With the parlor trick that collapses the axes of our consciousness—retracting it into the head and evicting livingness from the world—we find ourselves surrounded by things that, for the most part, have no personal relevance to us except as obstacles or resources. Our perspective on them tells us what, if anything, we might want from them; but the very idea that the world might want something from us, and might be calling to what is most personal in us to communicate that, is frankly nonsensical. Our culture’s story assures us that the world is ultimately no more than atoms moving through the indifferent vacuum of space-time; dead matter is insensate: it cannot want; it cannot call. That fiction leads to irksome conclusions, though: if the above were true, then we ourselves are ultimately no more than atoms within the indifferent vacuum of space-time—and yet we want, and we call. Might it be, then, that only some atoms—the ones we possess—can participate in consciousness? More to the point, might that last suggestion be more nonsensical than the conclusion from which it tries to save us?
In The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura wrote, “We boast that we have conquered Matter, and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us.”220 To my mind, those words offer a succinct summation of the place to which our evolving self-tyranny has brought us. We conquered Matter not only with the parlor trick that expelled the One Presence from it; we also subjected it to our every whim and use, baffled at the few lonely voices speaking of the need for respect—a claim that may seem wholesome in a New Age sort of way, but which can be no more than a sentimental overlay onto matter that is fundamentally dead and expendable. Ultimately, though, in conquering Matter, we became enslaved to it. That is, we conquered matter by eliminating its living dimension, which meant we then had to define ourselves as lifeless matter biochemically animated, and our existence as unipolar; and once we are so defined any concepts such as inherent sacredness, mystery and spirit appear to be no more than sentimental overlays on who we actually are. And so Matter triumphed over Mind, and holds us hostage: trapped in an idea of ourselves that is cut off from the unmanifest, abiding, all-creating stillness that enfolds self and world, we are slaves to the belief that our entire experience is a by-product of the ineluctable laws of biochemical materialism. Until we can escape that idea of ourselves, we will remain prisoners within the four dimensions of dead Matter, and will continue to devote our lives to its material bidding, its material pursuits and its material limitations.
The great Karlfried Dürckheim wrote an astute diagnosis of the trap into which our parlor trick has carried us. What we have called the construct of the ‘known self’, he calls the I-prisoner.
In the conduct of practical daily life the I-prisoner shows an anxious striving for demonstrable security, and as he does not possess that fundamental trust in life which comes from an openness towards Being, he has no choice but to rely upon himself alone. His self-confidence rests solely upon what he knows, has and can do. So he is always concerned with improving and preserving his position, always in fear for his material security, in society very sensitive about his dignity, and when he feels himself attacked he stiffens or turns sour—becomes “knotted up inside.” … Because of the rigidity of his preconceived ideas he is not even in contact with himself. He cuts himself off from all that fullness and unifying strength in life which, deep within his being, wants to unfold and be at one with others. Thus, by admitting only what does not upset his tenaciously held position he not only cuts himself off from the powers flowing towards him from the outside, but to the point of sterility, he is cut off from his own creative powers.… And lastly no amount of success in the world can serve to satisfy his inner need. For every success which he attributes to his own efforts only strengthens and heightens the wall separating him from his own being.221
Of course, we ourselves are the jail keeper watching over the ‘I-prisoner’. But how did that that fundamental separation of self from being come about? Myth gives us a clue, in what Joseph Campbell calls the “Refusal of the Call.”
Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered: for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or ‘culture’, the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.222
To refuse the Call is to refuse the mutually animating, corational exchange between self and world. By denying the analog axis, it impoverishes the embodied axis. The consequences of that refusal constitute the primary crises we face individually and collectively. It is the basis of our mistaken identity, which isolates us in our own skins and places us in a world of mere dead matter and physical laws. It disconnects us from the living world—so that our actions can only be insensitive and willful. As James Hillman observed, “The coming ecological disaster we worry about has already occurred, and goes on occurring. It takes place in the accounts of ourselves that separate ourselves from the world.”223 And finally, it leads to our unipolar, inner patriarchy: deafened to the world’s ability to guide all that we do, we then have to guide ourselves in all we do: we have to invest one part of us as the supervising authority, to issue orders to the other part. In other words, to refuse the Call is to insist on the solutions of tyranny.
As we have seen, the solutions of tyranny are willful, detached from the present, and deeply patterned. In fact, those solutions pattern us. Our word pattern derives from the Latin pater, which means “father.” The hetabrain is the inner patriarch, in charge of the self and enforcing its agendas—literally “things to be done.” It stands at the helm of the self, issuing commands, guiding the cybernetics of the divided self with nonstop directives. We might even refer to that relentless chatter in the head as the Pater-patter: the authoritative monologue in the stronghold of the skull that is forever issuing advice on what to do and how to do it, and overwhelming the call of the world with busy warnings and congratulations and calculations and blandishments and judgments. Of course, there is no true authority in the world; there is only companionship. Authority is an abstraction we create in order to govern what has lost touch with the guidance of Being. That is as true of our social patriarchies as it is of the unipolar patriarch within.
I have no desire to confuse fatherhood with the mythological tyrant, any more than I would wish to confuse the disembodied male element with men in general, or motherhood with the female element of pure Being: no one in the world has more to do than a mother. And as for fatherhood—it is one of the greatest gifts to have blessed my life, and I cherish it every day. I also know, though, that my ability to cherish it, and my own abilities as a father in general, have been guided by the vivid and sad memories of the extent to which my own father bought into the prevailing culture that said he was the head of the household—“master of a house” is the literal meaning of husband. As conceived of by that culture, his job was to rule and control. His natural vitality was hardened by those rigid assumptions: he was as remote from my childhood as is the hetabrain from the body.
When the body is patterned and controlled by inner patriarchy, it is so incapable of natural response that, as Moshe Feldenkrais observed, the “conscious wish to perform a reflex action is sometimes sufficient to stop it or interrupt it even when there is stimulation that is normally infallible.” He cites a range of examples, including this story by Charles Darwin:
Many years ago I laid a small wager with a dozen young men that they would not sneeze if they took snuff, although they all declared that they invariably did so; accordingly they all took a pinch, but from wishing much to succeed, not one sneezed, though their eyes watered, and all without exception had to pay me the wager.224
A natural response is uncontrolled, something that insults the very premise of the patriarchal hetabrain. The sole resource of the hetabrain lies in its bank of consolidated knowledge: it stores patterns, recalls them, revises them and adds to them; but without the crux of consciousness that unifies the self and locates it in the world, the hetabrain can never step outside of that fortified bank and open to the newness of ‘what is’. Newness comes upon us sensationally, as Archimedes leaped from his bath with “Eureka” echoing in the air; the hetabrain is sheltered from newness within the insensate skull—a word that comes from the Indo-European base “to cut, cleave, split,” the meaning of which closely resembles that of the Latin scindere, “to cut, split, cleave,” from which we get our word science. The Call is newness itself: it is freshly here, now, summoning through the present, fully awake to you. To be cut off from newness is to be immune to the Call and insensate to the felt mystery from which it issues.
