Dear Friends,
Have you ever done something so well that you lost yourself in it for a while? Most of us know what it’s like to lose focus and be active without being conscious, as you are when driving for miles without recollection of the road. My question, though is meant to address a state beyond spaciness. I’m asking about that thrilling experience when your creativity opens up inside a disciplined or contained focus. Not everyone has developed sufficient skill in a specialized area to have experienced this phenomenon. On the other hand, some have developed so much skill in so many areas that they achieve it habitually. Such experiences are sometimes referred to in our common discourse: the “runner’s high,” the “artist’s muse,” “automatic writing” or the instrumentalist who speaks of the instrument seemingly “playing itself.”
Nearly everyone has experienced the exhilaration of freedom, if only during childhood. Being a child has often been about succumbing to the call of the wild, acting on impulse and with gusto and passion. For some adults, freedom was underdeveloped in their childhood due to early trauma, restrictive parents or conditions. In others, who have never grown out of impulsiveness, the exhilaration of freedom has become a kind of addiction drowning out any notion of growth. I remembers some of my early explorations of freedom and wildness–I understand fully why it can become addictive. Perhaps you do, too. But, pleasure is not joy. Joy in adulthood can come from pleasure when growth or expansion is involved. Absent such expansion into new realms, the adult awareness will feel as though joy is farther removed from the simple pleasures that used to satisfy them as children. As children, they submitted themselves to the wild and experienced exhilaration. As adults, they must submit themselves to purpose to match it.
Purpose involves gaining and using wisdom. Impulse must give way gradually to wisdom as a human grows. Wisdom isn’t necessarily what’s correct or right. It doesn’t necessarily bow to social mores or religious dogma. Wisdom is the way that most efficiently accomplishes the highest good—that incorporates the broadest collection of consciousness. When an impulse is governed by wisdom, the same essential action attains the potential to remit joy. The impulse to ask another person on a date, governed by the wisdom of waiting until she comes back from her trip to the bathroom, for instance, has much greater potential for joy than catching her at the bathroom door.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you and a group of your loved ones happened to be crossing a frozen lake. Well into the project, there is a loud crack and one of your number falls through the ice into the cold water. The first impulse of a loved one might be to dive after the victim to grab hold of them and keep them within sight. The child inside fears losing the loved one to the blackness of the water; its unknown depths, and the wall of ice. One might see, however that to govern this impulse might be a wiser course of action. There are other loved ones on this ice with you, and collaborating with them might ensure a greater chance of saving the fallen loved one without risking another victim. If you dove for your loved one and followed them into the ice, then you’ve created a more difficult rescue mission for those left behind. The greatest good for the widest collection of consciousnesses involved is therefore wisdom. Still, holding on to the sometimes violent urge to act and trusting the quiet voice of wisdom and it’s often slow-seeming actions and effects can be very unpleasant. In this way it often seems to be the opposite of the impulse experience, until after the event turns out well. There’s something so fulfilling in realizing how many obstacles or pains were avoided by the simple exercise of wisdom that one can bask in the joy of it for some time.
The child, who often acts immediately on impulses doesn’t have time to consider consequences, which would be the application of the mind to the task of gaining wisdom, or to hear or feel the advice of the Higher Self, which might be ready with a more wise suggestion. A child, then, who stops himself from acting on an impulse, and considers the act and its potential consequences, is a child in the process of growing up.
Skill is the ability to take action and manage the various consequences as they occur. A person with great skill can take action with less delay, trusting that her skill will accommodate whatever failure her lack of planning exposed her to. One can develop skill through the exercise of wisdom and then occasionally replace the exercise of wisdom with skill. Still, skill requires attention and concentration. Depending on a person’s physical, emotional and mental starting state, the application of attention and concentration can be enjoyable or painful. But, attempting to use skill while allowing the attention or concentration to wander can create a situation even worse than the negative results of impulse: the unwitting mistake.
And then there’s the experience of sinking so fully into attentiveness of what you’re doing that you transcend the limits of concentration and begin to express yourself more fully. This is the experience I was getting at when I asked earlier about doing something so well that you lost yourself in the doing of it for a while. Skill is like a set of rules that are governing your behavior, but at a high level of skill one discovers how to be impulsive within those parameters. In this state, a person experiences the wonder and thrill of freedom that they enjoyed as a child, without worry over the negative results of impulsiveness. The adult mind can witnesses creative, wild impulses that contain the skill as a pretext, rather than being contained by the skill as an afterthought. He feels free again, and rarely threatens to venture outside of what would be wise.
