The complete stance is stabilized by understanding that ethical freedom can be a source of benevolent joy, not mean-spirited selfishness. It is stabilized by understanding that ethical responsiveness eliminates anxiety, and is not an intolerable burden of infinite responsibility without control.

meditation eventually allows you to experience “emptiness,” which is closely related to my “nebulosity ”; and after that “the nonduality of emptiness and form,” which is related to the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. That inseparability is the hallmark of the complete stances. Confused stances make you miserable directly; but even worse, they make you take dysfunctional actions that harm yourself and others. Some helpful interventions can replace dysfunctional actions with functional ones. These include both individual activities and social or group practices.

Each confused stance wrongly denies something about meaningness, and fixates something else. Stances alliedwith eternalism deny the nebulosity of a dimension of meaningness, and fixate a pattern. Stances allied with nihilism deny the pattern and fixate the dimension’s non-existence.

Recognizing how nebulosity and pattern work together moves one into the complete stance for that dimension.

Confused stances distort experience by fixating and denying particular sorts of meaningness. When these mistaken perceptions collide with reality, emotional pain results.

Each confused stance produces a characteristic pattern of misunderstanding and misery.

All suffering can be boiled down to one thing. An attachment / fixation to one thing and an avoidance / denial of something else. Suffering comes in pairs. Nebulosity is the antidote to misery and the pathway to infinite possibility.

meaning is neither subjective nor objective; it is not inside your mind, nor outside. It requires both subjects and objects, and it doesn’t dwell in either. It takes time and space, but it is not precisely located.

Especially, a meaning does not live in your brain. That popular pseudoscientific idea is the “representational theory of mind.” It is internally contradictory and unworkable. Meaning may require a brain, but usually many brains, and also non-brain stuff.

Meaning

What we want most from meaning is guarantees.

Life is nebulous: chaotic, risky, and confusing. Efforts that should work fail. The good suffer and wrong-doers prosper. The world does not make sense. Each of us is torn by uncertainties, conflicting desires, and impossible decisions.

We want assurance that this is all just an illusion. We want to hear that the real world is—somehow—orderly and consistently meaningful. We want answers—sometimes desperately.

Eternalism promises to deliver those answers, and to guarantee them. It cannot; and so it lies.

The complete stance recognizes that certainty is impossible, but that meaning is real. If we set aside the futile hope for absolute answers, we can find patterns of meaning that are usually good enough to navigate our lives. No ultimate, perfectly reliable foundation for morality or purpose is possible—but we do regularly solve problems of ethics and direction; and therefore we can

Increasingly many Westerners have abandoned organized religion, but surprisingly few say they are atheists. They may say “I don’t believe in God, exactly, not as a person, but I believe in something—maybe you could say a higher power, or the universe as a whole, or maybe it’s love—it doesn’t really matter what you call it.”1

I think what they are trying to say is that they believe meaning is real; and I think they are right. Theirs is a relatively sophisticated stance: nihilism is wrong, and so are God-based religious systems. But it’s not true that, for meaning to be real, it has to be fixed in place by some other eternal ordering principle.

Desire for meaning makes you willing to sabotage your critical ability, in order to accept preposterous stories in which the Cosmic Plan makes everything make sense. That inhibits curiosity and the natural drive to find a better understanding.

Natural Intelligence

To maintain eternalism, you have to deliberately stupefy yourself. You need to damage your own natural intelligence to not-see nebulosity and to preserve illusions of meaningfulness and cosmic order.

Eternalism: Addiction (Counters to Simulation)

It’s easy to see how experiences similar to mine in the casino (but more intense or frequent) can grow into eternalist systems. Put a name on the feeling, make up some theories about it, and you’ve founded a religion, self-help movement, or alternative therapy. Your vague certainty that everything now makes sense justifies your metaphysical speculations.

Established eternalist systems can also co-opt such experiences, and use them to reinforce their conceptual dogmas. Whenever someone feels something like I did, the system’s representative can say “Yes! You got it! That was God’s love / psychological integration / enlightenment / healing energy / etc.”

And when, inevitably, it dissipates, he or she will tell you what you need to do to get it back. Eternalist systems relentlessly exploit this addictive dynamic.

Eternalism makes you miserable Unfortunately, we can’t experience unexpected success very often; we’d come to expect it. Trying to prolong the dopamine high usually makes you miserable instead.

Gamblers almost all lose money in the long run. Coming off of cocaine is depressing. Then it takes bigger and bigger doses to get you equally high, with increasingly nasty side-effects. Mania ends in crippling depression.

Eternalism also always lets you down. It seems to offer hope and solace, but in the end it always runs into the brick wall of reality. Then, when it’s impossible to ignore nebulosity, you feel abandoned by the eternal ordering principle. That’s the profoundest possible betrayal.

Even nihilism feels better at such times.

And so, automatically, we swing back and forth between the two.

Eternalism is regressive and addictive

Eternalism is comforting, when life is going well enough. Then you can choose to ignore the ways reality fails to fit fixed meanings. Eternalism’s promises of hope and solaceseem credible. You can live in a pastel fantasy world. So eternalism “works” as long you can maintain a childish, self-indulgent obliviousness—which is its characteristic emotional texture.

Maintaining eternalism requires emotional regression, into a toddler’s bedroom, watched over by a wise protecting parent: the Cosmic Plan, or some authority who poses as its representative. When you are unable to keep deluding yourself, you look for someone more powerful to do the job: someone or something that can affirm eternalism in the face of your perception of the contradictory evidence. The parent-figure promises to protect you from nebulosity. You choose this relationship specifically to obstruct emotional and intellectual growthwhen that seems too frightening.

Preserving comforting illusions may be psychologically valuable in the short run, in times of crisis: as antidotes to depression, anxiety, and despair. (Those are symptoms of nihilism, which may be the only accessible alternative to eternalism for some people.) In the longer run, this pain-killing function leads to helplessness and addiction.

a relationship with eternalism may resemble addictive dynamics of domestic abuse, which keep a victim returning to the abuser. The victim believes—rightly or wrongly—that they are powerless, and that the abuser is powerful. The victim hopes that the abuser would act as a protector against the world, if properly propitiated. This requires the victim to delude themselves that the abuser has loving intentions, and that the abuse episodes are somehow be triggered by the victim’s inadequacy.

Wavering eternalism is emotionally painful

Eternalism persuades you that you should maintain the stance at all times. This has moral force; if you waver in your commitment, you are a bad person. However, it is impossible to accomplish consistent eternalism. This implies perpetual struggle, with shame and guilt at imperfection, and much wasted effort.

The wavering eternalist feels intense confusion during periods of doubt.

When eternalism fails, it tries to convince you that it’s your fault, for wavering, for not trying hard enough, for being unworthy of the Cosmic Plan. Then you may punish yourself—as harshly as you can, to demonstrate your renewed commitment. (The Cosmic Plan can’t punish you adequately; it doesn’t exist!)

As you repeatedly experience eternalism failing when it encounters nebulosity, you develop fear and loathing of ambiguity and change. You come to avoid areas of life that seem particularly nebulous. This progressively narrows your scope for action, leading to rigidity or even paralysis. You may isolate yourself socially: from everyone, or into a closed group that agrees to pretend eternalism works. You may adopt an aggressive hostility toward anyone who reminds you of nebulosity.

You may come to feel cramped and imprisoned in the small safe space where eternalism seems to function. Creativity and daring become impossible.

You somehow cannot find your true mission in life, for which eternalism would guarantee success. You neglect mundane goals as mere materialism, meaningless in the eyes of the eternal ordering principle. Most of the time, you cannot locate your true self; your miserable ego’s attempts to live up to its ideals are pathetic. Sometimes, you believe you have found your true self and mission, and go off on a fantastical ego-trip crusade, which needs constant confirmation from followers and eventually ends in catastrophe.

