One of the best ways of getting to sleep is to ask yourself a really profound question. The deeper the better. Dropping such a stone into the Well of Night is a torment to already reluctant Goblins who down tools in protest at all this pre-frontal cortex overtime which is a great help in nodding off. Turn your profundity over in your hand as if it were The Precious, next thing you know it’s morning and you need to pee.
Last night’s was the charm. ‘What is the most significant thing anyone ever said to me?’ A few pretenders threw their hats into the ring but I was suddenly way too tired to pay them any mind.
To have the desired effect you need fresh questions on a regular basis, otherwise the Goblins keep working and you’ll be up all night. Sometimes you can’t think of a good one, a nice juicy one to provoke the Goblin’s strike, but these musings work just as well and many a peaceful night’s sleep may be entered into on the magic carpet of wondering hard about what to wonder hard about.
Next morning though, it came to me. The most significant thing that any one ever said to me was after a session with my analyst, Chuck, who was also a gifted potter. He was seeing me to the door. In the hallway there was a magnificent example of his work. I asked him quite casually how he managed the inevitable desires to become rich and famous which must ride in on the back of such craftsmanship. His answer rang in me like a bell. ‘I tip my hat to them.’
The Zen quality of Chuck’s attitude towards the shadowy, grasping aspect of human nature seems to me the encapsulation of enlightened action. He really had found a mid way between the extremes, being neither enamored nor repelled by wealth and fame.
Non-attachment isn’t about separating yourself from the world, about getting rid of or overcoming anything. Unfortunately much popular psychology is steeped in the notion that people have to be fixed, made better, panel beaten back into normality. Ironically, inner conflict is bound to result from such partisan affiliation, from identifying with some narrow band of the psyche at the expense of all the others.
”You can have it any color you like so long as its black.” H. Ford.
When life’s other hues are relegated to the Underworld out of the need to present a particular face to Others, you visit a world of hurt upon yourself. The consistent view, the tried and true, the default position; none of these chime well with immediate life, the fresh possibility striving to outgrow yesterday’s mold.
”There is as much suffering derived from our resistance to circumstance as from the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.
Though we are largely free from the tyrannical hold Church had over the hearts and minds of it’s Flock in times past, we still seem to be in the business of trying to divide Good from Evil and fighting the good fight. Today’s demons are Anxiety and Depression which we combat no less than Knights of Old, wielding Prosac and Chlorpromazine in place of sword and lance.
But change never occurs on the back of such a combative attitude. In fact it makes it worse, entrenching inner conflict for which some new medication will soon become necessary….
‘What you resist, persists.’ S. Freud.
If you want to grow, you have to lower your weapon. People tend to think of their demons as the problem, but its the desire to be rid of them which actually causes the greater part of suffering because their strategy is rooted in rejection of experience and internal division. This then lends said demons with sharper horns and pointier tails.
The fears we have about entertaining our own alienated self is poetically expressed by the issues surrounding the US southern border wall. There is a strong feeling that unless there is an impenetrable barrier then there will simply be chaos, civilization as we know it will end, overrun by murderers and rapists.
The reality on the ground is very different as is often the case when the axe you are busy grinding can be put aside for a moment.
In the apocryphal Essene Gospel of Peace the Master says to the afflicted,
‘ Satan torments you thus because you do not pay to him his tribute. You torment him with hunger and so in his agony he torments you.’
What this means is that resolving inner conflict entails having a position slightly outside it, one that refrains from overly taking sides so that identity is not entirely wrapped up in it, just as a child may develop a relationship with Daddy without it having to cost him his relationship with Mummy.
‘The greatest and most important problems of life can never be solved, but only outgrown.” C. G. Jung
‘Trying-to-resolve’ is actually a form of throwing yourself back in the fray. It’s the wish to fix so that the issue will go away. It’s wanting to grow whilst sedimenting self construct and most destructively, identifying with the conflict itself.
But you are curious, you want answers; yet if the quest for knowledge is tinged with wanting dominion over it, wanting to feel secure, wanting to be free of the tension, then the spirituality used to counter materialism becomes yet another form of obsessive nut-gathering and covert inner warfare.
‘To solve a problem is to kill it.’ E.F. Schumacher
An old Jewish fable attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok tells the story of the difference between Heaven and Hell. They are actually the same place but in Hell the long spoons at the dining table mean that no-one can get the food to their mouths and so all are wailing and moaning. In Heaven the people are feeding Each Other.
The difference is Relatedness, which seems to be in such short supply these days that the British even have a Minister of Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, who has given teary eyed speeches vowing ‘to tackle the scourge of isolation’, using the same vanquishing language of conflict that creates isolation in the first place, rather than examining the ways in which we refuse to feed one another.
Generally this must involve a confession of some kind. Not the pill box variety, just the heart felt ‘bloody hell’ of realizing just how much you with-hold from yourself and others which then exacerbates conflict and its symptom, isolation.
Of course it takes a long time to get so poised that you can tip your hat to the devil with the confidence that such a gesture immunizes you from the worst of his effects. There are bound to be more clumsy efforts. But you have to start somewhere.
So next time you find something lurking in the lower corridors of the Psyche, refrain from running it through with your mighty weapon. Try tipping your hat and introduce yourself nicely. Ask after its name. Make it a cup of tea. Find out where it comes from and where it is headed. Swop baby pictures, take some selfies. You’ll part on better terms.