influential that role has been; it is as if they have discovered a lost continent of themselves, initially submerged or deeply shrouded in fog, and then illuminated by the spirit of exploration brought to it.
The zone where agreement and disagreement reign supreme has plenty of slippery ground, with an abundance of hooks and traps for our egoity, plus shame mindfields left, right, and center. “Who is right?” may seem to be the relevant question, but that’s only if we’ve given central importance to agreement. When I’m working with arguing couples, both may be adamant that they are right about a particular issue, but when we tease apart the whole argument, and stand apart from it for a bit, it’s obvious that both partners are right, but only partially right. (Facts are not necessarily synonymous with truth.)
This is often complicated by the intrusion or injection of shame by one or both parties into the conversation/confrontation, so that the issue in question takes on exaggerated importance. And why? Because the character of each partner is then being called into question, however indirectly. Their prevailing sense of self seems to be at stake.
Healthy criticism doesn’t shame, doesn’t condescend, doesn’t belittle, and doesn’t make excuses for any slippages in its delivery. The inner critic that plagues many of us may masquerade as a deliverer of healthy criticism, but is actually just the voice of self-deprecation in morality’s robes. A loveless loudmouth who doesn’t give a damn about us. When we look at others through the eyes of our inner critic, all we see are flaws, imperfections, things to be corrected. A negative negative evaluation, serving nothing except the conditioning out of which it arose.
When we tell another that they missed the mark bigtime or that they didn’t get what was happening, we might be overlooking the shaming intent within our assertion, not seeing that we may be, however subtly, framing them as lesser than us. None of this is to suggest, however, that we should not confront, and sometimes strongly, even fiercely, confront, others, but that to do so, we don’t have to put them down. Instead, we can make it very clear what we are feeling and what we need from them, while at the same time making room for finding out if we may have been mistaken in our original assessment of the situation.
If you inform me that I have missed or have not gotten what was going on, despite my longtime competence in that area, I am probably not going to be as receptive to what you’re saying as if you were simply to tell me what you are feeling about the topic in question and how you see it. If you did so and we allowed ourselves to access a deeper level of communication, we could then, with a mutually respectful eye, gaze upon both of our views regarding that topic, and find a resolution to it that did not require that either one of us be diminished.
Those who are truly competent in their field do not mind healthy criticism, and in fact welcome it and use it to further refine their skill-level, but they usually do not waste time with the shaming critiques of those who question their competence, especially when they know that the one shaming them does not have nearly the grasp of the total picture that they do. That is, they welcome feedback, positive or negative, but not judgmentalness.
What a shame it is that shame is sometimes so shamelessly employed — and what a gift it is to have the capacity to see through shame, absorb its lessons, and bring it into our heart, until it is but available life-energy.
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June 17, 2007
NEWS AS ENTERTAINMENT, ENTERTAINMENT AS NEWS
News and entertainment have been having a fling for quite a while, and have recently started living together. It’s probably the hottest affair going — there doesn’t seem to be anything that can get in between them — but the tabloids continue to ignore it. The mainstream media now and then addresses it, but only marginally, not wanting to interfere with what provides so much of their income.
Entertainment can be big news, and news can be big entertainment. Even the news that is not entertainment — like reports of more deaths in Iraq or the latest government bungling — can become entertainment when used to make or illustrate a point in certain shows, such as “The Daily Show”. Ironically, the “regular” news that is an essential ingredient in making “The Daily Show” entertaining probably makes more of an impact through being presented in a humorous/satirical context than when CNN presents it. Part of the reason for this is that “The Daily Show” — a mere 25 minutes or so a weekday — may have a higher percentage of its time devoted to real news than does CNN.
For example, “The Daily Show” has devoted a fair amount of time to the Alberto Gonzalez saga, again and again showing news clips and related information that would make any sane person wonder why Gonzalez is still Attorney General of the United States. Yes, it’s humorously presented, but the humor, at least most of the time, exists to make valid points, which probably wouldn’t have the same impact if they were just being read out by a news anchor in that professionally vacant, well-coiffed newsy tone that is used for everything from horrific tragedy to — sometimes a moment later — the most tediously banal details regarding the doings of the latest celebrity caught in the jaws of the major media.