Inner Authoritarianism:

control, safety + security (dominating or avoid dominating), approval

authoritarianism is embedded in the way people think, hiding in culture, values, daily life, and in the very ideals people try to live by. Thus our basic problems are not the inevitable outcome of human nature, but rather are shown to stem from deep authoritarian implants. This offers new grounds for hope. The Guru Papers powerfully attests that unmasking and decoding hidden authoritarianism can disempower it, increasing the range of human freedom and possibility. The book also elegantly argues that this process is essential for human survival. The Guru Papers  provides a penetrating analysis of the joy of eternalist self-blinding, particularly in the case of American pop religion, but also in eternalist political systems such as Communism and spiritual cults.

Disidentification and deconversion

Whatever system of meaning you may have committed to, everyday experience will contradict it at times. This creates cognitive dissonance between the abstract framework and concrete reality. Typically, then, you apply eternalist ploysto obscure the conflict and to reinforce your commitment. These tricks don’t always work.

At times when the ghost loses its grip, you may have the surreal experience of hearing your mouth saying things—often absolute statements—and you aren’t even sure what they mean, much less whether or why you would believe them. That can be frightening, when you realize you are not in control of your voice. To avoid it you might either submerge yourself in possession again, or try to snap out of it altogether.

It may be better just to watch for a while, with friendly curiosity? There’s lots you can learn about selfness here, and a fascinating altered state of consciousness, so long as you can tolerate the vertigo.

Because any eternalist system often contradicts experience, your commitment can only ever be wavering, to various degrees. Gradually, enough friction accumulates that you can’t help admitting you have been owned. As you disidentify, you come to have the ideology, rather than being had by it. You realize it is a somewhat arbitrary construction, which you chose somewhat arbitrarily. It no longer seems absolutely compelling. Then, perhaps suddenly, your commitment may fail. You reject the system and break free.

That’s usually horrible.

Commitment to an eternalist system is similar to a marriage. In return for an enormous, sometimes difficult investment, you gain feelings of certainty and stability. Leaving a religion or other ideology can be much like a painful break-up or divorce.

Overwhelming feelings of betrayal, loss, regret, anger, shame, anxiety, and depression are common. Not coincidentally, these are symptoms of nihilism. When you have rejected the system you thought was the source of all meaning, everything may seem meaningless.

Ideology

When you realize you have been a puppet to an ideology, or have been bought and sold by a series of them, you may recognize that the problem is not just particular systems, but ideology as such.

An ideology—a system of concepts—makes sense of meaning. But it seems concepts are deceptive; they obscure the truth of meaning. Maybe you could make better sense without them? Maybe you can perceive reality directly, instead? Maybe you can bypass concepts and gain ultimate insight by trusting your feelings?

This isn’t entirely wrong. Much of perception is non-conceptual. In uncommon states of awareness, in meditation for example, one may abide for hours without concepts, and find perception heightened. Significant but ineffable insights do sometimes spring from the unconscious, manifesting initially as peculiar feelings and mythic images, and may evolve into partially-verbal understandings.

Living in a non-conceptual or visionary realm full time is probably impossible, and certainly undesirable. We need concepts to deal with mundane reality, but also to engage with meaning. People who spend most of their time in exalted spiritual states are often ethically challenged, politically naive, surprisingly selfish, practically helpless, and all-round useless.

And taking conceptlessness as an ideal is itself a monist-eternalist ideology: anti-rational Romanticism mashed up with modernist Zen. Once again, rejecting your system of meaning has just led you into the embrace of another; one that denounces all others—just as all the others do.

Moving through Systems

Metasystematicity says “yes, and also, on the other hand…” This does not imply indecisiveness. It implies taking responsibility for your thinking, feeling, and acting. You understand situations; you cannot outsource your decision-making to an ideology, nor the blame it may entail. You are not subject to a system. Rather, you take the recommendations of systems into account, among other considerations.

Committing yourself to a system makes you a tool for accomplishing its goals. The move to metasystematicitybegins by inverting the relationship. For metasystematicity, systems can be tools for understanding.

Tools don’t do the work; you use tools to do the work. You can’t rely on a system to make sense of meaning for you. You make sense of meaning using systems.

You use different tools for different tasks. If you have one system, rather than being had by one, you can have several. You can use different ones in different contexts—or even several in a single situation.

freeing yourself from ideology by shifting from being had by a system to having one, and then to having several. That is a useful way of understanding the process as you begin it, but it is a simplification, and not fully accurate. You cannot fit even one system inside yourself. Complete independence from systems, and complete inversion of the domination relationship, are impossible and undesirable.

Some systems are better (or worse) than others, of course. If you realize you are in an abusive cult, speedy exit may be wise. Even then, reflection on what it got right will prove valuable. It’s tempting to replace unrealistic idealization with unrealistic vilification. It was all-good; now it is all-bad. The violence of rejection is a defense against being pulled in again by its attractions. It’s also an excuse to avoid admitting your own gullibility and culpability. You try to convince yourself that the only possible explanation for your previous adherence was that the cult was overwhelmingly duplicitous and coercive. A realistic assessment of what was genuinely good as well as evil in it will be painful and difficult, but worth the effort

Vastness

Relating accurately with the world’s vastness, including all its systems, requires changing your conception of self, and your relationship with your self. You can be bigger than any ideology—but it will no longer be a you, a self, that is bigger.

It always has been bigger, because it is not an it. You just didn’t notice. You are not a container. You do not have fixed boundaries. The distinction between you and everything else is nebulous.

Your understanding is mainly not personal; it is cultural. Your emotions are mainly not personal, they are relational. Your activity is mainly not personal, it is social.

You extend indefinitely across systems of meaning, from which you are not separate. This does not mean you are One With The Entire Universe. It means your self blurs together with everything you interact with, and selfness fades out with distance.

You cannot be a coherent, fixed, well-defined system. You never were one; but when you identified with an ideology, you tried to make yourself one. When you tried to havesystems, you tried to make yourself a bigger, stronger one than them.

Skill in metasystematicity involves accepting your own non-systematic nebulosity with good humor, and without trying to bully your self into a fixed, fully-structured form. You are an indefinite, constantly changing jumble of involvements with people, projects, ideologies, material objects, social and cultural institutions, a vulnerable human body, the cycle of the seasons, and the vicissitudes of history.

Understanding

understanding, and control are closely linked promises of eternalism If you are certain an explanation is correct, you have a stronger feeling of understanding. If you have an explanation for why something means something, it increases your certainty that it does mean that. If you understand something, you feel that you can control it. Psychology experiments show that people feel they can control events they definitely can’t, so long as they understand them.

Nevertheless, certainty, understanding, and control all seem to be separate innate psychological drives. We seek certainty, even when understanding is entirely unavailable. We seek understanding, even when control is obviously impossible. Personally, I love understanding things like supernovas and Precambrian evolution, even though there’s nothing I can do with them.

Exits & Breakdowns

Use moments of breakdowns to move on deliberately—ideally, to the complete stance. Troubles with meaning are valuable if you are prepared to transition and know where best to head. That requires understanding how all the stances work: what makes the confused ones attractive, how they inevitably fail, and why the complete stance is better. This takes intellectual understanding, thorough emotional familiarity, and then skill developed through repetitive practice.

Overall, the method could be described as destabilizingconfused stances and stabilizing the complete stance

• Eternalism consists of denying nebulosity, so learning to recognize nebulosity is the general method for destabilizing the stances that lead to breakdowns.
• Since eternalism’s appeal is the promise of certainty, understanding, and control, realizing that it cannot deliver those destabilizes it.

Fixation

The “abominations” of the Old Testament are examples. “Stereotypes” are one contemporary secular manifestation.

Often these categories don’t fit, and the imposed meanings are wrong. When you act on them, reality eventually slaps you upside the head. You get unpleasant outcomes you didn’t expect—based on your wrong categorization. Then you are shocked and confused; the conceptual system breaks down and you have no idea what to do.

The antidote is curiosity. Wonder what things mean; investigate without presuppositions. Allow things to mean whatever they do, or to remain mysterious or meaningless if that’s what they want. Avoid premature judgements of meaning.

Ultimately, the antidote to all eternalism is to understand, recognize, accept, and stabilize the complete stance: that meanings are always fluid, partial, changing, and vague.

Hope

Hope shifts imagined meaning to the future, when the present is obviously meaningless.

