The history of Western culture over the last eight thousand years follows a broad exponential curve—beginning with the Neolithic Revolution and accelerating precipitously into and through the twentieth century—in which man increasingly stepped back from the world of nature, acquired technological mastery over it, and gained specific knowledge of it that enabled him to evict wonder and kinship from every pine needle and worm and drop of rain, until now he finally stands alone: a world unto himself, superior to all he surveys, without peer, he also finds himself lacking spiritual relevance, purpose and affinity for his world—lacking even the assuring sense that his own experience is real. Of course, reality is fulfilled only through relationship—and how can any of us relate to a world to which we believe our lives are fundamentally irrelevant? That is the problem we have created for ourselves. The trajectory of the arc that brought us here has been driven by the urge within the male element to assert itself and refute its dependence on anything feminine. As we have seen, that urge has uprooted us from our own sensitivity, and our diminished sensitivity has in turn numbed us to the body, to the earth, to its wisdom, and to the guiding imagery and intuitions of conscious being. As the child individuates and separates from its mother, so too has modern man individuated and separated from maternal Being.
Today we are witnessing a slow and reluctant awakening to the crisis to which our separation from Being has brought both us and our planet. As a species that prides itself on reason, you might think we could have anticipated that being without Being would be a problem. But in fairness, the evolution of human consciousness requires the mature participation of both its female and male aspects—it cannot happen otherwise. The male aspect had some catching up to do, and if it has been a little overzealous in acting out the teenage-hood of its individuation—charging with self-infatuation straight into the self-glorification of the tyrant’s grasping independence—it has certainly gotten the job done. And now humanity faces a choice: we can either integrate or disintegrate.
If we are to take on the task of integration—if as a culture we are to extricate ourselves from our adolescent self-centeredness and mature into grounded and aware adulthood—we need to better appreciate the distinctiveness of our male and female strengths, and how each is necessary to the evolution of our consciousness. Their unity is not just a sum of their parts; it creates a generative dynamic so specific that it actually indicates the work we were born to do—the purpose of our humanity here on earth.
The revelations of male and female differences that come to us from myth, and brain-scanning technologies, and prehistoric art all point to their distinct strengths; and so do such polarities as ‘earth and sky’, ‘being and doing’, ‘yin and yang’, ‘belly and cranium’ or ‘immanent and transcendent’. What they all, in their way, suggest with regard to the female aspect of our consciousness is that the female strength lies in its ability to dwell within phenomena and integrate them. Being, of course, is not a thing or a state—it is a process of continuous integration. So it is with female consciousness: it is endlessly transformative because it “massively connects and communicates,” bending to accommodate all that is—just as Alan Alda risked being changed by true listening. Dwelling within phenomena, it “feels the thing as a whole, from the inside”—reminding us that integrate comes from the Latin word integrare, “to make whole.” The challenge of achieving integration presents particular demands: you can’t take in the wholeness of something objectively—you have to feel it as a whole “from the inside”; in other words, integration requires immanence. But appreciating a thing in its wholeness also requires that you yourself be whole: a diminished capacity for relationship cannot relate wholly. We should note, too, that if the female principle is integration, then it must integrate paradox and perplexity, feeling the unity that expresses itself through all the seeming contradictions of the present.
If Being is all-inclusive, the work of the male aspect of our consciousness is by inclination selectively exclusive: pure male doing dedicates its attention to narrowly defined ends and the means of achieving them. What drives it, then, is the idea of what needs doing and how to do it. Such ideas are abstracted from the undivided whole of being. To formulate them, the male element must first abstract itself from an aspect of Being and achieve an outside, objective vantage point on it; from that vantage point it can gain the perspective that will birth the idea. The male aspect of consciousness shows up very differently in the hero and the tyrant. The hero leaves the familiar terrain of his community to acquire an understanding that, brought back, releases new life into it; but throughout his journey he never turns his back on the guidance of Being, or suffers a setback if he does. By contrast, the tyrant occludes the guidance of Being by withdrawing into his “self-achieved independence,” and from that prospect he gains perspectives by which he can accumulate power and consolidate his position. Despite their differences, though, both hero and tyrant show us that the strength of the male aspect of our consciousness lies in its ability to stand apart from phenomena and gain perspective on them. Such perspective enables analysis and reveals both sequence and consequence; those elucidate possible paths for action; the path that is chosen becomes the vision that requires the doing. Whereas female Being seeks an active integration of the transforming present, male doing seeks an active transformation of the world according to its newfound perspectives. The hero, of course, seeks that transformation from a place of self-achieved submission, the tyrant from his position of self-achieved independence.
Acquiring perspective on something, whether literal or metaphoric, necessarily involves a basic differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘it’: we pull away from a phenomenon, stand apart from it, and look at it objectively. In “pulling away from” it we are reminded of the root meaning of abstraction; and in “looking at” it we find the root meaning of perspective. Perspective not only creates the fundamental duality of subject/object—it also grants the subject a single and empowering view of the object. That view may reveal several of its aspects (a word that is related to perspective), but it can never disclose the whole—for, like the far side of the moon, parts will be hidden from sight and therefore subject to neglect. The perspective that initiates male doing, then, can never reveal the whole. The aspects that do come into view, though, will help formulate an idea of the nature of the phenomenon—which reminds us that idea literally means “the look of something.” The young Noh actor was achieving perspective on the old lady precisely to present his ‘idea’ of her: male perspective formulates duplicates.
There is a reason, of course, that we were all born with both male and female aspects of consciousness. All-inclusive, all-aware Being just is, and feels all and integrates all, but has no perspective because it neither narrows its awareness nor steps outside itself to have a look. Its multitudinous aspects are felt as relationships within a whole, and are not manifest objectively. Pure Being, then, lacks analysis and the tolerance for exclusion necessary for perspective on itself; but analysis and exclusion are what bring certain features into consciousness—and only what is brought into consciousness can be integrated into consciousness, stimulating its evolution.
