Brave New Kitty

A devout believer was sitting at home when he heard that a flood was coming. Then the voice of God boomed down from above, “Have no fear! I will save you!” As everyone else fled in haste and panic, the believer sat confidently in his living room as the water rose. Presently, a boat floated by in front of his window. “Come, get into my boat!” a man cried out. “I will save you!” “No thank you,” replied the believer. “God is going to save me.” Eventually the water covered the lower floor of the house, so the believer moved to the second floor. A boat floated by his bedroom window. “Come, get into my boat!” a man cried out again. “I will save you!” “No thank you,” replied the believer. “God is going to save me.” When the water rose above even the second floor, the believer moved up to his roof. Along came another boat, and another cry for rescue, but still, the man refused help. The water continued to rise, and the man drowned.

When he got to heaven, he went in front of God. “God, I am such a devout believer. Why didn’t you save me?”

“I tried!” said God. “I sent three boats!”

In my last post, There Are No Guarantees, I talked about the importance of internal validation; if we want to be assured of achieving a sense of fulfillment, internal validation is the only way to do that. But this does not mean, by any stretch, that we ignore external factors. Writing that post got me thinking about how internal and external factors work together, how neither is complete without the other, and how important it is to understand how this works in our lives.

Many people don’t. They see internal and external factors as an either/or proposition. A good example occurs in politics. Conservatives tend to see the world in shades of internal factors, while liberals tend to see the world in shades of external factors. That is, the conservative sees individuals as solely responsible for their own fate, the “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality, and the liberal sees individuals as powerless against external forces such as the economy and big business interests. Both views are accurate, but they are also incomplete. People are responsible for their own fate, but sometimes they need help or protection. Some external forces are injurious to individuals, and need to be regulated. The two views balance each other, but few people see it this way. Instead, they pick one side and demonize the other, blaming it for all the world’s woes, which, if you give the matter any critical thought at all, you can see is just plain silly.

On a personal level, the victim mentality exemplifies pathologically externalized thinking. The victim mentality is when a person says, “I can’t do X because of Y.” For example, “I can’t be successful because I was abused as a child/am an alcoholic/am depressed/have a mean boss/have an unsupportive spouse/didn’t finish college/can’t get anyone to help me/am black/Hispanic/female/gay/disliked.” Such a mentality puts the whole burden of success on something outside of yourself and excuses you from making the effort. A sad, empty way to look at life.

Examples of pathologically internalized thinking would be along the lines of a control freak or someone unable to ask for help. Also sad.

What you should aim for is an alignment of the internal and the external. You can’t stop desiring certain outcomes, nor should you. But you can’t force them to happen, either. So what you want to do is align your internal choices with the external events that you want to occur.

I first thought of this idea years ago when I chaired an AA meeting on the Twelfth Step, which is “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” I wanted to come up with an interesting take on service, the principle of the step. Since the Eleventh Tradition says, “AA is a program of attraction, not promotion,” how should you think about “carrying the message” to alcoholics who need help? The last thing you want to do is shove sobriety down anybody’s throat. What I came up with is that the best you can do is to create an environment where a spiritual awakening can occur. (In this sense, the spiritual awakening refers to an alcoholic getting sober.) AA accomplishes this very well with a safe, supportive, non-judgmental atmosphere that offers all it can to people who are curious, but never tries to force an outcome. In this way, it creates an environment where the awakening, the moment of clarity (which must be 100% voluntary), can occur. The whole AA culture is based on the belief that people must draw their own conclusions, and all you can do is create a space where that can happen.

This principle applies, I think, to all areas of life. For example, if you want to be a writer, you write a lot, submit stories and ideas to publishers, and learn as much as you can about how the publishing industry works. You get to know other writers and learn how they broke into the field.

The same goes for anything you want to succeed at. You work hard, you become an expert in your field, and you make yourself available to people who can help you get ahead.
In other words, you put yourself in the path of the thing you want to happen. You align your internal efforts with desirable external events.

Then, you let go of the outcome.

Letting go of outcomes is the only sane choice we have. Focusing on things we have no control over is crazy-making, and is why learning to validate ourselves is so important. And yet, we don’t want to be like the devout believer who drowned waiting for God to save him because he didn’t recognize opportunity when it came along.

There is a fine balance between an individual and the universe, between knowing when to push and when to surrender, knowing when to dance and when to be still. It takes practice, conscious awareness, and more practice to find it. Understanding the world in terms of aligning internal and external is extremely helpful in finding this balance. It is the beginning of understanding your true self and your true relationship with the universe.