I don’t have the numbers, but I’d guess that CNN has devoted a lower percentage of its time than has “The Daily Show” to covering the Alberto Gonzalez scandal/coverup/ mess, preferring to put the lion’s share of it focus on truly newsworthy events, like the ins and outs of Paris Hilton’s life. Paris Hilton? With Anna Nicole Smith dead, and Phil Spector’s trial only marginally good for high ratings, Paris has been given the burden of keeping viewers glued to CNN.
Are her doings news? Not really. Are they entertainment? Not really — but that’s just my opinion. Maybe I should know more about Paris, but I’m one of the few who didn’t watch a minute of O.J.’s trial, and who doesn’t give a fuck about who the father is of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. I guess I’m out of the loop.
When I want news, I can grab it off the Internet in a less than a minute. I don’t need to read a newspaper to find out what is going on; if it’s really important, someone will tell me, or I’ll catch it on “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report”. I remember Marshall McLuhan once saying that people don’t read newspapers, but instead take baths in them. Comfort food for the mind. An information smorgasbord. A trough of data in which we can feed until we’re so stuffed that we can’t feel a damned thing other than toilet or sleep urges.
The usual front-page message of the “regular” news may be that we, to whatever degree, are threatened, but the inner pages take care of whatever anxiety might have been stirred up in us, through immersing (the bathtub again!) us in the latest entertainment and sports news. I’ve seen clients who “had to” watch two hours of news a day, plus read through a whole newspaper the same day, and who could not really explain why they needed to do so once we’d cut through their claim that they were taking in so much news so as to know what was going on in the world. They didn’t even know what was going on in their own world, especially internally. Devoting so much of their attention to what was outside them conveniently kept them outside themselves.
Such an overabundance of data, such informational overload, such a desperate pulling of attention away from what really matters — this is the presenting surface of our culture’s collective dissociation, a mass numbing through informational overwhelm. Such numbness is both a mark of and a “solution” to our distress. And the ever-fuzzier boundary between news and entertainment simply reinforces this numbness, keeping us “safely” removed ,from our core pain, both personally and collectively.
When there is so much information coming at us, a key question for us to ask is: What is really relevant? Another question: What is stopping us from asking the previous question? There’s always another channel when we get uncomfortable, but if we really want to free ourselves from the mess we’re in, we’re going to have to turn toward our discomfort, our disappointment, our disillusionment, and keep turning toward it until we can feel it right to our core. Such denumbing is far from entertaining (though it eventually does bring us joy, and not just vicariously), and may not be in the news, but it is real news.
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June 29, 2007
OURS NOT TO REASON WHY: MEANING, SUFFERING, & FREEDOM
Life is too real to have meaning.
Given the actual conditions in which we exist, it is understandable that we’d look, and keep looking, for some sort of comfort or reassurance in the explanatory dimensions of consciousness, even though our attempts to find or extract or assign meaning — whether mundane or metaphysical — ultimately only pad the cell, distracting us from the raw contingency and absolute mystery of our existence.
We act as if we need a reason to go on (plus a reason to keep on needing reasons), but, as James Hillman points out, “A significant life does not have to find meaning because significance is given directly with reality.”
Significance, unlike meaning, does not explain, but reveals.
Many of us are attached to believing that everything happens for a reason. But it may actually happen simply because various factors, in their mutual intersecting and coming together — that is, in their inherent interrelatedness — have made such manifestation inevitable. Each of these factors has its factors, and so on, back and back and back, in surpassingly complex contingency. This, all put together, constitutes something far more real than “a reason.”
We may not want to fully acknowledge the contingent nature of whatever arises — including us — trying instead to assign some kind of meaning to it, but such explanatory strategies do not even remotely approach what is really occurring.
The assumption that anything possesses — or can truly claim — intrinsic meaning is one of our more popular delusions. Whatever its value may be developmentally and socially, meaning basically remains a cognitive creation that is designed, however automatically, to distract us — and, more often than not, protect our separative self-sense — from the bare reality of that which has spawned us and paradoxically also is, as always, literally making an appearance as us.
We make meaning, and it makes us, and on and on this goes in Möbius loopity-loops, all offramps erased as we do our rounds, circling ourselves so tightly that there’s not much more to breathe than just more data. “Just when I found the meaning of life,” said George Carlin, “they changed it.” And we is they.