The thinking of the male element, on the other hand, amasses perspectives on everything, and catalogs those perspectives, and systemizes those perspectives, and assigns them relative values, all the while discerning cause and effect. All of that is brought into consciousness; as such, it awakens us to certain possibilities of choice. But however many perspectives are accumulated, they can never be integrated into a whole by the ideas of the unipolar, detached male view—at most they can merely supply some perspectives on wholeness. The act of integration—of “making a whole”—can only be the function of a whole; in us, that whole is the embodied axis of our consciousness, through which abstract perspective reconciles with present being, and is rendered as sensitivity. That integration is the foundational act of ordinary heroism. By contrast, a perspective that remains unintegrated stands resolutely apart from being and insists on its authoritative tyranny. The heroic and the tyrannical are the two choices available to the male element, and both concern perspective. Since the ‘normal’ of our culture is the consciousness of tyranny, it makes sense to look first at the consequences of the tyrant’s choice.
Both the hero and the tyrant transcend the familiar “organized inadequacy” of the known world. The hero leaves because his spiritual center of gravity has shifted into the unknown landscape of Being, and he yields to its pull and follows. Something altogether different happens with the tyrant: fearful of Being, he has no inclination to venture into it; instead, the tyrant withdraws his spiritual center of gravity from the world and consolidates it within himself. By that act he separates himself from his community without having to leave it: the modern syndrome. Even so, his act of self-achieved independence gives him a new perspective on his community that reveals it as a transformed entity: it now appears objectified and exploitable. Though familiar to him, it has no claim on his gratitude or his heart, and it is no longer felt as the living whole to which he belongs. The One has broken into the many, and the many are found not to be a manifold revelation of Being, but individual components of a system. Because his concerns are now self-centered, his perspective on that system reveals value only where it can work to his advantage.
The tyrant’s fear, then, births in him an addiction to perspective, and leaves him “alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment,” as Joseph Campbell put it. By keeping him at a fearful distance from the world, his addiction cuts him off from its spiritual life, persuades him the world’s center is within himself, and reveals around him only threat or expedients for his personal advantage. The tyrant’s addiction to perspective, then, is the mechanism behind the neutron bomb parlor trick, and it gives us a useful benchmark: to the extent that you feel your spiritual center to be within yourself, to the extent that the life of the world around you looks like a grand functioning system rather than an expression of the One Presence, to the extent that you feel your community to be irrelevant, you are looking from the perspective of the mythological tyrant. And that means that your perspectives, which would otherwise be a strength necessary to the evolution of your consciousness, are instead arresting that evolution. As we said earlier, it is the ‘normal givens’ of our world that hold us back. Nor is the arrest of that evolution unintentional: the tyrant within us fears experience—the words fear, peril and experience share the same root, remember—and he will defend his status quo without reservation, even if doing so should threaten the world around him. Because the tyrant’s perspectives are unintegrated, they are unencumbered by responsibility; and so they encourage him to use his life to build his ‘empire’ and secure his future by working to his own narrow advantage whenever he can. As long as we ourselves are stuck in the consciousness of the tyrant, that’s exactly how we will use our lives. I know that only because I have explored that terrain so fully in my own life, and can still occasionally feel its seductive pull.
What we have outlined here, of course, is a basic working model of tyranny that applies across the board, from self-tyranny to political totalitarianism; and the model tells us that the more perspectives the tyrant has on the community from which he has set himself apart, the more that knowledge will serve him in the manipulation and control of its resources. As such, we would also do well to recognize in our model the outlines of unregulated capitalism. In the values it upholds, capitalism encourages a perspective that breaks the One living mother that is our Earth into a diversity of raw materials, concentrates on defending individual rights rather than on gathering around collective responsibilities, rewards power and its consolidation, and places economic considerations before all others. Its emphasis on acquisition makes capitalism not the natural ally of democracy, but its ever-present foil. We have already noted that capitalism comes from a Latin word meaning “head”—it literally means “headism”—and that it systematically gratifies the values of the head rather than those of the heart. Because those values encourage isolation, they foment hallucinations in all we do—hallucinations that tell us, for example, that the cyclist riding in the rain at the side of the road is less successful than the commuter driving by in the Mercedes sedan. Hallucinations that persuade us that we are entitled to find bananas at the grocery store if we’ve got them on our list. Hallucinations that convince us that the elderly, whose ability to contribute to the bottom line is diminished, are an inconvenience. Hallucinations that persuade us to define ‘the natural world’ as everything other than ourselves, and to see in the plants and animals around us not companionship and teachings, but resources or inconveniences or mere decoration. Hallucinations that persuade us that the imbalances we inflict on the natural world are problems best solved by technology, thereby sparing us any need to question who we are or to consider the parallel imbalances we inflict on our own bodies and minds.
When our needs and emotions become entangled with our hallucinations, and both are estranged from the whole that sustains us, the damage we inflict can show up like a bleeding wound for all to see. Caught in our amnesiac fantasy, we can so completely detach from “feeling the thing as a whole” that it loses its ability to bring perspective to our isolated imaginings. The moral restraint afforded us by the whole has nothing to do with abiding by certain ‘shoulds’ or ’shouldn’ts’ and has everything to do with the mythic “self-achieved submission” by which the hero devotedly surrenders to the coursing intelligence of Being—which is inclusive of all and brings all into relationship with the whole. Without that surrender, our actions cannot arise from the grace of Being, and so pose a direct threat to it. When we awaken from our hallucinations, it is often to find our lives in tatters, and what we hold most dear to be imperiled. Extreme examples are familiar enough: Tiger Woods, Bernie Madoff and Bill Clinton have all faced the cost of such isolated imaginings very publicly. Whether our fantasies mislead us into blind entitlement or to actions of ruinous discord, they are all a direct outcome of the unintegrated perspectives to which we as a society have devoted ourselves.
Our ‘headist’ attachment to perspective is so normal for us that it almost stands beyond the reach of our ability to question it. But consider, for a moment, how much of your waking awareness is dominated by the voice in your head: advising you endlessly, supervising you, commenting on what you just did or should be doing, and obsessing over endless perspectives on the various broken pieces of your life—perspectives that have been locked up and systemized into your ‘known self’ and your ‘known world’; perspectives that continue to promise redemption from any problems, if only you can accumulate enough of them. In general we have so lost touch with our conscious being that we make no effort to integrate those perspectives: we can no longer, like the hero, bring them home to the pelvic intelligence so that thinking and Being can evolve together. And so we remain in our heads, and rely on our unintegrated perspectives to supervise the ‘many’ of our shattered body/world. And that reliance is absolute: without those unintegrated perspectives, there could be no tyranny of the self or of the world.