Hope is harmful in devaluing the present and shifting attention to imaginary futures that may never exist. Hope causes emotional stunting and childishness. It is inimical to emotional growth.

This page will discuss the putative value of hopeful illusions as defenses against anxiety, depression, and despair. (The logic of that is really that hope is an antidote to nihilism, which is seen as the only alternative. That’s a different ploy.) It may function as a useful defense in emergencies, but illusion is counter-productive as a long-term or general strategy.

Even in crises, hope can be harmful. Since eternalism consists of blindness to nebulosity, it is destabilized by anything that brings nebulosity to our attention. Fortunately, nebulosity is indirectly visible in everyday life: as uncertainty, surprise, endings, confusion, breakdowns, and disagreement.

Unfortunately, when in the eternalist stance, it is usually only negative manifestations of nebulosity that can shock us out of blindness. Generally that leads to nihilism rather than the complete stance. This happens for all of us, frequently. “Damn, I seem to have inadvertently offended that person I met recently who I hoped might be a friend. Oh, well, I guess it was pointless to try anyway.” More dramatically, personal crises (such as the death of a family member) are probably the most common triggers for crises of religious faith.

Crisis, by destabilizing eternalism, can be an opening into either nihilism or the complete stance. We should prepare for this. In a crisis, we generally get caught up in strategic suffering, i.e. frantically trying to get the world to go back to behaving the way we think it ought to. It is difficult then to think about what may seem like abstract philosophical concerns. Knowing that unwanted events are likely to tip us into nihilism, knowing how to recognize nihilism as we shift into it, and knowing the antidotes to nihilism, is a first step.

The antidote to hope is active acceptance of the present as it is, and prospective acceptance of the future, however it will be.

Pretending, like hope, is harmfully anti-growth. It causes emotional and intellectual stunting; childishness.

The antidote, as for kitsch, is realism. Just stop pretending.

Kitsch

Kitsch is one of the main ploys of eternalism. In Milan Kundera’s memorable phrase, “kitsch is the denial of shit”. For “shit” we can substitute nebulosity, which eternalism finds unacceptable. Kitschy eternalism simply refuses to see meaninglessness, even where it is obvious.

This leads to a willfully idiotic sentimentality. We try to live in a pastel-colored Disneyfied world in which everything works out for the best in the end, everyone is well-intentioned (although sometimes confused), there is a silver lining in every cloud, everyone is beautiful inside, when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, and all the world needs is love.  1

Kitsch is a refusal to seriously engage with spiritual problems. Any anomalies are dismissed as being due to finite human understanding of God’s benevolent intent. Reasonable faith is replaced with credulousness.

False and exaggerated emotion is characteristic of eternalist kitsch.

The antidote to kitsch

The antidote to kitsch is realism: the acknowledgement of shit. Realism requires no particular method or insight; merely willingness. Kitsch is idiotic because we always know better; we just don’t want to admit it.

The danger in applying this antidote—and a reason we fear to do so—is that we may conclude that everything is shit. That, however, is nihilism. We must acknowledge both nebulosity and pattern. The term “kitsch” comes from art criticism; it describes “art” that is self-consciously “beautiful” or sweet. Art that is self-consciously ugly and repellent is equally false, and in recent decades has become equally trite. Authentic art acknowledges the inseparability of light and darkness, and can be a path to non-duality.

Armoring

Arming and armoring oneself is a ploy for maintaining eternalism When nebulosityis obvious, eternalism fails to fit reality. The response is to armor oneself against evidence, and to arm oneself to destroy it.

Humour

Humor is the best method for demonstrating nebulosity and meaninglessness. Not “jokes” as such, but pointing out how cute it is when meaning and meaninglessness, pattern  and nebulosity, play together like puppies, nipping and tickling each other, tumbling over and over.

Armoring

The cost of armoring is blindness to opportunity. Much good is left undone because an eternalist code did not recommend it, and much harm is done because the code required it. Less obviously, but perhaps even more importantly, we lose the freedom of courage: the freedom to risk, to take actions whose results we cannot predict. Armored eternalism condemns such creativity.

When sentimentality feels threatened, it turns ugly—because the function of sentimentality is self-protection. Confronted with evidence that our code is imperfect, we retreat to a harsher, more restrictive code, and seek to impose it on the uncooperative world as well as ourselves. We become censorious and self-righteous.

When the armor wears thin, we crank it up into melodrama. We make ourselves up as heroes in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Alas: those who are too sure they are on the side of God are capable of the greatest evil. Armed eternalism results in hostility, punishment of self and others, narrowness, bitterness, and brittleness.

When the supposed Cosmic Plan collides with what is decent and sensible, one either does the apparently right thing, which erodes one’s commitment to eternalism, or one follows the prescription. If that has a bad outcome, one must blind oneself to the failure. We do that by hardening ourselves, and often also by hardening our interpretation of the code—against the temptation to weaken it to fit reality.

Eternalism makes you think “nice” people will behave the way you want them to. When they don’t, you demonize them, and try to control or punish them. In fact, Kundera’s theory of kitsch was motivated by his analysis of totalitarian communism in his native Czechoslovakia; totalitarianism, he concluded, is kitsch in government.

Arguments against Visualisation: Visualizing meaningness

Research like Lawson’s bicycle experiment shows that genuine understanding usually depends on perceptual support. It comes from exploring concrete examples by looking and poking. To some extent we can transfer that understanding by mental visualization; but as Rozenblit found, this is sketchy.

Direct perceptual support is generally impossible for meaningness (ethics, purpose, and so on). However, we do use mental images to help understand these issues too. Thinking about the Heinz story, I generated an image of his children watching their mother dying, for example. Likewise, when thinking about life purpose, we fantasize scenes of accomplishment, or imagine dying without having gotten anything much done.

These images are emotive, but probably mostly unrealistic and unhelpful. (The Heinz story didn’t even mentionchildren, for example; maybe he didn’t have any!) I suspect eternalism leads us to take these mental movies much more seriously than they deserve. (How? I’m not sure.)

Arguments for realistic scenarios

unrealistic scenarios—the famous “trolley problems” are another example—give misleading results. In fact, I suspect artificial “thought experiments,” even if they weren’t obviously silly, may be worse than useless for understanding ethics. I’ll suggest later that observation of real-life ethical deliberation and action in “ecologically valid conditions” is needed instead

Non-ordinary experiences and transformation

“Enlightenment experiences” are supposed to produce profound personal transformation (as well as insights). They can permanently alter the way you experience the world, and the way you act in the world.

Again, I have had meditation experiences that I think permanently altered my perception and way of being. (I am not claiming these were “enlightenment” experiences, of course!) Despite my self-perception of transformation, I am skeptical of it.

I’ve seen many a friend go to a weekend workshop on biodynamic crystal dowsing, or holistic orgone chakra balancing, and come back totally transformed. Or so they said. Now they saw the world completely differently, and they were at peace with everyone and everything. They had finally got it, and everything was going to be different forever.

Usually that high lasts about three days; sometimes a month. Then, somehow, life is about as usual. Evidently, it is possible to be entirely wrong about personal transformation.

So, I don’t take my own seriously. I hope I deal with life better than I did twenty years ago, and I believethat’s partly due to transformative non-ordinary experiences, but I don’t put much stock in it.

I’d consider it much more likely if there were good empirical data. Science, in other words. Anecdotes—even my own experience of myself—aren’t reliable. It’s too easy to fool yourself.

Suppose we drop the idea that there is a single thing called enlightenment; and suppose we drop the idea that it is the solution to all problems. To avoid confusion, let’s drop the word, too. Instead, let’s take more seriously the diversity of descriptions of Buddhist goals. Let’s try to clarify the vague explanations given for them. Let’s sort the ones that seem plausible from the obviously impossible. Let’s try to better understand their value, and how practice methods might develop toward that good. Let’s try to find reasonably reliable ways to evaluate progress and results.

ethics

Research by Jonathan Haidt and others shows that ethical explanations are mostly used to justify actions we have taken or want to take. This “social intuitionism” is a descriptive theory, about how ethics works in practice. It’s not a good account (even according to Haidt) of how ethics ought to work. In the ethics chapter, I’ll ask “what is ethics for?” if not social justification, and not rational individual decision-making

Control

If only you could get control over your life. If only things went according to plan. If only people did what they’re supposed to.

