3

The Stuckness Syndrome

Total meditation builds trust in consciousness to take care of your life, but if trust is the goal, what about the existence of evil? For centuries the human drama has portrayed good as contending with evil, thus undermining any theory that human beings are innately good. At the same time, the existence of evil has undermined the notion that God or the gods are totally benign. No God worth worshipping, an atheist will contend, would allow the horrors of war and genocide that have created deep wounds in our collective history, wounds that continue to this day.

Being stuck with the worst aspects of human behavior baffles us. There is ample evidence that at every level of our existence, from domestic abuse to civil war, from petty crime to mass murder, no good comes of evil. So why don’t we give it up, for our own good? This question opens the door to the whole issue of stuckness—in other words, the persistence of negativity, which continues to have its way despite our best efforts and highest ideals. The roots of evil behavior exist in all of us. We alone are the source of war, crime, and violence. We may not act out the dark side of human nature. But if placed in a situation that is combustible enough, each of us has a breaking point, beyond which reason and goodness give way to irrational behavior fueled by anger, resentment, envy, revenge, intolerance, fear, and even the thrill of violence.

If it’s true that we ourselves are the source of evil, then a practical solution to evil presents itself: Get unstuck. Experiences come and go; thoughts arise and quickly vanish; emotions last longer but also fade away. Anger and fear, the two most powerful negative emotions, won’t fuel evil behavior if they rise and fall in the same rhythm as normal experiences. The flow of consciousness takes care of this until we interfere. We are the cause, and at the same time the victim, of what I’m calling the stuckness syndrome. This syndrome has always been the trap of evil—that the same mind indulges in the activity that hurts it the most.

If the goal is getting unstuck, you can set aside almost everything about theoretical evil. It is merely a theory that God and Satan are at war with each other, or that an invisible archetype of war has influence over us. Equally theoretical are all psychological explanations about the unconscious mind, where our worst impulses supposedly lie hidden, or where the “shadow” rules like a malicious dictator. Countless people believe in one or more of these concepts, but no theory has led to a solution. Let’s set all explanations of evil aside, focusing instead on getting unstuck. The most that you can do is to free yourself from bad behavior. When anger and fear are passing shadows that disperse as quickly as they arose, you have accomplished something great. You have rid yourself of your share in the world’s evil.

THE HABIT OF EVIL

The most basic thing about evil is that it has become a habit, something that gets repeated over and over until it becomes an automatic response. In that regard, evil is quite mundane. It has no special power to ensnare us but rather belongs in the pesky realm of other bad habits. Nearly all of us exhibit self-defeating, irrational behaviors on a daily basis, to the point that they become routine and habitual. Rather than doing everything we can to change for the better, we unconsciously cling to the very behaviors that block us at every turn. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, investigated this kind of “pathological” self-defeating behavior in his 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a phrase that seems relevant to our look at evil in relation to stuckness.

The psychopathology of everyday life takes many forms. Evil, suffering, and woundedness overlap without the neatly separate categories we have created for them. Nevertheless, there are different kinds of experience that belong to everyday psychopathology, such as

Anxiety and depression

Compulsive behavior, obsessive thoughts

Self-judgment

Guilt

Shame

Damaged self-esteem

Lack of impulse control

Denial, or avoidance of what’s wrong

Repression, or pushing unwanted impulses out of sight

No sensible person believes that any of these experiences are psychologically healthy. They create enormous distress and can become disabling at their worst. At the same time, none of these conditions will get better by hating them, blaming yourself, blaming others, or giving up on dealing with them. Feeling bad about yourself makes most of these problems worse, in fact, and good advice from others scarcely improves the situation.

What we label as evil isn’t a single impulse or behavior. It is a composite of dark ingredients, none of them cosmically evil or even innately evil. The monstrous mass murderers in history magnify everyday impulses to disastrous degrees. Such everyday “dark” impulses include

Lashing out at others

Blaming someone else

Wanting to get back at the person who hurt you

Attacking first as a form of self-defense

Feeling powerless, which leads to revenge fantasies

Feeling hopeless, which leads to devil-may-care recklessness

Take an everyday situation like being bullied at school. You can’t have a bully without having a victim. No one volunteers to be the victim, but children and adolescents have a limited repertoire of ways to cope. It hardly matters which role they play. Bullies and their victims both act out the same impulses. If you look back at the list just presented, both sides are blaming someone else, using attack and defense as their only options, feeling helpless or making someone else feel helpless, and so on. The monsters of history are no different; they simply enact their psychopathology (“disorder of the mind”) on a grand scale because the millions of people they oppress would do the same in their place.