Virtue is its own reward. –Proverb

A close friend of mine got caught up in the poker craze that’s swept the world in the past five or so years. He studied the game voraciously, reading every book he could find, participating in online forums giving and receiving feedback, and becoming part of a community of smart players who are able to play for a living. You’d be amazed at the number of players who, although not rich or famous, are able to support themselves and their families this way.

My friend, Reggie, is smart, aggressive, and strategic. In other words, he has all the necessary traits to succeed as a poker player. Within a year’s time, he understood the game as well as many of the professionals you see on television. And this is not just my opinion; his community of poker pros repeatedly validated this for him.

But in poker, there is a phenomenon known as “running bad.” Without getting into the mathematics of the game (the knowing of which is the key to long-term success), it means that you repeatedly get your money into the pot as a favorite and are drawn out on by an inferior hand.

This is what happened to Reggie.

Everyone who understood the game and knew how Reggie played believed he had what it took to make it as a pro. But through a series of horrifying defeats, he went broke trying. Over and over, I watched him lose with superior hands, often when he was a 10 to 1 favorite or better. It was almost always to people who had no skills to discern whether they were making the right play; often, these people were drunk, sometimes so drunk they could barely stand up or speak. Typically, these are the people you want in your poker game. Over the long run, the pro will win the money and the unskilled gambler will go broke. But in the short run, anything can happen; this is why unskilled players are in there at all. In poker, if you think of the pros as the casino and the non-pros as the slot machine players, you’ll have a pretty clear idea of how the game works.

But in poker, the long run can be very, very long. And if you don’t have a bankroll large enough to sustain a big downswing, you can go broke. Every pro player has gone broke at least once in his career. Most more than once. It’s just part of choosing this way to make a living. Pros accept these severe financial swings with an equanimity that is astounding to behold.

So now Reggie is back working a nine-to-five job and trying to build up a bankroll. There’s no telling how long it will be until he takes another shot at doing it professionally. Even though he understands the game as well as most pros, even though he has all the personality traits required to be successful, even though he has people willing to back him because they know he has an edge, he just hasn’t been able to push past this gigantic losing streak.

Observing my friend’s poker experience taught me something about life that I don’t think I would have learned any other way: There are no guarantees.

Sure, we all learn early on that life’s not fair and that there are no free rides and that if at first you don’t succeed you must try and try again. But I don’t think, unless you immerse yourself in an activity so blatantly dependent on short-term luck for success, that you truly understand the vital role luck plays in life. Further, there is a very significant reason that we don’t understand, and that is because we don’t want to.

We want to believe that if we work hard enough, worry long enough, study, sweat, cry, and put our whole heart into a thing that we will be successful. We don’t want to believe that we can do all of that and still fail. We don’t want to believe that the world can work that way, that we can earn and be deserving of good things and not have them come to us.

But that’s the way it is.

And not just in poker. Poker merely drove the lesson home for me in a way nothing else ever had. There are examples everywhere you look. Have you ever listened to a successful actor talk about his rise to fame? He always credits luck, usually telling a story about being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right person when the magical alchemy happened.

Same in the business world. There are multitudes of people who were in the right place at the right time and ended up millionaires. Certainly, they were doing the right things, but so were thousands of other people who didn’t have the same fairy tale result from their efforts. And so it goes in every field, everywhere, all the time, as it always has, as it always will.

We can do everything right and still get unlucky. Natural disasters, violent crime, car accidents. Serious illness is perhaps the number one unlucky thing people don’t want to see as chance. When we hear of someone having cancer, for example, we almost automatically assume they did something to deserve it. Their diet, their anger, their karma; anything but that they just drew the short straw health wise. Because, you see, accepting that it could happen to someone who didn’t deserve it means it could happen to us.

Well, it could.

I don’t want to be the one to break this bad news to you, but I think it’s important to understand the significance luck has. If you don’t, you will be constantly over- or underestimating your sense of control over life. Besides, I don’t actually think this is bad news. Accepting the uncertainty of outcomes has a freeing quality to it absolutely vital to living an authentic life. This is the case for a number of reasons.

First of all, when we understand our inability to control external events and outcomes, we are free to live in the moment. We can give up trying to cajole or force the universe to behave as we want it to and simply engage in an activity. Such an attitude makes logical sense, given the universe’s indifference, and it allows you to immerse yourself in every moment of your life. With this attitude, it is even possible to find joy in things you don’t want to do, like an unpleasant task or obligation or a job you don’t like. When every moment becomes important for its own sake, it becomes an end in itself, and, in a sense, sacred.