None of that is going to happen. Reality is often chaotic. Things fall apart, break down, slip away, blow up in your face—metaphorically, or for real.

The physical world, the social world, our selves, and meanings: all are nebulous—intangible, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous. This makes complete control impossible.

Most activities involve other people, who are notoriously difficult to control. Even the most powerful tyrant cannot entirely manage it. Worse, perhaps, you cannot always control even yourself. Sometimes you find yourself doing things you hadn’t intended, and will probably regret later, because it’s what you want at the time. And, even when events go according to plan, their meanings may squirm out from under you. The outcome you so desired may be, objectively, just as you wanted it—and yet it no longer seems significant, as it did when you began. (I’ll say more about each of these types of failure of control later on this page.) Overall, nebulosity often seems the main obstacle to control,1 and pattern the main resource. Nebulosity, therefore, often becomes the hated enemy. Eternalism promises to make nebulosity go away by fixating patterns, making complete control possible. Of course, it cannot. Fortunately, nebulosity is not actually a hostile force. It delivers unexpected opportunities, and surprising good outcomes as well as bad ones. Learning to appreciate nebulosity is an important way out of eternalism and into the complete stance.

Illusions of control

Overconfidence that you can eventually get control (through practice, or by applying bigger hammers) can make you waste time and resources trying to control the uncontrollable. Combined with the sunk cost fallacy, this can lead to applying ever increasing resources to an unworkable strategy. Believing that control must always be possible makes it difficult to learn from failure. Each disaster looks like a mere temporary setback, and you may take it as evidence that even more violent effort is called for.

One common response to nebulosity is excessive, obsessive planning: trying to figure out everything that could go wrong, and what you’d do if it did. Sometimes this is wise, but when you don’t fully understand the pattern, planning may be impossible. Over-control and planning also blind you to serendipity and unexpected opportunities.

Often it is better to observe the actual pattern, and to intervene minimally in its flow as events unfold. This skillful improvisation—often coupled with collaboration—can redirect existing forces in the direction you want.9Such interaction doesn’t provide complete control, but may give better results. It also allows you to change course when new positive possibilities open.

Out of control

How to sustain the illusion, when non-control becomes obvious? The first response is to invent an excuse. Eternalism explains away each failure as a one-off special situation that does not predict future lack of control ie. negative energy of people The room, bad karma, I was high… excuses

Such excuses explain that the failure occurred only because you didn’t have control at the time. Therefore past failure doesn’t predict future failure, because of course in the future you will have control. Having control is “normal,” and should always be expected.

At some point, excuses run out, and the illusion of control collapses. Fear is the natural reaction to being out of control; and it can help deal with some bad situations. However, an eternalistic need to always maintain control can cause constant anxiety or even paranoia.

The eternalistic all-or-nothing tendency makes the sense of control brittle. Any temporary setback may flip you from an illusion of control into the illusion of no-control.

No-control (only ever partial control)

Anxiety and depression are strongly associated with nihilism. Feeling of loss of control in a specific situation is frightening; feeling that you may lose all control produces pervasive anxiety. Concluding that you have lost all possibility of control—that you are entirely helpless—causes depression: the sense that all action is pointless.

Psychological research has demonstrated that depression collapses the illusion of control.10 Normally,11 people overestimate their control; when depressed, people may underestimate.12

Perceived lack of control results in learned helplessness—inhibition of practical action—which is believed to be closely related to depression.13 Similarly, people who experience an external locus of control have been shown to be prone to clinical depression.

Total responsibility is the confused stance, promoted by popular “spiritual” systems, that “you create your own reality.” Implicitly, it requires complete control of every aspect of the universe. The opposite stance, victim-think, promoted by popular “political,” “ethical,” and “psychological” systems, requires denying that you have any influence or power. Both stances try to save you from confronting the fearful question “how much control do I actually have?”. However, both absolutist answers lead to dysfunction and misery.

Research finds that people who perceive control as partly internal and partly external, and that it shifts back and forth, handle difficulties more effectively than those with either external or internal locus. This resonates with my claims for the psychological value of the complete stance. For this dimension of meaningness—capability—I call the complete stance light-heartedness. I’ve summarized itthus:

Playfully co-create reality in collaboration with each other and the world. No need for self-criticism or for anxiety. Effortless creativity. Obstacle: Hard to let go of need to be reassured about outcomes.

Self-Control is impossible

It is often more accurate to see one’s self as a community of divergent, competing desires, with constantly-shifting political coalitions among them. Depending on which have the upper hand at any moment, the actions one chooses change. This frequently undermines plans and intentions. When desire for romance gains power, it forms a firm intention to avoid ice cream to lose weight and become more attractive; but when dessert time comes, desire for noms foments rebellion.14

Many excuses—particularly the excuses you make to yourself—boil down to “it wasn’t really me who did that.” (“Everybody knows I’m not that kind of guy!”) At some level, this is outrageously hypocritical; but it is also honest and accurate. The political coalition of desires that drove drunk was not the same coalition that regrets it the next morning—and those coalitions are more-or-less what we call a “self.”15

Disgust with your own inconsistency motivates the stance of True Self. That would be “who I really am”16—a unitary, separate, durable, consistent, and well-defined ideal. The “false self” is the divided, easily-influenced, impetuous, devious, incoherent one. If only you could become your True Self, you would be perfectly virtuous and always in control.

The True Self stance motivates over-control of your desires, and totalitarianism in your internal politics. The supposed True Self—itself actually just a coalition of impulses, fantasies, and fears—becomes a tyrant. It enforces a rigid personal morality and exiles the rest of the self to a dank prison cell. Fearing internal anarchy, it suppresses most enjoyment, creativity, and spontaneity, lest they undermine its control. Festering in the dark, these suppressed self-fragments grow monstrous, twisted, powerful. When eventually they break out in revolt, the carnage can be gruesome.17

A healthy self is a series of negotiated compromises among hopes, fears, projects, desires, and relationships, based on recognition that complete control is impossible, so all aspects of the self get enough of what they need that conflict is minimized.

Controlling others is impossible

To gain complete control over your own life, you would need to control other people. Not only their actions, but also their thoughts and feelings—because those interact with your own. Complete control of people is even more impossible than complete control of the inanimate world. Partial control or influence, by various means, is possible, and may often be benign. Sanity requires accepting that everything you do is a collaboration. It also requires accepting partial control (or influence) of others over you.

Control by proxy

Identifying your self with a more powerful proxy can give a vicarious sense of control. This is a back-up strategy when personal control is too obviously impossible.

Proxies include individuals, such as political and religious leaders; social groups, such as tribes, nations, and sects; imaginary people, such as God, gods, or culture-heroes; and abstractions, such as political and religious ideologies.

This illusion of control depends on psychological identification, allegiance, and surrender. You have to give up your own control—in a particular area of life, at least—to transfer the locus to the proxy. Psychological surrender gives a feeling of connection or union with something much greater and more meaningful than your personal concerns.

Feeling that you are part of a group allows you to participate emotionally in its strength and success. This is true even when the tribe—or its leaders—do not provide you with any actual control over your life. Sports fandoms are a benign example. Oppressive political regimes that maintain popular support are perhaps the worst. Vicarious power through identification with the state seems an acceptable trade-off to many subjects.

Control by renouncing action

Popular “spiritual” books like The Secret recommend abandoning all attempts at control, or even action, in favor of spiritual virtue (“positive thinking”). This is an extreme version of control-by-proxy, in which the proxy is the Cosmic Plan, or The Entire Universe, and it does all the work.

This approach is typical in monist systems, which deny all boundaries. Since, monism says, you are The Entire Universe, its actions and yours are identical. Any attempt to act on your own simply limits you, by creating an artificial and illusory separation.

Renunciation often acts as a moralistic reward fantasy. For monism, control is not OK, because control depends on differences, which monism denies. Since everything is the same, everything is equal, and nothing can be allowed to control anything else. Giving up control is a supremely virtuous act, which The Entire Universe rewards by showering you with everything you could possibly want.