Myths abound in which tyrants refuse the Call and set themselves up as the Authority. As I have said, my greatest interest in such myths is in their representations of our most significant struggle: the struggle to overthrow inner patriarchy and integrate our thinking with our Being. When Freud famously considered the Oedipus myth, he approached it in a different way, to shed light on an ageless dynamic among mother, son and father—and that insight has certainly proven its relevance. The narrowness with which that relevance can be applied—to certain males struggling with the problems of adolescence—is commensurate with the narrowness with which Freud looks at the myth. He neglects most of its inconvenient details, such as the fact that Oedipus only attacked his father after his father had twice tried to kill him. In fact, the tyrant Laius didn’t ever encounter Oedipus without trying to kill him. These and other events in the myth take on a new significance if we understand the story not as a struggle of son against father but as something more personal: the struggle we all face against the fearful tyranny of the self by the male element.
It was foretold to King Laius that his son would one day kill him, so Laius mutilated his baby’s feet at birth—as the Messenger tells Oedipus in the play by Sophocles, “the tendons of your feet were pierced and fettered”—and sent him to die of exposure on a mountainside. To illuminate the symbolic meaning of that act, we might understand that the father’s heart was moved by an absolute refusal to let his son stand on his own. For father and son, of course, we can substitute hetabrain and self.
The wounds gave the baby his name: Oedipus means “swollen feet.” When father and son next meet, the son has grown to young manhood and knows nothing of his real father. He is traveling along a road, as the play makes clear, on his own two feet. His father, a “head of state,” happens along the same road riding in a vehicle: a carriage pulled by horses. He is attended by five servants whom he commands from his seat of power. When they encounter Oedipus standing on his own, Pater Laius orders his men to thrust Oedipus off the road, as if to say, “The way belongs to me,” which pretty much sums up the attitude of the inner patriarch. Oedipus, angered, strikes the coachman who pushes him. Pater Laius sees that and waits until Oedipus passes by the carriage, whereupon he again tries to kill him, striking Oedipus “full on the head with his two-pointed goad.”225 Oedipus, enraged, unseats Laius from his carriage and kills him, as well as four of his attendant minions.
If this myth is taken as a message encoded by the self to be later discovered by the self, the message would read “kill the pattern, or the pattern will kill you.” Kill the Buddha, kill the patriarch of the law, as the Zen motto put it. Joseph Campbell pointed to precisely that as the hero’s task: “the mythological hero is the champion not of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.”226 Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson address the same issue when they write,
To cut off the head of patriarchy within us is to cut off the power drives—the injunctions, the rules, false reasonings, false values that separate us from our reality and take our voice away.227
The reason it is so vital to slay the internalized Pater is simple: the Pater refuses the Call, barricades the inner corridor, neutralizes the corational corridor of Being, and so imprisons us in its self-tyranny. Equally, then, we can see that the Zen motto is saying, “Kill who you know yourself to be, or it will kill you.” But we should also appreciate that our facility for perspective is what gives us the choice to get past “the monster of the status quo” and transform with the “things becoming”: perspective reveals pattern; perspective that is rooted in Being becomes insight that enables the hero to look the tyrant in the eye and vanquish him; in other words, perspective helps us liberate ourselves from the segregations of perspective.
As the story of Laius demonstrates, the Authority would rather kill what is new in us than risk being eclipsed by it. Trusting only in its hoard of fixed knowledge, the inner patriarch willfully shapes self and world in its image; its motivation is anxiety, its obsession is control, and its claim is entitlement—which considers the true self to be aloof from or more special than the ordinary world that calls us into Being. The bundle of tendencies that constitute the Authority make up the consciousness of inner patriarchy, or the Laius complex. Quite simply, the Laius complex is what inevitably becomes of us when we refuse the Call and step back from our primary relationship with Being. It is to the Laius Complex that Charles Davis addressed himself when he wrote,
The core of disorder lies in the self. The self has to be healed; its attempt to control the universe is a sickness to be cured, not a source of remedy.228
Similarly, Lao-tzu warns us that:
Not-knowing is true knowledge.
Presuming to know is a disease.
First realize that you are sick;
then you can move towards health.229
“Presuming to know” is the disease of Laius within us: it grows like a scab between us and the Energy of the present, effectively arresting our personal evolution. Forever guided by the Authoritative Pater, our lives remain infantile: unfulfilled, egocentric, grasping, reactionary, and irresponsible in its most literal sense: “not able to respond.” It is impossible to demonstrate response-ability to what cannot be felt. Of course, to step out from under the aegis of the Pater’s rule—to move from four-dimensional doing to five-dimensional Being—is to step into the unpredictable sensations of genuine experience; and that exposes us to genuine vulnerabilities. As Campbell points out,
Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself … You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed.230
On the uninterpreted path of Being, the streets are naked—the Pater’s rules and signs and sidewalks are stripped away—and there you are, naked to the energy of the present. In your passivity to the subtle intelligence coursing through the body you begin to assimilate the unknown currents in which you stand: the axes intersect, the corridors accord. That harmonic brings you into relationship with the present, and into the mutual awareness of Being—a tangible dialogue in which all the particulars of the world talk to you, and through them, behind them, the aliveness of the world is felt. Once you feel that aliveness as acutely as you feel your own, then you will recognize the fathomless sensitivity that embraces you in understanding; and the small step that takes you from that recognition to saying, “Guide me,” or “Comfort my friend,” or even just “Thank you,” is the step that will carry you into prayer.
The reality of our mind-suffused world, by calling to us, calls also to itself. But how do we actually attend to that reality—and how can we recognize the Call? For a first clue we could turn to a poem by Rumi:
All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright reedsong. If it fades,
we fade.231
Of course, the Call does not exist objectively: its reedsong exists for us only when we confront the present as life confronts life; when we meet the present as a child’s gaze meets its mother’s. In the loving intelligence of that mutual recognition, the present will talk to us. When our attention retreats from the reality of the present, though, the Call fades and we too fade. When the Call fades, the felt self fades, and the patterns of Laius take over—pulling us from kinship into isolation, from the energy of being into idea. The analog axis sustains the felt self in its limitless capacity for relationship, even as the felt self sustains the Call; and both sustain the bright spaciousness of Being.
The reedsong of the Call is neither esoteric nor obscure. Children live for it and dance to it. If you watch young ones you will see them suddenly stirred to engage with the world, and you will notice that they respond to its Call unfettered by self-consciousness or anxiety: they simply answer it, in tune with what their whole resonant Being communicates to them. And the world calls to them without generalization: it calls specifically and personally, suddenly illuminating a corner of their world with a special significance. As Mozart was called by the keyboard, another child might be called by a snowboard or a chessboard or a diving board or a ballet slipper. In The Soul’s Code psychologist James Hillman cites example after example of children seized by the desire to engage with the world through a certain activity. Elsewhere I remember reading that Baryshnikov as a child couldn’t stop dancing. My elder daughter was three when she appeared in a performance at her nursery school’s spring concert. Once the children had lined up across the stage, she stepped out of the line to come downstage center, where she remained for the whole program. She didn’t calculate that; it was just right for her. Some months before she turned seven, my younger daughter held a violin for the first time; it struck such a chord in her that she announced that she didn’t care if she got nothing else for her birthday but please, please, could she have a violin. I’ve never wanted a violin in my life—it makes me a little nervous just holding one. The world calls me in other directions.