Also, when we understand our inability to control outcomes, we can let ourselves off the hook for “failing.” We don’t give up, but we accept that there is only so much we can do to make what we want happen. We are in control of our own actions, and that’s it. If we don’t achieve a desired outcome, it doesn’t matter so much when we know we did our best. We can truly feel okay about it and let it go. Conversely, if we contract a serious illness, we don’t have to beat ourselves up over all the things we could have done differently to avoid it. Certainly, healthy lifestyle choices are important, but they do not guarantee anything. Some of most health-conscious people I know have gotten cancer, and some of the unhealthiest have lived into their eighties and even nineties. Letting ourselves off the hook for bad stuff is sooo important. Understanding the universe’s indifference and our own powerlessness in the face of it goes a long way toward doing this.

Finally, when we understand our inability to control the external world, we make a shift from external to internal validation. Rather than focusing on getting something from “out there,” the reward is in the doing. Good outcomes are desirable, and we never stop wanting them or working toward them, but they are no longer the point. The point is to satisfy our own sense of fulfillment, in our own way, and to do what matters to us. When we reach this point, we are liberated. Only then do we become truly ourselves; only then do we become fully authentic.

A closing thought: Viewing the world as offering no guarantees is not an excuse for nihilism. It is exactly the opposite. The point of internal validation is that you learn to do the next right thing not for any recognition, but because it’s the next right thing. Virtue is, indeed, its own reward.

There are no guarantees. And thank goodness there aren’t! Because if there were, there would be no surprises in life, and we would all know exactly what was coming, and that would be no fun at all. Surprises aren’t always fun, but without them—good and bad—life would truly not be worth living.

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered
Forgive them anyway
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives
Be kind anyway
If you are successful, you will win friends, some false and some true
Succeed anyway
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you
Be honest and frank anyway
What you spend your life building, someone destroys overnight
Build anyway
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous
Be happy anyway
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow
Do good anyway
Give the world your best anyway
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God
It was never between you and them anyway.

Last December, I bought a dock for my iPod from a wholesale/clearinghouse type of place for about a quarter of the new price. The salesmen told me it was from a recalled lot and it may or may not work, but that the company would repair or replace it at no cost to me if it didn’t. I was apprehensive, but it seemed like such a good deal, even if it turned out to need repair.

Of course, it didn’t work. I called the company and gave the tech support guy the whole story. To my amazement, he gave me an official repair authorization number and shipping instructions without missing a beat. I sent it off via Federal Express, with an expectation of getting it back in around four weeks.

Here it is a new season, and I haven’t heard a thing. That authorization number, scribbled innocently on a yellow post-it note, is burning a hole through my desk. I look at it every day and when I do, I feel a rock in my stomach and I can’t make myself call to find out what the heck is going on. I don’t usually mind doing these things; I put the phone on speaker and go about my business while I’m on hold. It takes almost no time out of my day.

So why can’t I get myself to call about the iPod dock?

I’ve been quietly agonizing, and I finally realized that I don’t want to make the call because I don’t feel good about the whole situation. I feel like I’ve done something dishonest and am trying to cheat the company. I’m afraid the person who takes the call will say, “Oh, it’s you” and chastise me for thinking I could get away with something.

I put off things that don’t feel good.

Of course, I also put off menial tasks and big, daunting projects.

I smelled an essay topic here, but couldn’t really come up with anything interesting, so I googled “procrastination” and was amazed at how much was out there about it: over 5 million hits. It shouldn’t be so surprising, but when I feel shameful about something, I tend to think I’m the only person in the universe with that particular issue.

Turns out I’m not.

Apparently, everybody struggles with procrastination to some degree. And, there are all kinds of programs, techniques, counseling services, and books out there about it. It’s a big business.

I’m a procrastinator. And my procrastination has caused some rather big problems. It took me fifteen years to get my bachelor’s degree, for example. And until about three years ago, I was utterly unable to sit down and make myself finish a writing project that I wasn’t being graded on or paid for, even though I’d intuited for many years that writing was going to be my life’s work.

My question is this: why haven’t I addressed procrastination before now? How have I, someone who’s spent nearly all my adult life engrossed in personal development, gotten this far without knowing what a big problem procrastination is for me?

I think the answer is that I simply had more pressing issues to take care of. I had to get sober before all else, then I had to deal with all the painful, ugly reasons chemical euphoria had been so appealing: low self-esteem, depression, shame, anger, fear of intimacy (for example). It’s not that procrastination wasn’t a problem, it just wasn’t a high priority problem. Furthermore, in dealing with my other issues, procrastination started to work itself out. I finished college, I pursued a professional career, I learned how to get close to people, I learned how to deal with my depression, shame, and anger in ways that caused them to not be as debilitating as they once were. After dealing with all of this—and it took many, many years—procrastination seemed comparably insignificant. I suppose I can count myself fortunate that I’ve gotten to a point where I am looking at what I consider a foible as opposed to a life-sapping struggle.

