The Authentic Life (15 page)

I mentioned that, in my early years in practice, I had the expectation that practice could free me of fear altogether. Now, many years later, it's clear to me that spiritual practice is not so much about being free from anxiety and fear as it is about
not having to
be free from them. There is a subtle but crucial difference between these two understandings. When we can welcome and reside in our anxiety, it's the beginning of bringing the nonjudgmental mind of mercy. We no longer see ourselves as flawed or weak because we have fear—we're able to see it as simply our all-too-human conditioning. We begin to realize that even our most unwanted emotions are simply part of the human condition, and moreover, that they don't have to dominate us. The more deeply we understand what it means to say yes, the less we feel the need to push away fear when it arises. Not having to be free from fear is a gateway to ultimate freedom, and it is what allows us to live most genuinely. We're willing to experience our life—
whatever it is
—and not hide in safety and complacency. The only price we have to pay for this is the risk of exposing ourselves to imagined danger.

13

The Great Teaching

I
like to go to the movies, and I particularly like it when I can get to reflect on things in a new way. A while back I saw a documentary called
Protagonist,
about four men who had experienced the fear of powerlessness, and how they each chose strategies to avoid feeling the tremendous discomfort of their fears. Even though each of them went through things that might be very foreign to you or me, their inner experience was not so different.

M
ARK
S.

Mark was a kid who was plagued by fear. He was very small, and always an outcast. The other kids played a game—called “Hit Mark”—where they would throw a ball at him, but he liked it because at least he felt he belonged. Then in junior high they picked on him even more, pushing Hostess fruit pies in his face and soaking him with a squirt gun filled with urine. He remembers having been afraid and hating it—and always feeling powerless.

In high school, after watching a TV series whose hero was a kung fu master, he decided he wanted to have that kind of equanimity, where he could stand up to anyone without fear. His motivation was to smash through his fear and defeat it, so he found a teacher and started taking kung fu lessons. Although this teacher was almost sadistically rough on his students, he had a certainty that seduced Mark, who longed for that kind of certainty. Mark practiced with a fervor that was close to religious obsession and gradually became good at kung fu. He also felt the comfort and power of being part of something bigger.

But he still had the fear of being weak, powerless, and afraid. So he tried to make himself impervious to pain by forcefully going against his fears. He hoped his efforts would give him an instantaneous lightning-bolt transformation, one that would result in calmness and certainty. But in spite of going up against his fears over and over again—doing things such as walking two miles to school in the snow in bare feet—his fear and sense of groundlessness remained. Eventually, he became disillusioned with his sadistic teacher's cruel methods. Discouraged, he turned to marijuana, which seemed at the time to be a much easier way to achieve equanimity, but he soon saw that his pot smoking was just another means of avoidance and escape. Eventually, he managed to find a genuine martial arts teacher, who taught him that kung fu was not about violence and power. When he finally stopped trying to get away from the feeling of powerlessness, he gradually learned that he didn't have to have certainty and control to feel equanimity.

M
ARK
P.

Mark P. was a gay man who was raised in a very religious community. As a youth, when he realized that he might be gay, he
was frightened, particularly because in his community homosexuality was considered a terrible sin. He did everything possible to avoid his fear of being gay, of being himself. For example, he tried to push sexual thoughts from his mind by reciting lines from the Bible. He eventually became an evangelical preacher, preaching to thousands of people all over the world on the merits of avoiding evil thoughts and acts. But he continued to feel an anxious quiver inside, because his attempts at virtue were primarily a way of trying to get away from himself and from the creeping feeling of groundlessness.

He learned to fast periodically and continued exerting discipline over his thoughts by replacing sexual thoughts with pious ones. He made it his mission to reform other homosexuals, and from this he felt certainty and a sense of power—from the adrenaline rush of preaching to hundreds of converts. Apparently successful at repressing his fears of being gay, he eventually got married and had a child. Still, he would occasionally break out in sweats and trembling—and finally had a breakdown. In the end, his years of repression fell apart, and it became crystal clear to him that he was in fact gay and that this was never going to change.

Yet he was still tortured about what to do about it. When he finally announced publicly that he was gay, his relatives and friends universally rejected him. When he told his young son, his son became very angry with him and cried, asking, “Why can't you be normal?” But when Mark P. also cried and said he'd tried very hard to be different but couldn't change, his son finally understood and said, “It's just like with me—I'm short and no matter how hard I try, I'll always be short.” This interaction with his son was instrumental in enabling Mark to fully accept himself. He realized that what we resist will persist, and when he finally accepted himself for who he was and stopped trying to
control his fate, he found some peace of mind. He eventually found a male partner and led a normal life as a gay man.

Mark's example may sound extreme, but are our personal strategies that much different? Mark P., like Mark S., was trying to get away from himself, to change himself, and to overcome his feelings of powerlessness and groundlessness. Aren't we all trying to do that to some extent? Mark P. used the discipline of pushing away his thoughts and behavior and relied on the feeling of certainty about the validity of his religious path. It's worth asking ourselves, “Do we have a similar attachment to our own spiritual beliefs and discipline, relying on them to give us a sense of control and certainty?” That kind of certainty solidifies our “story” about who we are and what life is—it gives us a sense of solid ground. Yet all the while we're using our discipline to try to get away from ourselves and our fears, particularly our fear of powerlessness. As with both Mark S. and Mark P., it is good fortune when the inevitable disappointment of following a strategy like this brings us back to the genuine path.

J
OE

Joe was a young Mexican man who was also born into a religious home. He remembered his early childhood as being happy and warm. Then, when he was seven, his mother got very sick and died. At that point his father began to beat him mercilessly and repeatedly. Joe was too afraid to fight back and felt powerless, until one day, after his father cracked his ribs and gave him a concussion, Joe took a knife and stabbed his father, almost murdering him. He said this act finally made him feel powerful.

