From The Larger Self
[O]ver the years, I've come trust the healing power of what I'll call the Self in clients and in myself. When there's a critical mass of Self in a therapy office, healing just happens. When I'm able to embody a lot of Self ... clients can sense in my voice, eyes, movements, and overall presence that I care a great deal about them, know what I'm doing, won't be judging them, and love working with them. Consequently, their inner protectors relax, which releases more of their Self. They then begin to relate to themselves with far more curiosity, confidence, and compassion.
As clients embody more Self, their inner dialogues change spontaneously. They stop berating themselves and instead, get to know, rather than try to eliminate, the extreme inner voices or emotions that have plagued them. At those times they tell me, they feel "lighter," their minds feel somehow more "open" and "free." Even clients who've shown little insight into their problems are suddenly able to trace the trajectory of their own feelings and emotional histories with startling clarity and understanding.
What's particularly impressed me in those moments isn't only that my clients, once they've discovered the Self at the core of their being, show characteristics of insight, self-understanding and acceptance, stability and personal growth, but that even disturbed clients, who'd seem to be unlikely candidates for such shifts so often are able to experience the same qualities. The accepted wisdom in the field during my training was that clients with truly terrible childhoods -- relentless abuse and neglect -- resulting in flagrant symptoms needed a therapist to construct functioning egos for them, virtually from scratch; they simply didn't have the psychological wherewithal to do the job for themselves. But even those clients, once they experienced a sense of their own core, began to take over and acquire what looked like real ego strength on their own, without my having to shovel it into them. And yet, almost no Western psychological theories could explain where this newfound and quite amazing ability to contain and understand their inner turmoil came from.
The more this happened, the more I felt confronted by what were in essence spiritual questions that simply couldn't be addressed in the terms of problem solving, symptom-focused, results-oriented, clinical technique. I began my own novice's exploration into the literature of spirituality and religion and discovered a mother lode of esoteric writings by sages, holy seekers, wise men and women, who emphasized meditative and contemplative techniques as a means of coming to know their Self. ("Esoteric" here means not exotic or far out, but derives from the Greek esotero, which means "further in.") Though they use different words, all the esoteric traditions within the major religions -- Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam -- emphasized their same core belief: we are sparks of the eternal flame, manifestations of the absolute ground of being. It turns out that the divine within -- what the Christians call the soul or Christ Consciousness, Buddhists call Buddha Nature, the Hindus Atman, the Taoists Tao, the Sufis the Beloved, the Quakers the Inner Light -- often doesn't take years of meditative practice to access fully because it exists in all of us, just below the surface of our extreme parts. Once they agree to separate from us, we suddenly have access to who we really are.
I have also found, however, that the most important variable in how quickly clients can access their Self is the degree to which I am fully present and Self-led. It's this presence that constitutes the healing element in psychotherapy regardless of the method or philosophy of the practitioner.
Love, but only if...
The near-enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, "I will love you if you will love me back." It is a kind of "businessman's" love. So we think, "I will love this person as long as he doesn't change. I will love that thing if it will be the way I want it." But this isn't love at all--it is attachment. There is a big difference between love, which allows and honors and appreciates, and attachment, which grasps and demands and aims to possess. When attachment becomes confused with love, it actually separates us from another person. We feel we need this other person in order to be happy. This quality of attachment also leads us to offer love only toward certain people, excluding others.
~ Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Honesty Is Best
The Energy Of Honesty
As children most of us learn that honesty is better than dishonesty, and we may not question this beyond whether or not to do what we’re told. As adults, however, we can go deeper to examine our choices as investments of energy with predictable risks and returns. When we speak the truth, we affirm what already is. This is like using a paddle when the stream is already moving the same direction. We are already supported by the universe and its energy flow, so we don’t need to exert much energy, leaving more for other pursuits. But dishonesty redirects a portion of our energy against the flow, which requires extra effort. In addition, it creates an alternate reality that requires further energetic input to be maintained. So we can easily see that we are best served when we work with the flow of the universe.