I don’t mean that we are all potentially mass murderers, but rather that we get stuck in the same patterns of attack and defense, hurting or being hurt, seeking revenge and fantasizing about it, and so on. If your situation drives you to extremes of anger, resentment, powerlessness, and hopelessness, you are ripe for acting out what we label as evil or becoming its victim. Either role is a form of stuckness.

The way out is to develop more options in your behavior, which is done by becoming more conscious. Most people cope with a difficult situation through four basic behaviors:

Defending themselves

Fighting back

Putting up with the situation

Going into denial

If you are stuck in this limited range of behaviors, you will experience many situations, particularly in personal relationships and at work, that do not move ahead toward productive outcomes. In total meditation, the desirable outcome can be left for consciousness to resolve. This isn’t a strategy many people find themselves using, although in an age of faith, leaving things to God was similar, the problem being that God was treated like a superhuman entity living in Heaven. This separation of the human and the divine stranded the devout in helpless passivity waiting for God’s decision. Such a position wasn’t viable, and human nature took over. An age of faith was not immune to violence and war, along with a plentiful display of the seven deadly sins.

Total consciousness isn’t separate from you. It is your source and your true self. As awareness expands, you discover new resources that allow for a wider range of behaviors in difficult situations. There are times when a confrontation is hard to avoid, and turning it into a zero-sum game, in which someone has to lose for someone else to win, is rarely the right outcome. The seeds of hostility are sown, and festering resentment leads to the stuckness syndrome that fosters evil.

The alternative to a zero-sum game is usually compromise, which keeps the confrontation from escalating. In any difficult situation, whether the situation is a domestic rift or two countries that need to pull back from the brink of armed conflict, consciousness opens up the possibility for a peaceful outcome. You can give peace a chance through the following behaviors:

You actively seek a solution from people who can genuinely help.

You don’t act on impulse but wait until you are centered.

You take responsibility for your feelings without lashing out or blaming someone else.

You trust that a solution is always possible.

You seek insight in meditation mode.

You leave stressful situations rather than endure them.

You don’t become the cause of stress.

You respect others as your equal.

You value your own happiness and do not rationalize suffering as if it is a virtue.

There is nothing magical about this expanded range of behaviors—they have always been available. Some disastrous wars would have been avoided, and countless divorces averted, if these behaviors had been followed. It is testimony to how asleep people really are that so few of us know how to prevent conflicts by defusing the threats at an early stage.

Consciousness naturally unfolds these responses in the process of waking up. They arise in many people who have never heard of consciousness and do not practice meditation, simply in the course of becoming a mature adult. The process can be greatly sped up, however, by consciously favoring awakened behavior. The best way to live right now is to live as if you are awake.

We cannot expect expanded consciousness to work with school bullying. Children and adolescents are still in an immature and often confusing stage of psychological development. We don’t hold them fully responsible for their behavior. If the wounds of childhood persist, however, the mature adult is just as wounded. Most of the psychopathology of everyday life comes from the damaged child within. (The popular notion of the inner child as somehow innocent and angelic ignores the psychological reality that alongside innocence every child harbors the negative impulses that eventually lead to stuckness.)

As you wake up, the psychopathology of everyday life becomes less troublesome, simply by your not needing to defend your ego personality. “I” is the problem and therefore can never be the solution. It doesn’t take much self-awareness to see that the ego personality is insecure, selfish, demanding, and driven by impulses it struggles to control. What’s harder to see is something much more basic. “I” is sticky. A housefly lands on a piece of paper and almost instantly leaves, unless it happens to land on flypaper. Likewise, experiences don’t stick to us unless we are sticky. By the same token, you can’t expect the ego to rid itself of its own stickiness. Whatever it takes to get unstuck, “I” isn’t going to accomplish it.

Total Meditation

Lesson 11: Habits

Total meditation replaces unconscious responses with conscious ones, and a very useful application of this shift centers on habits. Habits are a circular trap. The impulse behind a habit keeps repeating itself. When the impulse arises, most people struggle briefly, then give in. The habit has won, and it will win the next time it circles back unless you can break the circle.

The same model applies no matter what the habit happens to be. Overeating and worrying seem very different on the surface, but both are circular and both have roots in the unconscious (i.e., there is no obvious cause at the level of thinking, and trying to think your way out of the habit doesn’t address the problem). The more awake you are, the easier it is to address the key element that keeps a habit going, which is repetition. Let’s discuss this issue in terms of how the mind falls into repeated patterns, because this is the nub of the problem.

Consciousness accomplishes everything in silence, but the mind is full of noise. Much of this noise has little to do with useful or rational thought. When a tune gets stuck in your head, there’s no reason it should keep repeating itself long after you’ve stopped enjoying it. The psychopathology of everyday life is rife with other examples that are less innocuous. Worriers constantly fret, unable to escape the vicious circle of fears that have no real possibility of coming true. At the clinical end of the spectrum, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) condemns sufferers to persistent ritualized thoughts, such as counting the cracks in the sidewalk or adding up the numbers of license plates on cars.