Our self-tyranny, then, interrupts and organizes our lives and thinking from the detached perspective of a supervisor, which literally means “overseer.” The identification of that supervisor with the head is reinforced by the fact that we literally see from the eyes—the center of the cranial pole of consciousness. All the authority figures of our culture are based on that supervisor in the head, placed on high and set apart—like the judge who presides over a court, looking down dispassionately on its various warring factions and using the power of his position to make a ruling and administer justice. This model is radically at odds with, for instance, an aboriginal healing circle. Other such authority figures include the general on the hill overlooking the battle, or the manager in the office above the factory floor, or the helmsman overseeing the journey of the tall-masted ship. That supervisory model seems natural to us, because it is how we relate to the self.
Every resource marshaled by the supervisor in our heads—every duplicate we construct, every rule we create for ourselves or others, every map of how things ‘should be’—issues from the unintegrated perspectives we gather and systemize into models of the world: we judge the world’s particulars and divide them into schemes of good/bad, useful/irrelevant, mine/theirs. Such value judgments are implicitly embedded in any perspective that is not integrated, and they advise us tyrannically in all we do. Unintegrated perspectives are so deeply bound to judgment that we could also refer to them as judicative perspectives. When Parmenides warned that the senses can deceive us, and when Plato praised “the man who pursues truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his body”163—they were saying, in effect, that only an unintegrated perspective can judge the pure truth of a thing, and that only while a perspective remains unintegrated does its judgment remain reliably pure. That view represents the unipolar outlook of our entire culture: moving into the head, we become forgetful of the whole, and are left with only our judicative perspectives to rely on; and so we argue over them, and defend them, and compare them, and refine them, and support them with data, and hold them to represent the truth and to refute the truth of other perspectives—but we do not integrate them. As a culture we do not even know how to any more.
So deeply committed are we to perspectives, and so unaware even of what it means to integrate perspectives, that we can only stand resolutely apart from the world, impotent to join it. As Cistercian monk and writer Thomas Merton observed, we
have been “turned around,” and we are always aware of ourselves as spectators. This spectatorship is a wound in our nature, a kind of original sin … for which “healing” is urgently required. Yet we refuse healing because we insist on preserving our status as spectators. This is the only identity we understand.164
And, as Merton understood, it is a mistaken identity—one to which we have so deeply habituated that it’s hard even to imagine what it might feel like to allow our male perspectives to travel down the embodied axis and come to rest in the integrating center of our female being: the pelvic intelligence. But until that happens, our consciousness will be stuck in the “original sin” of spectatorship, ceaselessly amending and arranging our unintegrated perspectives.
The ultimate trophy for the tyrant within, of course, is the self: the more perspectives we can accumulate on the self, the more we will be able to direct it, judge it, correct it, praise it, blame it, encourage it, warn it and generally control it. And so in the same way that the tyrant stands apart from his community and gains perspective on it, we stand apart from the ‘self’ and watch it, and gain perspective on it, forgetful of the journey home. Standing in exile from the self, of course, means that we can no longer feel it as a whole, from the inside—at best we can ‘know’ the self and feel the body; but that’s okay, because that place of exile enables us to supervise everything.
Of course, any time we are supervising the self rather than feeling it, the self is literally observing the self; and that, by definition, is self-consciousness: a defining characteristic of the ‘known self’. As Alan Watts writes,
The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.165
In the twentieth century a great deal of scientific thought and debate was dedicated to determining that you cannot observe an event without affecting it. That is the Universal Law of Interrelationship at work, and it is the inescapable reality of living in the world. Every time you hear it, smell it, or even think about it, you are affecting it, even as it affects you: when you feel the skin of an apple with your finger, that exchange leaves both of you changed. If you have ever felt yourself being watched, you will have felt the effects of being observed. If you knew your phone was tapped, for instance, your conversation would be radically altered. Even as simple an event as standing at a bus stop can be complicated if you feel someone’s eyes on you: how you stand, where you put your hands, and what you look at and when may all be called into question. Reality TV is painful in its unreality for that reason: conscious of being monitored by cameras and crew, participants exude self-consciousness in all they do.
If we observe ourselves, a similar effect takes hold; and when nothing in the world is more important than the gravitational center of your self-centered, isolated ‘I’, nothing else can command your attention as urgently—not even the intimate whispering of the world around you. And so the self-consciousness of self-tyranny soon leads to self-absorption—a sort of black hole of awareness. Once the whispered guidance of the world is obscured, the authoritative supervisor of the ‘known self’ takes over and drags you into a sort of cybernetic nightmare: to observe anything is to change it; when you observe yourself doing, it changes what you do, which you observe, which changes what you do, which you observe, et cetera. It is a self-made isolation chamber in which you cannot receive guidance from the outside world because what you mainly see is your doing and what you mainly hear are the directives of the inner helmsman. As self-consciousness grows, the white noise in your head buzzes louder and louder, overwhelming the signal of Being. Obsessing over your own cybernetics, trying to steer what you do and how you do it, you eventually forget the world. The narcissism of our culture is drawing us towards the fate of Narcissus, who was so self-absorbed that he forgot the world and perished.
The prison of self-consciousness is a stale, anxious environment. It is existentially painful to be isolated—constrained and judged in all you do. It leads to fretfulness, frustration, boredom and disappointment. Of course, those feelings themselves are an inducement to pay attention and question and grow. But rather than directing us to face those shadows and process them, our culture provides a variety of distractions to anesthetize their pain. These distractions are our antephialtics—drugs concocted by apothecaries to ward off nightmares. Most consumerism, for example, is of a self-congratulatory nature, promoted by ads assuring us that we deserve the best, the biggest, the fastest, the newest: “Feel better about yourself—buy something.” Television offers distraction of a different sort, one that occupies the mind just enough to deliver it from self-consciousness—although at times it seems to deliver us from consciousness of any sort. Alcohol and drugs offer another kind of escape—a high that, in its unself-conscious meanderings, seems to liberate us to just be, whereas, in fact, the discipline required to ‘just be’ is as compromised by that high as is the tyrant of self-consciousness. Nor are fitness classes generally designed to let us ‘be’ with the experience they offer, or to encourage a surrender of the many-chambered room to the spaciousness of the felt self; rather, we tolerate that strained experience so that when we look in the mirror, our self-consciousness will be less painful. We might also note that the time-gobbling, isolated, Internet-enabled ‘socializing’ we do also largely sidesteps the issue of self-consciousness by excusing us from actually having to be present with anyone except our own reflection, staring back at us from the screen. Antephialtics, all.