Of course the world does not call primarily to children; but it calls most reliably to those who have retained—or, more likely, regained—the innocence that makes children receptive to the Call. In childhood we are surrounded by giants, and the world is enormous and mysterious; by the time our childhood becomes a distant memory, the world has typically so shrunk in our adult awareness that it has largely become a ‘known’ entity—and our own presence within it, by comparison, can seem quite significant in its scale. Such bloat fantasies are born of layers of neglect, and are incompatible with the innocence that enables children to walk through the ordinary world knowing it as an extension of the Mother’s lap. A child feels its mother’s love expressed in its essential relationship to Being; an adult who can open his eyes to the present mystery of Being, and trust in it as a child trusts in its mother—who can feel the maternal caring and love expressing itself through all that is—will hear the world call him by name to undertake with heart and soul and dedication the work that will renew the world, even as it renews the self. Hearing that call, he will respond as a child summoned by its mother.
No one simply remakes oneself as a ‘summoned child’—it happens as the outcome of an unswerving honesty about one’s own life and a dedication to one’s own personal journey towards wholeness. Once you understand the fundamental nature of your relationship to the world as that of a child summoned by its mother, you will never lose your sense of the world’s wholeness—and you will heed its Call and dedicate yourself to it, and express your unity with it in all that you do.
A friend of mine, musician Marty Reno, once told me that his favorite saying was, “God will give you your heart’s desire.” He expressed dismay at those who construed it to mean, “God will give you what you desire”; for Marty it means just what it says: God’s gift is the desire itself—specifically your heart’s desire. It is a gift that pulls your entire life into focus; it lights up the world for you and illuminates you within it. And it is worth stressing the point: your heart’s desire never conforms to the tyrant’s desire to acquire, or to the prideful desire of the ‘known self’ to manipulate its fiction. It is something else—something that threatens to upset your world, to challenge you and transform you. You awaken to a mere possibility shimmering in the darkness beyond, and your whole life is tugged towards that new horizon on its way to an adventure. And that adventure could be of any sort whatsoever: intellectual, physical, romantic, spiritual, or all of them at once.
The inner, physical resonance of the calling can come as a momentary touch of guidance, or as a huge thing that seizes you and sustains years of dedication—which is what happens when you find your ‘calling in life’, or your true vocation, a word that comes from the Latin vocatus, “called.” Whatever the nature of the resonance, it always calls you into the unknown, and it always calls you towards wholeness, and it always calls you to come and play and risk. It calls you to follow your soul’s valence, to leave the safety of your own organized inadequacy, to find something out and to grow. By responding to the Call, you knowingly or unknowingly undertake a deepening of your responsibility.
It seems paradoxical that in leaving behind the segregated realm of your ‘known self’—every part of which seeks your individuation—you more fully discover and grow into your own individuality. But once you have cast off the smothering constraints of ‘who you know yourself to be’, you will be open to the world’s perplexity, which calls you to be changed and challenged who knows how. By heeding that call, you are following what in mythological terms is the hero’s call to submission: the quest begins, the search is underway, driven by the need to find something out. It is through the quest that you shed your own consolidated ‘norms’ and discover yourself anew. It bundles certainty and uncertainty together at the same time: the certainty of your heart’s desire moving you forward, grounded in the world and awake to it; and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. But the certainty you feel does not rest, as our culture’s story would advise, on your having ‘found the answer’. The certainty with which the hero moves into the unknown rests on his having found his quest—which, as the word suggests, is empowered by a question that has you in its grip and calls you to life. Indeed, both words quest and question take us back to the Latin word quaerere, “to seek.” A quest is the basic human activity—our search for wholeness—brought into focus and writ large.
In his novel The Seeing Stone, Kevin Crossley-Holland presents an astute observation: “Each of us needs a quest … and the person without one is lost to himself.”232 Your quest is your compass: it orients you to the world and unites you with your heart’s desire. When Joseph Campbell famously encouraged his readers to “follow your bliss,” he was urging them to heed that compass. And just as the needle of a compass doesn’t ‘decide’ on its orientation, but is aligned by the far poles of the earth, we don’t decide on our heart’s desire. It is awakened in us by the felt unknown, perhaps by the unblinking, steadfast stars returning our gaze. Our word desire contains that exact image: as the remarkable linguist Ernest Klein explains, the word comes from the Latin de, “from,” and sideris, “star,” and originally meant “to expect from the stars.” And how many times has someone sat in solitude under the night sky and, glancing up into the stars, found herself connecting then and there in a wholly personal and ineffable way with her own compass? Once the unknown world calls to us like that, we recognize it in our core. And in the same way that a mother’s milk is let down when her baby cries, so too sensation is let down into the body when the world calls. The body enters a kind of fluid harmony such that the merest reverberation of the compass needle will ripple through the whole of it. You become you, you feel your self—fully present and alive and activated, world-conscious rather than self-conscious. And at that point you face a decision: whether to heed the Call or pull back from it.
A decision to heed it will be life-altering. As the radical Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”233 To follow the Call into the Energy of the unknown world is to leave behind the world stitched together by Idea. On the other hand, if you refuse the Call, you refuse your compass, your means of orienting to the world. In that case, your only recourse is to willfulness, and its abilities to lobby on behalf of the fictions of the ‘known self’. However splendid a house you build for yourself, it will be a many-chambered house of death. Warnings to that effect are embedded in myths, as Laius demonstrates—but they are also found in the substructure of our language. The word vanity, for instance, is cousin to a Sanskrit word that means “insufficient, wanting.” The state of spiritual torpor, the state of someone who, as Crossley-Holland puts it, is “lost to himself,” is described by the Middle English word accidie, which is from the Greek and means “not caring.” “I don’t care” is the anthem of youth who are lost to themselves; but equally, there are CEOs who are out of touch with their heart’s desire and are lost to themselves; or successful movie stars who are lost to themselves. The story is a familiar one.
When we speak of someone “being lost to himself” we are spelling out the idea that a person can stray from what might be called his true self, which can therefore exist independent of his person. In effect, we are invoking the ancient recognition that a double, or spirit self, is always there, ready to guide you in your truth. Our expression of that ancient notion, though, is disguised and rather pale; in fact, the idea of a double could only have survived for us in an etiolated state, because our fiction of four dimensions would balk at a more robust expression. If we sidestep the literality of the double for a moment and look at the different cultures that speak of it, and at the various ways in which they understand the concept, we find that one essential feature is constant: the double is understood to be a part of us that is informed by or in touch with the unseen, unbroken whole. If the consciousness of the felt self consists of a ‘world’ aspect and a ‘self’ aspect, then the ‘double’ would be the ‘world aspect’—the vivid, mysterious part of the self that is aware of the unbroken whole, indivisible from it, and limitlessly informed by it. Understood in that light, the idea of a double may look less like naïveté and more like a wake-up call, for it embodies the idea that there is a part of you that directly knows the larger harmony, can possibly help guide the events of your life to manifest it, and can even—where your surrender is sufficient—offer the bottomless possibility of attuning your inner Being to it. If that possibility should be realized, then your moment-by-moment living would manifest that harmony. That is the mystical view, and it is nonsensical to anyone who has bought into our culture’s unintegrated perspectives of self and world.