Obviously, adopting this strategy leads to severe emotional dysfunction, passive-aggressive relationships, and total inability or unwillingness to deal with everyday responsibilities.

Dullness of control

Total control (which requires total predictability) is totally boring. Life needs some challenges, surprises, setbacks, and serendipity to make it interesting. Enjoyment and personal growth come only with partial control.19

Highly-successful people, whose lives are too much under control, often semi-deliberately mess them up, for example with an extramarital affair whose revelation destroys their career as well as their marriage. The thrill of risk, and the difficulty of avoiding detection, breaks the monotony of excessive control. It is better, of course, to leave what is going well on autopilot, and to take on greater challenges in new domains.

control: interaction, improvisation, collaboration

In the ideal situation of perfect control, you could make anything you want happen simply by choosing it. You would be unconstrained—causally unaffected—by the outside world. Control would flow only outward from you toward the world. The locus of control would be purely internal to you.

In the opposite extreme, you would be entirely controlled by the world, and any choices you might make would be meaningless. The locus of control would be entirely external, and causality would flow only inward, from the world acting on you.

Neither of these extremes occurs in reality. Ultimately, this is a fact of physics; causality is always distributed, and one thing cannot affect another without also being affected by it to some extent.2 However, it’s also obvious in everyday life, so long as you look without forcing an extreme internalist or externalist view.

Because “control” is often understood as “complete control,” an alternate vocabulary may be useful. One might speak of “influence,” meaning partial control, for example. This is somewhat misleading, though, by suggesting that you are active and the world is passive (although passive-aggressive: it doesn’t always do what you tell it).

I prefer the word interaction: it suggests that both you and the world are actively participating in determining what happens.3 “Interaction” covers causality shared with both the non-human world and with other people.

Improvisation is characteristic of interaction. Because the world is nebulous, you can’t plan in advance everything you are going to do. You always have to figure some actions out as you go along. Usually, when the time comes, it’s obvious what you need to do, although you could not have foreseen it.

Collaboration is the most important form of interaction.4Most human activities involve other people. Human interactions may be hostile; not all are collaborations. But collaborations are the most valuable, and most interesting (to me at least).

Practical activity is a spontaneous partner dance. You are continually responsive to the details of your unfolding situation, as revealed by perception. It is futile to try to force interactions to conform to a preconceived idea of how things should go.

Control” sometimes has negative connotations, and “collaboration” positive ones. However, my point is not moral or political. The issue here is not that control is not nice, it’s that complete control is physically impossible.

So long as you recognize that nebulosity is inevitable, there is nothing necessarily wrong with seeking partial control. Sometimes it’s even ethically imperative to get as much control as possible; for example in designing and operating a nuclear power plant.5

Control: suffering

We use the mind to falsely pretend we are more in control than we are. This faculty of mind feels like one of those child’s car seats that has a fake steering wheel on it, made famous by The Simpsons opening credits. The mind either deludes itself by carefully moving the fake steering wheel in line with what it sees so that it can pretend it has control, or it strains itself throwing its weight ineffectually into cranking hard on the wheel when the car goes places it doesn’t like.

And this isn’t an argument that trying to gain a better understanding of causal relations so that we have real steering wheels instead of fake ones is bad. Again, the point is to spot the mental moment of playing with the fake steering wheel instead because it is easier.

Identification: suffering

Self-making, identification, separating self from world, and insight into such are very important for decreasing suffering. We believe that we ‘obviously’ have ownership over ourselves and that we ‘should’ be in control of ourselves. It’s just that this isn’t how things are in moment to moment experience, so it causes a lot of problems. People get really caught up in this set of insights, but at its core it really is just the specific moment of a mental act that we learn to identify (ha) and stop doing that act as we gain awareness that it isn’t actually helping in the way we thought.

Stories

The big message here is: drop the stories. Find a physical object like the breath, the body, pain, or pleasure, some feeling of resistance you may be experiencing, etc., and train yourself to perceive the three characteristics precisely and consistently. Drop to the level of bare sensations. The three characteristics of impermanence, dissatisfactoriness, and no-self are so central to the Buddha’s teachings that it is almost inconceivable how little attention the majority of “insight” meditators give them

Karma

The reason those on the spiritual path have a daily practice is just this: to ensure that karmic stagnation does not happen. You may already have noticed that if you have a daily practice and you stop it for six months, many recurrent issues—physical, psychological, and social—that have not bothered you for a while start returning. This is how the karmic cycle works. You may have believed you were transformed, but you will suddenly find all kinds of compulsive behaviors returning with a vengeance. Only practice, or sadhana, helps break the cyclical movement of life.

Meditation

Meditation is about training the mind to be able to notice these more subtle events and then instructions for noticing certain things about the causal relationship between these subtle events  and how good your moment to moment experience really is. The purpose of meditation is not to become a really good meditator, to experience certain cool temporary states (though some are helpful), etc. But direct insight into the basic building blocks of your experience.

Suffering

Dukkha is usually translated as suffering, which sort of works but misses important stuff. A more literal translation is 'a difficult emptiness.' Approaches, even quite effective ones, for dealing with the suffering of life were already in existence at the time of the Buddha. Both schools that preached constant absorption into pleasurable meditative states, and schools that preached a doctrine and practice of 'non-duality.' Both of these approaches survived, became mixed up with Buddhism, and today there are schools claiming to teach Buddhism which actually teach these methods. These methods do in fact decrease suffering, but they are only partial solutions. Both because they are reliant on maintenance of certain states and ways of being, and because while they deal with suffering caused by the immediate senses, you are still left with a more fundamental suffering related to feelings of emptiness or, Dukkha's other translation, 'worthlessness' and related feelings (nihilism etc. in the west). You've encountered this for yourself if you've experienced something cool during contemplative practice but then had a kind of 'so-what?' moment. The sense that this experience, while interesting and probably a temporary respite from your worries, hasn't actually addressed the core problem. People especially have this coming back from retreat. If this were just considered on its own, without the teaching of the antidote, this might be called worthlessness, that it seems like things are never satisfying and thus nothing has any value.

If suffering were truly just coming in from the outside in thousands of different forms (i.e. the way things seem on cursory inspection) then we wouldn't have much hope of a single intervention helping us. Nor would we be confident in any such intervention since some new form of suffering can always show up. But if suffering is a result of something we're doing, then if we can figure out how to stop doing that, the suffering stops. Which we can confirm for ourselves in moment to moment experience. Spotting it for yourself is very powerful. If this were just considered on its own without the teaching of the antidote it might be related to feelings of hopelessness. That there is no hope of maintaining the conditions that lead to things we like. Thus, the flow of positive and negative experiences are undependable, indefinite in duration, intensity, and frequency. That our hopes of forcing them to be stable with our mind will be in vain.

Time: past, present, future

Now, human beings, as we all know, experience time as three different dimensions: past, present, and future. Our lives and our languages are structured around this. But let us look at this afresh. In actual fact, all that you call your past exists only as memory. Do you see this? All the life events that have shaped you; all the work you have ever done; all the money in your bank balance; all the vacations you have been on; all the conversations and arguments you have had; all the relationships of love and hatred and indifference; all the friendships and enmities you have nurtured; all the books you have read and movies you have seen; all the scriptures you have read—all this exists only in your memory. Similarly, all that you call future exists only as imagination. All that you long for and dread—your dream house; your perfect mate; your baby; your promotion; your pay hike; your beach home; the accolades you believe you deserve; all the horrific illnesses you could contract; all the terrible accidents that could befall all those you love; all the gruesome ways in which you could lose your money, your property, your family, your life; all the apocalyptic ways in which this planet could meet its end—all this exists only in your imagination. And so these are the only two things that you are suffering right now: your memory and your imagination. Nothing more. Both memory and imagination exist only in your mind. They are aspects of your psychological reality; they have nothing to do with the existential reality. Stop for a moment and ask yourself, When I am not lost in these mental constructs of memory or imagination, where am I? There can be only one answer to that: the present. The present is not a creed, a matter of faith. It is a reality. You don’t have to try to be in the moment. The present isn’t an idea. And the fact is, you don’t have to try to be in it. You are in the moment. There is nowhere else to be. Existentially, this is the only truth. It is just that you are not available to it. Does this mean that you should abandon your memory and imagination? Certainly not. In any case, we do not wish to destroy karma, because it is the glue that makes our physical and psychological reality possible. However, we do wish to transcend it when we choose. This means seeing one simple fact: your individuality is entirely made up. It is your creation.

