Learning from the ancients

The risk and opportunity of being alive: relationship with pain, part 5

The word Odysseus has been translated to mean son of pain. Pain given and pain received. Odysseus seems to have become himself through the rigors of life.

Rigors he endured, and rigors he inflicted on others.

It’s a mixed process and we’re all in it. It is impossible to get through life without experiencing both sides of this coin.

And trying to is a colossal waste of time.

So self actualization is not easy. Whether it’s meant to be or not is difficult to say. At this stage in human evolution, it isn’t.

It’s hard.

And this is especially true when you are trying to be yourself and live a life of your own making.

Being yourself will stir up the people around you: relationship with pain part 4

By Peter Crowell 8 Comments

As you do the work of becoming yourself you will start to glow. Your presence will change the chemistry of a room.

You won’t need to be loud or flashy. You won’t need to try to be noticeable. You won’t need to do anything to stand out.

You simply will.

Because when you’re you, you don’t resemble anyone else. You stand in contrast to everyone around you.

Especially among people who are not being themselves.

The ancient drive to be you: relationship with pain part 3

By Peter Crowell 2 Comments

When you are fully yourself you tend to treat people with the kindness and respect. Courteous behavior goes hand in hand with true individuation.

It comes from having a strong sense of self.

But that strength only happens when you undertake the inner journey of discovering what is true about yourself, good or bad.

And the risk of allowing the world to see it.

Not on purpose, necessarily. What I mean is, you own it when it pops out.

The inevitable mistakes.

In how you treat others.

In how you treat yourself.

In how you let others treat you.

Become your own frame of reference: relationship with pain part 2

By Peter Crowell 12 Comments

Turns out pain is a necessary aspect of life.

Who knew?

At least, we can’t escape it. And trying to usually leads to more pain, or an extension of the pain we’re trying to avoid.

Trying to live without pain ends up being a huge waste of time.

In a world full of people doing the work of self actualization, I assume there would be a lot less pain. But the road to that world seems to be paved with it.

Some pain has no explanation. And for some pain there is no response except to manage it the best you can.

But most pain indicates a problem to be solved. And in solving those problems we advance.

Pain is ever present as we continue to experience and reveal more and more of ourselves. As we grow into the individual manifestations of love we are intended to be.

Jesus was not a moralist

By Peter Crowell Leave a Comment

Jesus was not a moralist. He had no interest in people’s behavior, except when it hampered fullness of life. He taught love, compassion and forgiveness, but not in some dogmatic vacuum.

He taught these things because he knew that if we did that kind of work, we would be forced to engage our obstacles. He knew that our potentials and dreams would come pouring out of us to irrigate the world with creativity and refreshed priorities.

It hasn’t really worked as a social platform because it hasn’t really been adopted as one.

Ever forward.

Filed Under: Learning from the ancients

The key to living a satisfying life is how you respond to the life you’re living.

By Peter Crowell 2 Comments

You come back from the coffee station with a new stain on your shirt to find your coworker crying because she’s just been laid off. So, you take her to lunch at Chili’s to cheer her up and everyone has margaritas and when you get back to the office your e-mail account has been deactivated. Is that an echo of the Mexican Hat Dance you’re hearing? No. It’s the sound of the ax dropping and it’s not what you had in mind when you left the house this morning.

In the teaching of the Tao, the 10,000 Things is everything that happens in your life, good or bad. You win the Super Bowl pool. You get a speeding ticket. You have a ridiculous blind date. Your alarm clock goes off. The 10,000 Things is how the Tao shows itself to you, and losing your job is one of them.

By itself the 10,000 Things is just a bunch of stuff that happens. How you interact with it is the key. Your responses to the details of your life have an effect on what happens next. Consider that speeding ticket. What happens if you give the cop static for pulling you over? What happens if you just accept it as the consequences of your actions? Very different potential outcomes.

Your present situation combined with your response to it gives birth to new circumstances to which you must respond. From the moment you lose your job, everything that happens in your life, for the rest of your life, will be the spawn of unemployment.

The key to living a satisfying life is how you respond to the life you’re living. Not only does responding creatively improve how you experience your circumstances, it helps you change them for the better. With each choice you make you alter your landscape just a little. By responding creatively you take some control over the direction of your life.

It’s not complete control, of course. Life is risk and there is always uncertainty. It’s like a rudder on a boat. It helps you deal effectively with a current you can’t control. At some point you have to trust the current but this is much easier when you know how to handle the rudder.

