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The will­ing­ness to be self expres­sive is the very thing
that leads to insight.

And I use the word will­ing­ness inten­tion­ally. It requires force of will to be self expres­sive, as opposed to con­duct­ing your life by rote.

I’ve been think­ing lately about how con­di­tioned we are. Let me quickly set a cou­ple of para­me­ters about this.

Nor­mal, Mar­gin­al­ized, and the Fringe

Let’s play fol­low the leader!

Nor­mal might be thought of as our social­ized self. Attempt­ing to be nor­mal is one, strong point on the polar­ity of self.

I’m con­vinced that part of the social­iza­tion project is to teach us to have amne­sia, to not notice, the depth and breadth of our socialization.

Not only have webeen taught how to behave, think, and feel, but we’ve been set up to miss the fact that this is going on.

In Zen, this process is described as, “The fish does not notice the water it swims in.”

The whole process of wak­ing up is about notic­ing.

It’s not about, nec­es­sar­ily, rebelling against our social­iza­tion. As a mat­ter of fact, the kinds of rebel­lion that most peo­ple go through are socially sanc­tioned. Teenage rebel­lion, for exam­ple, is “con­tained” within the sys­tem. In a sense, teenagers are sim­ply exchang­ing one set of behav­iors for another, mar­gin­al­ized set.

Mar­gin­al­iza­tion hap­pens within the sys­tem. When we look at the mar­gin­al­ized in any soci­ety, we see that mem­bers of the soci­ety some­how man­age to work around, or walk around, the mar­gin­al­ized person.

It’s like what hap­pens in big cities, as peo­ple pass pan­han­dlers. If you watch, you see that there are cer­tain behav­iors per­formed over and over. A few give the pan­han­dlers money. Oth­ers walk by and pre­tend the per­son isn’t there. Some even go out of their way to move away from the pan­han­dler — across the street, or at least to move toward the curb. While it seems intensely per­sonal, all of this is socially sanctioned.

If you observe, you see that this dance is not a ton dif­fer­ent from ele­va­tor behav­ior. You get on the ele­va­tor, turn toward the door, and look up the num­bers — no eye con­tact, typ­i­cally no con­ver­sa­tion, or only con­ver­sa­tion with peo­ple you know. If you don’t believe that this is socially con­di­tioned behav­ior, the next time you’re on an ele­va­tor with other peo­ple, turn and either face the back or side walls. See what happens.

What hap­pens is that you’ve stepped out­side of the allowed behav­ior for elevators.

You’ve even moved beyond mar­gin­al­iza­tion. Some­where, out there, is the realm of, “This does not fit in.” Now, there’s no ques­tion that the other peo­ple in the ele­va­tor will fig­ure out a way to adjust to the way you’re stand­ing. How­ever, if you allow your­self to pay atten­tion, you’ll see all sorts of signs of their dis­com­fort. And, because this expe­ri­ence is likely “one off” — in other words, some­thing that isn’t hap­pen­ing reg­u­larly, the adap­ta­tion will only last as long as the ele­va­tor ride does. It does not get incor­po­rated into “the norm.”

You might say then, that behav­ior designed to be dis­rup­tive or sim­ply strange (think weird fash­ions, protest marches, generation-based lan­guage, etc.) if it is deemed harm­less, is incor­po­rated into society’s def­i­n­i­tion of “out there but acceptable.”

You feel a bit of dis­com­fort when you first con­front the behav­ior, and then you “let it in.” All of this is hap­pen­ing out­side of your con­scious­ness. Until you choose to notice!

The Fringe is my take on the term fringe dwellers, which comes from Stu­art Wilde. Wilde is a semi famous Taoist. I’ve been read­ing and appre­ci­at­ing his stuff for decades. He is respon­si­ble for one of the lines I quote a lot – “The way it is, is the way it is.” He calls the peo­ple who awaken, who “get it,” fringe dwellers. I sus­pect he means the same thing that Saint Paul did when he wrote about “being in the world but not of the world.”

In other words, the per­son has learned the tools and tech­niques for oper­at­ing within the cul­ture, while not buy­ing into the siren song of the culture.

We might, then, say that wak­ing up and being self expres­sive means that you notice, or become aware of, the mind­less numb­ness that comes from not pay­ing atten­tion.

From an inter­nal per­spec­tive, this means that you are capa­ble of see­ing through the game. Emphat­i­cally, what this does not mean is that you become pain-free, or oth­er­worldly, or bounce around in a state of relent­less hap­pi­ness. You become aware of the way things are, you become aware of your emo­tions, and you put no judg­ment or restric­tions on any of it. The way it is, is the way it is.