Context + Variety

Eternalism is the stance that everything has a fixed, clear-cut meaning. That’s an attractive fantasy, but it inevitably runs into the reality that meaningness is nebulous: variable, vague, and context-dependent. That collision can cause serious trouble.

Urgency

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, ‘here and now,’ without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset

Phenomena

A rainbow is a physical phenomenon, but not a physical object. It has no specific location. Two observers standing a hundred feet apart will see “the rainbow” in different places. If you drive toward a rainbow, it appears to recede just as fast, so you can never get to it. Rainbows are pretty fully understood, and guaranteed 100% metaphysics-free.

To make the analogy explicit, meanings:

• are interactions among people and circumstances
• are physical phenomena, but not physical objects
• have no definite locations (whether inside or outside heads)
• are observer-relative, to varying extents
• are usually well-understood, and 100% metaphysics-free
• are mostly not subjective, mental, illusory, or dependent on magical properties of brains
• are not inherent in objects
• mostly are publicly verifiable, so reasonable observers mostly agree about them.

This analogy makes plausible the claim that meanings can be non-objective, non-subjective, and existent. That makes it plausible that eternalism, existentialism, and nihilism could all three be wrong.

Identity: Obliteration

Your karma enables you to gather a certain amount of life. What you call “myself” is simply the name you give to the volume of life that you have captured. But if we wipe out all psychological imprints, you as a person will not exist. You will exist as pure life. Existentially, you are life in its essence. In that essential, unmanifest state, you are completely devoid of time and you are completely devoid of karma. You are deathless, indestructible, eternal. So what is left when the myth of individuality is shattered? You simply reach the end of cyclical time. This moment contains an infinite number of possibilities. You can destroy your entire psychological structure and create a new one at this very moment. Or you can stop creating entirely and exist as pure, formless life. This means you have chosen freedom over form, timelessness over temporality, the present moment over cyclical time. Once you break the cycle, there is no “you” and “me” anymore. For individuality exists only in time and space. Once we cross the boundaries of time and space, of memory and imagination, there is no “us” and “them.” There is no “here” and “there.” There is no “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” There is only this moment, and this moment is eternity.

Identity: Oppositionality

You then see yourself as an individual in opposition to the world. You see the larger universe as trying to crush your world. But it is only trying to crush something that doesn’t exist! Creation is simply reminding you that you are taking the virtual to be real. It is the magnanimity of creation that allows you an experience of individuality, even though you actually have nothing that you can call your own. Of course, you can have fun with the game of individuality and the dance of duality. I do not want to discredit your lived experience in any way. But I do want to remind you that it is a game—and one created by you. Go ahead and enjoy the ride, if it appeals to you. Just don’t take it too seriously, that’s all!

Transformation

Psychotherapy

Therapeutic psychology began as an attempt to cure “nervous illness,” but almost immediately developed into methods of inquiry into meaningness. In fact, many mental illnesses resemble everyday confused stances, taken to extremes:

• Manic psychosis “reveals” hidden meaningfulness in everything, accompanied by powerful feelings of certainty, understanding, and control. This also constitutes, by definition, eternalism.
• Feelings of meaninglessness are a typical symptom of clinical depression, and by definition of nihilism.
• Narcissism is an exaggeration of the stance of specialness.
• Borderline personality is a disorder of selfness.

Most problems for which patients seek psychotherapy have no known biological cause, and pharmaceutical treatments may work scarcely better than placebos. Talk therapy addresses questions of meaning for which earlier generations would have sought the advice of a rabbi, priest, or pastor. Some therapists obligingly provide answers that have no basis in empirical psychology. Some have developed those into theoretical frameworks for understanding meaningness.

Because meaning is inherently interactive, answers to problems of meaning cannot be found through psychological exploration. Attempting that leads to self-involved paralysis. Psychotherapy-ism obsesses with the self: self-esteem, self-loathing, self-image, self-fulfillment, self-actualization, self-worth, true and false selves, et cetera ad nauseam. The complete stance cuts through this by pointing out the nebulosity of selfness and of the distinction between self and other.

Meaning, as interaction, requires action. Decades ago, there was a beach resort ad whose tag line was:

HAVING YOUR DREAMS FULFILLED CAN BE MORE THERAPEUTIC THAN HAVING THEM ANALYZED.

It stuck with me. Fixing circumstances often beats grubbing about in your unconscious.

Prayer

Most prayer is about telling God what to do. Save me, fix me, help me. It’s normally the outsourcing of one’s own survival to another power. Prayer is largely about requesting help for limitations. Meditation is about understanding limitations. Simulations is about breaking your limitations.

Joy

There are joyful people and miserable people. But they’re are not any good people or and people.

Creativity & Genius (Companies)

It is my belief that strokes of genius and creativity emerge from higher levels of consciousness. One day many companies will understand this and take a more active role in developing the consciousness and working environments of their employees so great ideas and innovations can emerge more effortlessly. I don’t expect this to happen overnight, but it is where the world is going.

Domination: Resistance

"Resistance and the need to be right dominate and be destroy your ability to allow things to be. When you have no ability to allow things to be, you have no ability to be responsible for them as they are. When you cannot be responsible for the way things are, you have no space. When you have no space, you have no ability to create. It is in creating that you establish true independence. - Werner Erhard

Identity: Leadership

The religious leader . . . extends the problem of his identity to the borders of existence in the known universe; other human beings bend all their efforts to adopt and fulfill the departmentalized identities which they find prepared in their communities. No wonder that he is something of an old man (a philosophus, and a sad one) when his age-mates are young, or that he remains something of a child when they age with finality. -Erik H. Erikson

Responsibility: Survival

Stepping up to being responsible for who we really are, isn't required in order to survive. Really. You and I will survive for as long as we do, whether or not we step up to being responsible for being who we really are. Omitting being responsible for who we really are, is convenient inasmuch as it lets us off to commit to nothing, yet surviving and allowing the status quo to persist (the "status quo" is living our lives without being responsible for who we really are).

This convenience allows us to live in a strange kind of socially accepted daze in which we're alive yet incognizant of who we really are. I'm

sorry but I assert that is strange. It's strange that we can be alive, live our lives, and yet not know who it is that's alive and / or not know what it is that's doing the living of our lives. It's a conundrum, a paradox. The truth is it's easier living the paradox of omitting who we really are, than stepping up to being in the inquiry into it. Ease ranks higher on our life-preferences' scale than profundity. So we omit it out of hand, mostly with nary a second thought. It's a convenient omission.

Identity: Adulthood + Money

At some level, I knew my masquerade of the self-reliant farmer was a farce. For one, I was a shitty farmer. But more importantly, I was facing that first hard lesson of adulthood: that our identities are being continually shaped by exogenous economic factors so boring, so banal, that we dare not even consider them as our lifeblood. And yet they are.

Financial crises serve as nice reminders that money is an imaginary garden in which we lead our all-too-real lives. In bull markets, we might be tempted to validate money in order to validate ourselves—to tell ourselves it’s deserved, a product of our hard work, a testament to our taste as upstanding citizens of the world. It is not just financial wealth that lets us forge our identities, but financial stability. It’s the fineries and fripperies of stable finance—the donation we make to our local PTO, the cutlery we set for neighbors when we invite them to say grace, the trip we book to Baja to showcase our new bikini—that shield our family and our god from the decennial death-rattle of a bank run.

Love + Truth

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.

Love + Service

The mark of Spirit fullness: a loss of pride and self-will that leads a person to humbly serve others.

Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage.

