The Endless Project of Improvement

Sometimes meeting with defeat is a quicker way to awaken than experiencing success. Sooner or later, during the journey of spiritual awakening, the project of self improvement comes to a dead end.

From what I gather, reading and listening to those who abide in awakened awareness, enlightenment does not turn out to have anything to do with becoming faster, smarter, sexier, or even healthier. It is not about perfecting the personality or glorifying the body. Several well known spiritual teachers who were thought to be enlightened have died of cancer. A Course in Miracles teaches that whether it's a sick body or a healthy body, it's all a dream, taking place in one mind which has forgotten reality, a mind which has divided into many pieces, all of which are sharing a collective dream of believing they are separate selves.

Trying to perfect one's body, character, personality, and professional abilities, and making efforts to advance educationally, all have their place in this dream world. Some of the actors and actresses in this movie appear to engage in that sort of thing. Within the dream world, the little self can often be improved to some degree. We may dream we are learning to take better care of our bodies, focus on affirming thoughts, and find more mature ways of relating to one another. With our imagination we may envision new possibilities, then work at developing special skills and technical prowess through perseverance and practice. We may then appear, in the dream, to invent things with our intellectual cleverness and express our unique selves creatively. Developing self will and self-discipline are part of the arc of maturity. As an individual, you may be able to go pretty far into heightened self-awareness, service-oriented work, and the having of transcendental experiences.

Some individuals may appear successful, in worldly terms, for a period of time, perhaps a whole life time. They may be given (and take) personal credit for successfully manifesting health, wealth, material abundance, and fame. Others may appear to be victims of circumstance, unable to move ahead––no matter how hard they appear to try. Paradoxically, they may be making more spiritual progress than those who are deemed "successful". 

Sometimes things seem to be going well and you feel as if you have gotten a handle on improving your own life and the world. Then, out of the blue, you are prevented from doing whatever it was that made you high. You can't go out running, you're flat on your back. You can't afford to fly off to the spiritual pilgrimage you've made for years. You can't think clearly because you're feverishly hallucinating and fatigued. Sometimes grace comes in the form of pulling the rug out from under your individual feet. What life brings you is the opportunity to surrender being in control of the project of getting somewhere, of making life "better". Others seem to be allowed to get on the next bus and carry on with their journey of self advancement, but you're apparently not allowed to leave the depot. At some point in life, perhaps the majority of your personal effort to improve your circumstances is stymied. Ever your earnest efforts to become a more wide awake, aware, enlightened individual brings you to a road block. A dead end. A sense of defeat.

It may thoroughly suck at the time, but feeling stuck and out of control can be a high-speed course in awakening. Whether it happens gradually, or suddenly, the incapacity to improve your circumstances and self will give you the opportunity to see life differently. Perhaps from an aerial view.

If we float up above the maze of goal-setting, dream-following, effort-expending, project-doing, future-based behavior, we may see that this maze has no out. There may be a long run of apparent successes, the experience of seeming to get somewhere without being blocked. But eventually, if you play the game long enough, the 50/50 duality of this world becomes uncomfortably apparent. Try manifesting what you want, as hard as you care to try. You'll most likely appear successful––some of the time. The other times you won't. And if you get what you thought you wanted, come talk to me in a year and tell me if it lasted. You may come to the same conclusion I did, again and again, that the little me did not have a broad enough perspective to see what she really needed, or to anticipate the full consequences of getting what she wanted, much less what was in the best interests of everyone else. She could not make anything happen that resulted in lasting peace, joy, contentment, or security. All phenomena change in this dream world.

Life has had the grace to confront me again and again with situations where I felt helpless to alter my outer reality, no matter how hard I tried. Being squeezed and stuck at times helped me surrender into a different view of life, one which could symbolically be described as floating above the maze, recognizing its no-way-out-ness. I stopped trying to manifest abundance or health or a partnership that would last. It's not that I've stopped believing in the importance of self-discipline and taking responsibility, it's that there is a much bigger integration going on. I notice that for every high there was a low, for every success a failure, for ever passion followed an equal degree of pensive frustrated stuckness when I was prevented from following it, for every moment of personal success and pride an equal and opposite wave of chagrin and anxiety. For every "ah ha" of discovery about why things were as they were, an inexplicable exception that landed me back into not understanding.