So is Life meaningless? Coiled deep within-and-beyond this question is the “answer,” existing not as a facile yes or no, but rather in the transconceptual illumination of what is really motivating the question.
Identifying who — or, more to the point, what — is formulating it is far, far more important than just attempting to reply to its content. Whatever is generating the question needs to be fully exposed and acknowledged, not only intellectually, but with our entirety. Then, and only then, can the actual relevancy of the question be viewed in its nakedness, so that it might spark a truly fitting response.
That is, when the question becomes primal inquiry, its investigation leads beyond the cognitive associations of the conventional mind into firsthand participation in deeper dimensions of Being. Something more real than answers — or what we “normally” think of as answers — is sought, intuited, taken in.
Life makes sense only when we stop trying to make it make sense.
That is, when we cease plastering meaning onto Life — thereby giving Life more breathing room, more space to be — then Life’s natural significance begins revealing itself to us. Meaning tries to explain the Mystery, whereas significance deepens it (and the deeper our felt sense of the Mystery, the more at home we tend to be).
The entire issue of meaning and meaninglessness, if explored with sufficient depth, provides an opportunity to become more aware not only of the functioning of our mind, but also of our attachment to knowledge and its various framings. Stephen Levine speaks of how “no ‘meaning’ can hold it all.... There is an odd way the mind, particularly when threatened, attempts to find ‘meaning’ in life, to make some intellectual bargain with the unknown.” We forget that that which seeks to explain the Mystery is just part of the Mystery, as ultimately unfathomable as anything else.
However, the point is not to make existential real estate out of meaninglessness (which is where existentialism has floundered). When our mind is quiet and our heart open and our belly relaxed, Life can be before us in its horizonless, nameless, naked, ultravivid reality and absolute mystery, and we have room for it all to be just as it is, not minding that it carries no intrinsic meaning. Its bare existence and seeming paradoxicalness — a neverending perishing that is never other than Eternal Being — draws us to it, beyond the reach of our mind, until our relationship with it becomes, at least to some degree, identification with it.
Nevertheless, the usual “I” is but a thought away.
So easy it is to shift from Be-ing to me-ing.
Meaning provides a relatively secure sense of certainty, a psychosemantic hedge against the Wild Mystery of Being, a comfortingly shared or personalized flag to hold up and wave in the midst of Infinity, a neatly-bricked bastion of explanatory facticity (and corresponding values) in which to hole up when emissaries of primordial Being — like death and nondual stirrings — come knocking.
As necessary as meaning is at times — as when it provides needed bridges over stormy or confusing waters — it is nonetheless little more than a mental strategy. It may take us to the very edge of the personal, but to proceed further, we must cease hanging onto it.
And we must also cease hanging onto meaninglessness. Where meaning seduces us with hope — nostalgia for the future — meaninglessness seduces us with despair — angst for the future.
Meaninglessness is a grave problem to many of us, a burdened sea with no habitable coast, the suffocating yet reassuringly familiar shadow of a brooding existential ghost. Meaninglessness — which is not equivalent to purposelessness — is the glum and sometimes intellectually smug companion and angst-crowned legitimizer of despair, elevating to pseudo-priesthood those who claim to be able to restore meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, the issue of meaning and meaninglessness isn’t really that much of a core concern, being peripheral to the issue of purpose. In brief, purpose involves the uncovering and fitting-as-possible embodiment of a kind of personalized blueprint, simultaneously simple and complex, already written yet invitingly blank, rich with improvisational possibility. Purposefulness may seem to share some overlap with meaningfulness, but it is much more than a cognitive construction. Purpose is more organismic than meaning, rooted not just in mind, but also in body, emotion, psyche, and spirit. In such totality, there is a naturally felt sense of significance.
In the crunch, significance is not nearly so dualistically rooted or framed or limited as is meaning, signaling the impact, however slight, of direct recognition of What-Really-Matters, whatever the level. Significance transcends meaning.
Significance doesn’t ask “Why?” — because it has no need to — but meaning does, and in fact is an attempt to meet “Why?” with answers/explanations/beliefs that will shut it up. But “Why?” is asking for something very different, if we will but really listen to it...
When we are suffering, we may find ourselves asking: “Why?” There is, however, no genuinely satisfying answer at the level at which our suffering is the prevailing reality for us. And nor are the metaphysical and “spiritual” reasons and beliefs spewed out by our intellect truly satisfying.