What all of these conditions have in common is repetition. If we take away the clinical labels, it seems that everyone is subject to thoughts, memories, and impulses that return time and again. Old, outworn reminders of guilt and shame, humiliation and defeat, lost arguments and prickly grievances circle the mind as if on a toxic merry-go-round we’re stuck on. Yet no one knows why the mind keeps returning over and over to thoughts that serve no good—these reminders are useless and unwelcome. They only serve to annoy and distress. Something you’d rather forget refuses to be forgotten.

Bad habits fit into the general scheme. Short of being diagnosed with OCD, few people seek professional help for repetitive thoughts, but at the same time we feel helpless to stop them. Consider these examples from daily life:

Despite the futility of repetition, the mind doesn’t give up the behavior.

If you can learn to clear away repetitive thoughts, impulses, and mental habits, they will stop returning. You will gain a sense of being more in control, and the screen of your mind will be noise-free.

Here a deeper bit of understanding helps. These repetitive thoughts and impulses are fragments of the ego, and because “I” is sticky, so are its fragments. The ego personality is built entirely from past experiences, so naturally it cannot help but relive them, for one reason or another.

You don’t have to figure out the reason. You are more than your ego. When it insists upon its viewpoint, you are free to offer another perspective, one that is more conscious. This is easily done, in any of the following ways:

None of these practices is intended to be effortful. In everyday life, repetitive thoughts eventually fade away. If you already know how to center yourself, you know the difference between being awake and being asleep. Habits and repetitive thoughts don’t stick around when you are awake.

Yet it is still worth knowing that bothersome thoughts, memories, impulses, and habits are ego fragments. They stick with us because “I” is sticky. Be patient with getting unstuck. You have lived with ‘I” for a long time, and every day in big and little ways you have adopted its viewpoint. Shifting into a different viewpoint requires you to return to meditation mode so often that it becomes the mind’s new perspective. Every small experience of being in meditation mode—centered, at ease, and in balance—teaches the brain to remain there, and in time it will remain there permanently.

INTENTION AND RESISTANCE

Waking up gives us a more expanded perspective than the isolated ego personality. When you are awake, your awareness is unclouded by the things that affect “I” every day. Aligned with the infinite power of consciousness, desires are fulfilled easily, as if the path has been smoothed beforehand. Your intention reaches the desired goal in a straight line, as indicated in the following diagram.

Intention → Accomplishment

Having a conscious intention is how consciousness manages every successful outcome, without missteps along the way. With simple intentions—lifting your arm, driving a car, talking on the phone—the path to accomplishment is so automatic that we rarely think about it. Yet a disturbance along the way can block the whole process. I know a woman who was driving home from a restaurant at twilight. She was feeling relaxed after a glass of wine and a good meal. The country road she was on came to a T-stop, and after a pause she turned left. Carelessly she hadn’t looked right, and an instant later an eighteen-wheeler smashed into her car. Only by a fraction of a second did she escape being killed.

Her narrow escape preyed on her mind. She let her husband take over all the driving from that day on; he had been in the back seat during the accident and had suffered very minor neck injuries. But the trauma of the accident left its mark on him. He lost his appetite for several months and lost twenty pounds. At the time of this writing, three years later, the woman has been psychologically unable to get behind the wheel of a car, even to drive one block on a nearly deserted street inside their condo community to get the mail. The same mind that learned to drive a car—a skill that some psychologists consider the most intricate one that most people master in everyday life—now feels paralyzed. It doesn’t matter that the woman wants to drive. Her desire has been blocked.

There are countless ways that an unwanted outcome occurs, but a general pattern can be diagramed as follows:

Intention → ← Resistance

Every situation in which you are blocked, either by your own mind or by outside forces, fits this diagram. You want to do something (intention), but you meet with resistance. Pause for a moment and consider something about yourself you find very hard to change. For one person, it might be weight and body image; for another, lack of love; for yet another, a sense of frustration in relationship. Once you single out an example of stuckness, the following points are very likely to be true:

You’ve known about this problem for a while.

You have thought about it often.

You haven’t made progress in solving it, or progress has been temporary.

No one has given you truly useful advice.

In your worst moments you feel helpless, hopeless, or both.

You keep repeating fixes that never worked in the first place.

In the end you simply put up with whatever has gone wrong.

