WE LOOK THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES for people who will make us happy and light our fires for us. And so we search and search. We sing songs that say “Come on, baby, light my fire.”
But we search in vain, because the fire can only start on the inside, not the outside. We’ve looked outside of ourselves prematurely, searching for help. We need to learn to break back into our prison of solitude, because it’s not really a prison, it’s a power station. It’s where the switch is thrown. It’s where the atom is split.
The mistake we have made is to believe we need to “break on through” to something further outside ourselves to find happiness. The further outside, the better! The longing to make that breakthrough is reflected in much of our most intriguing music, such as the music of Jim Morrison and The Doors.
In The Leveling Wind, George Will makes a telling observation about The Doors: “Jim Morrison’s short, shabby life, and its peculiar echo today, express a longing that waxes and wanes like a low-grade infection but never quite disappears from temperate, rational, bourgeois societies. It reflects a vague—very vague—desire to (in the words of The Doors’s anthem) ‘break on through to the other side.’ Through what? To what? Don’t ask. The Doors didn’t. People who talk like The Doors are not, as such people say, ‘into details.’”
But I think we do know the details.
The haunting and poetic music of The Doors—which I still love to listen to—expresses our belief that happiness must be out there, on the other side of wherever we are. Somewhere over the rainbow. There’s a place for us. Somewhere.
Many sad and beautiful songs like those of The Doors are a version of the dream that “someday my prince will come.”
The longing is for someone to take our journey to the spirit for us. We keep dreaming about some magic place where the living will be done for us. But the kingdom of heaven is not beyond a star or waiting in some future land. The kingdom of heaven is within us, as a teacher who gave seminars many years ago taught. To think it is not within us is a tragic illusion that causes us to waste our lives turning mere humans into idols who can’t deliver.
Deepak Chopra quotes an anonymous ancient Indian sage who expressed this tragic illusion perfectly when he said, “All your suffering is caused by a single superstition: You believe that you live in the world, when, in truth, the world lives in you.”
Can we really perceive, in a way that’s clean and clear, how much the world lives inside us?
The Doors took their name from a William Blake passage about “the doors of perception.” But it’s also obvious that they didn’t fully understand the meaning of Blake’s famous words: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
The doors of perception are inside our own minds. They are not out there. The job of cleaning is an inside job.
You can notice each and every filthy victim’s thought you think. You can listen to yourself speak and notice when you are being cynical for no reason. You can study the link between fatigue and pessimism and learn ways to get your energy up.
You can experience first-hand the wisdom in Gandhi’s advice to “be the change you wish to see in others.” You can learn to notice when you are trying to get happiness for yourself by changing others. You can learn to replace that thinking with more creative thinking. You can learn to clean out everything that muddies up your perception and stops you from seeing the infinite possibilities of life. You can invent someone amazing if you want to.