Our culture’s attitude towards the possibility of a double can be seen in various reactions to the Third Man Factor. In a book of that name, John Geiger looks at dozens of cases in which a seen or unseen presence appears to someone in trouble—often in the most extreme circumstances imaginable—and plays a significant role in his or her survival. The presence affords calm companionship, and often guidance or advice—leading one man from the eightieth floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center moments before its collapse; helping a scuba diver find her way out of a cave system just before her air ran out; guiding an explorer to safety through the tropical mists, heat haze and rainstorms of the New Guinea jungle. Other firsthand stories came out during a radio show about the book. One listener described how, driving along a mountain road, she heard her deceased father’s voice come from the backseat, clearly saying, “Take it easy.” She slowed down and drove on cautiously, only to turn a bend to see dust rising from a rockslide that would have hit her car. Another listener told of flying a plane through thick fog when she heard a voice telling her to climb. She did, only to see a mountain suddenly come into view that she would otherwise have crashed into.
Of course there is a stampede of specialists falling over one another in their haste to demonstrate how all of these phenomena must be biochemical hallucinations of the stand-alone brain. Just as, no doubt, my friend’s dash home in the middle of a school lesson just happened to coincide with his mother’s imminent death, and was actually caused by a random biochemical brain burp. The need to reduce all such phenomena to four-dimensional mechanics bespeaks a profound fear of the transformative sensitivity of female Being; and any such fear will render the Call—in any of its manifestations—as undetectable as Eurydice became to Orpheus.
Many cultures understand that an individual’s journey in the world is assisted by a nurturing spirit, a double, who summons and guides us. Plato called this soul-companion our daimon; the Romans called it our genius; in many native North American traditions, it is an animal spirit or an ancestor; Australian aborigines refer to their “bush soul”; in the Philippine languages it is called kadua, kakambal, kaluha and many other names; even in our contemporary culture, people refer to their ‘guardian angel’.
In early Egypt one’s double, called one’s ka, was seen as an identical twin born at the same time as an individual, to accompany him through life—guiding, sustaining and supporting, much like the Third Man Factor. Ka is, suitably, a perplexing, many-layered concept—but a concise summation of it is found in the appendix of Julius Lester’s novel The Pharaoh’s Daughter. There we read that ka was understood in three overlapping ways as,
(1) the spiritual essence of a person that was the guiding force of life; (2) an astral being that existed alongside a person and had its own individuality; (3) an aspect of the divine essence on which all existence rested.234
Among those three meanings of ka we can find links to innumerable cultures around the world. Working backwards through them we find that the third meaning—the divine, vital spirit of life—is akin to the Sanskrit notion of prana, the Chinese term chi, the Japanese ki and the Hebrew ruach, among others. The astral being of the second meaning is like one’s guardian angel, or animal spirit, or ancestor, and is found in philosophies in India, in most Philippine ethnic groups and among North American aboriginal tribes. The first sense is a lot like Aristotle’s notion of entelechy: the immaterial drive that carries living beings towards their ultimate form. It is the entelechy of an acorn, for example, to become an oak tree. The term entelechy has fallen in and out of fashion over the centuries, but it was mostly out of fashion during the twentieth century, and it remains so, as scientists have sought to liberate biology from the taint of anything not purely of four dimensions; if there is a driving, organizing force, they argue, it must have an explanation that is purely mechanical. As we have seen, though, all attempts to contain life within the perseity of interacting things—whether genes or electrons—have so far failed; and if the Universal Law of Interrelationship is anything to go by, they will continue to fail.
In the meantime, the term lives on in a different context. Psychologist and philosopher Jean Houston has given it a contemporary relevance. A leader in the Human Potential Movement, Houston identifies entelechy as an innate sense of our essential reason for being. Entelechy is the inner quest that, once awakened, will unlock our energy and engage us with the world: “Contact entelechy, and all circuits are ‘go’. Tune into it and another order of perspective is at hand.”235
I sometimes feel my own entelechy—quite tangibly—as what the spirit seeded within me wants to become, or as what a loving attention to the world calls me towards. Of course, entelechy is not located either within, like a seed, or without: it is located in the clarity of a relationship between the two—seed and world, each pole recognizing its need for the other. Contact entelechy, and you become Orpheus drawn by your own Eurydice, willing to risk as much, and able to trust as deeply. When the world calls to your heart-seeded entelechy, it births a quest in you, a hunger—a longing, a need to engage, to make, to act, to move towards a spiritual center that summons you from an unknown landscape. The hunger birthed in you by entelechy is something to which your every faculty awakens. It is something entirely different from the tyrant’s insatiable appetite for acquisition, or for self-aggrandizement: it is a recognition of the work you were born to undertake, and to which you must give yourself. That recognition is liberated in you by a heart’s gate that is wide open to Being—and the hunger it births summons your every faculty into growth and discovery. That hunger—the passion of it—is also what makes us who we are. Without it we collapse into self-absorption, lost to ourselves. Without that hunger, in a real sense, we are nothing.
The concept of entelechy does not suggest that there is such a thing as who any of us is ‘meant’ to be, or that our individual destinies are somehow predetermined or foreordained. The calling is the invitation, not the destination; entelechy initiates and guides and transforms rather than limits. The very idea of Fate belongs to the fable of perseity: it tells us that the future is sealed up and enclosed; beyond change; preordained and inevitable; fixed, solid and eternal. That may be a comforting fiction to some people, in the same way that the fiction of the ‘known self’ is comforting; but comfort is not a measure of reality, and the fiction of Fate is as vulnerable to scrutiny as is the fiction of the ‘known self’. As we are developing, so is the world. When the needle of my compass quivers and points me towards the unknown, my stepping into the unknown will change not only me, but the world as well. There is no fixed storyline, no predetermined end for either of us. There is just the ongoing game in which world and self are cocreators, each in its way caring for the other, exchanging gifts. As James Hillman wrote of the daimon, “Not only does it bless us with its calling, we bless it with our style of following.”236
In the original sense in which Aristotle coined the word, entelechy was made up of two words that combined to mean “to have completion.” We all yearn to be complete, to find wholeness in our lives; in amplifying that original sense of entelechy we can understand something very basic, yet rich with implications: every living thing is born to complete itself by receiving the energies of the world, processing them, and releasing them back into the world. That is the universal drive in the acorn, the amoeba, the grasshopper—and in us. It is in the midst of that exchange and transformation of energies that we thrive. It is through that exchange that we live our purpose and our own becoming. Similarly, it is through that exchange that the hero’s journey is shaped: venturing into the unknown, he receives the energy of his newfound perspective; in receiving it, he processes it, even as it processes him; and he returns home to release that energy back into his society—to which, if it is integrated, that energy will bring new life.