This, in a nutshell, is how resistance gains the upper hand. Everyone is burdened with limitations that are created by running into resistance. “I” is part of this process, since the ego is shaped by disappointments in the past, all those times when things didn’t go our way. The whole issue of stuckness depends upon a simple fact: Experiences come and go, but some leave a lasting impression. These impressions fall along a spectrum from very shallow to very deep. The first impression you get of another person can lead to lasting enmity or lifelong love, but usually it is somewhere in between. Your upbringing left a lasting impression on you even though you had no idea at the time that this was happening. Deep impressions get stuck; shallower ones vanish fairly quickly—the movie that made you cry might linger in the mind for a few hours or longer, but few movies remain in the mind much longer. There is no way to quantify the good and bad impressions created in a child’s early experiences. We are marked by those experiences, without a doubt. At the same time, however, we compensate for the bad stuff and move ahead.

This pattern of response doesn’t negate the fact that current solutions for getting unstuck are generally ineffective. Handing out information goes only so far, as evidenced by the fact that nearly a quarter of American adults continue to smoke more than fifty years after the link between smoking and lung cancer was definitively stated by the surgeon general. Nutrition labels on packaged foods have done next to zero in halting the country’s obesity epidemic. Traditional psychotherapy has an equally poor track record with the most common forms of mental suffering. The multibillion-dollar market for antidepressants and tranquilizers grimly attests to failure, and these drugs merely improve symptoms in a given percentage of patients. The most advanced medical science has yet to find actual cures for depression and anxiety.

The essential problem is that the more we meet with resistance, the more likely we are to define ourselves in limiting ways. “I am depressed” or “I am anxious” turns into part of a person’s self-image if the condition lasts long enough. Sometimes we blame ourselves for disappointing outcomes; at other times we blame external circumstances. Whatever we tell ourselves, however, we seem to inevitably begin to reduce our expectations when our dreams don’t come true.

One of the chief causes of unhappiness is lowered expectations. From the viewpoint of consciousness, expectations should be unlimited. As we get unstuck, the prospects for higher expectations steadily improve. Yet, on a daily basis, the experience of meeting resistance needs to be resolved before your higher expectations can become real.

Total Meditation

Lesson 12: Resistance

When life resists you, you have to do something. Imagine that you are traveling and you discover at the airport that your flight has been delayed. It’s important to make your next connection, which is in doubt, depending on how long the present delay turns out to be. Life is resisting your plans, so what do you do? People usually pick from a menu of choices:

You can sit there and stew.

You can walk around or read a book to distract yourself from the situation.

You can complain at the check-in desk.

You can negotiate to get on another flight.

You can reschedule for the next day and go home to relax.

There are other less likely options. If you are very rich, you might procure a private plane. Or, more realistically, if the flight is delayed because of the weather, you can opt to take a train instead. The range of responses is so wide that most of us rarely have any certainty about which one to choose. We wind up with inner confusion and conflict. A delayed flight is a simple problem. Responding to resistance can become much more complicated in other situations, such as in the workplace or in personal relationships.

Stuckness is the outcome when resistance wins. Moving forward is the outcome when your intention wins. You have control over the different outcomes.

When resistance wins, you have allowed yourself to fall into one or more of the following responses when you meet resistance:

You give in to anger, resentment, or fear.

You lose control of your options.

You fall back on old responses that are unlikely to work.

You vacillate out of doubt.

You hunt for who to blame.

You give up because “they” are too strong to fight against.

You become a victim.

You try to push or bully your way through the obstacle.

You walk away without a solution.

You ask someone else to solve the problem for you.

The above list is the anatomy of frustration. None of the responses actually get you out of stuckness, even when your tactics may win in the short run. The next time you meet with resistance, you will again plunge into inner confusion and conflict, flailing around to get past the resistance. There are people who stick with only one response. They always bully, for example, or always give in and do nothing. But these people are stuck—the very problem we’re trying to solve.

In contrast, when you win in the face of resistance, you have made use of one or more of the following responses when you meet resistance:

You don’t give in to anger, resentment, or fear.

You can clearly see your possible options.

You don’t fall back on old responses that are unlikely to work.

You don’t make any decisions when in doubt.

You blame no one, including yourself.

You don’t fight with yourself or others.

You trust in a good outcome.

You don’t push or bully your way through the obstacle.

You remain open to unexpected solutions.

As you can see, quite a few factors are involved when you meet resistance in your life, but most people do not see the complexity of things as they really are. If they meet with opposition, they react with the same reflex they always use. Marital arguments repeat the same pattern year after year, for example. But it would be futile to try to address every item on the list of things that conspire when resistance wins.

The bottom line is more clear-cut: Either resistance wins or you win. This isn’t oversimplification. It goes back to the premise that when we are in balance, the bodymind is aligned with total consciousness. Only total consciousness can control all the diverse elements that are in play. This holds true in the life of a cell and is just as true in our daily life