Maybe not even really a foible. In perusing my Google results, I realized that procrastination is rooted in many of the things I’ve struggled with my whole life: feelings of low self-worth, poor impulse control, anxiety, a self-defeating mentality, etc. One article even said that “Having a harsh, controlling father keeps children from developing the ability to regulate themselves, from internalizing their own intentions and then learning to act on them.” Ha! I knew there was a family-of-origin connection somewhere!

So, I think the larger reason I haven’t worked on my procrastination is that it wasn’t a root cause, but rather, a manifestation of my underlying issues. When I worked on the core issues, the procrastination sorted itself out. I still procrastinate, but not nearly like I used to, and when I do, it’s usually for some discernible reason, like not wanting to feel dishonest, or, in a more serious vein, anxiety about tackling a big job, such as writing a book. Not ideal, but not too far from the norm, either. And, writing this essay has brought me to a new level of awareness about procrastination that can only be helpful. Lucky me: I continue to find new opportunities for growth.

While I think conquering procrastination is best done by addressing its underlying causes (and not with behavioral modification techniques such as this, which can be helpful, but may not get at root issues), here’s a guy who sidestepped the issue altogether and found a way to make procrastination work for him: Structured Procrastination describes a way to turn the character flaw to your advantage by doing productive work while you avoid doing other productive work. It wasn’t the only article that had positive things to say about procrastination (here’s another one), but I thought it was the best written. I love the idea of using procrastination to your advantage. I’ve long believed that all “negative” traits have positive potential, and if we pay close attention, we’ll figure out what that is.

Hey, that’s a good essay idea. Maybe I’ll give that some more thought…tomorrow, after I resolve the iPod dock issue.

Not too long ago, I watched a Frontline episode about marketing. One expert said that people drive trucks and SUVs because they want to feel a sense of domination. This made sense to me. It’s the only reason I can think of why people who don’t need a truck for utility purposes (henceforth referred to as “city people”) would want to drive vehicles that are hard to park, hard to maneuver, hard to see around, and get terrible gas mileage in this age of expensive gas. Things that don’t make sense on the surface are usually motivated by deep psychological longings. (And this is exactly why advertising works. Shadow motivations are extremely powerful; because we aren’t aware of them, we can’t counter them with logic.)

I think many city people who drive trucks are trying to claim some feeling of control over their lives. Many different personalities fall into this category. There’s the angry young man who feels a sense of powerlessness over his destiny. There’s the lesbian woman wanting others to see her as tougher than she really feels, and the twenty-something girl who wants people to think she’s tough. There’s the middle-aged man who wants others to see him as having arrived—he’s probably driving an Escalade, Navigator, or Porsche Cayenne. There’s the thirty-something mother who lives in the suburbs and quietly wishes she had never gotten pregnant or married. There’s the trendy urbanite—could be either sex—who puts looking cool above all else. There’s the suburbanite dad—probably married to the thirty-something mother—who insists his SUV is a practical vehicle given his number of children and dogs, but wants to retch at the idea of driving a minivan.

This is not a new or revolutionary observation. It’s just another take on Mid-life Crisis Man driving a Corvette (have you ever noticed it’s always middle-aged men driving Corvettes?), or Small Penis Man driving a huge four wheel drive truck, (domination/compensation again) or really, anyone wanting to make a statement about their personality with the vehicle they drive. The most interesting thing about this is that the statement a person wants to make is usually the opposite of their true personality. The people with the greatest sense of powerlessness, loneliness, or fear have the most need to project the opposite impression.

Interestingly, the lack of self-awareness never goes the other way. People don’t drive econoboxes because they want to see themselves as thrifty, or minivans because they want to see themselves as practical. The error is always on the side of glamour, power, prestige, sexiness, adventurousness, and all the other bold character traits that we wish we had and want other people to think we have. Nobody buys a Corolla because they think they look cool in it.

But back to the truck/domination theory. I find this interesting because of the sheer volume of trucks and SUVs on the road. Their appeal seems to cross all age, gender, and ethnic lines. At any random stoplight in the Twin Cities metro area, the ratio of trucks/SUVs to cars averages around one to one. This means there are as many people buying trucks as there are buying cars, which is mind-boggling when you consider that the ratio of people who actually need trucks, even for recreational purposes like hauling snowmobiles or jet skis, is less than ten percent of the urban population. It also means that people are voluntarily opting for big, gas-guzzling, impractical vehicles over smaller, more economical, more practical ones. Does this mean there are that many people who want to feel dominant?