If we can understand it in those terms, we can see that entelechy forms the basis of all relationship and as such forms the basis of all reality. To come into relationship with anything is to exchange energy with it. Where there is no exchange of energy, there is no relationship; where there is no relationship, there is no reality. We saw that in the case of tachyons, the hypothetical particles that can only travel faster than the speed of light. If they don’t interact with our universe on this side of the speed of light, they cannot exchange energy with our world, and so they simply don’t exist in it.
The exchange of Energy—and specifically its limits and forms of optimization—shapes all life on earth. It is entelechy that shapes a tree, and it is into that exchange of energies that a tree grows. A poplar tree is optimized for a different exchange than the ones that shape either the oak or the fir tree. Conversely, the similarities in morphology that can be seen among beetles, cats, horses, and elephants have been shaped by the limits and optimizations for similar exchanges. The eye of the beetle and the eye of the elephant are similar insofar as they are both shaped by an exchange in which the energy of light is received, processed, and released into the nerve ways. We might further note a fundamental entelechy in which all life participates: the exchange of energies between the earth and the sky. We eat and breathe earth-transformed sun energy, even as we further transform it to return it to the earth. I feel it is not insignificant that, like the trees, we spend most of our lives upright, our embodied axis aligned along that exchange between earth and sky: between the integration of the ground at one pole and the perspective of the sky at the other; between the consciousness of Mother Earth and the consciousness of what used to be called the welkin, where angels dwell.
How we evolve as individuals, we might further note, is largely made possible by the exchanges that run through the axes of our consciousness. Each axis, remember, is the energetic potential for exchange between two poles: in the case of the embodied axis, between the male and female aspects of our consciousness; for the analog axis, between the self and world aspects of consciousness. When you can feel the potential for the coursing of an exchange through the corridor within you, each pole of your consciousness yearning to know itself through the other; or when you can stand in the corational corridor that is the mindful present, and feel between self and world a recognition, a stirring of dialogue, a mutual awareness that bespeaks a necessity; when you can feel those axes illuminated by the pulsing call of complementary opposites for each other, seeking completion, then you are feeling your own entelechy.
As such, we can understand our axes of consciousness to be the means that reveal our entelechy; and we can understand entelechy to be the dynamic that engages us with the world and most fully brings us into relationship with it. Like the poplar, each one of us is optimized for a particular exchange of energies: everyone has particular gifts to offer, particular blessings to receive. Not just our lives but our very bodies and souls are shaped by the ways in which we choose to—or choose not to—give ourselves to that exchange. And it is through that exchange that we acquire poignancy in our lives. As Buddha said, “Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.”237 Creativity itself is precisely about receiving the energies of the world, processing them, and releasing them. But the same could be said of presence: to be present is to be here, now, fully sensitized and awake to the world—assimilating it and giving over to what it calls from you without resistance or hesitation. The same can also be said of the third leg of our metaphoric stool: freedom. The caged tiger cannot live in an open exchange of energies with the world; the tiger treading the bamboo grove is fully participant in it. In fact, the currents of energy that make up your exchange with the world are what you feel as your life. You are most fully in reality, then, and most freely in reality, when your exchange of Energy with the world is most free: when the inner corridor is uncluttered and the corational corridor wide open. And just as entelechy is the basis of all reality, we might also recognize that unintegrated Idea is the basis of all unreality: cutting across the axes that join us to self and world, it imparts to both the aura of a fantasy we watch as though through a windowpane, shielding us from the threat of any real exchange. The effect on your own sensitivity is to numb you to the harmony and deafen you to the Call, which will give you more than enough reason to deny that either exists. And then you will neither feel blessed nor sense your ability to bring blessings upon the world. In such a scenario as that—a very familiar one, unfortunately—you could only equate the notion of freedom with the need and ability to acquire.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that the world’s great spiritual leaders tell us that we most fully realize our own humanity when we receive the energies of the world as a gift and, in processing them, release them back into the world as a gift. That view represents entelechy as an exchange of gifts; indeed, each breath we take in brings a gift of oxygen from the plant life of the world, and each exhalation carries in return a gift of carbon dioxide. All forms of thanksgiving—whether prayer, song or ritual—celebrate the exchange of gifts, and acknowledge it in all the phenomena of the world.
The Egyptian glyph for ka depicts the calling of the world as a gift being extended: ka was represented by a picture of two arms outstretched in a gesture of calling, offering and support. That image could also serve as a depiction of the self as it opens along the analog axis, welcoming ‘what is’ and supporting the world in an openhearted exchange. It is when you actively attend to the present that you reverberate to its call and discover the self as a verb rather than an object. To recognize that Call in the present is to recognize yourself in the present. Look to it and there you are, calling yourself. The genesis of your wholeness commences there—with the summons, the Logos—and with the quivering needle in your core that answers. And when we think of that compass needle quickening in response, it helps to bear in mind that the root of compass is an Indo-European base that means “to spread out,” and is also the root of our word petal. By issuing through the present, the Call roots you in it; by summoning you from the felt unknown, the Call summons the energy of your being through the heart, which blossoms at the touch of its currents. The Call and the cello-stringed flower of the felt self are complements—each a realization of being. As Dürckheim said, whatever exists
does not realize its inner truth unless it allows Being to manifest itself in its particular form. We can say that man is truly in his center when he has become conscious of his own path as an innate truth and as a personal call, and that he is capable of consciously realizing it through the simplest activity in daily life.238
Ordinary activities are often the most challenging in which to consciously realize your own path and your personal call. It helps to recognize that the ordinary world always calls us to live more fully in the present; the ‘known self’ always warns us to live on a leash of anticipation. The inspiring theater teacher and director Robert Barash once commented, “The greatest gift you can give anyone is just to be present with them.” To be present with others in simple appreciation of who they are, without expectation or anticipation, is also to make a gift of ‘being’ to yourself.
The heart’s compass is drawn to its true bearing by the world. Our culture distracts our attention from the reedsong of the present with messages inciting self-absorption and compliance. They tell us that the truth of our relationship to the world lies inside us, and we should take hold of the compass needle that orients our truth, seize it in our hands, point it at what we want—and pursue it. In all of the grasping and pushing that follows, the Call of the world is forgotten—as Rumi observed, it fades and we fade.