Let’s use the present swine flu sit­u­a­tion as an illus­tra­tion. First of all, notice the social­ized, herd men­tal­ity reac­tion. Mostly, what you see is hyper­bolic writ­ing, an under­ly­ing panic, and the famous demand, “They need to do some­thing about this!” They, mean­ing the gov­ern­ment, the med­ical estab­lish­ment, the drug com­pa­nies — some­one — to make the thing all bet­ter, so that the herd can go back to graz­ing. Now, I’m not say­ing that the awake posi­tion is to ignore the sit­u­a­tion. The awake per­son asks,

“What, exactly, is going on right now, and what can I do to max­i­mize my chances of avoid­ing the swine flu, should it actu­ally amount to something?”

At the end of the day, all that you can do is what you, per­son­ally, choose to do. Pan­ick­ing, get­ting upset, stomp­ing your feet, demand­ing that “they” do some­thing — all are behav­iors that fit with what you have been trained to do — panic, then look out­side of your­self for res­cue.

The awake per­son knows that all you can ever deal with is what is actu­ally hap­pen­ing. As of April 29^th, for the vast, vast major­ity of us, right now, noth­ing is hap­pen­ing. Good diet, good hygiene, some vit­a­mins, reduc­ing your stress — these are the things you can do right now–things that are good for you any­way. And if swine flu turns into some­thing big­ger, all each of us can do, indi­vid­u­ally, is to look after our­selves as best we can. Annoy­ing your­self over this does not change the sit­u­a­tion. The way it is, is the way it is, until it isn’t.

This is not nihilism

Nor is it denial. What it is, is sim­ple accep­tance. It is sim­ple, because it lacks drama — it lacks panic, game play­ing, and demands. It is liv­ing by using self respon­si­ble insight. It is accep­tance, because wish­ing some­thing wasn’t hap­pen­ing, or scream­ing “It’s not fair!” changes nothing.

Once I accept, sim­ply, what is, I free myself to act.

You might say that insight means see­ing into. The oppo­site, obvi­ously, is out­sight, a word that doesn’t even exist. And yet, out­sight is the norm. Out­sight is what the top part of this arti­cle is all about. Out­sight places your point of ref­er­ence, out­side of your­self — look­ing to the field, to oth­ers, to define your­self and your behav­ior. Cen­ter­ing — insight brings every­thing both into your own aware­ness and under your own responsibility.

Fringe dwellers oper­ate from insight

If you don’t under­stand that total self respon­si­bil­ity is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the fringe, you just don’t get it. Insight means mas­ter­ing the abil­ity to know your­self. Know­ing your­self requires ask­ing the question,

“What, specif­i­cally, is going on for me right now, and what, specif­i­cally, can I do to move in a direc­tion I choose to move in?”

The answer you come up with is yours, and yours alone. Oth­ers on the same path may res­onate with what is going on for you, or with your deci­sion, but basi­cally, this is about land­ing in your­self and stay­ing there.

The sixth Chakra (the third eye Chakra) is the home to insight, self-awareness, and intuition.

The kicker here is that we are all intu­itive. We all have a sense of the truth of the mat­ter — of what is. The path of intu­ition is that of accep­tance of the total­ity of our expe­ri­ence.

We use the expres­sion “gut feel­ing” to describe an aspect of intu­ition, for exam­ple. What this really means is that we sense in our bod­ies what we ought to be doing. In all my years of coun­selling, I’ve never met any­one who was totally sur­prised by the results of their choices. They all had a sense that their dumb behav­ior was going to head south, and rapidly, and they did it any­way — usu­ally think­ing that they were so spe­cial that they ought to get away with the dumb behav­ior. Being bit on the ass often brings peo­ple run­ning into ther­apy.

Soci­ety hates intu­ition and insight

It has to. Intu­ition and insight often lead us to act, to be, dif­fer­ent from the norm — and soci­ety is all about con­form­ing. Fringe dwellers get the joke. They wear a but­ton that reads, “Run, Lem­mings, Run!” If the hud­dled masses want to run off in panic, or sit down in the mid­dle of a huge pity party, fringe dwellers sim­ply walk rapidly in the oppo­site direc­tion. No mat­ter what they expe­ri­ence, they imme­di­ately ask the ques­tion, “What’s really going on here?” They dig deeper. They real­ize that they’re always going to have a social­ized reac­tion to what’s going on, but have no invest­ment in actu­ally doing what soci­ety dictates.

When you see through things, leav­ing your mind and your body open to the pos­si­bil­ity of some­thing new emerg­ing, some­thing new emerges.

Insight requires pay­ing atten­tion, while hav­ing a light touch. Insight requires pay­ing atten­tion to all of you — to body mind and spirit. Next week, we’ll look at ways to do this.