Yes, I think this is exactly what it means. Driving is a microcosm of a culture, and this trend toward big vehicles is another aspect of it. Seen this way, trucks make perfect sense for any number of reasons. People frequently feel a sense of helplessness in an increasingly technologically complex society. Or, maybe vehicular dominance is a statement about self-absorption and a dying sense of community (an “every man for himself” sort of mentality). There is also the American obsession with wealth, power, and importance (which, advertisers would have us believe, can be ours if only we’re willing to go into enough debt). There are so many reasons for people to feel insecure and powerless in modern society that what seems completely irrational at first glance quickly becomes perfectly logical. There are a lot of people trying to feel control over their lives by what and how they drive.

Car manufacturers figured out decades ago that people associate cars with self image, and they’ve been perfecting their marketing along these lines ever since. Selling glamour. And for the most part, we’ve bought it. It’s a small segment of the population indeed who see their vehicle as a means of transportation and not as an extension of their personality. You’d think consumers would be savvier then ever in this age of instant information and worldwide audience via the Internet, but we’re not. I think it’s because we want to believe that easing our anxiety, whatever it may be, is as easy as spending the right amount of money.

The thing is, it’s not. The vehicle you drive (or the clothes you wear, or the house you live in, or any other material purchase) isn’t going to make you strong or powerful or rich. And whether or not it causes strangers to see you as any of those things doesn’t matter one slim little bit in your own life. The trappings of power and control do not make it so. All they make you is inauthentic. And more, not less, out of touch with yourself.

If you drive a truck and don’t need to, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re compensating for a sense of powerless in your own life. But there’s a good chance you are.

Just something to think about.

A friend of mine recently decided that she does not believe in God. She is a middle-aged woman, and after a Catholic upbringing and experiments ranging from Unitarianism to Wicca, she did not arrive at this conclusion lightly. The other day, she told me about an empty feeling inside that she’s struggling not to quell with compulsive behavior. I suggested that the emptiness might be spiritual in nature, and that she might benefit from trying to see it as a spiritual problem.

“How can I do that,” she smiled wryly, “when I don’t believe in god?”

I blinked at her, taken aback by this question, until I realized that she had a radically different view of spirituality than I did. And, that her view was the much more common one, the one that says God is a cosmic daddy figure holding court over us from his omniscient vantage point up in the sky, and that if you reject that, you are not a spiritual person.

It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that my friend is struggling mightily with depression. She’s fighting the good fight, making good self-care decisions and moving forward in many ways, but nevertheless seems to be losing the battle. For her, deciding not to believe in god means giving up all claims to her spiritual nature, leaving herself overwhelmed and hopeless.

This is a devastatingly incomplete way to look at spirituality.

It’s also quite common. Belief in the mythical god—the one residing in the sky—is by far the most popular view of spirituality in the industrialized world. Although most are not pious, something like 90% of Americans consider themselves Christians, meaning that they believe Jesus Christ literally died so they might live eternally. Most Judaic and Islamic practices are also mythic, meaning that people believe these gods live in the sky and are capable of rescuing human souls from eternal suffering.

Mythical merely means a god created by early man. These gods were born in the stories—the myths—man told himself about his origins, the meaning of his existence, and what happens after death. (Back then, myth passed for science, being the only means man had for explaining his world.) These stories became so entrenched in our cultures that they have become representative of all spirituality.

The myths are not “wrong.” They tell crucially important stories about the human struggle, stories meant to help us find meaning and serenity and help us along our inner journey. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, for example, holds potent meaning about the pain and struggle of growing spiritually, as do the Greek myths, as does the story of Job. It’s only when myth is considered literal history that it becomes problematic. This makes sense if you think about it. When stories are elevated to the status of literal truth, then people with something at stake must protect and propagate them as such. These defenders of the faith are essential because without them, the fabricated history can’t survive. The result of this effort is dogma, a fragile system of rigid beliefs that vehemently—sometimes violently—discourages curiosity, spontaneity, and exploration of other philosophies. It’s a shame, because these myths, if only they could be seen as such, contain such wonderful, universal truths about being human, being alive, and understanding our inner search. (See the works of Joseph Campbell, particularly The Power of Myth series, for more information on myth.)

There are reasons that myths became literalized, mostly having to do with convenience and control; making “spirituality” easy for people who don’t want to put a lot of thought into it, which is most of us. Mythical-religious spirituality fits nicely into our industrialized culture, packaging up the Great Mystery in neat little boxes that people can partake of when needed (as in times of crisis, or when you move to the suburbs to raise children), and leaving little room for interpretation, questions, or doubts. By following a few straightforward rules and beliefs, you need never be bothered by niggling questions about your place in the Universe or your mortality ever again. In fact, this is the exact purpose the church serves in modern society: in the parlance of our times, it provides a place for people to settle their account with god. And, as we all know, when an account is settled, we’re home free; we need not give it another thought.

