 The
birth of the de-centered self can be profoundly disorienting, it is
transcendental and often involves a heightened sense of awareness and
connection. The analytical 'localized' self can find it fragile,
frightening and impossible to grasp...There is a sense of being present
to what is seeking to emerge, with intentionality. If you follow your
nature enough, if you follow your nature as it moves, if you follow so
far that you really let go, then you find that you're actually the
original being, the original way of being. The original being knows
things and acts, does things in its own [intuitive?] way. It actually
has a great intention to be itself, and it will do so if you just let
it. (-- from the book Presence, chapter on Letting Go, Letting Come)
Those who advise people to follow their passion, no matter where it leads, are believers in intentionality*. Many meditation programs
that advise that imagining 'success', what one wants to happen, is the
first step towards its realization, are believers in intentionality
(the second step, they will tell you, is acting in accordance). Those who will tell you that having the courage to 'real-ize' what you were always intended to be and do, by living on the Edge beyond the reach of civilization's safety net,
is the only sane way to live, the only hope for us as individuals and
as a culture, are believers in intentionality. And so are the 'power of
positive thinking' and 'appreciative inquiry' proponents.
With all these different groups of people advocating intentionality as the catalyst for Let-Self-Change,
and as something that has almost mystical power of direction and
self-realization, why is it that most of us remain so skeptical that
intentionality is either a sufficient or necessary condition for
realization of anything? Have our hopes and dreams been shattered so
often by harsh reality that we no longer believe that aspiration
matters? Does power, influence, money, ruthlessness, deceitfulness,
have more to do with successful achievement than knowing what you want
and having the passion and sense of purposefulness and
single-mindedness to pursue it, even against all odds?
It is
hard, sometimes, not to come to this conclusion. We watch corrupt
politicians with enormously powerful and wealthy connections steal
elections. We watch horrifically destructive mega-polluters lie and
deny in hugely influential media, media that they have bought with
their ill-gotten gains. We watch corporate, political and celebrity
criminals literally getting away with murder. We watch churches and
other social organizations turned into astonishingly effective
propaganda arms of devious extremist political groups, in both affluent
and struggling nations. We watch psychopathic fear-mongers trump
impassioned voices of reason in the war for public opinion. It is easy
to get discouraged, to believe that mere intentionality, no matter how
impassioned, rational, altruistic and intuitively sensible it may be,
is no match for the clout of those that care about nothing, that seek
only the soulless acquisition of even more wealth and power, for its
own sake.
But then we realize that, in today's immensely complex
world, where the levers of power are increasingly ineffective against
multitudinous and asymmetric opponents, and where neither social nor
ecological systems can be managed, predicted, analyzed, or even
significantly steered, no one is in control.
Our world is like a vehicle accelerating ahead on its own momentum and
careening wildly from side to side, with no braking or steering
mechanism available to the powerful bullies and rich gamblers who still
believe themselves to be in the driver's seat. The rich and powerful
are failing in nine out of every ten things they try to do. Their
attempts to gain popular support are universally backfiring in the
court of public opinion, as the truth comes out despite their
machinations to obscure it. Every time they think they have a new ploy
or a new technology that will accomplish their goals, its
implementation instead creates a dozen new unforeseeable problems that
they cannot constrain or even influence, and which takes them even
farther from their intended objective.
And we realize, too, that the only person who has influence over our personal ability to Let-Self-Change is us,
the lonely, disconnected bag of skin and organs that is the individual.
To the extent we let others make our decisions for us, that too is
ultimately our choice. And
even though our minds are principally in the service of the organisms
that comprise our body, and our decisions are mostly made instinctively
and subconsciously by them for their benefit, still we have significant
influence over what we do.
The word intention literally means stretching toward. The word aspiration means breathing toward.
We have the capacity to do these things, to take ourselves away from a
life of learned helplessness and addiction to consumption and debt,
from relationships that are abusive and stifling, from the ruts we have
stuck ourselves in. We have
the capacity, by first imagining better possibilities and then by
stretching and breathing towards them, to become someone different,
someone real-izing those better possibilities.
I
believe that my Gift and my Passion and my Genius is imagining those
possibilities and helping others to imagine them for themselves. That
is why I'm here, in this world where so many live in horrific
imaginative poverty, live their entire lives so narrowly, so 'safely',
with such little variety of experience that they cannot conceive or
perceive of what they are missing, of what underlies the terrible
emptiness that they instinctively feel inside.
What people do
with the possibilities I help them imagine is not really my business. I
am here only to unlock the doors. What I am learning, though, is that
it is easier to imagine possibilities for others than to enable them
to imagine those possibilities for themselves. It is like trying to
describe a life of freedom to someone who has spent their whole life in
a prison -- to them it is frightening. What must it take for such a
person to suddenly acknowledge and come to grips with the poverty of
their entire life, the shame of not knowing that there was so much
more, the agoraphobia of the vast outside, and especially the
humiliating realization that all this time the key to escape the prison
was in their possession?
I
am, of course, my own first and worst customer, still hovering at the
exit doors, trying the key again and again and being astonished that it
opens so easily, that there is nothing holding me back except me. How much safer and more comfortable it is for me to instead show others the keys in their possession, and to tell stories of how they could be living outside the prison that is their lives!
I convince myself that I am still at the Let-Self-Be-Aware
stage that precedes Let-Self-Change. I'm thinking and planning and
imagining and worrying. Like all those I'm goading to free themselves
to real-ize their possibilities, I'm afraid to let go. I'm stretching toward and
breathing toward becoming someone different, but I'm terrified of what
lies ahead, outside. I want someone else to go first, and pull me out
with them, make my Let-Self-Change somehow partly their responsibility. Don't try to do anything alone, I keep admonishing others, using my own advice as my excuse for holding back, for not real-ly intending to Let-Self-Change. Break the large, imposing tasks down into manageable chunks, I tell everyone, and take it one small step at a time -- that's the key to intentionality.
But there are steps and there are steps, and the important steps, even the small ones, are bold ones, with no turning back.
These are the steps that we only take when we must, when we have no
alternative, when the pain of going forward is less than the pain of
staying where we are. Those who profit from our inaction, our lack of
true intentionality, our fear, are counting (with good reason) on the
fact that, for most of us, we have not yet reached that tipping point
when we must act, must
Let-Self-Change. They keep us distracted and addicted and comfortable
enough with our prison life that escaping is never urgent enough.
My
weblog is, more than anything else, a diary for talking myself into
practicing what I preach, for convincing myself that I must act. Help convince me, it says to my readers, who are impatiently hoping for me to convince them. How to be a model, I write. Won't somebody be a model for me, I am asking, to those who want and rightfully expect me, the advocate of Let-Self-Change, to be the model for them.
My audience is dwindling as so many get tired of all-talk, no-action.
So we sit here, by the exit doors of the prison, talking about
possibilities and trying to talk each other into real change, to make each other bold.
But despite what the self-help pundits of all stripes say, intention is not enough. We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun. We are not yet persuaded that we must take that first bold no-turning-back step, and we know that step won't be easy and that it may not be fun.
We
will only leave the prison when someone, probably inadvertently, with
the best of intentions, or accidentally, sets it on fire. Maybe that's
what we're all waiting for.
* The discipline of
philosophy has appropriated this word and given it a limited, passive
meaning of 'aboutness'. I mean it instead in the sense of
'purposefulness' -- having an intention. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