The understanding we seek is not in our everyday mind. But it exists. It is often first sensed when we cease turning away from the pain that centers our suffering. And it is found when we — in the form of awakened attentiveness — penetrate that pain so deeply that we connect, intimately, with its essence. Then suffering’s “Why?” ceases being a conventional question, and simply becomes one more catalyst for opening the book of our life to the most fitting pages.
Philosophically, we may rebut suffering’s “Why?” with “Why not?” or with cosmic smooth talk. But when we move beyond these and other such tactics, our sense of identity shifts from everyday selfhood — which both centers and animates that dramatization of pain which we call suffering — to the selfhood that knows itself to be but Being making an appearance. Pain may still exist here, but not suffering.
So when you, in your suffering, ask “Why?”, shift your attention — your undivided attention — to whatever it is that you are feeling. Thoughts may be campaigning for your attention, but shift, and keep shifting, your attention from thought to sensation and feeling (including the feeling of being). Don’t try to silence your mind; simply let it be as you focus in on the feeling dimension of your suffering. Enter it. Explore and illuminate its geography from within, touching all of it with care. See it without eyes, hear it without ears, know it without thinking. Don’t stop short; enter it fully.
Permit yourself intimacy with detail — detail of location, shape, texture, pressure, temperature, speed, color, directionality, imagery. Don’t wait for a seemingly more auspicious moment; go, go this very moment, now. Enter it deeply, passing through it until you reach the place where pain is but fierce grace. Then observe who or what it is that is asking “Why?” — is it really you, or is it just a habit that has been given permission to refer to itself as you? Looking for meaning here is just a detour.
Check out the billboards lining your journey into and through the associations and feelings that are central to your suffering. Notice which ones grab you, seduce you, hook you. Maybe ones like “Life’s not fair” or “I don’t deserve this” or “Why me?” snare you. Don’t, however, get focused on the dramatics at this point — it’s enough to simply recognize that you’re caught. All the places, faces, and embraces that hook us weave the net of our suffering.
Suffering can be one hell of a drag, but it also gives us an identity — I suffer, therefore I am. We tend to be reluctant to give up our suffering. What would we then blame for our failures? And who would we be (and who would we be responsible for being) if our suffering were to cease?
The end of suffering — which does not mean the end of pain! — means, among other things, ceasing to adopt a problematic orientation to Life. Then every feeling and thought and state, however dark or tight or dense, becomes a portal into Being, the open sky of which effortlessly renders transparent suffering’s “Why?”.
As Presence — the self-illuminating, effortlessly sentient imprint of Being — becomes primary and perception secondary, we find ourselves reassembled as transparently personalized openness, as at home with the ouch as with the aahhh!
The answer to suffering’s “Why?” is not really an answer, but rather an openness ablaze with a recognition before which the mind gets so quiet, so unburdened by meaning, so dynamically empty, that the arising of a single thought is thunderously apparent.
Instead of trying to get rid of suffering’s “Why?”, we could instead treat it as a kind of divine appetizer, signaling a feast not so far away, to which one and all are invited. The main course includes the self that turns pain into suffering, cooked to perfection. Not exactly tenderloin, but quite edible, nevertheless, and easily digested when not allowed to become food for thought.
Suffering is but pain that’s gone to mind. Instead of minding pain — thereby letting it overfuel thinking and thinker — be with it, breathe it, feel it, inch closer and closer to it. The more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer.
Ours not to reason why, ours but to come alive.
Perhaps later on we will understand what is not ours to understand now, but that is not the point — what matters is the degree of intimacy that we cultivate with our not-knowing and the Great Mystery to which it points.
Allow suffering’s “Why?” to be like a roll of newspaper used to stir a fire; soon, it becomes food for the flames, its transformation its gift to us, the ever so brief calligraphy of its ashes eloquently traced across Big Sky.
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July 29, 2007
Turning points often can be very challenging. At such times, we tend to view our situation as a problem, especially when its degree of difficulty leaves us in unfamiliar places at unaccustomed angles. Very edgy. Others may be telling us that it’s just a phase or an opportunity or something similar, but their words, however well-meaning, have about as much impact on us as does spitting into a gale. Reading about being on shaky ground or being uprooted is very different than actually experiencing it, and very few of us are quickly comfortable with sudden and sometimes overwhelming discomfort.