Insofar as the obsession with such distractions succeeds in dulling the pain of your self-consciousness, they keep you in a state of bondage: distracted from the energy of your own life calling out, you miss the summons to unite with your deepest truth and live the sheer adventure of it. Sipping at your antephialtics, you numb yourself to the soul’s true hunger, and so never initiate the transformation necessary to move you beyond self-consciousness.
Oddly, that transformation depends more than anything on a reconciliation with your own ignorance, for only once you confess that you do not have the answers about what you should be doing and when you should be doing it can the tyrant be silenced and the grace of the world begin to suggest itself. Once you confess that you do not know the present, you can open your eyes to discover it; once you confess that you cannot know the world, you can begin to feel it. Such a reconciliation with your own ignorance imparts not doubt, but certainty: the certainty of being in the truth of the present, here and now. That certainty is always close at hand, if only we could keep ourselves from reaching to find it instead in what we know. As Stephen Mitchell wrote, “Insight into the Tao has nothing to do with the intellect and its abstractions. When we step out of self-consciousness, we step into the Tao.”166 That is, when we abandon our unintegrated perspectives and the self-consciousness to which they bind us, the chattering in the skull will subside, and we can walk through the door of uncluttered ignorance into the self that can be felt here and now: when you ‘know’ nothing, there is nothing to talk to yourself about. And there is everything to experience.
When the courage behind the mythological hero-deed is understood, we see it is precisely the courage that carries us out of self-consciousness into an openhearted reconciliation with ‘what is’. By contrast, the path of self-absorption is the natural outcome of our head-centered existence, and it is the foremost poverty afflicting not just our age, but our personal lives as well. Stephen Mitchell noted that the teaching of the Tao Te Ching “doesn’t see evil as a force to resist, but simply as an opaqueness, a state of self-absorption which is in disharmony with the universal process, so that, as with a dirty window, the light can’t shine through.”167 When our self-absorption creates baffles and shadows within the corridor of the embodied axis, we can feel its opaqueness; when we “step out of self-consciousness,” the corridor loses its opaqueness, and we achieve a clarity of being that uniquely leads to clarity of action. The great pianist Glenn Gould illustrated that with a story about a millipede: one day an ant watched the millipede approach, his countless legs moving in a blur of precise coordination. Excited and amazed, the ant flagged the millipede down, expressed admiration for his astonishing ability to move all those legs together in perfect unison, and asked him, “Tell me, when you start walking, how do you know which leg to move first?” “Let me see,” replied the millipede—and he stumbled around for five minutes before he could get underway again. Like the millipede’s legs, Gould’s fingers moved in “a blur of precise coordination”—and, as the story tells us, the rich, life-infused harmony they expressed belongs to the “universal process,” in Mitchell’s words, and could never have been achieved with orders issued by the helmsman.
Gould’s story brings to mind a provocative observation made by Jerzy Grotowski, the renowned and innovative Polish theater director. Addressing the problem of an actor’s expressiveness, Grotowski commented,
True expression, one could say, is that of a tree.168
Every tree is expressive—from the birch sapling to the gnarled oak to the towering pine. What a tree expresses is the essence of its very Being, shining through all its living relationships with the world: the universal process, again. Nothing that is expressed by the tree results from a decision to express. That is what separates the tree from most performers, and it is precisely Grotowski’s point:
If the performer expresses, it is because he wants to express. And so, division once again arises. There is a part of the performer which orders, and a part which executes the orders.169
The part of the performer that orders is the knowing inner supervisor, the prototype for all our authority figures. The part of the performer that is being ordered, of course, is any part of the self that can be bullied—often the body, but including as well the heart, our faculties of reason and our emotions. The exercise of such authority is the basis of our self-tyranny: our frozen perspectives guide us in what should be done; to follow them, we override our own Being and overlook the myriad cues found in the nourishment of the breath, the spaciousness of the moment, the aliveness of the world and the deep harmony of the whole. Whenever we ‘make ourselves do things’, we segregate our thinking from our being and undertake the self-conscious task of executing what we know. Our inner supervisor then manhandles the body according to the endarkenment of that knowledge. This is essentially a corruption of the self—a word that is related to our word rupture, which means “to break or burst.” Corruption, of course, has long been associated with tyranny, but it is actually endemic to self-tyranny. Self-tyranny, being posited on a rupture of the self, always indicates that we have denied ourselves permission to integrate. And what’s that about? Why would we withhold from ourselves permission to be whole?
The dilemma is actually a deep one. Whatever problem we face—acting a role on stage, playing a better tennis game, closing a deal—it helps to know going into it what you should do. That is precisely why the young actor was scrutinizing the old lady. If you can gain an idea of what to do, you will want to secure that knowledge and use it. And if you can’t get perspective on what to do, then how can you proceed? The dilemma seems to suggest that the female element of Being is utterly dependent on the male element to get anything done. But as soon as the male element takes initiative, “division once again arises,” as Grotowski noted—and that empowers our isolated, judicative perspectives to override the present and frog-march us through the fantasyland of dead duplicates.
It is critical to appreciate that this division, this corruption, this ascendancy of the male element over the female is a form of self-conflict; and when we are fighting ourselves, our actions will lack grace, harmony, ease and efficiency, just for starters. In fact, they become mechanical, because they are being controlled by the cybernetics of stop-go-stop-go commands. One of the most delightful stories to illustrate that is found in The Paper Canoe, by Eugenio Barba, and concerns Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr and an experiment with water pistols. Apart from being one of the world’s preeminent physicists, Bohr was also a fan of movies, particularly Westerns. Given his native curiosity, he began to wonder about the typical movie showdown: the bad guy and the good guy face off on the main street, the bad guy goes for his gun first—but the good guy still beats him to the draw. One afternoon Bohr handed out water pistols to his lab workers, and they put the scenario to the test: facing off in pairs, waiting for someone to draw first, and then squirting. Empirical, scientific methodology. Sure enough, the person who drew first was consistently the slower one; like the millipede, he had to order the body to perform the action and then oversee its synchronization in executing it. The second one to draw, by contrast, didn’t need to issue an order from one part of himself to another.170 The One was not broken into the many, and could just react, guided by the world, unhampered by self-consciousness. Like the true expression of a tree.