Turning to an appointed Authority can equally deafen us to the Call—and in our culture, doing so is as deeply ingrained a habit as heeding our inner patriarch. That habit is nowhere more evident than in a phenomenon that I call Lab Coat Voodoo. It is practiced by experts and is endorsed by the population at large; it effectively casts a spell over our personal relationship to the guidance of the world and endarkens it. To illustrate, a personal anecdote: while I was out for a run one day my left foot landed on a stick, which rolled sideways and wrenched my ankle. Over the next week I was slowed down but I carried on with my life, which included wiring in a 200-amp electrical panel and climbing onto the roof to hook it up to the power lines. I wasn’t ignoring the pain—on the contrary, I was deliberately and gently attending to the ankle; but after a week it wasn’t much better, so I cycled to the local hospital, where a doctor sent me for X-rays. When he returned with them in hand, he told me my ankle was broken. I thought he was joking, but he said, no, it actually was broken. As his words sank in, I lost my ability to walk. Never mind that I had been up and down ladders and lugging things to work and cycling around town in the past week: I suddenly couldn’t take a step. Lab Coat Voodoo.
The doctor intended me no malice, to be sure, but the power of his word “broken” and the authority of his expertise were sufficient to override both the sensations of my body and my ability to be gently guided by them; he had issued a verdict that was fixed, solid and intractable. All too keenly aware of the absurdity of my reaction, I recovered from the effect of his words within a few minutes; but the ability of those words to disable me, to extirpate my thinking from my Being with a single utterance, was profoundly disturbing.
Recent research by Gregory Berns has demonstrated that expert advice suppresses areas of the brain that involve our judgment. As Berns noted, “The study indicates that the brain relinquishes responsibility when a trusted authority provides expertise,”239 a finding we might also interpret literally as “the brain relinquishes its responsiveness to Being.” Once we are alerted to that phenomenon, we find it in every sphere of our lives, presenting us with empowered words that magically displace us from the guidance of the world—and from the peace of mind that it fosters. Experts are called upon to tell us when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, as well as what not to eat, when not to eat, and how not to eat. They tell us how and when to exercise. What to wear and how to look. How to make love. What to say when. What to think. How to judge others. Never mind that their edicts vary from year to year—the seductive persuasion of Lab Coat Voodoo oozes expertise. And so its practitioners persuade us not by pushing pins into little dolls, but by jabbing us with statistics and studies; by piercing us with images of people depressed or anxious and who simply need the right solution to perk them up. Or they prick us with images of actors and models who have been paid to present happiness such as can only be found on TV, and we are led to believe, knowing that it is not true, that their happiness comes from the right consumer product that has filled an emptiness in their lives.
Our culture promotes an underlying message that happiness is fatalistically determined by certain mechanics. Certain solutions. Certain answers. Forget the quest that unites us with the felt unknown. Forget the soul-shaking submission that awakens the crux of our intelligence to the corationality of Being. We just need to breathe the right ions or use the right vitamins, wear the right colors, practice the right secret, drink the right tea, hang our mirror in the right place or say the right mantra. As we have seen, such fatalism is a form of endarkenment that can keep you from your own experience; it can distract you from turning your attention to the most pertinent question of all: What keeps you from being present?
If we turn our attention to that question, we find that what keeps us from being present is always a resistance to the Energy of the present. And that resistance always shows up in a deliberate impairment of our consciousness: dividing up the corridor within and constricting the pipeline that carries us into corationality. To open our consciousness to the world’s calling is to discover that the present challenges us to develop even as it supports that development: entelechy is a process, and the present is your midwife. Learning to live in the Energy of the present is a journey of trust, honesty and evolving sensitivity. That journey brings not happiness, but felicity; not acquisitions, but grace; not importance, but ease; not fixity, but aliveness; not knowledge, but understanding; not personal conquests, but gratitude; not meaning, but experience; in short, not solutions, but wholeness.
The reason we so readily acquiesce to the dictums of an external authority is because we practice acquiescence every day of our lives, whenever we bow to the tyranny of our own internalized patriarch. We bow to his instructions instinctively; we follow them as a way of life. So when it comes to Lab Coat Voodoo we are sitting ducks. We naturally want to be told what to do and what is best. How else will we know? And who better to tell us than experts? If you meet a Buddha, kill him. If you meet an expert, kill him.
Not all experts in our culture practice Lab Coat Voodoo, of course: some raise questions rather than presenting answers; some encourage experience rather than prescribing behavior; some gently shake the house in order to help you strengthen it from within, rather than handing you more things to tack onto its facade; some nurture playfulness rather than dictating the road you should follow; some even point you to the unknown that calls you by name, and do so with compassion and encouragement. Voodoo experts uproot us from the source of presence, creativity and freedom in our own lives; real teachers return us to it. They also help us pay attention. Once the male element grows sufficiently passive to enable us to hear the world calling, body and world merge in mutual awareness—and then our doing acquires the grace of Being itself. If it is that simple and rewarding, though, why in the world don’t we do it more often?
The grace of Being is quintessentially corational: as your analog intelligence yields to the present, feeling the whole in all its fluid harmony, that harmony lives in you and guides you, at one with the ordinary reality of where you are. To submit to the grace of Being is not just to pay attention to the ordinary world the way you might pay attention to the scenery outside your window; it is to be no other than ordinary yourself, so that the ordinariness of where you are runs through your core as the smell of your mother did when you were a small child. When that happens, it will induce resonances and feelings that are beyond your control.
And that is the issue. Losing control. Once you hear the Call and begin your journey, you expose yourself to reality as it is—the unknown terrain that lies beyond interpretation. In myth, the hero’s vulnerability in answering the Call is graphically presented to us in countless storied metaphors. Vulnerable literally means “able to be wounded.” Answering the Call, then, expresses and is made possible by a willingness to risk being wounded.
You cannot live and escape wounding. But I think many of us make the choice to wound ourselves, thereby at least asserting some control over how we are wounded, rather than risk being wounded by the unknown. Mythically this is represented by Laius, the patriarch within, skewering the feet of his newborn son Oedipus, the child within. The scars of our self-wounding are the consolidations that dull us to the world, blocking and constricting the rush of sensations through the body. We are largely blind to our own consolidations, forgetting entirely that they are not just the givens of what is normal, but were at some point created by a choice not to integrate the present. We overlook the significance borne to us by the fact that every consolidation in ourselves is itself actually a wound. That lack of self-insight is surprising in that we can plainly see the same kind of wounding in everyone else around us. It is visible because the scar tissue of those self-inflicted wounds actually shapes people’s bodies: the way we move, hold ourselves, look, listen, gesture, breathe and speak reveals those consolidations for all to see. They show up because they constrain us and pull at us—like toughened calluses that resist movement and feeling, or like a face partially disabled by Botox.
The purpose behind such self-inflicted wounding is to dull ourselves to pain; in fact, those patches of scar tissue diminish not just pain, but all sensation. The practice is in keeping with a tacit deal our culture has brokered, based on the belief that an individual has a right to be free of pain. That belief would be hard to argue against if it did not by implication give everyone the nonsensical right to be free of living. Pain accompanies everything of value: love, self-knowledge, the hero’s journey, the lessons of failure—which lessons themselves can turn any failure into a gift of learning. Essentially, pain is communication; the most accelerated learning in my life has been guided by suffering of one sort or another. On the other hand, when we try to avoid pain by self-wounding, we fall into a vicious cycle: our anxiety about pain prompts self-wounding; the scarring diminishes sensation; the diminished sensation abstracts the world around us; and that abstraction itself creates more anxiety, et cetera. Self-inflicted wounding directs us into a cul-de-sac.
