Somewhere or Other

by Christina Rossetti
 
Somewhere or other there must surely be
     The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!—
     Made answer to my word.
 
Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
     Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
     That tracks her night by night.
 
Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
     With just a wall, a hedge, between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year
     Fallen on a turf grown green.

Competition

Does competition in the economic sphere really produce all the benefits that are claimed for it? Can it really be a secure foundation for the increasingly interconnected worldwide commercial system? The answer is no—at least, not without strong, effective, and wise regulation.

 

The reason is not difficult to understand. Where there are valuable prizes to win, some people will act unscrupulously to get them. The world business community portrays itself as ethical and conscientious; and, of course, most people like to think of themselves as decent. But the truth is that almost everyone will cut ethical corners, and some will shred them, if there is sufficient profit to be made from doing so.

 

Hence the never ending series of financial “scandals” that follow one another in the never ending waves of “news” that wash over our 24-hour-long media cycles. The only scandal is that people never seem to learn that oversight and regulation is absolutely necessary to prevent people from cutting corners.

 

And if an elected government should come to be dominated by “business friendly” officials who refuse to oversee and regulate, then the “scandals” just come faster and bigger. But somehow the religion of “competition” continues to have millions of adherents. Whatever the advantages are of unregulated competition in the name of “freedom,” the costs are much too high.

 

There are fantastic benefits to cooperation, especially when it is deployed precisely to counteract the evils of competition. As the world moves toward a global society, perhaps we should insist that our governments begin to promote cooperation rather than competition, so that we can begin to solve the new crises that threaten the future of humanity.

Why is this happening?

Life’s greatest challenges, as far as inner growth is concerned, arise in the form of moments when we can’t understand why something is happening to us. Perhaps a friend or a family member picks a fight with you, or embarrasses you in front of others. Perhaps you get stuck in traffic, or swamped by obligations unexpectedly, or suffer a financial blow, or have an accident, or get a disease, or encounter any of the infinite number of difficulties that can befall a human being. Whether the event is  relatively minor or major, you know you have met one of these moments when you find yourself asking, “Why is this happening to me?”

 

Sometimes, before we even get to this question, we have already responded to the situation with one of many coping mechanisms—with anger, withdrawal, insults, self-recrimination, even violence.

 

This is where inner growth becomes part of the picture. When you  see that you have responded like this—or even better, when you see that you are about to respond like this—cut off the response by asking “Why is this happening to me?” and then answer the question immediately with “I don’t know why this is happening to me!”

 

Don’t be seduced by the illusion that you really do know why it’s happening. That will only lead you to your usual coping mechanisms, but with an added feeling of justification—which is terrible for learning to grow out of these reactions. And anyway, the truth is that you don’t know why. Nobody knows everything that goes into a situation. Why did your spouse pick a fight with you? Probably not because he or she is mean and doesn’t love you. There is a reason that you don’t see, or there wouldn’t be this sudden anger. So why get upset when you should be asking “Why are you upset with me?”

 

The truth is that we really don’t know much of anything, and the sooner we realize it and start asking questions instead of reacting, the sooner we’ll be free of the fluctuating conditions of our lives.

Why bother?

If it is true, as some say, that both past and future are thought-creations, and that only the present moment is real, then why should we hope for anything better than what already exists? And since we all do have hopes for the future, isn’t that evidence that the theory of “only now” is wrong?

 

These objections, natural as they seem, are rooted in one very persistent misconception. It is a mistake to imagine that a though-creation is a mere illusion, without reality, that cannot influence the world. Anyone who has ever experienced a change of mood from a new discovery or revelation knows that thoughts are real and have a real effect on life. So past and future, as really existing thought-forms in the present, can have a real effect on the world—an effect that arises from the way we act under the influence of our beliefs (which are also thought-forms) concerning the past and the future.

 

This really shouldn’t come as such a great surprise. After, all, what is a poem or a novel or a play or a film but a thought-creation? Yet any one of these things can change your life if it comes alive in your imagination.

 

And when does this happen? Only in the now. 

Pretense

Why do some people have the ability to do the most horrid things and continue to live undisturbed lives, while others do everything they can to avoid bad behavior and suffer tremendously if they should slip? Is it a matter of conscience, or willpower, or upbringing, or religion?

 

Perhaps it has to do mostly with  how easily we can pretend to ourselves that our actions don’t harm others, or how easily we can rationalize our harmful actions as being necessary or even good in some respects.

 

Pretense is a thick veil that hides our true face not only from others, but also from ourselves. It helps you to preserve your conception of yourself as decent, or competent, or successful, or realistic, or whatever positive quality you habitually attach to yourself. It keeps at bay the opposite qualities—injustice, incompetence, failure, soft-headedness, or whatever—that you regard as negative. Pretense lets you remain relatively secure in your self-image.

 

But self-image is just that—an image, not a reality. So you sometimes act in ways that do not align with your self-image. The “decent” person will sometimes be unjust, the “competent” person will sometimes be incompetent, and so forth.

 

Your response to the dissonance between your self-image and your actions determines whether you are going to continue living out the role that your self-image has set for you, or whether you are going to leave that behind to align yourself with reality—which is that you are not the decent person, or the competent person, or whatever; you are just a human being, like everyone else, with traits you value and traits you don’t value.

 

So give up your self-image and just watch what you do. It will be an eye-opener.