But the mythical-religious view of spirituality is only one of many, and a rather unsophisticated one at that: most of its foundations have been proven false by science; it purports rigid, black-and-white rules for salvation, allowing little room for wonder at the majesty and mystery of creation; and it is stuck in a metaphor that I don’t think was ever meant to be taken literally. It certainly has no corner on the spirituality market. So just because you happen to reject this view as literal truth doesn’t mean you can’t be a spiritual person. Quite the contrary, in fact, because once you move past dogma, you instantly open up new worlds of possibility.

What are those possibilities? What does a more sophisticated view of spirituality look like? In his book Integral Psychology, Ken Wilber discusses four definitions of spirituality. They are:

• The highest level of any developmental line (such as cognitive, artistic, moral, etc.). In other words, reaching the very highest levels of development in a certain area. For example, great art or literature: something of great beauty or profundity embodies a sense of the spiritual that does not exist at lower levels. Greatness in any field seems to supersede its creator and exist as its own entity, embracing humanity, yet somehow transcending it.

• A specific developmental line of its own. In addition to being the highest level of other developmental lines, spirituality can also be seen as its own line, and a person can develop their spirituality to advanced states just as they can develop other lines. A person who has meditated seriously for years, for example, is developing her spiritual line.

• A temporary experience. People can have an unexpected spiritual experience, in which they feel (for example) a sudden, overwhelming connection to all things, or a glimpse of what they believe is their true nature. The experience can happen without warning, or during a spiritual practice such as meditation; it can happen at any age and level of development, and it usually passes, sometimes causing a profound change in a person’s outlook and sometimes not. Jesus is a good example of someone who had one of these peak experiences and took it very seriously.

• An outlook or feeling. Perhaps the most common usage, it pertains to having a certain attitude toward life, such as love or compassion or tolerance.

You can’t really understand these definitions fully without knowing Wilber’s model of human development (which I highly recommend to anyone interested in personal development, spirituality, human behavior, psychology, or the like), but that’s not terribly important here. The most important thing to see is that none of these definitions invoke Jesus, or Mohammed, or the Buddha, or any other godly figure. Each definition sees spirituality as a distinctly internal, human experience.

Perhaps people interested in spirituality already know this. Certainly Wilber is not the only theorist to see spirituality in this light. Self-help gurus from Wayne Dyer to Deepak Chopra all preach some form of spirituality as a personal experience (none, in my opinion, as clearly as Wilber). It’s been around as long as the mystics (“God is inside us”), that is, long before Jesus Christ was born. But if you’re like my friend, you may think that spiritual avenues are closed to you if you’ve rejected the mythical god. They’re not. And understanding spirituality as a personal experience, independent of the definition of god you’ve chosen, opens wide the doors of possibility. By the above definitions, you can find spirituality anywhere, in any endeavor, in any experience. An atheist can be just as spiritual as a monk. More so, even, if the atheist holds more reverence for his passions than the monk.

Like my friend, we all have a spiritual hole inside of us; it may be the very definition of the human condition. When we try to fill it with non-spiritual things—things that don’t fulfill our deepest desires or highest sense of purpose, but rather, carry us away from them—we end up feeling even emptier. But when we accept the spiritual nature of the emptiness, and see it as a calling to fulfill our deepest passions, our wildest desires, our highest potential, it becomes an opportunity for the most satisfying growth imaginable. Rejecting dogma is not the end of your spirituality; it’s the beginning of it.

No matter how you struggle and strive, you’ll never get out of this world alive. – Hank Williams

Have you ever considered the complex miracle that being a living creature is? And even more so, a cognizant living creature, capable of comprehending and appreciating this miracle of life?

We spend so much time wanting more than we have, making a better life for ourselves, providing for ourselves and our family, working and struggling and striving and in general not settling. There’s nothing wrong with this; it is the innate impulse driving us toward self-actualization, toward realization of our true nature.

And yet, as we acknowledge the necessity and inevitability of moving ever forward, I think it’s also important to be aware of the precious condition that being alive and being cognizant is.

Regardless of how you believe we got here or what happens after we die, life is truly amazing, and life that is aware of itself, able to create stories about how it got here and what it means is, well, the most majestic, most mysterious, most miraculous, most magical occurrence ever to happen in the infinite history of the Universe.

Think about what human life really is. The body starts out as a single cell. Inherent in this cell is the intelligence to make muscle, intestine, pancreas, lung, kidney, liver, lymph nodes, eyeballs, teeth; it somehow knows where bone ends and cartilage starts, and it knows the difference between a femur and a tibia, a cranium and a rib cage, adrenaline and epinephrine, saliva and blood. It knows how to make a heart beat. It knows how to build a sex organ capable of orgasm.