Achieving this state requires a period of disciplined activity. Discipline represents neither impulsiveness nor skilled action. In fact, in the scheme of life, discipline does not relate in any way to appropriate action in everyday life. Discipline represents an adopted reality directed at learning. We create conditions in which we can learn skill and act under those conditions as though they were more or less real. If I’m practicing typing, I’m not actually writing the letter or report. Rather, I’m typing a predetermined set of words over and over to practice the skill of typing. Each time I forsake my actual life for the discipline, I’m investing in the development of a skill. One can, of course, exercise discipline in an everyday experience, but when we do so, we’re often turning the real experience into a learning experience and in doing so removing it from organic reality. Making your learning the bottom line isn’t always appropriate. It wouldn’t have been appropriate in our earlier example, for instance to begin disciplining your actions as your loved one sloshes around in the icy water. The point in those moments isn’t how capable you’ll be the next time this happens, but rather the successful resolution of this event.
Even though discipline is an adopted reality slightly removed from life, it can often be the first place where the mystical experience described earlier first surfaces. Transcending what you’re doing and experiencing a kind of pure expression within skilled or disciplined behavior returns the adult to the possibility of joy. Feeling yourself to be full and complete and in the moment, while retaining enough life-skill to act with wisdom, is an elevator ride to divine experiences we only read about.
Many of the practices and disciplines of the East, like Taoism, Buddhism and Zen, are schools of thought that encompass methods toward achieving this state in various areas of life. In setting this state as their goal, these schools of thought forsake the study of any one profession or endeavor of man, but instead adopt all activities into their field of study. It isn’t just about the skill needed to design a car, build a bridge or write an eloquent sentence. Rather, the skill to be developed is the ability to do whatever you are doing with attention and concentration, resisting impulse and listening to inner wisdom. Its assumed that practicing every aspect of your life while living that life will eventually develop skills sufficient to triggering the transcendent experience. One submits to the doing of a thing with so deeply and with such skill, be it playing a flute, playing with a child, cleaning a toilet or arguing a case in court, that we experience suddenly a childlike wonder and impulsiveness to do the thing with gusto, laughter and playfulness. Yet, somehow the skill contains this impulsiveness without squelching it—guides it, you might say, into skillful action. Suddenly, skill becomes playful.
This is what I believe Dan Millman speaks of in his book Way of the Peaceful Warrior in describing the “peaceful warrior.” The realm of the fighter, it might be said, is the ability to move with speed and precision while using a dangerous weapon. When the fighter wields her sword with such skill that her movements become graceful, and her ability a kind of playful dance, she has gone from the realm of the fighter into the realm of the warrior. In the realm of the warrior, one no longer considers the development of the skill the final point, but rather the accomplishment of a wise and successful life while still honoring one’s true self. The warrior determines the goal, then acts with skill and wisdom until the goal is achieved. Along the way she may experience the pure expression of the self and imbue her actions with spirit.
To be yourself, it isn’t necessary that you develop any particular skill or reach a transcendent state. You could do any old thing you like without consideration for consequences and without regret. You’d still be yourself. Neither would transcending the ordinary self to experience the realm of the warrior be a path that diminishes your sense of self. Both involve expressing your true self in life.
But, the path to the realm of the warrior that you could be is one that takes long sidetracks into realms that don’t seem like the self. All that time that you’re spending practicing, learning and governing your actions feels as though someone is dominating you. You can lose sight of why you chose to do it, or why you bother to do anything. Acting with discipline can often be accommodating eventualities that are obviously not a part of this event. But you include them anyway; so that you can reach a state of acting with such skill that consideration of the variables is no longer necessary. Such practice can feel so removed from reality as you experience it that you lose your sense of meaning or your connection with your real life. The path to expression within the wiser, transcendent self is long and confusing. It’s no wonder that so many choose not to pursue it, instead indulging their child-selves throughout their lives to one degree or another.
There is one big difference between indulging the unskilled self and aspiring to the higher realms of being, though: being your unskilled self all of your life leaves you open to as much if not more pain and disappointment as pleasure. Remember, the longer you live without aspiring to the wiser self, the further from joy your regular, everyday experience seems. It’s in the nature of humans to seek growth. Avoiding growth, therefore, eventually turns into a kind of illness with real consequences.
