A New Series—On Cling­ing

The remain­ing arti­cles in this series:

9– emo­tions
10– ide­olo­gies

Image by babasteve

Today, we are going to turn our atten­tion to how we cling to habits.

For most of us, this is going to seem a strange topic, as we assume that habits are some­how just there, as opposed to some­thing we actively engage in (and cling to.)

When we con­sider the word habit, we think of things like exces­sive drink­ing, smok­ing, or other activ­i­ties that seem to get us into trouble.

One way to define a habit is: “The rep­e­ti­tion of an often uncon­scious behav­ior which was cre­ated through repeated prac­tice.”

Here comes the weird piece.

The biggest and most pro­found habit that we have is how we view, under­stand, and live life.

Although we’ve talked about this before, we’ve really never looked at it from this per­spec­tive. Let me put it this way:

The way you view your world is not true; it’s sim­ply your most deeply ingrained habit.

The process of pri­mary habit cre­ation is called social­iza­tion. Our par­ents, our rel­a­tives, and our tribes have a lot invested in get­ting us to mind­lessly repeat their view of the world.

On a much more pro­found level, social­iza­tion pro­vides us with the tools and resources we need—not only to fit in but to be able to live at all. Chil­dren show up as tab­ula rasa, as blank slates, upon which their tribes write the story of how to be.

I really need to repeat this.

These sto­ries aren’t true—they’re sim­ply habit­ual expres­sions of how we believe the world works.

Here’s another odd piece about this habit we call life.

Photo by shuriruu

This pri­mary social­iza­tion might also be thought of as a way to make us nor­mal. In other words, it’s as if there is some invis­i­ble stan­dard that every­one is try­ing to live up to, and the odd piece is that this invis­i­ble stan­dard is pretty bor­ing.

• Nor­mal just sits there.
• Nor­mal doesn’t rock the boat.
• Nor­mal doesn’t make waves.
• Nor­mal fits in, or at least tries to.

And this nor­mal­ity is so ingrained, so habit­ual, that we don’t even notice we are play­ing this game.

I’ve been read­ing a book by Osho called “The Book of Secrets.” It’s a 1200 page book, describ­ing Osho’s take on Tantra.

The main Tantric the­ory has to do with using the body, fully and com­pletely, to wake up. There are 100 plus tech­niques that can be used to help us to see what’s really going on, as we free our­selves from our habit­ual view of life.

I want to pro­vide you with a cou­ple of rea­son­ably long quotes, just to give your per­spec­tive on how Osho sees nor­mal.

“And what is nor­mal? What is nor­malcy? Just the aver­age. If the aver­age man him­self is not nor­mal, then being nor­mal means noth­ing. It sim­ply means you are adjusted to the crowd. So West­ern psy­chol­ogy is doing only one thing: when­ever some­one is mal­ad­justed, West­ern meth­ods make that man again adjusted to the crowd. The crowd is not ques­tioned at all; whether the crowd itself is okay is not the ques­tion.” pg. 221

Osho sug­gests that the East­ern approach comes at this from a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. In order to under­stand this, you have to “get” that, in the West, the mind is seen as an end­point. In other words, noth­ing exists beyond the mind. It is assumed that men­tal ill­ness actu­ally exists, as an ill­ness of this “thing” called the mind. The role of the “mind doc­tor” is to fix the bro­ken part; this is under­stood as the only way to bring the per­son back to normal.

In the East, the mind is the ill­ness.

“For Tantra, man him­self is the dis­ease. It is not that your mind is disturbed—rather, you mind is the dis­tur­bance. It is not that you are tense within, but rather you are the ten­sion …if the mind itself is the ill­ness, than this ill­ness can­not be treated. It can be tran­scended, but it can­not be treated.” p. 261

In the East, there is some­thing that lies beyond the mind. Through focus, through pres­ence, through med­i­ta­tion, one can find a cer­tain still­ness. This still­ness tran­scends the mind. As a mat­ter of fact, mind is thought of as a hin­drance.

The mind is often described as mon­key mind;

flit­ting from one thing to another, pick­ing some­thing up and get­ting dis­tracted, flit­ting to some­thing new, get­ting dis­tracted, and on and on. There is noth­ing valu­able in this.

Fritz Perls said,
“Go out of your mind and come to your senses.”

Tran­scen­dence has every­thing to do with mov­ing beyond normalcy.

Osho, again:

The East­ern effort is for how to tran­scend the mind, because for us there are no men­tal dis­eases, remem­ber. For us there are no men­tal diseases—rather, the mind is the dis­ease. For West­ern psy­chol­ogy, the mind is not the dis­ease. The mind is you, it is not the dis­ease. The mind can be healthy, and the mind can be ill.

… Unless you go beyond mind, you can never be healthy. You can be ill and adjusted or you can be ill and mal­ad­justed, but you can never be healthy. So the nor­mal man is not really healthy. He is just within the bound­aries, he is ill within the bound­aries. The abnor­mal per­son is one who has gone beyond the bound­aries; and the dif­fer­ence between the two is only of degrees—of quan­tity not qual­ity. p. 121

We might say, then, that the goal in the West is to herd peo­ple back into the fold of being nor­mal, pre­dictable, non-sensual, selec­tively sex­ual, and with­out an opin­ion of his or her own.

Good lit­tle sheep, fit­ting in.

That last part, about not hav­ing an opin­ion, may feel unreal. You may want to say, “Of course I have an opin­ion, and man am I ever going to give it to you!”

But really, there’s a lot of truth to the expres­sion, “There’s noth­ing new under the sun.” What you believe is your opin­ion is noth­ing more than some­thing you’ve heard that you are com­pelled to agree with.