There is an irony to all of this. In the same spirit as youths will paradoxically take up smoking as a way of showing their independence, when in fact every cigarette they light affirms their bondage, we willfully assert ourselves in the belief that any triumph of the will is a triumph for personal freedom. The truth is more complicated than that, and also less flattering. Willfulness is a form of mastery, but it exacts its price: to achieve mastery over the self is also, by definition, to enslave the self; willfulness is a form of self-bullying, and it initiates endless cycles of self-judgment, self-flattery, self-hatred and self-doubt. Like smoking, those cycles are addictive; and in the way that the culture of smoking was once endorsed by society, society currently endorses the culture of self-tyranny—without really questioning the destructive patterns it sets in motion. In fact, our culture mistakes compliance for mastery, isolation for control, self-consciousness for self-awareness, and the exercise of power for an experience of freedom. In a similar vein, we also mistake the conceit of perseity for our true reality, blind to the Universal Law. All of those misapprehensions ultimately issue from our devotion to unintegrated perspectives: if we hold ourselves apart from the world to maintain perspective on it, we will never find guidance within it; so we will have to guide ourselves, willfully and self-consciously.
The actions spawned by our culture of self-tyranny are as damaging to the world as they are to the self. When you define self in terms that grant it an independent existence, and create values and laws that enforce that illusion, then the world can go up in smoke as long as personal acquisition continues. The culture of self creates a tyranny over the world, and it can have no other outcome. A triumph of the will is the triumph of a personal fantasy, riding roughshod over what is real in search of personal gain. But freedom cannot be found in hallucinogenic isolation. It can be found, experienced and understood only when we return to the mutual awareness of the mindful present.
When mythology warns us against the tyrant, it is warning us first and foremost against the tyranny of the self. The reasons for that warning are clear: self-tyranny clouds every living moment with abstract idea, isolates the self from the world that gives it life, creates an addictive dependence on doing, and dominates our awareness with its incessant directives and judgments and anxieties and comparisons, so that our remembrance of the all-nourishing female element of Being is reduced to a mere shadow. More crucially, the closure of self-tyranny obscures our choices for escaping it—like the glass wasp trap. Consider, for example, the time-honored sentiment expressed by Publilius Syrus around 50 B.C.: “A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.”171 Sage advice indeed, until we realize that the only options Publilius offers us are forms of self-tyranny: the wise man decides what he’s going to feel and what he’s not going to feel, and makes it so, and the fool holds on to his emotions and obeys them. States of enclosure both—and Publilius and his sympathetic readers are likely not even aware of any alternative to it.
The habits of self-consciousness have so thoroughly seeped into the very neurology of our bodies that the task of undoing them can at first glance seem overwhelming. The task is simplified once we note that Grotowski’s example of the “true expression of a tree” alerts us to the difference between ‘showing’ and ‘integrating’. When we “decide to express,” we are showing; more specifically, we are showing a version of the story of the ‘known self’. In fact, if we reflect honestly, we will realize that any time our doing dissociates from our being, it does so to uphold and embellish that story. And of all the aspects of the self we enlist to play supporting roles in that fantasy, the face usually takes center stage. A poster in my daughter’s school informs students, “Of all the things you wear, the most important is your expression.” The visage, disengaged from the core, is arranged and paraded like a fashion accessory—and it can remain disengaged for hours, days, or even years, as we swap one expression for another, wearing the moods of our story for all to see. When we get stuck in doing, so does the face. When the face is stuck in doing, we are stuck in the head. So critical is the face to the fictions we rely on that it is increasingly popular to select the ‘known self’ we wish to present to the world and have our faces cut open so that idea can be surgically constructed.
Such phenomena suggest that we have found more than just a coincidence when we discover that our word face comes to us from the Latin word facere, “to do or make,” and that our words do and face have the same Indo-European parent: the base dho-, also meaning “to do or make.” Our language has lots of expressions in which face is used, and what is common to all of them is the sense of willfulness or opposition: we find this in the idea of a face-off, and in the idea that when there is a problem you should face up to it or you might lose face, and then someone would be more likely to face you down in the future—that is, if you were ever prepared to show your face again. And without wishing to push the metaphor too hard, we might notice that setting the face or wearing expressions on it is the first choice of those wishing to ‘mask’ an uncertain sense of Being. But it turns into a kind of hell, being caught in the face, so busy arranging its different expressions that one can neither know nor make peace with one’s own truth; fitting, then, that the Indo-European base dho- also gives us our word perdition.
We generally imagine that we use the face to communicate a certain message to the world, but I think the truth more often lies elsewhere: the primary function for all the subtle and overt arrangements we impose on the face is to supervise the story that the self is selling to the self. A small example: one night I was alone doing some push-ups, and the more I did, of course, the more difficult they became, and the more my face expressed that difficulty. But at a certain point I realized that my face was expressing that difficulty to me, saying things like, “This is really hard; you might have to stop; how many more?” When I disengaged the facial muscles, I shifted almost immediately from the self-conflicts of divided doing into the simplicity of being—and the push-ups became much easier. That occasion marked the point at which I began to understand exercise as thanksgiving or prayer. The other lesson it taught me, though—to become aware of the story I was needing to tell myself—was also a lesson about the depth of our ‘original sin’, as Thomas Merton called it: our spectatorship. Any time we display the story of the ‘known self’, the main audience for that narrative is the watching self. There is a time for living your story, and a time for telling it, and both have value; but if the story you are telling is an interpretation of the present moment which you haven’t even lived yet, then your living tumbles headfirst out of life and into a world of duplicates. And the purpose of any such world is to stave off integration and preserve the status quo.
To step out of the story, of course, you need to step out of the face. In that regard, it’s interesting to note that the Venus figurines from the matrifocal cultures of Paleolithic Europe, as Campbell commented, “are all of essentially the same type. There is no action on the face at all.”172 In Noh theater, too, Zeami covered the faces—the ego doings—of most leading Noh actors with masks, and he advised those who did not wear masks to relax their faces into the stillness of a mask. He knew that when the doing is masked, Being is more likely to shine through. This holds equally true for us: sometimes simply by disengaging the facial muscles we can disengage from our doing—efface it, so to speak—and return to Being, which is the single source of play, discovery, wholeness, trust; in short, of all the elements of a creative life.