Though I’m someone who aspires to the transcendent life, I don’t feel the urge to push other people toward making the same choice. I can see the negative effects of avoiding the choice in some people, and I empathize with them—perhaps wish for their sake that they’d embrace their soul’s yearning. But I’m not a cultist. I don’t need much company on my path. I believe in the importance of proper timing, and each person has to determine their own timing for themselves. I believe in taking responsibility for your own choices, and each person will do so best when they choose the moment and the conditions. I don’t even recommend the transcendent path to everyone wholesale. There’s a Taoist saying: “Better never to begin. Once begun, better to finish.” I don’t think we leave anything on the back burner forever. So my philosophy is: Wait as long as you can to begin! Make sure there’s nothing on the back burner. That’ll give you a clearer road than mine has been; I didn’t have the patience to wait, and now that I’ve begun its worse for me if I stop.
What I do propose, though, is that you have the courage to acknowledge one or another path. I still feel some impatience toward people who waffle in their choice of path, choosing in one moment to seek transcendence and in another to give the impulses their reign. Know what you’re doing and to what degree. I think that it’s perfectly fine to be on the transcendent path but feeling that you’re not up to it today and want to give your inner child a little playtime. I suggest only that you know you’re doing it, and not lie to yourself or others about it. There are consequences, and you have chosen them. There need be no guilt involved. If you’re ready to face the consequences with courage, then you owe no one else an explanation about it.
In Taoism, we are all believed to be born inferior humans. The impulsive state I’ve described is thought of as a mostly animal existence, favoring that side of our ancestry. Taoism also notes that actions from that state have a kind of long run-out of consequences, such that even if you decide that you no longer want to commit to a certain kind of action in your life, you’ll still be facing the consequences of taking that action in your past for some time. There are consequences on all levels of experience that we can make note of. Physically, even if you regret eating that big dinner, you’re stuck digesting it, and then living with those substances as your body’s best nutritive resources for a while. Emotionally, even when you want to heal from a breakup, your emotions will continue to wave in and out in tides somewhat beyond your control. Mentally, even if you want to think about something else, the images from the horror movie you went to will insert themselves persistently into your inner discourse for a time. And the Taoists believe that spiritually the consequences of anyone’s actions are shared by the many selves that the larger consciousness of the self experiences until they are resolved with wisdom and grace. All of these levels of consequence are contained in the concept of karma.
The Taoists, therefore, believe that in addition to being born with an insistent animal side, our birth is a part of a larger story in which we have certain karmic consequences we’re playing out, and each action we take further complicates the matter. It is this complicated weaving of cause and effect that the Taoists believe makes it so difficult to see reality for what it really is or to feel the true depth and power of the soul. Taoists have compassion for people not seeking a spiritual path, because they realize how obscured everyone’s vision can be by the adrenal, hormonal roller-coaster that is the human body, the tumultuous sea that emotions can be, the cluttered and slippery landscape that is the mind, and the obligations that the spirit insists we take care of.
If you’re wondering why you can’t get it together, or how you’re ever going to get it all done, perhaps you could choose to believe as the Taoists do. You’ll get it done because you have an infinite number of lives and realities in which to accomplish it–and you don’t need to get it together, because what you can discern is all that you can really handle right now anyway. Stop seeking after the wonder pill that will resolve all of your troubles. Relax about the deeper truth, or the hidden realms, either for what they can give you or for what dangers they might throw at you. Begin with what you can see and feel and touch. Start with your understanding as it is now. Do the best you can with who and what you are now. Pay attention to what you’re doing, and take the time and put in the effort to do it completely. If you find yourself with too much to complete and too little time, take that as a sign that you might be acting on impulse when you take new things on. Cultivate the power to act with synergy and passion and the wisdom to choose your timing.
Your friend in the Tao,
Lihai
(c) I Qi You, 2006. All rights reserved.
Further reading:
Relaxing into Your Being, by B. K. Frantzis, Energy Arts/North Atlantic Books, Copywright B. K. Frantzis, 1998, 2001.
The Great Stillness, by B. K. Frantzis, Energy Arts/North Atlantic Books, Copywright B. K. Frantzis, 1999, 2001.
Way of the Peaceful Warrior, by Dan Millman, HJ Kramer; New Ed edition (April 13, 2006).