Interacting with the 10,000 Things is a skill you can develop. Over time you learn to recognize and respond to opportunity you could not see before. You can even learn to create opportunity out of circumstances where it may not be obvious. It takes time, but it’s really just a matter of beginning, of making mistakes and persevering, and it begins where ever you are right now.

Just lost your job?

Start there.

Ever forward.

Filed Under: Learning from the ancients

The Te of Unemployment

By Peter Crowell Leave a Comment

Te (which sounds like day with a really hard d) is the virtue of following the Tao. It's an active effort to cooperate with what life hands you instead of resisting it. The result is a more fluid experience of life with less conflict and greater responsiveness to opportunity. In fact, practicing Te enables you to evoke opportunities from circumstance, as if they were hidden there waiting to be found. Like Easter eggs.

It's the power by which the Tao creates transformation. When an acorn becomes an oak tree, that's Te. So, to practice Te is to participate in the process of transformation, instead of just being a passenger. You make the most of a situation by bringing out all the potential it contains.

The Te of Unemployment sounds something like this: "Being out of work brings opportunity you should try not to miss."

Sure, there are lots of unemployed people, but there's only one unemployed you. In the Tao of Unemployment, you lost your job because it's part of your path. You are the only one walking your path, so the situation is full of opportunity and potential intended just for you. Unemployment and you make a unique combination not repeated anywhere.

How you deal with it is totally up to you. That's why Te is a virtue—it's something you really should do, no matter how other people react to the same situation. It is uniquely yours no matter how many other instances of it occur. And that's why it's a gift. Something about the experience of unemployment is exactly what it takes to reveal the next phase of your life, which, if you let it, could be incredible.

So, Te is your part of the equation. You can dive in and learn, or you can resist. Te is diving in. It's how you find and activate the opportunity and potential in your situation. Resistance is anything you do that prevents you from finding those things. Fear, anger, laziness, desperation—feeling these things is normal. To give in to them is to resist the Tao. To explore and learn from them is to practice Te.

What do you want your life to look like over time? Will a new job give that to you? What do you want to be true of you when a new job finally comes along? What thing of value can you get from unemployment that no other experience could give you?

What are the gifts?

The treasures?

Eventually you will find a new job. But what happens then? The opportunities contained in unemployment will no longer be available to you, and you could miss out on something you really need in order to be happy, job or no job.

Ever forward.

Filed Under: Learning from the ancients

The Tao of Unemployment

By Peter Crowell Leave a Comment

If the Tao is the Way (and it is, I looked it up at Wikipedia) then it must lead somewhere, into something. That something is this: the constantly expanding awareness of what reality is capable of, and how to deal with it. Following the Tao makes us ever more available to the lessons of experience, which makes us better at life.

So, what's the Way of Unemployment?

I haven't had a full-time job for eighteen months. It's been a long painful grind. Interviews and opportunities come and go like mirages and in between are these long stretches of hot sand. Sometimes just staying positive is rigorous work. But you have to become at home in the shadow of unemployment. No matter what your situation, you have to get creative, because job or no job your life is happening.

Much of the popular advice about unemployment relates to finding a job or reinventing your career. That's logical and smart. More personal is the advice to enjoy the time, go to a cafe, pick up those water colors, or spend time with the family. Also, very good advice. Less is said about all the information you can gather about yourself.

The stress of unemployment brings out the truth. It's filled with indicators about how you live your life. An honest look will reveal all the repair work you need to do on your personal foundations, and all the potential for growth, healing, and positive inner change. Unemployment is an opportunity to explore your fear, to understand your expectations of life, to get a feel for your relationship to success, to your dreams, to the people you love. It's a chance to evaluate and strengthen the your connection to yourself—the connection that exists completely independent of your career goals.

If you don't have a connection to yourself independent of your career goals, that may be the greatest thing the Tao of Unemployment can show you.

Of course losing your job is a chance to take a new direction. Of course it's a chance to evaluate the path you've taken to this point. But it's not just about reinventing yourself. It's about "who the heck are you to begin with?" You can't reinvent something until you understand what it is already. If you look, you'll find out who you are right now. If you're honest you'll see the opportunity. You'll see where you are strong, where you are weak, where you are fearful, where you are brave.

There's an old saying: "When the disciple is ready, the master will appear." That's the Tao of Unemployment: unemployment is the master and it appears because you are ready to learn what it has to teach.

Ever forward.

Filed Under: Learning from the ancients

"Mark my footsteps, good my page. Tread thou in them boldly."

By Peter Crowell Leave a Comment

“Good King Wenceslas” is a Christmas carol written by John Mason
Neale. It’s based on the life of Wenceslaus the First, Duke of
Bohemia, who lived in the tenth century.