Our species seems to be hardwired to attend to the expressiveness of the face in social interactions; but consider for a moment that when we meet someone we love dearly, we forget about our face and will likely experience an expression of love that reaches out from our heart: the true expression of a tree. When conversing with someone we know intimately, we tend to look with our heart into her heart. We feel her story living in us: the human inseparability principle. If you converse with a less intimate acquaintance, it is sometimes more difficult to “rest in the pelvis and act from the heart.” Should your attention latch onto the other person’s face—the envoy of his ‘known self’—he will often sense that and in return attend to your ‘known self’, which puts it on alert, and before you know it you are both sitting in the face rather than in the moment. When that happens, the only thing your conversation can really work out is the relationship between the fiction of your ‘known self’ and his.
Of course, that is precisely the agreement on which most of our social interactions are based: “I’ll take care of your fantasy if you take care of mine, and both of our ‘known selves’ will feel better for it.” It is the natural outcome of a culture that declares the world to be dead matter, the unbroken whole to be uninformed chaos, and the spirit of consciousness to be a personal possession. Hoarding our spiritual center of gravity inside of us, we endarken the world and focus on the self-serving voice of the inner tyrant—so that even on a bus full of people, you can feel alone and hear only your internal monologue as you vaguely try to uphold the story of “who you know yourself to be” for the strangers surrounding you. There is no inclination to feel the present as a whole; you merely flit back and forth between different perspectives on the people around you, perceiving them in isolation, and objectifying yourself in isolation among them. Almost invariably, such a sense of isolation induces a low-grade anxiety that needs to judge everything; and with that we enter our self-inflicted perdition, for any time you judge someone or something, you create a division in yourself. As Rumi so eloquently expressed it,
Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself.
Nail me down in a box of cold words, that box is your coffin.173
A return to Being is made easier by remembering that the sensitivity that carries you into the felt self is one that recognizes your body, your self, your thoughts and the world as energy to be integrated. If you feel alienated, or isolated, or stuck, it is a symptom that you are resisting the world’s energy and binding up your own; that is, your body puts the brakes on its consciousness by putting the brakes on its ability to exchange energy. But to look at someone’s face is already to initiate an exchange of energy; to look at her from the core of your being is to open further to that exchange; to release the energy of your heart to her is to maximize the sensitivity of your exchange with her. As the energy of the exchange passes between you, it repudiates enclosure; and once you dismantle enclosure, all that’s left is the present—the moment-by-moment perplexity that sustains you both. Beyond enclosure, you no longer look at the world with the face; you no longer look at the world from a fixed perspective: Being is immanent and integrative and has no perspective. But we might also say it looks from all perspectives, which amounts to the same thing. As Thomas Merton wrote, the consciousness of Being is beyond
self-consciousness, separateness, and spectatorship. The pure consciousness … does not look at things, and does not ignore them, annihilate them, negate them. It accepts them fully, in complete oneness with them. It looks ‘out of them’, as though fulfilling the role of consciousness not for itself only but for them also.174
The consciousness of Being, we might say, fulfills the reality of mutual awareness. To enter that consciousness is to undertake a journey from the ‘known’ to the felt; from separateness into unlimited relationship; from the constructed story to the living present; from showing to integrating. And what you are integrating, when you get right down to it, is your own sensitivity—which is rooted in your body, in the present, and in the mysterious love that is Being.
The tyrant governs according to his unintegrated perspectives, which become his rules. To the extent that we internalize and operate by rules for ourselves, we are exercising self-tyranny. Rules underwrite the duplicates by which we try to live and solidify within us the divisions of self-consciousness. Every should or shouldn’t we internalize, every must or mustn’t we enforce, and every self-definition we live by is a rule that intervenes to keep us from contact with the pelvic intelligence; it preempts any need to attend to Being. Our desire to be told ‘what to do when’ is deep, and shows up in the popularity of various self-help initiatives that peddle different rules for how to live—redemption will be ours, we are assured, if only we can implement the solutions they propose.
That promise exploits the vanity of the male element and feeds our persistent feeling that, “If only I could get the right perspective on my situation, I could fix my problems and get free.” But as soon as you question the idea of finding greater freedom by finding the right rules to live by, the absurdity becomes obvious: whoever seeks rules to live by is actually seeking to be ruled—which is the opposite of freedom. Rules exert conformity over behavior, instill compliance and stunt our natural responses; they limit questioning and learning and activity and the unruly joy of play; they separate us not only from ourselves, but from each other as well. To recognize the dehumanizing effect of rules is to gain some insight into the puzzling, well-known Zen motto:
If you meet a Buddha, kill him.
If you meet a patriarch of the law, kill him.175
A patriarch of the law is the one who upholds the rules; a Buddha is the one who holds the answers. An answer will bind you as quickly as a rule, for both stand in isolation from the energetic truth of the present. The motto shockingly reminds us how vital it is to break the corrupting hold that rules, and indeed answers, have on us. They always plant themselves between us and the world.
And yet the deep trust we place in the guidance of unintegrated perspectives leads us to gather them and harden them into rules and enlist them to solve all our encounters—not only with the world around us, but with ourselves as well. It is precisely those hardened perspectives that stake out a private world that only we can inhabit: the cage that shelters our “organized inadequacy.”
If a tyrant lives by the rules of his unintegrated perspectives, the hero lives by the integrated perspectives of his principles. Whereas rules separate us from Being and forestall transformation, principles incite transformation. For example, people dreamed for centuries of taking flight. They watched beetles buzzing through the air, and butterflies fluttering by, and the aerial careening of swallows and hawks and eagles, and the solution seemed obvious: in order to fly, we would have to put together a big set of wings and flap them. More than a few disasters were engineered by that logic. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, a Swiss physicist gave us something that would free us from flapping—he gave us a principle. In his honor it came to be known as Bernoulli’s principle. With it to guide them, people could design an airplane wing that would achieve lift at a certain speed, and a propeller to help them attain that speed. A short 150 years later, the Wright brothers made history.