He then took up a life of crime, robbing many banks and enjoying the feeling of power over others that came from holding a gun. Often he would feel panic before the robberies, but
then he would conjure up memories of his childhood abuse to reignite his rage, and that would give him the feeling of power he needed and some temporary solace from his panic and fear. He felt high on his life of crime and also a sense of certainty in what he was doing—just the opposite of the powerlessness he was running away from. He said he wanted to be an Übermensch—a superman—and even when he was eventually caught and put in prison, he joined the toughest gang. Then, at one point, he was put into solitary confinement for two years. The darkness and isolation broke through his false veneer of power, and he lost all sense of solid ground. His ego fragmented, and he literally fell apart, realizing that he was not an Übermensch at all but instead a person who was very frightened and vulnerable.

After this he could no longer go back to his strategy of violence, and he began reflecting on his childhood, remembering that he had once been innocent and gentle. In order to heal his rage, he began to write about his life. Eventually, when he got out of prison, he became a journalist and tried to atone for the remorse he felt at hurting others, such as the female teller who'd been so afraid when he held up the bank where she was working that she peed on herself. He finally realized that the false certainty he'd once felt had prevented him from experiencing real humility, and from this experience of groundlessness he eventually found genuine peace of mind.

Joe didn't have an awareness practice as we know it, but he had the good fortune of being able to learn from his disappointment, particularly from his ordeal in solitary confinement, which had fragmented and dismantled his false stance of power. Sometimes we have to be forced to surrender to the great teaching of the helplessness of the loss of control—something we'd never do willingly.

H
ANS

Hans was a German political activist. His mother, who was Jewish and had been in a concentration camp, killed herself when he was an infant. As a result, he was raised by foster parents and remembered having had a happy childhood until he was nine. However, at that point, whenever he'd see his father, who was a policeman and an anti-Semite, his father would beat him. Then one day he saw policemen beating a women and her children, and his whole idealized image of his father and of the police as protectors fell apart. At that point he became a political activist, trying to right the wrongs he witnessed during the 1970s. He said that Germans had ignored the evil of Hitler and shouldn't continue to ignore present-day evils. He felt he had to do something to overcome his feeling of powerlessness. Gradually he became more and more active, and more and more violent. When one of his fellow activists died in prison, he became intoxicated with rage. He became a terrorist, a guerilla, and rose high in the ranks. He became a colleague of Carlos the Jackal, perhaps the world's most famous terrorist before Osama bin Laden. Hans said that when he held a gun in his hands, he no longer felt powerless; instead he felt like he ruled heaven and earth.

Then one day, during a violent kidnapping attempt, three innocent people were shot and killed, and he, too, was shot. Although he was considered a hero by his friends, he experienced tremendous remorse for what he was doing. He realized that he was becoming worse than those he opposed, that all his ideals had turned upside down, and that he felt truly groundless. Once drunk on power and certainty, he now felt devastated by the consequences of his actions. He went into hiding, chased by both the police and the terrorists; but out of remorse for what he had done, he wrote to the newspapers, divulging future terrorist
plots. After twenty-five years in hiding he was caught and went to prison, but by then he was a changed man. He experienced tremendous remorse for the suffering he had caused, seeing through his prior certainty for the sham it was—a dodge to avoid his own feelings of powerlessness. As a result of his experience of groundlessness and his remorse for what he had done, he was able to make sincere efforts to live more honestly and genuinely.

Each of these four men had his own unique journey, but we can notice our own parallel tendencies. When we don't like who we are and make efforts to try to change ourselves, are we really different from these four men? We, too, have an aversion to feeling a lack of control, and we, too, choose strategies that give us a false sense of power and certainty. Although these four men's lives may seem very different from ours, recent world events continue to remind us how precarious life is for all of us. Normally we're so insulated, maintaining such a narrow view of things, that we glide through life on automatic pilot, ignoring the sense of how thin the ice beneath us really is. Like these four men, we try to avoid the anxious quiver inside of us by manipulating our world to make it feel safe, secure, and comfortable. We particularly want to avoid the feelings of groundlessness, uncertainty, and loss of control.

It's very difficult for us to accept the reality that life is not subject to our control—that it is always changing. Much of our suffering arises when we resist this reality. The inherent groundlessness of life as it is—of the changing and impermanent nature of things—makes us feel very uncomfortable. Thus we try mightily to put ground under our feet. We pretend we're in control, in the same way that the steersman in a rowboat thinks he's in control of his boat. He moves his rudder and to some extent he can determine where his boat will go. But he forgets
that the stream is going at its own speed and that there may well be unknown twists and turns and rapids ahead. Like him, we may occasionally realize that we're not in control, but as soon as our boat hits the quiet waters, we fall back into the illusion that we can control what happens. We simply don't want to feel the uncertainty and groundlessness that this illusion attempts to cover over.

But when the external world seems like it's falling apart, such as with the threat of global financial instability, mass shootings, or the seeming inability of government to address critical issues such as genocide, world hunger, global warming, or even the budget—it can feel as if we've fallen right into the icy water, with little control over events in our life. It's easy to feel lost and groundless in these times, and we may not see how our spiritual practice can be quite relevant. Hopefully we understand that it's not worthwhile to indulge in anger or blame, or to wring our hands over the horrible state of things. Yet dense and intense emotional reactions can leave us feeling lost and overwhelmed. Talking with others or taking some kind of action may seem to relieve our distress, but despite any valuable function this may serve, it can also act as a cover-up, keeping us from feeling what none of us wants to feel—the helplessness of the loss of control.