Life is not always clearly defined, so we may find it useful to follow our choices to their logical conclusions. We may feel that little untruths are harmless, but they can be like small cracks that weaken an overall structure over time. Even giving someone a compliment or trying to protect them can create problems later when the alternate reality we’ve created becomes the basis for further actions. Even if the actions that follow are honestly done, the underlying unstable foundation of dishonesty will threaten to topple things eventually. This can lead to further energy being spent on keeping things hidden, working to remember the tales we’ve spun and fearing the consequences of being found out. Life doesn’t need to be this draining, but we can make the choice to free ourselves from the bonds of dishonesty at any time.
Speaking and living our truth may involve risking, among other things, the possibility of rejection. But when we allow ourselves to follow the flow of life, we are supported. We can then use our energy to cultivate physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being and to create our dreams, rather than leaving ourselves too drained to even maintain our existence. Today we can make honesty our choice in every interaction, bringing the nurturing power of the universe’s energy into our lives to bring positive, lasting results.
Monsoon Season
I like gentle rain, the kind that softens
the earth, guides leaves to the ground,
gets beneath the skin, the way memories
lie just beneath the veil of surfaces
But here, in the desert, the rains are violent,
dragging trees to the ground, drenching everything
in minutes, then the skies clear, and it feels
more like an eruption than a cleansing
Monsoon rains peel back the veneer of things,
undo my illusions, wash away surfaces
until all that remains is the core, solid,
unyielding, the darkness no one wants
So here it is, all the shadows laid bare,
the sediment washed away, the body wind-whipped
and submissive, every fiber vibrating,
everything exposed I have tried to hide
Soul seeks communion, interconnectedness, experience, inclusion, and darkness. This is what Jung called the anima, which is the original Greek word for soul.
Spirit seeks agency, autonomy, knowledge, distinctions, and light. This is what Jung called the animus, the original Greek word for spirit.
When soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or to try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it. We have today few specialists of the soul to advise us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain....
~ Thomas Moore, Introduction to Care of the Soul
Alongside those developments [of self], the soul (the psychic/subtle self) can follow its own trajectory, unfolding in its own holarchical stream. The soul or deeper-psychic line includes all the self-streams that adapt consciousness to many facets of the subtle sphere. The soul is the self that depends on the subtle line of cognition (which includes, as we saw, imagination, reverie, daydreams, creative visions, hypnogogic states, etheric states, visionary revelations, hypnotic states, transcendental illuminations, and numerous types of savikalpa samadhi), and thus the soul is the self-stream that orients and integrates consciousness in the subtle domain. (126)
It is impossible to define precisely what soul the is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway; the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth.... Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.
...
Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination. (CS, Introduction)
The Five Spiritual Faculties
The five spiritual faculties--faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom--are our greatest friends and allies on this journey of understanding. These qualities are most powerful when they are in balance. Faith needs to be balanced with wisdom, so that faith is not blind and wisdom is not shallow or hypocritical. When wisdom outstrips faith, we can develop a pattern where we know something, and even know it deeply from our experience, yet do not live it. Faith brings the quality of commitment to our understanding. Energy needs to be balanced with concentration; effort will bring lucidity, clarity, and energy to the mind, which concentration balances with calmness and depth. An unbalanced effort makes us restless and scattered, and too much concentration that is not energized comes close to torpor and sleep. Mindfulness is the factor that balances all these and is therefore always beneficial.
~ Joseph Goldstein, in Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Newsflash: Time May Not Exist
Not to mention the question of which way it goes...
Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.
But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”
The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.
“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time.
The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.
“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.”
The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.
“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”
Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.