If that isn’t enough, this cell can build an intelligent brain, a brain capable of creating beauty and understanding, capable of marveling at the miracle of its own condition and understanding its place in the Universe. That one microscopic cell from which we all begin is, somehow, an agent of that mysterious force called Spirit, and no matter how much we know or are capable of knowing, we will never fully grasp what that is. Yet this little cell knows.

When I think about life in this way, I find it hard to be dissatisfied in any major way. Even the inevitability of death can’t really dampen the fire of life; it only makes it sweeter and more precious. Nietzsche said that we should so love our life, with all of its joys and sorrows, that we would be willing to live it an infinite number of times. In other words, it isn’t how much joy or sorrow, suffering or euphoria we experience, it is existence itself, in all its iterations, that we must hold dear. Consciousness is what makes life sublime.

Even if we never make it to where we want to be or think we should be, it’s possible to find peace in the daily moments in which we find ourselves conscious, upright, and sucking air. That’s enough. Existence is its own reward, and this awareness is, paradoxically, one of the few things that make all the striving, work, and effort at improvement meaningful. If we can’t find pleasure in the journey, and understand that there is pleasure in every single moment of the journey whether we experience it or not, then we do not grasp the miraculous significance of our own life.

Certainly the ups and downs of daily life can make this difficult. But not impossible. Ask any cancer or disaster survivor, and they will tell you their version of what I’m talking about. You don’t have to wait for illness or tragedy to appreciate your alive-ness. You can do so right now. If you earnestly contemplate what life is, it would be difficult not to.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.—Friedrich Nietzsche

I recently perused a book called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr about what he predicts will be the next great technology revolution, the switch from local computing to the Internet. I’ll leave the main point of the book to the technology experts to discuss, but Carr addressed one issue that I think applies universally to human behavior. He talked about people’s natural tendency to gravitate toward their own interests (my own words), and how the Internet exploits that, polarizing people at a rate alarmingly more rapid than anything to come before it. Where once you had to pull up stakes to leave a community, you can now do so at the click of a button.

This got me thinking. Is it true that people tend to pay attention to what they’re interested in and ignore the rest? And if so, is that a problem? In this world of instant global communication, are we growing more factionalized instead of less so? Most importantly, if these are real problems, what can we do about them?

First of all, yes, people pay attention to what interests them and largely ignore everything else. We read the books we like, we watch the television shows we’re interested in, and we identify ourselves with the groups we belong to: gender, ethnicity, class, religion, region, hobbies and interests. There’s nothing wrong with this. Nobody should feel bad for identifying with a particular group. Somebody forcing me to watch professional football, for example, or read about Middle Eastern art history, is absurd. If I was dropped into a culture I wasn’t familiar with, I couldn’t be expected to fit in. These don’t seem like very big problems to me. They seem to be more in the category of common sense. You can’t know everything, so why not focus on the things that interest you?

Yet there’s definitely a problem here, one likely exacerbated by instant global communication, but polarization is merely one symptom of it. Closed-mindedness is the underlying issue.

The seedy underbelly of paying attention to what interests us is hearing only what we want to hear. The world is full of people (and institutions) who pick a mindset and then prop it up with whatever necessary so as not to deviate from it, making truth a secondary concern. It’s as if changing your mind, or even just being open to the possibility, is the most unthinkable thing in the world. And it seems that the weightier the issue, the more closed-minded people are: the jury is in on evolution, for example, but the Creationists only dig their feet in deeper. They have no patience for proof, facts, or evidence. (Sadly, their spiritual worlds are mostly flat and empty, too, because of their unwillingness to entertain beliefs contrary to their literal interpretation of the bible.)

I don’t mean to pick on one group (although they make it awfully easy). Politics is another world of staunch opinions often backed up by less than staunch knowledge. I grew up on Minnesota’s Iron Range, a region that has never had a Republican representative. I once heard someone say, “I’d vote for the donkey if Howdy Doody was on the ticket.” Here is a person who has no interest in expanding political knowledge or looking at a situation neutrally. And of course, the same can be said for many Republicans.

It doesn’t matter what the group or what the interest. Filtering information because it’s threatening to a point of view we don’t want to change, merely because we don’t want to change it, is the real problem. This, not our special interests, is what keeps us stuck and small, ignorant and factionalized.

The solution is simple: Question your assumptions.

Read what you like. Enjoy your interests. Educate yourself on whatever captures your fancy. But keep an open mind. Try to understand the other guy’s perspective. Read opposing views. Value truth. Question your assumptions.