Simulation Theory

Promises + Identity (commitments vs. changes)

Why is a binding promise of future love so crucial for creating deep, lasting passion? Christian ethicist Lewis Smedes wrote an article that I read as a young pastor and a still new husband. It helped me enormously as both a counselor and spouse. It is called “Controlling the Unpredictable—The Power of Promising.”8 First, he locates the very basis of our identity in the power of promising: Some people ask who they are and expect their feelings to tell them. But feelings are flickering flames that fade after every fitful stimulus. Some people ask who they are and expect their achievements to tell them. But the things we accomplish always leave a core of character unrevealed. Some people ask who they are and expect visions of their ideal self to tell them. But our visions can only tell us what we want to be, not what we are. Who are we? Smedes answers that we are largely who we become through making wise promises and keeping them.

Since promising is the key to identity, it is the very essence of marital love. Why? Because it is our promises that give us a stable identity, and without a stable identity, it is impossible to have stable relationships. Hannah Arendt wrote, “Without being bound to the fulfillment of our promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each person’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities.”7 Smedes uses himself as a case study: When I married my wife, I had hardly a smidgen of sense for what I was getting into with her. How could I know how much she would change over 25 years? How could I know how much I would change? My wife has lived with at least five different men since we were wed—and each of the five has been me. The connecting link with my old self has always been the memory of the name I took on back there: “I am he who will be there with you.” When we slough off that name, lose that identity, we can hardly find ourselves again.

Decision and identity

you wiggled your finger, you chose to do so; I couldn’t force you to do it. At the same time, you almost certainly wouldn’t have done so if I didn’t suggest it. And even if you didn’t wiggle your finger, you thought about it. You really couldn’t have read the sentence and not considered it. If you didn’t do it, you chose not to. So even though I didn’t compel your action, I did compel a decision. What does that say about my relationship to your self? If you think of your self as, in part, the decisions you make, I just shaped your self. If you think of freedom as freedom from others’ influence, I just hampered your freedom. This tiny little interaction between us is a microcosm of your day-to-day life.

Now consider the countless encounters, both planned and completely incidental, that occur throughout your day. All these interactions demand something of you; more importantly, they affect you. Of course, most of the people you walk past barely register, but that doesn’t mean these fleeting interactions have no consequence: even one person seeing you as attractive or unkempt, a threat or a friend, can transform everything you think and do that day. Imagine that your partner or roommate questions the way you’re dressed just before you leave the house. Maybe their comment undermines your confidence. You start to worry about the way others will see you. At work you feel less confident giving that big presentation, and it doesn’t go as well as it could have. You feel a little less extroverted than normal after work. Maybe you’re not as talkative around strangers you bump into. You come home and you’re in a bad mood and maybe have a fight with your roommate or partner. This can sound like just a bad day, but these effects reverberate. Maybe you like your job a little less after that lackluster presentation and feel less tied to your professional identity. Or maybe your bad day intersects with your partner’s insecurity and a resulting fight forever changes the way you see and interact with each other. Small causes can create big effects.

The behaviors of others affect the way you, in turn, behave in the world. Even when you were reading a book “all by yourself,” suddenly a choice was forced upon you by someone you couldn’t even see. What other choices are you being forced to make, and by whom?

With a better understanding of self and freedom in hand, we can turn to a different question. What function does self serve? Why do we even need self? Today we just assume the existence of an individual, self-contained, autonomous self, but why? Do we need this idea to function as a community? We need self, at least in part, because unfiltered reality overwhelms us. Self provides order that helps us function. Self is a point of view. Self helps us manage a world that exceeds what we can imagine. Self is a social structure that allows you access to the ultimately unfathomable, blooming, buzzing chaos of reality. A well-functioning self provides a sense of predictability, stability, and certainty.

This is all to say that your self is constructed and reconstructed in a swirl of ever-evolving relationships. The ideas that live in these relationships and interactions provide the social identities—for example, gender, ethnicity, professional identity—that we use to make sense of ourselves and others. This self situates you in the world, it provides a perspective, a vantage point, from which you experience the world. The construction of self might be complex, but the experience is pretty straightforward. But there are no free lunches. The simplification that a self provides comes at a cost.

Victimhood / Injury

Marcus Aurelius

Death / ego death

New start ever day, daily death

A SPIRAL WAY OF KNOWING

The Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades chapters follow a spiral form: the first time around, we hear about the god and his mythology; the archetypal pattern is the next turn around the spiral; how the god or archetype shapes a man’s life is the third time around; the psychological difficulties that are characteristic comes next; and the last time around tells how the man who lives out that particular god pattern might grow. Like a musical composition or a poem, the spiral form means that a thematic chord or theme runs through each different movement, each turn expands and simultaneously deepens the meaning of the god-archetype for the reader. Each time around, the same god is reintroduced, and with each repetition, the image of the god becomes more fleshed out, seen in more dimensions. The spiral form invites both halves of our brains to be involved: the understanding that comes through the left half of the brain comes through our linear mind, which absorbs information through words and logic; the right brain is in touch with images, sensations, memories, and feelings that are personal and collective, in time and timeless, and it imposes no order or logic on them. An “Aha!” recognition comes when there is a crossover from right to left or left to right, and suddenly a whole piece of knowledge falls into place—we then know something on multiple levels and are affected or moved by what we now know.

RE-MEMBERING

When we learn the names for these patterns, and they come alive in the chapters that follow, we’re able to recognize the presence or absence of each particular god in our psyches, as I imagine has already happened with the three preceding father gods. Like the “Aha!” culmination of the detective story, which hinges on the discovery of the real identity of a significant person in the story, the most important “Aha!” in this book may come when you discover something about your true identity or an important piece of yourself that now can be “re-membered.” — Gods within Everyman

Invocation

Many of the Homeric hymns are invocations to the Greek deities. For example, a Homeric hymn may create an image of a goddess in the mind of the listener by describing her appearance, attributes, and feats. Then she is invited to be present, to enter a home, or provide a blessing. The ancient Greeks knew something we can learn: goddesses can be imagined and then invoked.

In the individual goddess chapters, readers may discover that they are not well acquainted with a particular goddess. They may find that an archetype that they would find extremely helpful is undeveloped or apparently “missing” in themselves. It is possible to “invoke” that goddess, by consciously making an effort to see, feel, or sense her presence—to bring her into focus through the imagination—and then ask for her particular strength. The following invocations are examples. Athena, help me to think clearly in this situation. Persephone, help me to stay open and receptive. Hera, help me to make a commitment and be faithful. Demeter, teach me to be patient and generous, help me to be a good mother. Artemis, keep me focused on that goal in the distance. Aphrodite, help me to love and enjoy my body. Hestia, honor me with your presence, bring me peace and serenity.

Toxic Shame - Less Than / More Than

Adam went into hiding after the fall. By trying to be more than human, Adam felt less than human. Before the fall, Adam was not ashamed; after the fall he was. Toxic shame is true agony. It is a pain felt from the inside, in the core of our being. It is excruciatingly painful.

False Self

SHAME AS FALSE SELF Because the exposure of self to self lies at the heart of neurotic shame, escape from the self is necessary. The escape from self is accomplished by creating a false self. The false self is always more or less than human. The false self may be a perfectionist or a slob, a family Hero or a family Scapegoat. As the false self is formed, the authentic self goes into hiding. Years later the layers of defense and pretense are so intense that one loses all conscious awareness of who one really is. However, as we’ll discuss in Chapter Twelve, the true self never gets away. It is crucial to see that the false self may be as polar opposite as a superachieving perfectionist or an addict in an alley. Both are driven to cover up their deep sense of self-rupture, the hole in their soul. They may cover up in ways that look polar opposite, but each is still driven by neurotic shame. In fact, the most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

SHAME AS THE CORE AND FUEL OF ALL ADDICTION

Neurotic shame is the root and fuel of all compulsive/addictive behaviors. My general working definition of compulsive/addictive behavior is “a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences.” The drivenness in any addiction is about the ruptured self, the belief that one is flawed as a person. The content of the addiction, whether it be an ingestive addiction or an activity addiction (such as work, shopping or gambling), is an attempt at an intimate relationship. The workaholic with his work and the alcoholic with his booze are having a love affair. Each one alters the mood to avoid the feeling of loneliness and hurt in the underbelly of shame. Each addictive acting out creates life-damaging consequences that create more shame. The new shame fuels the cycle of addiction. Figure 2.3, which I have adapted from Dr. Pat Carnes’s work, gives you a visual picture of how internalized shame fuels the addictive process and how addictions create more shame, which sets one up to be more shame-based. Addicts call this cycle the squirrel cage. I used to drink to solve the problems caused by drinking. The more I drank to relieve my shame-based loneliness and hurt, the more I felt ashamed. Shame begets shame. The cycle begins with the false belief system shared by all addicts: that no one could want them or love them as they are. In fact, addicts can’t love themselves. They are an object of scorn to themselves. This deep internalized shame gives rise to distorted thinking. The distorted thinking can be reduced to the belief, “I’ll be okay if I drink, eat, have sex, get more money, work harder, etc.” The shame turns one into what Kellogg has termed a “human doing,” rather than a human being.