“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”
By “big things,” Rovelli means anything that exists much above the mysterious Planck scale. As of now there is no physical theory that completely describes what the universe is like below the Planck scale. One possibility is that if physicists ever manage to unify quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be described by some modified version of quantum mechanics. In such a theory, space and time would no longer be smooth and continuous. Rather, they would consist of discrete fragments—quanta, in the argot of physics—just as light is composed of individual bundles of energy called photons. These would be the building blocks of space and time. It’s not easy to imagine space and time being made of something else. Where would the components of space and time exist, if not in space and time?
As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. “Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,” says Rovelli. “There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.”
Rovelli has been working with one of the world’s leading mathematicians, Alain Connes of the College of France in Paris, on this notion. Together they have developed a framework to show how the thing we experience as time might emerge from a more fundamental, timeless reality. As Rovelli describes it, “Time may be an approximate concept that emerges at large scales—a bit like the concept of ‘surface of the water,’ which makes sense macroscopically but which loses a precise sense at the level of the atoms.”
Realizing that his explanation may only be deepening the mystery of time, Rovelli says that much of the knowledge that we now take for granted was once considered equally perplexing. “I realize that the picture is not intuitive. But this is what fundamental physics is about: finding new ways of thinking about the world and proposing them and seeing if they work. I think that when Galileo said that the Earth was spinning crazily around, it was utterly incomprehensible in the same manner. Space for Copernicus was not the same as space for Newton, and space for Newton was not the same as space for Einstein. We always learn a little bit more.”
Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.
Schroeder
Schroeder played the piano and all of the girls loved him. They would sit there for hours and watch him play. Schroeder had a big old cock, too, and the girls loved that just as well. The times Schroeder wasn’t playing one instrument, he was playing the other. He would play the piano all day and screw all night and he got maybe an hour or two of sleep. He came into the bar one afternoon and took a seat next to Charlie.
“You’re looking sort of beat there, baby,” Charlie said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Schroeder. “It’s these girls. They’ll kill me one of these days. They just won’t quit, Branaski! Every time I think I might get some sleep, here comes another one, pounding at my door. It’s enough to drive me mad.”
“I bet Beethoven never had these problems.”
“Beethoven probably had the clap,” said Schroeder.
They sat and drank their beers and talked about women.
“There’s Lucy and Violet. They’re some real pieces of work, Branaski. They don’t get jealous of each other and sometimes one will come over while I’ve still got the other one in the sack! It’s not like Frieda. I think that Frieda would kill me if she ever found another woman over. It’s nothing but trouble, all the time. More trouble than it’s worth, I can tell you that much.”
And Charlie said, “Maybe you should just give it up.”
Schroeder laughed and clapped Charlie on the back.
“I could never give up women for the same reason I could never give up the piano, Charlie Branaski: I’m just too damn good.”
The Wisdom Of Surrender
Resistance Equals Persistence
We all know the feeling of being repeatedly haunted by the same issue, no matter how we try to ignore it, avoid it, or run away from it. Sometimes it seems that we can get rid of something we don’t want by simply pushing it away. Most of the time, the more we push away, the more we get pushed back. There are laws of physics and metaphysics that explain this phenomenon, which is often summed up in this pithy phrase: That which you resist persists.
Resistance tends to strengthen the energies it attempts to oppose by giving them power and energy to work against. Additionally, resistance keeps us from learning more about what we resist. In order to fully understand something, we must open to it enough to receive its energy; otherwise, we remain ignorant of its lessons. There is a Tibetan story of a monk who retreats to meditate in a cave only to be plagued by demons. He tries everything—chasing, fighting, hiding—to get the demons out of his cave, but the thing that finally works is surrender. He simply lets them have their way with him and only then do they disappear.
Now, this wisdom must be applied practically. We are not meant to get ourselves physically injured. Instead, this story speaks of how, in essence, our demons are inside of us. What plagues and pursues us on an inner level has a way of manifesting itself in our environment in the form of people, events, and issues that appear to be beyond our control. But all these external expressions are reflections of our insides, and it is inside ourselves that we can safely experiment with surrendering to what we fear and dislike. It may feel scary, and we may find ourselves in the company of a lot of resistance as we begin the process of opening to what we fear. But the more we learn to surrender, and the more the demons that plague us disappear in the process, the more courageous we will become.