One of the problems with turning turning points into problems is that we then tend to overoccupy ourselves with looking for solutions, trying to think our way out of our apparent misfortune, desperately searching for some clarity, nonturbulence, and relief from our confusion. But not so often do we recognize that our confusion is simply an exaggeration of what usually is already occurring in our mind, a confusion that’s largely manufactured by confining or trying to confine our turning point’s energies — our distress, disorientation, anxiety, excitement — to our head.
Fleeing to our headquarters, however, only prolongs and feeds our difficulty. Trying to outthink our seeming problem keeps us ricocheting between warring or oppositional factions within us — should I go, should I stay, and so on — leaving us stranded in the duststorms of beckoning maps, blinded to what is really needed: Directly facing and going toward, into, and through the operational dynamics of our turning point, not just with our head, but with our entire being.
Turning point are times of increased energy, surplus force, times of fertile chaos and uncommon chance, times when a leap into more fitting level of being is not only more than possible, but also necessary for our evolution. If we keep on trying to figure out what to do — wanting to know what will happen if we do take the jump — when we’re in the midst of a turning point, then we risk losing or at least seriously dissipating the very energies that we need to actually take the leap. That is, if we wait too long, the edge will lose its edge; the forces that could have carried us toward a deeper level of being may not be there in sufficient supply or intensity, having been eroded and drained by our continued resistance to taking the jump when it was time to do so.
The more fully we enter the depths of our turning point, the better, so long as we keep our eyes open and our trust alive, a trust that’s not just cognitively based or inculcated or otherwise superficial — a naive or unawakened trust is not really trust, but rather just a cocktail of foolhardiness and hope — but a trust that, to whatever degree, emerges from and resonates with our core of being. Such trust allows us to blend with the currents of our turning point, to freely yet discerningly embrace, know, and embody the turbulent richness of it, the crosscurrents and whitewater, the frothing chaos and luminous forces of its waves, and, ultimately, its purpose-revealing depths.
If we thus trust, we will not, at least initially, necessarily know where we are being taken, but we won’t need to know, because we’ll inevitably be carried to a new shore, a truer shore, one more deeply aligned with what we truly need. Right timing is essential. Too late doesn’t work, because we’ll have missed the necessary momentum for our leap, and too soon doesn’t work either, because prematurely taking the leap only leaves us in over our heads. In the latter case, we are not adequately prepared; we’re just looking ahead, impaled upon our nostalgia for the future, doing little more than thrashing around in the waves, fighting just to surface, just to survive. Even if we are cast up on some shore, it will just be, regardless of its appearance, the same old shore, the same old life, featuring the same old inclinations that first propelled us into our premature plunge.
It is not difficult to turn a challenging turning point into a crisis, to get so worried and distressed about it that some sort of relief or release becomes exaggeratedly important to us. As various remedies are pursued — narcotic, erotic, and so on — the imperatives of our turning point recede, becoming but not much more than peripheral disturbance or muffled noise, an anaemic halftone or faint knocking to which we turn a blind eye or deaf ear, thereby leaving ourselves stranded where we’ve already been long stranded, clinging to our compensatory doings, merely dreaming about a deeper or truer shore.
Finding ourselves thus marooned and at the same time not wanting to directly feel the sheer pain of what we’re really up to, we may then turn our dreams of a truer life into fantasies of some kind of “higher” domain, a place of immunity from pain that typically stars a more evolved us. Eventually we may get disillusioned and slide into cynicism, or we may remain with our fantasies, making an informational idol out of possibility and promise, haranguing ourselves into making good resolutions, not realizing that another, counterbalancing aspect of us that doesn’t give a damn about such resolutions will inevitably sabotage them.
Turning points ask not for a flight into thinking and fantasy, but rather for courage and an openness of eye and heart, along with a willingness to come fully alive. This is about letting our innate warriorhood emerge, a warriorhood in which love and power work together, and in which vulnerability is a source of strength.
A certain disintegration often is needed, if only of obsolete structures, whether external, internal, or both, so that a deeper integration can occur. Thus do turning points often ask for a falling apart that leads not to fragmentation, but to a deeper wholeness.
The navigational directives of a turning point spontaneously emerge when we choose to enter its waters, having recognized and openly acknowledged that we actually are at that significant transitional juncture known as a turning point.