What a principle does, ultimately, is to illuminate the dynamic that lies at the heart of a harmonious relationship. Whether a principle addresses the relationships involved in aerodynamics, theater, or personal freedom, it points to the essential dynamic that enables the complementary opposites within that field to achieve harmony. What we call the Golden Rule, for instance—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—is actually a principle: it points to a key for unlocking the harmony of human relationships—a key so simple, powerful and essential to the fulfillment of our humanity that the principle is expressed in one form or another by all the great faiths of the world. Like any principle, it returns us to the guidance of Being and can lead to results as diverse as the people whose energy it liberates. By contrast, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand,” is a rule. In the specific instance of injury, it corrals all the possible diversity of human circumstances towards a preordained result (e.g., “you caused him to lose a foot, so you have to lose a foot”); and that result is taken to represent goodness, or fairness.
Rules encourage us to act from our heads, like the tyrant; principles encourage us, like the ordinary hero, to act from our creative hearts. Developing either rules or principles requires perspective; but whereas a rule endarkens and keeps us from evolving, a principle illuminates a doorway and invites our evolution. The boundary distinguishing them is occasionally a little blurred, but that shouldn’t keep us from outlining some other basic differences:
• A rule is concerned with upholding order (as in ‘law and order’); a principle is concerned with a deepening of harmony.
• A rule seeks first and foremost to limit behavior in a given circumstance in order to ensure a specific result. In prescribing those limits, a rule has the effect of a funnel: it gathers all the varieties of human drive and hope and insight (imagine a throng of pedestrians on a busy sidewalk) and channels them to a common point (e.g., waiting at a red light). A rule is enforced in the name of a perceived good, and so relies on a scheme of good and bad. Those who follow the rule are upholding the good and may even feel some entitlement for doing so.
• A principle points to the heart of a dynamic: the relationship that brings its parts into harmony. Understanding that essential relationship provides a starting gate for exploration, learning and play: as theater director Eugenio Barba pointed out, a knowledge of principles enables us to learn to learn.176 The Latin word from which principle derives literally means “beginning.” A principle does not aim at a specific result. In fact, its effect is precisely the opposite of a funnel: it starts from a common point of understanding (imagine a dozen engineers, each with their different temperaments and interests and insights, being handed Bernoulli’s principle); and that understanding acts as a springboard into limitless forms of integration (the principle might generate eight different airplane designs, two hydrofoils, a valve and a Frisbee).
• A rule can be written in a flash. As soon as an authority wants a certain result, it can issue a rule to enforce it. But a rule can never be as complex as the human behavior it is trying to govern, so it will tend to precipitate unforeseen results, which in turn require more rules, which in turn precipitate unforeseen results, and so on. Rules tend to grow in complexity. George Orwell’s Animal Farm comes to mind.
• A principle is uncovered only after someone has so thoroughly immersed himself in the dynamics of some form of exchange (human, mechanical or otherwise) and so thoroughly integrated all his perspectives that he gains insight into the heart that harmonizes it. The articulation of a principle often happens in stages, and it moves towards simplicity. The simpler a principle is, the more helpful it is likely to be.
• A rule can be broken, and when that happens, it threatens the order of the perceived good and the entitlement of those who uphold it.
• A principle can be used or discarded. There is no such thing as ‘breaking a principle’, for it constitutes a point of departure, not a barrier.
• We might also note that a rule reinforces an existing story, whereas a principle initiates a new one.
• Finally, as we have said, rules thwart transformation; principles promote it.
Of course, we all appreciate that rules are necessary in certain circumstances. Can you imagine the chaos that would engulf a busy intersection if we eliminated the signs, the speed limits, the traffic lights and the sidewalks—without even a traffic cop to help things along? In fact, that’s exactly what has been done in some cities in Denmark, Holland and Germany in an urban planning movement begun by visionary traffic engineer Hans Monderman and dubbed ‘naked streets’. The results are puzzling: traffic accidents are fewer, trip times for drivers are lower, and businesses lining the road thrive. When Christiansfeld, Denmark, took an intersection with a troubled history of traffic jams and accidents involving pedestrians and decided to go naked, the number of fatal accidents dropped from three per year to zero. But why? Well, once you take away the little green or red dot of light that orders people to go or stop, drivers and pedestrians have to notice what’s happening around them, and make eye contact, and cooperate and come into relationship with each other rather than merely with a set of rules; suddenly no one using the street is granted entitlement. Because the intersection is stripped of the dissociated governance of law, drivers are no longer upheld in their own dissociation, and they discover and take on responsibility. Taking away rules, then, actually necessitates an evolution of consciousness away from the presuppositions of entitlement and into relationship with ‘what is’. In effect, rules take you out of relationship with the present; principles bring you into relationship with it.
Principles activate thought in every walk of life. It is on the basis of principles that laws are written, challenged, amended—and sometimes removed, leaving a busy intersection naked. Principles of house design enable us to question and reconfigure living spaces. Principles of bodywork enable us to experience our own bodies anew. And the liberating power of principles sustains the hope expressed by the writing of this book: the hope that, by looking into the grace of living in wholeness—by looking at it from as many illuminating perspectives as possible, and by allowing all those perspectives to come into relationship with each other and yield and integrate—we can find for ourselves not a solution for our own wholeness, but a principle to guide us towards it: a starting point at which we might abandon the internalized road signs and traffic lights that govern what we see and do, and ‘go naked’ into the world as it is, free to join its sacred unity and discover ourselves there.
To sum up our look at the dark side of the male element, then: its latent tendency towards tyranny is secured by perspectives that are segregated from Being and is fulfilled by the interventions these perspectives suggest. But what about the other side of the coin—the hero? How can the male element integrate its perspectives into the unity of the body/world? What does that mean in practice? To begin to answer that, it helps to assess the idea of ‘normal’ in which we have invested so much. For instance, how deeply resistant to integration is the ‘normal’ we have accepted?
We might begin that assessment by appreciating that the ultimate position of judicative perspective is the one that is held by the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic image of God: our Father who lives in heaven, far above us all, looking down from on high and judging; He is the Authority, the Overseer and Rule-maker, and He commands an all-knowing perspective. Of more critical import, though, is the fact that because He is placed at such a remote distance from us, we have perspective on Him. We consider Him and pray to Him from the perspective of distance, and that absolves us from any need to integrate His divinity into the world around us: into the ground we walk on, the people we walk with, the trees we walk among; it absolves us, above all, of having to find His Divinity within ourselves, alive in our own hearts. How could we possibly integrate what stands at so unattainable a distance from us? We can’t—so we are off the hook in that regard, as long as we obey His rules.