PERFECTIONISM : Shadow Archtype

Perfectionism flows from the core of toxic shame. A perfectionist has no sense of healthy shame; he has no internal sense of limits. Perfectionists never know how much is good enough. Perfectionism is learned when one is valued only for doing. When parental acceptance and love are dependent upon performance, perfectionism is created. The performance is always related to what is outside the self. The child is taught to strive onward. There is never a place to rest and have inner joy and satisfaction. Perfectionism always creates a superhuman measure by which one is compared. And no matter how hard one tries, or how well one does, one never measures up. Not measuring up is translated into a comparison of good versus bad, better versus worse. Good and bad lead to moralizing and judgmentalism. Perfectionism leads to comparison making. Kaufman writes: “When perfectionism is paramount, the comparison of self with others inevitably ends in the self feeling the lesser for the comparison.” Comparison making is one of the major ways that one continues to shame oneself internally. One continues to do to oneself on the inside what was done on the outside. Judgment and comparison making lead to a destructive kind of competitiveness. Competition aims at outdoing others, rather than simply being the best one can be. Competing to be better than others is mood altering and becomes addictive.

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OTHERATION AND DEHUMANIZATION Toxic shame, which is an alienation of the self from the self, causes one to become “other-ated.” “Otheration” is the term used by the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y. Gasset to describe dehumanization. He says that man is the only being who lives from within. To be truly human is to have an inner self and a life from within. Animals live in constant hypervigilance, always on guard, looking outside themselves for sustenance and guarding against danger. When humans no longer have an inner life, they become otherated and dehumanized. Toxic shame, with its more-than-human, less-than-human polarization, is either inhuman or dehumanizing. The demand for a false self to cover and hide the authentic self necessitates a life dominated by doing and achievement. Everything depends on performance and achievement rather than on being. Being requires no measurement; it is its own justification. Being is grounded in an inner life that grows in richness. “The kingdom of heaven is within,” says the Scripture. Toxic shame looks to the outside for happiness and validation, since the inside is flawed and defective. Toxic shame is spiritual bankruptcy.

Emotional Binds & Basic Needs

Our emotions are the core of our basic power. Two of the major functions they serve in our psychic life are: 1. They monitor our basic needs, telling us of a need, loss or satiation. Without our emotional energy, we would not be aware of our most fundamental needs. 2. They give us the fuel or energy to act. I like to hyphenate the word “e-motion.” An e-motion is energy in motion. This energy moves us to get what we need. When our basic needs are being violated, our anger moves us to fight or run. Our e-motions are the scenes that involve our affect system. All human development, according to Silvan Tompkins, is rooted in affect (feeling) dynamics because affects (feelings) are the primary innate biological motivator of human life. Our anger is the energy that gives us strength. The Incredible Hulk becomes the huge, powerful hulk when he needs the energy and power to take care of others. Our sadness is an energy we discharge in order to heal. As we discharge the energy over the losses relating to our basic needs, we can integrate the shock of those losses and adapt to reality. Sadness is painful. We try to avoid it. Discharging sadness releases the energy involved in our emotional pain. To hold it in is to freeze the pain within us. The therapeutic slogan is that grieving is the “healing feeling.” Fear releases an energy that warns us of danger to our basic needs. Fear is an energy leading to our discernment and wisdom. Guilt is our morality shame and guards our conscience. It tells us we have transgressed our values. It moves us to take action and change. Shame warns us not to try to be more or less than human. Shame signals our essential limitations. Shame limits our desire for pleasure and our interest and curiosity. We could not really be free without our shame. There is an anonymous saying, “Of all the masks of freedom, discipline (limits) is the hardest to understand.” We cannot be truly free without having limits. Joy is the exhilarating energy that emerges when all our needs are being met. We want to sing, run and jump with joy. The energy of joy signals that all is well. Dissmell is the affect that monitors our drive for hunger. It was primarily developed as a survival mechanism. As we’ve become more complex, its use has extended interpersonally. Prejudice and rage against strangers (the ones who are not like us) have terrible consequences. Dissmell is a major sexuality factor. Disgust follows the same pattern as dissmell. Originally a hunger drive auxiliary, it has been extended to interpersonal relations. Divorces are often dominated by disgust. Victims of abuse carry various degrees of anger and disgust. Rapists who kill operate on disgust, anger and sex fused together. When our e-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers. Parents who are out of touch with their own emotions cannot model those emotions for their children. They are out of touch and shut down. They are psychically numb. They are not even aware of what they are feeling. Their children have to unconsciously carry their feelings for them.

Role Addiction / Role Attaxhment

In our Center for Recovering Families in Houston we have discovered a large number of family system roles in addition to the roles I’ve discussed. Some other roles are Parent’s Parent, Dad or Mom’s Buddy, Family Counselor, Dad’s Star, Mom’s Star, Perfect One, Saint, Mom or Dad’s Enabler, Rascal, Cute One, Athlete, Family Peacemaker, Family Referee, Family Sacrifice, Religious One, Winner, Loser, Martyr, Super Mom, Super Spouse, Clown, Super Dad, Chief Enabler, Genius, Mom or Dad’s Scapegoat. We suggest that people really work at getting a feeling for the role(s) they played by putting a name on it. You may find that you played several roles. Each role has a felt sense, and the felt sense of the role will stay with you even if you give it up. You may have been the baby. You were cute and quickly became the family Mascot. Two years later your little brother came along and knocked you out of a job. You will retain the felt sense of being a Mascot. What is important to underscore is that when we play roles, we put aside our true and authentic selves. The role is a false self. In dysfunctional family systems the roles are necessitated by the needs of the family system in its attempt to balance itself in the wake of the primary stressor. The primary distress may be Dad’s alcoholism, Mom’s pill addiction or eating disorder, Dad’s violence, incest, Mom’s religious addiction, etc. Each role is a way to handle the family distress and shame. Each role is a way for each member to feel like he has some control. As one plays the role more and more rigidity sets in. As one becomes more and more unconscious of one’s true self, one’s self-rupture increases. The shame that promotes the role is intensified by the role. What a paradox! The roles are necessitated by the family system’s shame as ways to overcome the shame, and they in fact freeze and enhance the shame. The old French proverb applies here: The more you try to change, the more it stays the same. The most important thing to say about the roles is that they don’t work. My being a Hero has done absolutely nothing to change my shame-based family system. Max’s playing his Scapegoat and Lost Child role did nothing to change his family system’s dysfunction. The power of these roles for a shame-based person is their rigidity and predictability. Staying in the role gives one a sense of identity and control. Even the Scapegoat can be somebody. This is why roles are so hard to give up, especially the Hero, Caregiver, Superachiever or Star type of roles. They are mood altering. One feels good being a caregiver. How could I be flawed and defective when I’m taking care of all these people? I can remember saying this to myself when I had a counseling load of fifty people a week. What I couldn’t grasp is that there is no way to change your being by your doing. The shame-based core cries out, “You’re flawed and defective! There’s something wrong with you!” All the doing in the world won’t change that. The dysfunctional family system roles are ways we lose our reality. Over a period of time the fact that we are playing a role becomes unconscious. We believe we are the persona that the role calls for. We believe the role-designated feelings are our feelings. The role literally becomes addictive.

Leverage / Action / Goals