Speak­ing of Paradox

Per­haps noth­ing is more impor­tant than truly grasp­ing the para­dox­i­cal nature of real­ity. Most of us hate paradox—we want things to be sim­ple, pre­dictable, and emphat­i­cally, we want things to be the way we think they ought to be. Fly­ing in the face of our lit­tle foot-stomping rants about how things ‘ought to be’ is ‘how things are.’ I call this side of the equa­tion real­ity.

Here’s a com­mon para­dox. Peo­ple say they love some­one, and their actions say the oppo­site. Crit­i­cisms (for their good, of course), the silent treat­ment (I’ll show her!), pub­lic humil­i­a­tion. As opposed to lov­ing some­one, unabashedly and unre­servedly — Hey Darbella!

Or, as James Tay­lor put it: (just down­loaded his “One Man Band” live album. On that album is the best record­ing of “Shower the Peo­ple” I’ve ever heard.)

Notice: the defin­i­tive term is: “SHOW them.”

Shower the peo­ple you love with love

Show them the way that you feel

Things are gonna be just fine if we only will (If we only will)

Shower the peo­ple you love with love

Show them the way that you feel

Things are gonna be much bet­ter if you only will.

Have a para­dox, on me.

I often get requests to teach. In late Feb­ru­ary, I’m doing a 2 hour lecture/presentation on alter­na­tive approaches to pain relief. Specif­i­cally, I’ll be look­ing at breath­work, Body­work, yoga, Ki Gong, and med­i­ta­tion as pos­si­ble approaches. But key to my pre­sen­ta­tion is the idea of learn­ing a new approach to liv­ing with­out adding in a list of tech­niques. Despite just hav­ing pre­sented a list of techniques.

Last week, I wrote a list of 10 ways to trans­form 2008. The first idea was “Sim­plify.” My expe­ri­ence with clients, friends, and to a small extent, myself, is that sim­pli­fi­ca­tion is misunderstood.

Deck Chairs, Rearranged

One client recently bought me a cof­fee. Dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion she men­tioned how hav­ing another kid had com­pli­cated things. She noticed that they had their kids enrolled in a bucket load of classes and teams and social stuff, and that they’d become taxi dri­vers. She thought per­haps lim­it­ing the kids to one sport might be an answer. I was about to agree. Then she said,“And we need a big­ger house.”

I real­ized that she was busily doing what I call rear­rang­ing the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The pre­vail­ing west­ern myth is that ‘more is bet­ter,’ and so we make piles of stuff. We then stand back and com­pare our piles to the piles of our neigh­bours and friends. Our pile does not sat­isfy, so (and here is the insan­ity) we add more to the pile, or start a new pile!

Mar­keters love this.

When you think about it, my friend who thinks she needs a new house will ini­tially feel bet­ter. First, she has sur­passed “the Jone­ses” in her old neigh­bour­hood. Sec­ond, she has more space for her stuff, so super­fi­cially it ini­tially looks like less stuff. How­ever, and here is the kicker, what tends to hap­pen almost always is:

1. she’ll begin to com­pare her­self to the “new Jone­ses” in her new neigh­bour­hood, and
2. she’ll fill the empty places with more stuff.

Why? because we sur­round our­selves with stuff to escape from deal­ing with our empty lives.
Far bet­ter to look at exter­nal piles than inter­nal meaninglessness.

Noth­ing is ever enough if your goal is to fill the empti­ness inside (and, of course, I want to con­vince you that empti­ness is a good thing!) with stuff. It’s the mean­ing of the first Basho haiku:

Even in Kyoto, Hear­ing the Cuckoo’s cry, I long for Kyoto

When we long for some­thing, we are say­ing that ‘what is’ is not good enough.

What­ever ‘it’ is, is not good enough, strangely, when com­pared to ‘what is not’—our fantasy—our long­ing for Kyoto, while one is IN Kyoto. It’s cap­tured in the fol­low­ing line:

This isn’t as good as I remem­ber it.

She’s Not Quite Right

I was re-reading OSHO’s Zen: The Path of Para­dox on the week­end, and at one point he describes this in terms of rela­tion­ships. If you want my longer ‘take’ on this, see my free Rela­tion­ships book­lets.

“I can FIX her!”

The “YES” Stage

Any­way, a man meets a woman, or vice versa, but let’s make the descrip­tion sim­ple. In the begin­ning, he sees what he wants to see — the ‘good stuff.’ He’s already pre-chosen the woman on the basis of what he finds attrac­tive phys­i­cally. He puts his best foot for­ward, behaves, as does she. She dresses up, flat­ters, smiles. All is well in Fan­tasy Land.

The “NO! Stage

At some point, around six months, the first ‘no’ hap­pens. Remem­ber, up until then, it was “Yes, yes…YES!” Because he has a fan­tasy about how his woman ‘ought’ to be, up until the first ‘no,’ things seemed per­fect.

Here’s the joke. The ‘no’ was there all along, unex­pressed.