How resistant are we to integration? Every idea of the world that is based on perseity—every notion that atoms or genes or thoughts have an independent existence; every conviction that the cranial brain is a stand-alone, self-sustaining and self-generating originator of consciousness; every feeling that we are all basically alone in what we do; and every fact of knowledge that we consider to be a stand-alone absolute—every such idea is a perspective that repudiates integration. Part of the Big Chameleon. As is every idea that is hardened into a ‘should’. For instance, if you were to realize how many ‘shoulds’ you live with, and make a decision to integrate them, that in itself would constitute a resistance to integration, for you would merely be creating another ‘should’ that renders the guidance of the world unnecessary, providing as it does its own directive and goal and measure of success. Like any other ‘should’ we accept, such a decision does nothing to return us to the intelligence of the body: the slightest reliance on any unintegrated perspective, even one that seeks to return us to Being, is actually a barrier to that return.
Similarly, then, if you decide that you should be more sensitive and compassionate, you are committing to an idea that requires a division of the self into a part that orders, and a part that executes the order. So by directing yourself to be more sensitive and compassionate, you risk diminishing your sensitivity as you preoccupy yourself with instructions on achieving the right results; you diminish your compassion by diminishing the capacity for relationship on which it depends; and you diminish your ability to be present with people—which is the source of sensitivity and compassion—because you diminish your need to find guidance in the present. Any ‘should’ we take on that dedicates itself to a given result—even one directing us towards compassion—leads us away from the hero’s love of Being, and his adventure to discover ‘what is’, and carries us into a scheme of duplicates.
How resistant are we to integration? Our ‘shoulds’ apply not just to ourselves, but to all the world: someone should pick up this garbage; she should have stopped at that yellow light; he shouldn’t wear that color; it shouldn’t be so cold this time of year. And so the disconnected chatter runs its course in our heads, heedless of the fact that perspective without integration is disintegration: the One broken into the many.
Some of the most transformative work you can do for yourself is to acknowledge the tacit rules you create for the world to live by, and then recognize the need within yourself to maintain that kind of judicative distance from the world, from those around you, and from your true self. You might also reflect on the extent to which all male aggression is rooted in the sense that one’s perspective is right and should prevail. The tyrant insists on his perspective, and will not tolerate any other, even as he commits road rage, or bullies subordinates, or perpetrates war crimes on a dehumanized populace, or judges his neighbor. If any tendency, ultimately, is going to destroy us all, it will be the insistence on an unintegrated perspective that announces it is right even as it charges towards its own demise. By that measure, the most important lesson we have to learn is the one the mythic hero came to show us: the lesson of a self-achieved submission that enfolds a perspective back into the whole, and brings new life in its wake.
We have described the ‘headism’ by which our culture organizes itself, and by which the enclosed male element rules the self. But description, as Alan Watts warned us, is not understanding. If we are to truly face and depose the tyrant we have ensconced within, we need to remove the benevolent guises behind which he takes refuge and nakedly confront him. That is what this exercise does: it pulls back the curtain on the little ruler in the head as it struggles to maintain control. It offers you direct information about the way you may have segregated your conscious thinking from your conscious being and enables you, with practice, to address that broken state, topple the partitions of the many-chambered room, and reveal the corridor within. This exercise requires the help of a friend.
To begin, sit in a chair with your torso upright and your shoulders and neck relaxed. Your friend places one hand on your forehead and one on the occipital bone at the back of your head. You then give over control of your head to your friend, so that your head becomes a completely relaxed appendage, like an arm or a leg. Your friend will then slowly and gently move your head in a random fashion. In doing so, your friend has to understand that a patient and understanding touch is needed from him to earn your trust, and that the exercise cannot happen without such trust. It is not necessary for your friend to go very far in any direction—subtle movements are best. The main thing is that your friend be aware of the slightest resistance or anticipation from you.
A few people find this exercise relatively easy. Most do not, and they are the ones for whom the exercise will precipitate a vast amount of information about patterns of control, of calculation, of needing to achieve the right results, and of the thinking bottled in the head, like wasps in a trap.
Such patterns, when first encountered, may seem to be structural elements of your very being. For that reason, only your friend can really tell you when you are taking over control of the head and when you are relinquishing it. I remember once standing for more than a minute holding my hands still in the air a couple of inches to the front and back of a young man’s head, watching his head move slowly forward, touch my left hand, and then start back slowly to touch my right hand, and then start forward again. He was reading signals from my hands—actually, taking orders from them—and was doing the work himself without being aware in the least that it was he and not I moving the head. So one of the jobs of your friend is to provide occasional feedback during the course of the exercise to help you understand when you have dropped out of the authoritative control center of the head and into the fluid consciousness of being within the pelvic bowl.
You may find the exercise confusing and frustrating, and it may at some points seem almost insurmountably difficult. It may even feel at times as though you were being jostled around inside the dome of your cranium, faced with the ridiculous task of trying to concentrate while your control center is being moved erratically off-balance.
In fact, all such experiences comprise a huge information feed. The exercise is a little like an MRI for the inner tyrant, revealing its hidden structures. And although it may initially be discouraging to gain such insights into structures that seem to be so deeply a part of you, it is my experience that as soon as you bring an unseen habit into the light of your awareness, you have already begun to change it.
Culturally we are so used to withdrawing into the head that to attempt to withdraw from it may feel like trying to swim against the tide—or it may feel as if there is no way out. For me, that is all the more reason to go there. To help with that, here are a few suggestions that I have found useful.
Try thinking of the head as a bowling ball, with the kind of dead weight that that implies. In fact, your friend should ideally feel at all times that you have entrusted him with the complete weight of your head.
Your breath is also key: allow it to drop freely into the pelvic floor and release out. Be aware of any and all attempts to interfere with it, or manipulate it, or constrict it: the many-chambered room asserting itself. Part of your vigilance, too, is to keep the torso upright and open, and to keep the chest from collapsing. Be aware, also, that your assimilating center of wholeness lies in the pelvic intelligence—the more clearly you can rest there, the more readily you will process what is happening. Above all, bear in mind that the exercise is a gentle one and asks that you be gentle and patient with yourself and the discoveries you make. It is all about leaving the ‘stronghold’ of the self and coming home—and as with most things, the more often you return to the exercise, the easier it becomes.