It’s possible to have opinions without insulating ourselves from reality. It’s possible to remain loyal to one group while empathizing with the mindset of another. It’s possible to be a seeker of truth and still have your beliefs. And, with the Internet making information instantaneous and ever at our fingertips, it’s possible to read as many opposing views on a topic as you could possibly absorb.

It’s just harder.

I know I’ve gotten away from Carr’s point, which I think is that what we thought would bring us all closer together is having an opposite effect, and we ought to pay attention to that. I agree; I just see technology as a neutral tool that can either fix the problem or make it worse. However, when we learn to value truth over dogma, the problem dissolves completely. As always, looking within and dealing honestly with what we find there is the true solution.

We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden. –Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

Most people don’t love themselves enough. This is evident in the gigantic self-help industry, the leviathan mood-altering drug industry (both prescription and non), and pretty much any scrutiny of typical human behavior. Whether looking for true love, self-esteem, career success, sobriety, serenity, spirituality, fitness, weight loss, or some other way to feel better, a sense of deficiency seems commonplace, even the norm. It’s a rare individual indeed who accepts herself as she is (which, somewhat ironically, is the first step toward real and lasting growth).

But you love yourself, even if you don’t know it. Even if you have the lowest self-esteem on the planet, don’t speak your mind, never assert yourself or ask for what you want, engage in self-destructive behavior, put up with shoddy treatment, hate your appearance, think yourself unlovable, or grew up with horrible abuse, the residue of which you’ll never be quite free of. You love yourself, even if that love is in a deep, faraway place inside you.

The proof of this is in the search itself. Why do we endlessly search for ways to like ourselves more? Why are we outraged when someone is treated poorly? Why do abused children have repressed anger? What is that nagging itch we can’t ever quite shake free of, telling us we deserve better than we allow ourselves to fully believe? If we didn’t believe somewhere inside that we deserved more, we wouldn’t be angry about not getting it; we wouldn’t be off looking for it. And we all do, even if that search never gets much past first gear for some.

What we are searching for is already inside us. We are all born with an innate sense of self-love. Whether or not you’re in touch with it, whether or not you acknowledge it, whether or not you believe it, it’s always there, underlying everything you do and think and feel. You know, even as you read this, that there is a part of you that consists of pure radiant love, a calmness at your center around which flitters all the other voices, anxiety, beliefs. It is what the mystics call our True Nature, Buddha Nature, or True Self.

“If that were true,” you might challenge, “then why don’t I feel it? Why do I spend so much time trying to like myself more? It doesn’t make any sense.”

The part of us that is radiant love—love not only for ourselves but for all beings—is behind, beyond, and underneath us. It comprises us; it’s our source and ground of being. Trying to see it is like trying to see the molecules in your hand, or see your face with your own eyes, or find the end of a rainbow. This True Nature is also very subtle. It doesn’t demand attention or impose itself on our lives. It is always and already present, but you have to learn to see it.

Ego (that is, our conscious, practical, way of interacting with the world) doesn’t see this True Nature very well. And since ego is what drives our desire to feel better, a dichotomy of sorts is created. Ego wants something concrete it can grab hold of and work with: therapy, drugs, books, cosmetic surgery. Our pure radiant being does not fit into this category. So ego wants to ignore it and occupy its time with activities it can understand and feel some sense of control over. Nothing wrong with that, really; in fact, it’s necessary. It’s the same impulse that drives us to eat when we’re hungry and sleep when we’re tired. We couldn’t survive without it.

What we’re left with, though, is a paradox. We are driven by ego to feel better, but ego refuses to surrender to its True Nature (the source of all feeling better) because it can’t admit its own powerlessness. So we search and search and search, and strive and strive and strive, and still, our ego is hung out to dry. We make some progress, we feel a little better, but still, our ego is hungry. Hungry for more, hungry for better, hungry, hungry, hungry. Never quite satisfied. Ego left to its own devices will never, ever feel better or be contented. To the ego, contentedness means death.

How do we resolve this?

The search itself is the solution, just as it is proof of our radiant self-love. A fool who persists in his folly will become wise. And this is how enlightenment—realizing our True Nature—occurs. We chase our ego down every path until, exhausted, it relents, realizing that it can’t fix itself. Nor does it have to. It is part of something greater, a manifestation of the Source and Ground of Being that gives birth to us all.

It was there all the time. Ego was just searching for itself. But the search is important, because it’s where our ego intersects with our Buddhahood, making enlightenment possible.

Thus, we must continue the search for self-love. But we must also learn to see it as a foregone conclusion, to accept it as the most fundamental part of who we are. Understanding that the search will ultimately bring you to your own front door might make the quest less serious and more playful. I hope so. Because, really, playfulness is what it’s all about.