When I work as an actor I know that I cannot ‘inhabit’ a character until I have found his particular body in my own—his stance, his rhythms, his carriage; I also know that those qualities are primarily shaped by the wounds of his unique anxieties. Those wounds literally represent who the character knows himself to be, which in the course of the play usually comes into conflict with where he finds himself—a conflict expressed by: “What is happening to me is not who I am.” That in a nutshell is the germ of both tragedy and comedy. I have also found that the more innocent the character, the less scar tissue he carries. Innocent literally means “doing no harm,” and I take its true meaning not to be doing no harm to others—you would have to check before each footfall as you walked so as not to crush any insect, and what would you eat, and how could you speak truth without the risk of hurting someone?—but to be more fundamentally grounded in inflicting no wounds on oneself. An innocent heart is one that has not hardened itself with scar tissue. An innocent heart is what enables you to see the world anew. The patriarch within, the Laius part of us, wounds our innocence with his two-pointed goad, because our innocence is what enables us to hear the Call and discover that our true relationship to the world is that of a child, summoned. By bringing us into that relationship, our innocence enables the wound of our ‘spectatorship’ to heal. Even as I watch my young daughters lose innocence, I continue to learn from them about how to regain my own.
We employ self-inflicted wounding to forge an enclosure within which our self-tyranny can reign—an enclosure that keeps the world out even as it traps us within. When the world wounds us, something very different happens. Sogyal Rinpoche has written about the world’s wounding with a lucid and uncompromising simplicity:
So each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth.240
In its unflinching clarity that statement reminds me of an insight into art that is as beautiful and true as any I’ve read, and which appears in the form of a question in The Medusa Frequency, a novel by Russell Hoban. Halfway through the book, a character asks: “Is not all art a celebration of loss?”241 The character asking that question is, felicitously, Orpheus—or more accurately, his severed head. Wounding is always a loss of one sort or another. To celebrate loss is to celebrate the perplexing truth it brings in its wake. Sogyal Rinpoche paraphrases the poet Rilke, observing that “our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”242 Yet another take on wounding seems to me equally insightful. The late Isaac Vogelfanger was more intimately acquainted with wounding than most of us could imagine: he was a survivor of Stalin’s death camps. He later came to Canada, where he taught medicine, and was able to write of his ordeal:
Wounds heal and you become whole again, a little stronger and more human than before.243
How is it, though, that being wounded can make us “more human”? It isn’t easy to say what makes us human in the first place, but a wound will do several things that help awaken us to our humanity. First, as Sogyal Rinpoche pointed out, a wound will teach us about impermanence: by doing so, it will challenge every assumption of the ‘known self’, which clings to the idea of permanence and control and assiduously avoids looking directly at the implications of its own impermanence—which happens to be the ground of truth and the source of all that is precious in life.
A wound will also nourish compassion: how much easier to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and open your heart to him from the perplexed understanding that your own wounds have nurtured. And the more human we become, the more that compassion extends to all living things, and recognizes all things as living.
Wounding also makes us more human to the extent that it makes us more grateful. There is nothing like a broken leg, for example, to release a newfound gratitude once you are able to walk again; or the loss of a family member to bring the rest of the family closer, newly appreciative of what they share. As Joni Mitchell astutely observed, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
The gratitude that wounding teaches us, at its most extreme, is a gratitude for life itself, and for the opportunity to be here, now in its rich and poignant mystery. I remember lying in a hospital bed after a construction accident in which my thumb had been crushed and deboned. Once I was left alone in the room I began weeping: they were tears of gratitude for the wonder of the life in which I was so blessed to participate—a blessing made vividly clear, paradoxically, by the naked bone and sagging flesh of my thumb.
More than any single perspective on the present, I think that to be grateful for what is here will place you here; gratitude opens us to Being and lets it penetrate our core. By doing so, it summons the crux of our consciousness to flower forth into all that is. It is perhaps for that reason that religions and shamanic traditions the world over and without exception give thanks in prayer or song or poetry or ritual. Thanksgiving is rooted in the ground of truth: that reality consists of the exchange of energies. Thanksgiving is itself a gift, given in exchange for gifts received. It connects you with your own entelechy and opens you to the transient present. And so it was common not that long ago to give thanks before every single meal we ate; to give thanks in our prayers before going to sleep; and to go to church at least once a week and sing songs of thanks. If someone didn’t learn to be thankful, it wasn’t for lack of practice: all the social rituals were in place to support it.
Nothing has come along to replace those ancient rituals, which leaves the discovery of gratitude up to the individual. I have nothing against the personal learning curve, but in our culture this one is a particular challenge. Our belief in perseity and our cult of self-achieved doing make it hard enough; beyond that, though, the benighted persuasions of entitlement wage an assault against gratitude on every level. ‘Entitlement’ is as close as we are likely to come to naming gratitude’s dark counterpart, and it seems to be woven into the very cloth of our culture. Consider the extent to which our thinking—especially on political issues—is clouded by the agenda of individual rights: I have a right to that, but she has a right to this, which violates my right to those, and so on. If I have a right to something, I cannot receive it as a gift and there is no reason to feel gratitude for it. Such entitlement also makes deep compassion, such as that which prompted the desegregation movement in the United States, functionally redundant. Entitlement doesn’t require compassion; it requires policing. We’ll just sort out who has a right to what and enforce it. The miasma of entitlement taints even our most personal reckonings: if I should be wounded, forget about becoming more human—I’m entitled to happiness and my rights have been violated. Someone should pay. As writer Curtis White succinctly put it,
In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the deader the social and natural worlds become.244
Rights are a representation of what ‘should be’, and adherence to them dulls our responsiveness to ‘what is’. We don’t need to be really touched by a given situation if we can sort out who is entitled to what. And when our ability to respond is off the hook, so, of course, is our responsibility. It used to be understood as a maxim that it was a community’s responsibility to care for the common good. A responsibility is a relationship within a larger whole; by contrast, an individual right is a possession, something you have and defend. When we accept responsibility, we transcend perseity; when we focus on the rights of individuals, we fortify it. The fight for racial equality in the United States was not a fight for personal rights, but for social justice. The fight for human rights in totalitarian states remains critical, because policing can remain unaccountable in such states, and legislated rights are the most effective way of curtailing it. In Western cultures, though, the entitled pursuit of individual rights often erodes the most valued asset of a society: the sense of community. A mind-boggling practice was long ago legalized in the United States: a corporation, which is created from and sustained by the larger community, is granted the rights of an individual citizen by law—and is also reified as a stand-alone entity. So much for the common good. Optics replace compassion; gratitude is useful only if it increases stock value. Which of course it can’t.