I recommend that if you haven’t yet, you create your own calming routine. Give it a couple of weeks to become a habit, focusing on doing it every day, and soon, you will not want to miss it.
Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
- Morning coffee. If you’re not a coffee person, tea or cocoa work great as well. Sit and enjoy the silence as you wake up, and even better, watch the sun rise. It’s the perfect way to greet the day.
- Exercise. I like to go on an easy run. It relieves stress, and gives me time to myself to think, and enjoy nature. Evening runs are great too, especially as the sun goes down. If you’re not into running, walking, cycling, swimming, or really any exercise works well. Just take it easy in the beginning, and try to do a little every day. Don’t overdo it.
- Meditation or yoga. I haven’t been meditating on a regular basis, but when I do, it’s so calming, and so centering. You don’t need to do anything formal — simply focusing on your breathing, as it goes in and out, is a good meditation. While I’ve never been into yoga, I know a lot of people who swear by it, and I would recommend you give it a try if it sounds appealing to you.
- Gratitude session. This is one of my favorite rituals: every day, take a couple of minutes to think about everything and everybody you are grateful for in your life. This may sound corny, but it is an amazing ritual. Try it right now — it only takes a minute. Who are you grateful for? What are you grateful for? I’ve found that this little ritual has so much power that it makes me happier and more compassionate. Btw, every time I do it, I thank the people who donated and helped me become a giant step closer to my dream (that’s you guys!).
- Goal mantra. This is another one of my absolute favorites. I got the idea from Guy Kawasaki, who tells us that corporate mission statements are basically useless, and recommends you create a corporate mantra instead of three or four words (tops). So instead of creating a corporate mantra, I created a personal mantra to remind myself of why I do everything I’ve been doing this year (with the blog, all my writing, and some new projects that are coming up, including an e-book). Here it is: Liberate Yourself. And I just make sure to repeat this mantra at least once a day (if not several times). It helps me stay focused. I suggest you do the same for your personal mission.
- Evening review. I think this would be an especially fruitful routine for anyone. Basically, it’s a routine that Ben Franklin did himself: he would spend some time at the end of each day to review how he did with his goal, and reflect on how his day went. It only needs to take a few minutes, but just go over your day, think about your goal (your mantra), what you did to further that goal, what you did right and what you did wrong today, what you can improve, what you need to do in the future. If you want to journal this, it would be even better!
- Bath time. My home doesn’t have a bath tub, but I truly cherish a long hot bath. If you have the time to do this, it can be extremely relaxing.
- After work unwinding. Long day at work? Stressed out? Take 30 minutes to unwind. Some great ideas for that: a 20-30 minute nap, snuggling with your kids, deep breathing, stretching, self-massage, or really anything that relaxes you.
- Pre-bed ritual. Another ideal time for a calming routine is just before you go to bed. You can do any of the calming things mentioned in the other items, or just develop a routine: get clothes ready, get lunches ready, clean up, brush teeth, decide on your three Most Important Tasks (MITs) for tomorrow, etc.
- Journaling or writing. A morning writing ritual is a good thing, but you can do a writing ritual at any time that works for you. Or instead of writing, try journaling. It can be very productive and relaxing.
- Conversation. Try this: every night for an hour, just sit and talk to your spouse. Share the highlights and lowlights of your day, talk about your goals, your finances, your relationship, movies, music, books. This can, of course, be adapted for conversation with your children.
- Reading time. Ah, one of my favorites. Take time each day to spend with a good book. Or a trashy novel. It doesn’t matter. I actually like to take time in the morning and evening, but whatever time is convenient for you will work.