What happens when you come home from visiting some Holy Place? What happens after the retreat? What happens after the chanting and meditation with the group? How much is your inner well-being dependent on a place, a group, a practice? Practices have their place in the grand scheme of things, otherwise they would not appear to exist. There is merit to refining one's willpower and focus. But at some point in, it may become clear that the one doing the practicing is what feels so very cumbersome. The seeker starts to reek. The self-improvement Project Manager feels burned out. After months or years of dedicated efforts to heal the self, old wounded patterns still arise. No matter how far you think you've come, there you are, still in a state of suffering and incompleteness. The yearning for completeness may become stronger and stronger, motivating you to try many new ways to find it. Reading more books, attending more workshops, flying to faraway places to meet famous spiritual teachers. All of this may keep one's hope up for a while, but as long as there is still a distance between the guru and the grocery bagger, the sacred place and the parking lot, there is still a niggling sense of lack somewhere in the background.

If your character has access to the guru and the book and the workshop and the air fare that's fine, that's in your character's script. But if you don't have the free time or the health or the money to travel, don't worry. Be glad. For everything you need in order to awaken is right here in your daily life. Where you live now and what you are going through may be far from fun and easy. But it is just as good a place as any to realize what is really true and what you really are. No one and nothing is preventing your completion.

There is a limit to what can be accomplished by and as a "self". After a while, it is apparent that trying to completely attain perfection as an individual is as impossible as painting an entire floor while remaining in the room. Eventually, the self that thinks it is in charge of the project is what is in the way of completing the project. Evolving consciousness is one thing, enlightenment is another.  Evolution––and devolution into chaos––happens over and over within the dream. Enlightenment is more about waking up from the dream.

Being Presence

"As long as you are unaware of Being, you will seek meaning only within the dimension of doing and of future, that is to say, the dimension of time. And whatever meaning or fulfillment you find will dissolve or turn out to have been a deception. Invariably, it will be destroyed by time. Any meaning we find on that level is true only relatively and temporarily." pg. 263

"In other words, not your aims or your actions are primary, but the state of consciousness out of which they come." pg. 265

 A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, by Eckhart Tolle

~

Fresh from a memorial service for a friend, my heart was wide open and awareness felt expanded. The gathering was more of a celebration than a lamentation. She was dying, so she helped to plan the service. She chose the caterer, the menu, the musicians and dancers, and the program of songs to be shared. As we who are still embodied danced, sang, ate, and shared testimonials, I reflected on her life and the community she influenced. She was an icon, to me, of wholesome living. She expressed her creativity fully though writing, singing and dancing, leading the way for many other people to join in. She dared to explore a wide variety of occupations, some very physically demanding and intimate with the natural world such as fishing, farming, and gardening. She grew an organic garden for her family and raised free-range poultry.  Every time I saw her, she glowed with a sincere smile. The caring lilt in her voice at times lifted me from discouragement into renewed hope and faith that things could get better in my own life when I was most uncertain of that. She was encouraging, and down to earth, a dreamer, but also very practical. She was intimately involved in life, not living on the edge but diving deeply into it.

~

In some places in the world, just surviving is the challenge. No one goes to work out at a gym when they have to carry water for miles in heavy vessels balanced on their heads. When the basic needs of survival are met, however, and there are resources to spare, a huge emphasis may be placed on developing and improving the body and mind. The project of getting in good shape may become a personally chosen focus, rather than a byproduct of some necessary survival activity.

Where I live, many people work out regularly at the gym and outdoors, practice various forms of yoga and meditation, spend "quality time" in nature, and sing and dance until they glow, for recreation, health, and personal expression. Many people I know have the opportunity to explore trends in healthy eating on the micro and macro level, buying expensive nutritional supplements in health food stores and growing their own organic gardens full of dark leafy greens.