If the focus on rights undermines a personal sense of gratitude, an even more invidious influence is wielded by the fictions of advertising, which generally appeal directly to self-centeredness. You can’t move very far in a big city without being confronted by billboards dominating the skyline, or ads on the subway, or videos in the elevator, all proclaiming the same message: “You deserve more. You deserve better. You could be happier. You are entitled to be happier.” Those blandishments are like candy to the hetabrain—but our stampede towards acquisition funnels ineluctably into a closed loop. Once gratitude atrophies, we can never quite be satisfied; to ease our dissatisfaction, we acquire what promises us “better, more, happier”; we may be thrilled by the act of acquisition, but learn nothing about gratitude from it, and so have nothing to return to but our ever-present dissatisfaction. As we persist around this closed loop, our actions are fueled by restlessness, and we eventually come to mistake any diminution of that restlessness for being truly at rest; or a diminution of white noise for the reverberant signal of being; or the tugging need to acquire for the calling of the world.
To experience deep gratitude is to experience a profound opening to the spacious present: the Indo-European root that gave us gratitude literally means “to praise, to welcome.” But establishing any grounds for gratitude is almost impossible if you buy into perseity, for it only prompts questions: gratitude to whom? And for what? I would suggest, though, that the first step towards gratitude may be found in just being present—beyond all ideas or calculations or agendas. If you find that difficult, you might remember that if you don’t love being here now, you will resist it—and such resistance is always successful. Standing before the king of the underworld and his queen Persephone, Orpheus explains how it was that he, alone of all mortals, was able to make his way into the heart of their realm: “Love had greater strength than I.”245 The strength of his love enabled a calm acceptance of whatever woundings his journey might bring—enabled him to ‘be’ in his life exactly as it was, without resistance. Just how subtle such resistance can be is pointed out in a story by Shinichi Suzuki, the founder of the Suzuki method for teaching the violin:
When I was at junior high school, there was a time when four of the neighborhood children and I used to visit our local shrine every evening. We talked about all sorts of things on our way to and fro. That is all there was to it, but it was a pleasant daily task. Then one day my father asked me, “What do you say when you visit the shrine?” I replied that I asked for protection for all of my family. But my father remonstrated, “Stop being so selfish. When you go to the shrine each day, all you should say is, ‘Thank you very much!’ ” … I realized that what my father was trying to teach me was that although man is prone to always be waiting for something, that is wrong.246
As Suzuki’s father understood, if we are waiting, we lack true gratitude; and without gratitude we are always waiting, ready to be somewhere else, never truly here. Never fully present. To detach from gratitude is to slide into self-absorption. No wonder Meister Eckhart advised that “If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you’, that would suffice.”247
If self-inflicted wounding reinforces the ‘known self’, and the woundings of the world bring us the gifts of humanity and strength as we return to wholeness, then we can appreciate why it is that so many journeys to enlightenment, to the ordinary mind, have been precipitated by crisis and loss. The transition through wounding from the dark and isolated fantasies of the ‘known self’ into a sensitivity that is wide open to ordinary, luminous Being is stunningly captured by William Golding in his novel Free Fall.
The protagonist, Sammy, having been interrogated in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, is then shut up in a pitch-dark concrete cell, where he is terrorized as much by his own imaginings as by anything else—just as the tyrant of the enclosed consciousness is “self-terrorized, fear-haunted.” Sammy’s crisis plummets him into an abyss of fear, whereupon he is unexpectedly released from his dark enclosure into the spacious light of day; there he finds the ordinary world transformed. He saw things shining
with the innocent light of their own created nature.… I lifted my arms, saw them too, and was overwhelmed by their unendurable richness as possessions, either arm ten thousand fortunes poured out for me. Huge tears were dropping from my face into dust; and this dust was a universe of brilliant and fantastic crystals, that miracles instantly supported in their being. I looked up beyond the huts and the wire, I raised my dead eyes, desiring nothing, accepting all things and giving all created things away. The paper wrappings of use and language dropped from me. Those crowded shapes extending up into the air and down into the rich earth, those deeds of far space and deep earth were aflame at the surface and daunting by right of their own natures though a day before I should have disguised them as trees. Beyond them the mountains were not only clear all through like purple glass, but living. They sang and were conjubilant. They were not all that sang. Everything is related to everything else and all relationship is either discord or harmony. The power of gravity, dimension and space, the movement of the earth and sun and unseen stars, these made what might be called music and I heard it.248
Sammy is introduced to the uninterpreted world by a dissolution of the ‘known self’. As he later says, “I was surrounded by a universe like a burst casket of jewels and I was dead anyway myself.”249 Who he knew himself to be had perished, and the five-dimensional present was resplendent around him and through him, expressing its Call through every molecule. He was nothing and everything; ordinary and extraordinary; submissive and uncompliant; wounded and whole; a witness to the full revelation of Being and suffused with wonder and gratitude at it. And when Being is heard as song, as music, we are reminded again of Orpheus, the archetypal artist and the archetypal shaman, singing the world into harmony.
Entelechy is the basic drive towards a fulfillment of what the spirit seeded within you wants to become, of what the world calls you towards. That fulfillment proceeds through the exchange of energies with the world—which we spoke of as an exchange of gifts. That exchange, which sustains and constitutes reality, involves the receiving, processing and release of energy. Receiving is the beginning of our journey beyond the enclosure of self-tyranny. As Lao-tzu put it, “If you receive the world, the Tao will never leave you.”
Any faculty will atrophy without use; but in our doing-obsessed culture we rarely give ourselves the permission or space to just receive. That’s what this exercise is about. Receiving, without labels or judgment or naming. Receiving what the sensational language of the logosmind brings to you, in all its subtlety.
To begin, lie on your back with your eyes closed, and allow your attention to take in the sensations of your breathing. Receive the touch of the cool air on your mouth or nose, and notice the cascade of sensation in your body as the breath wave washes into your body and then releases out in a stream of warm air. Without interfering with your breath any more than a baby does, just receive all the sensations throughout the body that accompany it. You may do this for as long as you wish, which might be two minutes or twenty.
When you are ready to move on, let your attention welcome and receive all the sensations of your body making contact with the ground as your weight presses into it.
Receive the sensations of your clothing on your skin, and the touch of air on your exposed skin.
Receive the sounds nearest to you, without naming them or judging them. Just receive them gently, as they are. Then receive whatever sounds reach you from the middle distance and then from far away.
When you wish to, open your eyes and just receive the colors and textures and shapes of whatever comes to them. If you are moved to do so, look around at the world that surrounds you and just receive its particular energies, without any need to name them.
When you feel ready, sit up slowly, receiving all the sensations of your own movement as you do so. And pause there for a bit, receiving where you are.
Then slowly stand, again receiving all the sensations that accompany your moving. Receive where you are standing, which is so different from where you were sitting.
Finally, try walking about, receiving the sensations of your own body resting on the ground as it moves through space, and all the sensations of the world around you that each moment brings.
Of course, this exercise really comes into its own when carried into the world: to walk down the street, and receive all its energies; to converse with someone, and truly receive his presence; to sit on a park bench and just receive ‘what is’. In a state of receptivity, the nourishment of Being is bottomless.