A poem

I Am

by John Clare

 

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

   My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self-consumer of my woes,

   They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

And yet I am, and live with shadows tost

 

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

   Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,

   But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best -

Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

 

I long for scenes where man has never trod,

   A place where woman never smiled or wept;

There to abide with my Creator, God,

   And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

History

There are some people who believe that history holds the answers to all questions. They study the past intently, poring over ancient chronicles, old books, yellowed magazines and newspapers. Some to them write their own history books, or become professors who teach history to the upcoming generation.

 

Often, when you ask such people about current events, or even about life in general, they will draw an analogy from their knowledge of history, and extract a lesson from it. Depending on how rigid they are about the lesson to be drawn from the analogy, you can tell the degree to which the person understands that history itself is in large part interpretation. Yes, there are such things as history facts: the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on December 7, 1941 and not on some other date. But even the simplest attempt to connect such facts causally—that is, to explain them—requires interpretation. Which facts are going to be connected? What kinds of things are more causal in history—human choices or economic and cultural forces? Are the facts part of some progression in history or do they group together into separate periods that have nothing to do with one another? Are humans essentially animals with a heightened sense of self-interest, or are they rations and capable of improvement? One’s interpretation of the causes of historical events depends largely on how one has answered these prior questions. Hence, two historians can produce quite different interpretations of the same historical facts.

 

While each of us can learn much from studying history, it would be a mistake to believe that anyone’s personal interpretation settles anything about the lessons to be drawn from history. Be especially wary of historical “lessons” claiming to prove that meanness, ruthlessness, and self-interest are the prerequisites for “success.” These “lessons” were probably manufactured by mean, ruthless, and self-interested historians.

The joy of obstacles

If you want to find the quickest path to freedom—real freedom that makes your state of being independent of external circumstances—you need to let yourself be drawn precisely to those people and situations that cause you the most internal discomfort. The obstacles that make your insides shrivel are infallible signposts of the places you need to go. The boss or spouse you’re afraid to confront, the apology you fear having to make, the public speech you can’t bear having to deliver—all of these, and thousands of other anxiety-ridden circumstances, are the compass points of your journey to freedom.

Why? Because they all point to something you fear. You may not realize this, because we often cover up fear with other emotions, like anger, depression, shyness, and so forth. But at the bottom of everything you try to avoid is some sort of fear, if you investigate it closely enough. And fear is the enemy that must be vanquished, because it is fear that steals your freedom, fear that makes it impossible for you to stand up to your boss or spouse, fear that keeps you from making that apology or speech. Fear, ultimately, is the source of every limitation we feel in our lives.

How do we vanquish fear? Simply by doing what it doesn’t want you to do. Oh, it will try to tell you that you dare not do it, that there will be no future at all if you do it, that you will suffer forever if you do it, that you will die if you do it. But if you just do it anyway, you will find that you survive. You may lose your job, or your marriage, or your career prospects, but as long as you don’t let those consequences frighten you into avoiding future situations, you’ll find that you were just letting the fear stop you from living your life.

Don’t give fear that power over you. Be free. Tell fear to drop dead. 

The thinness of before and after

When you awaken to the fact that you must change, you often find enormous resistance in yourself to making even the slightest alteration in your usual way of acting. This is normal. After all, we have been living with our habits for years; they have become comfortable, and we fell keenly the discomfort of trying to act against them. In addition, almost all of us have the stubborn habit of demanding that the world or the people in it ought to change to accomodate our habits, rather than the other way round.

Nothing prevents us from actualizing the change we need to make like immediate retreat into past memories or future plans. We can daydream for hours about the causes of our past actions, or about detailed plans for a new future in which the change we want may someday come to pass. But at the end of the daydream, we will be no closer to making the change. We may, in fact, be further away, because the dreaming has drained the vitality from the moment of awakening.

This happens because the past and the future, where many of us spend most of our waking hours (check for yourself!) have a “thin” sort of being. They exist, but only in a secondary way that depends on our thinking. This is easy to test for yourself: no memory is as clear or as strong as the actual event was; no imagined future matches a real event for vibrancy and aliveness.

Because of their thinness, the past and the future need lots of energy to seem solid to us. They get that energy from our present, and drain us of the energy to act now.

So when you see you need to change, don’t let you habits pull you into reverie or into imagining the future. Get up and do something now to start the change. Now is where the power lies; now overcomes past, future, and habit.

Two quotations from Aristotle encapsulate the difficulty and the promise of change. The difficulty: “Habits once formed are difficult or impossible to break.” The promise: “Well begun is half done.” 

From knowledge of ignorance to action

Yesterday we discussed how we can be certain of our own ignorance. The question that was left hanging had to do with how this certainty helps to live our lives, or gives us any guidance on how to act.

First of all,  it should make us more humble than we actually are most of the time. Knowing that we don’t know much of what we think we do should help us to be less judgmental of others, less demanding of getting our own way, less invested in our egos (which are merely accreted opinions about who we are), more flexible, more forgiving.

Second, it should make us more aware of how we are behaving at every moment. If we can remind ourselves that we don’t really know that we’re right about the thing we’re currently in a snit about (e.g., that the driver ahead of us is an idiot, that our spouses are trying to make us feel guilty, that our bosses have it in for us), we may be able to stand aside a bit and look at our behavior from the outside, as it were. Perhaps we can even see that we are being silly to be preoccupied with the dialogue in our heads when it does no good, when it keeps us from doing what must be done, and especially when it hurts some one else.

Can you see how knowledge of ignorance might become the basis of a whole series of ethical choices? Just pose a situation, and ask yourself “What follows from the fact of my ignorance about how I should act in this situation?” See where it takes you.