The ‘no’, para­dox­i­cally, is the point when you find out that there is another side to your part­ner. The para­dox is this: when all you see is the “yes” side, your part­ner is incom­plete. The pain of hear­ing “no” means you are now liv­ing with a real per­son. (There’s that “real­ity” word again…)

Which is fine, if you are awake and present. Most are not.

So, what hap­pens nor­mally? He thinks he’s been lied to. Deceived. Here she was, all “Yes, yes…YES!” and now she dares to dis­turb his fan­tasy, his ‘long­ing for Kyoto,’ by “no-ing” him. The manip­u­la­tions and judg­ments hap­pen, and mis­ery is the result.

This is oth­er­wise known as con­tem­po­rary relationships.

Wak­ing up requires rad­i­cal acceptance.

And the first is this: you do not have the right to make oth­ers live up to your fan­tasy about who they should be or how they should act. Your long­ing and fan­tasy is noth­ing. It’s just a game you play in your head. Real­ity is what is really hap­pen­ing.

Or as John Lennon sang,
“Life is what hap­pens while you are busy mak­ing other plans.”

Most peo­ple are heav­ily invested in their piles. Their title at work. How much stuff they have in their piles. Oddly, most in the west have bought their piles on credit, and there­fore do not even own their piles.

I can own that one. I half-jokingly say Dar­bella and I are still pay­ing for our Euro­pean vaca­tion, and that hap­pened in 1986. It has only been in the last three years that we have dumped stuff and begun to pay down our debt. After 20 some years of adding to our debt pile, we have reduced it two years run­ning. Not easy. We still want what we want, when we want it.

We now, how­ever, see this, con­sciously and clearly. No excuses. So, we pay cash. Here’s a hint: you can’t get into debt using cash.

Back to Pain and Work­shops — and Paradox

The peo­ple in pain who will attend my sem­i­nar have spent months or years in the ‘sys­tem,’ and the sys­tem has one answer for pain — medication/surgery. Most are stoned on drugs and not par­tic­u­larly mobile.

I’ve got­ten this gig through a friend a client of mine, named Gerry. He blew his back out a few years back. We’ve worked together, and he’s a fanatic for hav­ing a dis­ci­plined approach regard­ing his pain. He does yoga with my yoga teacher, he med­i­tates, he is deeply into Native Spir­i­tu­al­ity, and has never, once, taken pain med­ica­tion. He’s in his 50’s and is back in school, work­ing toward a Social Work degree. He wants to work with injured workers.

Does he have pain? Yes. Is he man­ag­ing his pain? Yes.

So, what’s dif­fer­ent here? He has changed the way he lives. Every aspect of it. He did not add on something.

He simplified.

The first sim­pli­fi­ca­tion is a drop­ping of the fan­tasy, the long­ing to be pain-free. Nice fan­tasy, not pos­si­ble. Once he accepted this as his real­ity, he could look to chang­ing what caused it in the first place. His behav­iour toward him­self changed, and his flex­i­bil­ity increased, both phys­i­cally and inter­nally. He gave him­self per­mis­sion to exper­i­ment with new ways of being. In so doing, his pain became Muzak — back­ground noise.

This is the no-path path.

• If you insist that you have the ‘right’ to force oth­ers (or the cos­mos) to man­i­fest your fan­tasies, despite the fact that your fan­tasies (by def­i­n­i­tion) fly in the face of real­ity, you are
  doomed to a life of misery.
• If you think that the best solu­tion to being over­worked and over-stuff-ed is to add more work and stuff, you are doomed. And yet, many peo­ple come to me with just such a request. “Teach me some­thing sim­ple to make what is not work­ing for me work.”

OK. I will. Stop doing what does not work.

Be empty. Empty of your fan­tasies, demands, ego-driven demands for the world to put you first.

Basho’s sec­ond haiku:
This road–
no one goes down it,
autumn evening.

Read it again.

The road is the Path — the way of empti­ness. Basho him­self walked this path, and calls him­self “no one.” Ego­less, demand­less,“no one” walks the path — and his total real­ity is:

no one, autumn evening.

No piles, no iden­tity, no ego, no demands, no fan­tasies, no expec­ta­tion. Just walking.

This means total free­dom. You choose to do what­ever you want to do, and you sim­ply do and be it. You turn pain into Muzak, drama into com­edy, all by let­ting go of wish­ing for magic.

You take your life as it is, own it all, blam­ing no one (in both senses of that expres­sion — no one is to blame, and “no one” is respon­si­ble for where you are, right now) and make a choice.

In 2008, take the oppor­tu­nity to notice your piles.

You piled it there, and you walk around it, wor­ship­ing it. You think your piles makes your impor­tant, spe­cial. And some­day, your rel­a­tives will own your piles, and you will be dust.

Remove the piles, stop pil­ing more, let go of what does not work, and choose.

Choose empti­ness, peace, walk­ing. Walk a new road, pick stuff up, put it down. Change your focus, change your path. Add the new path of adding nothing.

It’s a paradox.