To make a me-knot and distressing fuss out of a turning point is to unnecessarily resist Life, to deny Life its inherent flux, its built-in changeability and mystery. A turning point is a charged arising, loaded with fuel. It is an emotional, as well as a physical and psychospiritual, event/process. It tends to proceed optimally when it is given a fitting freedom of emotion. Without such freedom, such a rawness and undamming of feeling, its waters — waves, currents, storms, and all — won’t exist for us except as a problem requiring an inordinate amount of control and shore-hugging.
There are big turning points, and there are much bigger ones, and there are small turning points, and very small ones. However miniscule or subtle it might be, every moment is a potential turning point. Each turning point intelligently entered into and made good use of prepares us for bigger or more demanding turning points. In its letting go and dissolution of old forms, every turning point is a kind of death.
The more that we we turn away from taking good care of our small turning points, the more that we deny them their full existence and fruition, the more that we try to drink, think, eroticize, drug, or fantasize them away, the more likely it is that crisis will show up, catalyzed into being by our not handling our turning points more skillfully. Crisis as such is but the endarkened offspring of aborted turning points, offering us no offramps from its demands.
If we don’t heed a crisis, a bigger, more hard-hitting crisis almost inevitably appears, gatecrashing our slumber, really clobbering us; we may complain about this, perhaps playing victim to it or taking merely intellectual responsibility for it, repetitiously wishing that things were different or fairer, not noticing that each moment carries the same fundamental opportunity, the same basic invitation, an invitation that, when fully embraced, becomes but a sacred demand that we do whatever it takes to journey toward what matters most of all.
A turning point may really hurt, but it’s basically a good hurt, a purifying hurt, a hurt that deepens and hones our receptivity to what we must do. Our choice is not so much to enter or not to enter our turning point, as it is to make or not to make good use of it. We can’t truly escape our turning points — we can fend them off and anaesthetize ourselves to them, but we can’t actually flee them (even when we homestead on the surface), for they are part of us, revealing and reflecting our evolutionary state, as well as potentially serving to transport us into a deeper life.
Big turning points are often potential quickenings of the Awakening process, shocks of marvelous/hellish magnitude, veined with an intensity needing only the spark of our full participation to become but grace in action.
We often tend to look for clarity within a turning point, not realizing that its opaque turbulence, its churning crosscurrents and unpredictable tides, are inherent to it, offering not clarity, but— if we dive in — a passage into clarity.
Despite their chaos, turning points contain at their center a deep organic stillness, a vibrantly silent pulsation of unbound Being. This stillpoint, this clearing of transverbal lucidity, cannot be found, but rather only embodied, for it exists at our own core, already present no matter what we do. This is not the stillpoint of dispassionate inwardness, nor of any strategy to bypass or transcend desire and vitality, but rather is the very heart of feeling, the breath of Being, the dimensionless abode of what we truly are.
The hubbub around the center of a turning point, all the wildness and color and chaos and uprooting, is simply the fertile outreaching of that turning point, its flowering, its song, its marvelously opportunistic circumference, its interface with our resistance. If its turbulence is entered into without restraint and with sufficient awareness, we’re not then just spun around on the surface, forced to go in circle after exhausting circle, but instead are spiralled toward the core (which may feel as though we’re going down the drain when we let fear occupy us). And sometimes not even spiralled, but simply propelled from one fluid orbit to another closer to the nucleus, a deeper concentric circle of What-Really-Matters’ unrehearsable flow.
This is the opportunity of a turning point. It is present in every moment, but some moments possess more of a timely buildup of available energy. Our work, our labor of love, is not to waste this energy, but rather to ride it, to yield to its momentum, to use it well.
Do not look for clarity in a turning point. Do not look for security or guarantees. Simply trust, not out of submission, but rather out of awakened surrender, realizing that what is asked of you through your turning point has always been asked of you.
Furthermore, the riper you are for the needed change, the more compellingly you will be asked, until one day you won’t be asked or invited, but will be absolutely required to participate, and participate fully. You then will have no choice but to take the leap, but it won’t matter because there will be nothing else for you to do. Such is the freedom of not needing to have a choice.
Turning points are but signs of our readiness for a certain leap, a passage into a more fitting level of Being. Use them as such. Instead of looking ahead, look inside your looking. Look as you leap. You won’t regret it.
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