Metaphorically, Wenceslas is Jesus. Like the story of Jesus, the song
is a portrayal of transformation with deep insight into the inner
workings of reality. Like the teachings of Jesus the song reaches down
into the mythic structures of basic human experience — the place
where the demands of life are revealed to be life giving.

The song tells the story of a king and his page who venture the winter
night to bring gifts of basic comfort to a poor man. They spotted the
man gathering firewood far from home on St. Stephen’s Day, the day
after Christmas, and along their journey to reach the man’s house, the
king’s page is overwhelmed:

“Sire the night is darker now,
and the wind blows stronger.
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer.”

It’s not a complaint. It’s a simple observation of the reality of his
situation, which is radically different from complaining. The words
read like a prayer. The page is standing in the truth, the only place
in which real prayer can happen, and the only place from which
transformation is possible. His circumstances have driven him into
consciousness in a way the comforts and safety of the king’s castle
never could. Out there, in the snowy woods, the page finds
opportunity.

Here’s a line-by-line translation from the song, turning poetry to
prose. First, the king’s reply:

“Mark my footsteps, good my page.”
Translation: Remember that I’ve walked this ground, too. I’ve felt
what you feel. See, those are my footprints. Remember what I’ve taught
you and do what I do.

“Tread thou in them boldly.”
Translation: Give it all you’ve got. We’re on an errand of love. Trust in that.

“You will find the winter’s rage freeze thy blood less coldly.”
Translation: Life can be hard and that’s just how it is. But if you
love as I do, you’ll find strength, creativity, good cheer. You have
to do it to understand.

And the resultant miracle:

“In his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted.”
Translation: The page went for it.

“Heat was in the very sod, that the saint had printed.”
Translation: It worked.

If love is the efficacious desire for the well being of another, the
good king has nailed it. And so has the page. The key here is that one
line, “tread thou in them boldly.” That’s the “efficacious” part. You
do what it takes. With that in hand, the storm cannot stop you. Love
transforms and from it springs extraordinary possibility. In the
struggles of life, commit acts of love. The amazing will happen.

Ever forward.

Filed Under: Learning from the ancients

Myth itself caught in the act.

By Peter Crowell Leave a Comment

The Boyne Valley, north of Dublin Ireland, is home to a place called Newgrange. There, in the middle of a field, stands a tumulus. At two-hundred and fifty feet across, and forty feet high, it spans an entire acre and is thought to be at least five thousand years old. On the southeast side an entrance opens into a sixty foot passage that leads to a beehive shaped chamber, twenty feet high, at the heart of the mound.

Each year at the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, the first rays of dawn strike a specially crafted window above the entrance, and the stones shape the light into a point on the ground. As the sun rises, this pointed band of light grows longer and longer, creeping along the floor of the passage until it reaches the chamber, sixty feet inside. There it proceeds to drive out the subterranean darkness with light bright enough to read by, and sustain it for more than a quarter of an hour. Then, the chamber fades to darkness again, and the line of light recedes back down the passage just as it came.

To see the event on the day of the solstice, you literally have to win a lottery. But I've twice been to Newgrange, twice followed the sixty foot passage to the chamber within to see the electric-light simulation. It makes the point and it leaves the imagination to feast on what the real event must be like.

Just building the tumulus was an act of mythic magnitude. There are ninety-seven stones surrounding the base of the mound, and each would have required a separate adventure just to find it, never mind bring it back. Each one weighs about eighteen tons and came from as far as twenty miles away. The quartz that adorns the entrance (literally tons of it) probably came from Wicklow, seventy-five miles to the south. All this at a time when Ireland was a vast primeval forest and it was dangerous work just hiking to the next village. And it would have taken at least three generations to plan and build the tumulus, so the visionaries never saw the completed project, and the people who finished it may never have known the visionaries.

All that effort. A one hundred year project that must have impacted the time and resources of an entire society, in a world where time was precious and resources hard won. Just to fill an underground chamber with light? No one knows what they meant by it, but Newgrange is the greatest symbol for the mythical nature of human experience that I have ever come across. Better than any actual myth I've read. So simple, and yet so complete. There is no human situation for which the illustration is not relevant. Light literally penetrates the earth and fills the darkness with illumination. It is us. By taking the mythic path we enact this process in our own lives. We allow light to flood the inner self and bring into view that which was before hidden in shadow.

Earth, stone, light and darkness. Human striving. Myth itself caught in the act.

Ever forward.

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