On the level of the mind, my community offers vast possibilities for intellectual and creative exploration. Whether in local college classes, free programs through the libraries, or online study, people with even a modest income and a modicum of free time may peruse a vast web of information. Even those of us who fill unglamorous service roles in a seasonal tourist industry (such as cleaning at inns) may also be writers, artists, philosophers, and former world travelers, with resumes that may seem to represent more than one lifeline!

I am grateful to have had all these rich life experiences and a mind-expanding education, but for me, the focus has changed dramatically over the past decade. I used to be deeply concerned about whether or not I was living up to my full potential. Was the work I was doing expressing my creativity and talents? Was it making enough of a difference in the world? How could the impact of one small person's actions make the world a better place when there were new problems of gargantuan scale cropping up daily?

Part of what fueled my efforts was fear. I feared that without my intensely urgent participation to make a difference, the world would slide even further into chaos and darkness. There was a battle to be fought. Sitting it out was a sin.  I feared that if I did not work to my full potential I would be guilty of not trying hard enough, and would suffer regret at wasting my "one precious life." I feared reaching the end of my life and looking back and seeing that I had not lived to the fullest–whatever that meant. There was an urgency to develop myself, to become something more complete, to build up experience and someday, somehow, earn a sense of having "arrived."

Self development and selfless service also got linked to health. I held the belief that if I lived my life to the fullest, expressed my creativity with a passion, worked diligently to process whatever inner emotional homework came up, focused on positive thinking, beamed a positive attitude, worked hard to eat well and stay fit and help other people and the world through doing meaningful work, the reward would be good health. My friend was a shining example of all of the efforts above. But, as we who are still embodied found out, even such people can die, in middle age, of cancer. She was a year and a day younger than me.

Several well known spiritual teachers, who were thought to be enlightened, have died of cancer. In this world, things happen to individuals. Our individual selves want there to be ways to control life, ways to maneuver through life with the least amount of pain and suffering. But sometimes even when you "do all the right things" your time in a particular body is shorter than that of someone who doesn't.

~

What struck me most about the memorial service for my friend was that the room seemed infused by her presence. She seemed to be nowhere in particular–yet everywhere at once. Another close friend of mine, a teacher, died several years ago, also in middle age. Her presence also feels real when I tune into it. When I hear a sparrow chirping I remember her poetry about sparrows, but there's a more immediate timeless sense of her being able to hear this particular sparrow's song right now. When we are "in love" with someone, doesn't it sometimes seem that the essence of that person is everywhere, all around us? We seem to "see" them in the vast blue sky, the sunset whisps of cloud, the way light slants through pines. We can't put our finger on where, exactly, they are, they simply seem to be everywhere, like the paper that a watercolor painting is painted upon. No matter where you look in the painting, the backdrop holding it all together is there. Love opens us to the awareness of Being that both expresses through and transcends the physical. We become aware, we remember, that we are–that everyone IS–this presence. 

Having someone you know die can be a great gift. Becoming so ill you almost die can also be a great gift. Losing a career or a relationship or a home or a lot of money can be a gift. Anything that rocks your sense of proportion, that pushes you to see beyond what you thought was real, can be a gift. It can help you see what is still there, even when what seemed to hold your world together disappears. Anything that acts as a still point to the persistence of doing, planning, becoming, and trying to get somewhere else, anything that even momentarily stops some self-driven agenda in its tracks.

It has been a relief, for me, to discover and know for sure that I don't have to learn any more in order to become a "better" person. I no longer worry about whether or not I am living up to my full potential. I am as at-ease ironing sheets for three hours as painting or teaching a creatively inspired social studies class on global awareness. Day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, much richness of experience has been accumulated. I still hedge on the side of eating more kale and fewer cookies, but I enjoy both just as much, one is no longer consumed as compensation for the guilt of the other. I am aware, when I love someone, that our time in this physical form is limited. What a wonder it is, to meet you as this! The game of Being Presence while testing out inhabiting this particular form! Now that there is no longer a goading fear of not being enough, no urgency of need to work on perfecting the body and mind, there is even more delight in the ordinary moment. Typically a lot gets done in an average day, but the quality of living it no longer has the strain or weight or rush or seriousness that it used to. I'm already here, now, as Awareness, as Presence. Everything flows from that.