I sus­pect you can remem­ber a time when you expressed an opin­ion in a group of peo­ple who disagreed—and how, almost imme­di­ately, great anx­i­ety arose in you. You felt iso­lated, scared—and you either retreated, toughed it out and argued more, or did what ever you had to do to get back into the group’s good graces. Dif­fi­cult, very dif­fi­cult, to smile, hold to your opin­ion, and not defend.

That anx­ious feel­ing is some­thing you should pay atten­tion to.

Photo by shuriruu

Any­time you feel a dis­tur­bance inside—queasiness, tight­ness, imbal­ance, or just a sense that “some­thing is not quite right,” that’s you bump­ing up against your habit­ual thinking.

In other words, your body knows.

Your body says to you, “Some­thing is going on here that you need to pay atten­tion to.” Mostly, in such sit­u­a­tions, this anx­i­ety is such that we sim­ply want to go away. And the best way to get it to go away is to ignore it by shift­ing into neutral—to become nor­mal again.

In tra­di­tional “habit ther­apy,” there are two ideas that I think hold water. The first is that a habit can’t just be stopped. I have it has to be replaced with a new behav­iour. The sec­ond is that it takes around 25 days for this solid, new behav­ior to com­pletely over­ride the old.

This, of course, is pretty much how peo­ple stop smok­ing, or stop drink­ing, or stop swearing.

It’s an entirely dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish to talk about break­ing the habit of how we live.

The first step in this process is to begin to believe that some­thing exists beyond mind, beyond habit, and beyond our cur­rent belief.

Osho calls this tran­scen­dence. Ken Wilber speaks often and pas­sion­ately for a method that he calls “tran­scend and include.” By this he means that we take what we have, stop judg­ing it, accept it as an aspect of our­selves, [that’s the include part], and then move past it in a direc­tion that is, larger, more ben­e­fi­cial, and, at the same time, more detached. And yet more indi­vid­u­al­ized. [That’s the tran­scend part.]

One cheap and dirty illus­tra­tion of this is learn­ing to meditate.

I got my first taste of med­i­ta­tion at Uni­ver­sity, back when I was about 18. There was a Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion group that I became a part of. Now let me tell you, I have a lot of energy in my body, and sit­ting still is noth­ing short of a mir­a­cle for me. I’m not sure how Dar­bella sits next to me when I drive. Talk about the end­less wig­gle. Back then, when I was a kid, there was always some­thing bet­ter to do than just sit­ting there. Zazen means “sit­ting still like a moun­tain.” My moun­tain had tremors—earthquakes—and all I wanted to do was get up, move, do something.

The West is full of doing. Being? Not so much.

Over the last two years, I’ve been putting much more focus into med­i­ta­tion. Since Feb­ru­ary, I’ve med­i­tated pretty close to 90% of the time that I decided upon. And oddly, he says with a grin, I’m sit­ting still.

Bet­ter put, I’m sit­ting in the stillness.

I’m not sure this is a habit yet, but it’s darn close. And there’s sort of a pyra­mid­ing effect; the still­ness is extend­ing into my non-sitting moments. I find this to be a good thing.

Tran­scen­dence comes to us when we first allow for the pos­si­bil­ity that some­thing exists beyond what we presently believe to be so. The funny part is, we’re get­ting body cues that this is so, all the time. Aches and pains, queasy feel­ings, that nag­ging sen­sa­tion that there’s some­thing seri­ously wrong with the way things are right now. We’ve been con­di­tioned to ignore these feel­ings. Hell, we’ve been con­di­tioned to ignore our bod­ies entirely. Except for a few, socially sanc­tioned, accept­able bod­ily feelings.

Most of my work is get­ting peo­ple to pay atten­tion to the sig­nals they’re receiv­ing all the time. I see tight lit­tle bod­ies, aching minds, bro­ken spir­its. And then I hear, “It’s not as bad as it seems. I’ve just got to do more, toughen up, and win the lot­tery.” I so des­per­ately want to reach out and give peo­ple a shake. I want to yell, “Pay atten­tion! Your body, your spirit, is try­ing to tell you some­thing! Please, this time, listen.”

What I’m look­ing for is a har­mony, a dance, between body, mind, and spirit.

Too often we get into focus­ing on one thing to the detri­ment of the oth­ers, and in our cul­ture mind pre­dom­i­nates. And Lordy, are our minds ever messed up. We hurt. And then we go on doing the same things, try­ing harder, work­ing harder, run­ning faster, and falling down, exhausted. Our bod­ies and spir­its keep try­ing to get through to us, but it’s hard to lis­ten. We’re so afraid will no longer fit in, that will be judged, that will be rejected, that will be blamed, that some­how we’ll die an outcast.

Tran­scen­dence comes to us when we real­ize the utter stu­pid­ity of this belief. We tran­scend when we under­stand that we are big­ger than this, and are meant for bet­ter things. We tran­scend when we refuse to suck our­selves down the drain that our soci­ety has created.

Tran­scen­dence begins with sitting.

With qui­et­ing. With bring­ing our focus back to where it belongs.

Tran­scen­dence begins, as I lis­ten to myself, accept myself, for­give myself, bless myself.

From this place, I can sim­ply be, and “who I be” becomes how I live and how I enact myself.

I break the habit of being normal.

I dis­cover that stand­ing forth as a whole, cen­tered, focused, and clear human being is ulti­mately, what life is really all about.

The worst habit you can have is to live your life as if you have no choice. Con­tinue to ignore your­self at your peril. See with new eyes, and the world and you are trans­formed, tran­scended, and whole.

It’s up to you. What are you wait­ing for?