Think By Design

A few years back, I was at a men’s retreat with my dad.  One of the activities was to climb a 30-foot pole (like a telephone pole), climb onto a 1′x2′ platform, stand up, and jump for a trapeze bar a few feet away.  Having donned a harness and a helmet (safety first!), I climbed the pole with no problem.  Getting onto the platform – problem.  A 30-foot pole with me on top tends to wiggle.  There’s nothing to hold onto, every ounce of body fat seems to get in the way, and in most cases you have little choice but to be looking down while doing it.  I could get one foot onto the platform, but just didn’t have the strength in the right places to pull the other one up.  After a couple of attempts, my toe caught on the edge, I lost my balance, and pitched off to the side.  As I was lowered down by the safety line/harness (thankful I had adjusted it correctly!), a defense mechanism kicked in.

I wanted to “succeed”.  I didn’t want to “fail”.  I wanted to protect my ego.  So, I redefined success from standing on the top or catching the suspended bar to “doing my best” and getting as far as I could.  I did this to protect my ego from “failure”, and even as I did it, I knew there was an element of denial and self-deception at work.  I knew it was a lie.  I had failed. Yes, I did my best, and more than most people would try.  But this was not how I had defined success when setting my  intention – and expectation.  I had “redefined” it retro-actively once I knew the outcome. I even remember telling my dad that I had learned that when you re-define success to whatever outcome is achieved, then you are always successful.  It does avoid some pain, but at the cost of deeper truth.

To the extent that we define success according to things we don’t control, success is also beyond our control. 

Most of the time, success is defined as a goal or milestone.  Get the job done.  Make it happen.  Are we there, yet?  The truth is that every goal I can imagine has elements that we don’t control.  The actions of others, the butterfly effect, even the chemistry of our own brains and bodies.  A billion different factors come into play, yet if the criteria for success are met, we generally take credit.  If not, we start looking for one of those factors to blame, or ignore them to blame ourselves.

As a fallback, we may define success as a direction.  But, try walking against the wind in a hurricane, or improving a marriage when one partner would rather not.  It’s perhaps easier and more likely to succeed, but still relies on complicit factors beyond our control.  Even intentions are subject to brain chemistry and psychological health.

In it’s purest sense, the only success we can truly have is “to be”.  To exist as we are.  Even acceptance of “what is” over what we want is a success that relies on the complex web of interactions we call “past experience”.

But, we still find that we need the traditional concepts of success.  We need them to communicate, to organize, and to motivate – both ourselves and others.  In order to meet the practical needs and aspects of life, we have to enter that fantasy world of milestones, goals, directions, intentions, and all the make-believe that comes with it.  For all it’s illusory and fictitious nature, it is still useful – even necessary.

My advice, though, is not to confuse it with reality.  Apply it where it works and suspend it where it doesn’t.  Set goals with the knowledge that they are an imaginary construct useful for accomplishing things that are just as non-real and illusory, but just as useful.  As a result, we can release the strings that tie ego to the success or failure of these useful illusions.  Accept the you that “is”, absent of any criteria and what must be borrowed to even apply them.  They aren’t really yours, anyway.

So, given the chance, I will attempt to climb another 30′ pole, stand on another 1′x2′ platform, and jump for another bar.  I may “succeed”, and I may “fail”.  Or perhaps I will suspend both and give myself over to experience and truly live.

Dualism is a term used to describe the act of separating experiences or things into two groups: good and bad.  Different people use different criteria for sorting things into these groups, so you might recognize them more as right and wrong, good and evil, dark and light, black and white, desirable and undesirable, friend and enemy, or something like that.  In reality, most of us also have a third category which is neutral, or perhaps we see it as a spectrum where something can be some mix of the two, but even that is a result of measuring the thing against some dualistic standard.

So, if dualism roughly equates to right and wrong, and I’m suggesting that we dump dualism, then am I suggesting that there is no right and wrong, no morality, or that we must each determine for ourselves what is right and wrong (aka. moral relativism)?  Well, no.  (Even moral relativism is itself a dualistic perspective, just one that is determined by each individual for themselves rather than according to some standard.)

In order to understand what I’m suggesting, it is important to realize that dualism – any form of it – is a tool that we use to label things in our experience.  It is a frame of reference, or filter, that we place over our experience.  The difference between a good day and a bad day is how I apply dualistic measures to the things that happened in that day.  You might agree that my day was good or bad after hearing my experience, but only if we apply similar dualistic filters.  (One person may see adversity as a setback where another sees a growth opportunity or a challenge.)  And the same day that was bad for me might have been really good for you.  Certainly, then, dualism has its uses when we are trying to communicate our perspective to somebody else, but most of us live our lives enslaved to our dualism.

For most of us, a bad day doesn’t make us happy, secure, and optimistic.  For most of us, the dualistic labels that we apply to things reinforce, or even determine, how we experience them, and justify the actions that we take as a result.  For example, let’s assume that a person learns that their partner has cheated on them.  For most people, the immediate result is anger (from betrayal), shame (from powerlessness), rejection (of value), fear (of loss or isolation), and a lot of other things.  Note that each of these emotional response are the product of our dualistic interpretation of what happened – the partner had an intimate relationship with somebody else.  Note the difference between “they had an intimate relationship with somebody else” and “That #$^& @!%^ cheated on me!”  Some might react from religious dualism Christians and say, “They have sinned against me and against God, violating the sanctity of marriage!”  On the other hand, the other person in the affair might simply say, “Wow, that was totally awesome!!”.

In each case, the difference between what happened and how it is experienced by each person is a dualistic filter.  Are these filters wrong?  No (that would be a dualistic filter about dualistic filters).  They simply highlight a particular set of interpretations in isolation of all others.  Depending on how closely our filters match each of these people, we might identify with one or more of their perspectives.  Sometimes those filters are useful.  They can help us communicate, and motivate us to take action or make changes.

But, they are not always useful.  If our filters are too different, they can impede communication.  When they are rigidly applied across the board they tend to prevent growth and insight, and in some cases result in serious fallout.  Consider the dualistic filter that we often apply to addiction – that it is primarily a moral failing to be cured through punishment rather than a physiological condition to be treated as such.  The shame and isolation that often result from applying this filter to this situation is often devastating and  has prevented addicts from seeking recovery, or even admitting its existence.  The point here is not what you and I believe about addiction, but that not all filters are applicable to all situations.  They have an affect, but not always one that leads us to a greater understanding of reality.

Sometimes a filter is applied where it doesn’t really fit, and something good happens.  That’s called “luck”.  It’s no guarantee that it will work out well the next time around.  If we like the filter (maybe it makes us “right” and others “wrong” more often), we tend to say it worked when we get lucky, and blame something else when we don’t.

And then, there is “going commando”.  Observing an event without applying a filter.  Drink it straight and drink it all.  In the case of our victim of infidelity, this would mean stepping back and observing that “my partner had an intimate relationship with somebody else” … and then stopping.  Like a frozen moment in time.  The filter has not yet been applied and all options are still on the table.  Rather than being propelled into a state of shame, blame, and revenge, you are free to choose your course, your filter. You could instead choose compassion for the partner who is trying to meet a need (probably without success).  You could begin with the position that shame has no value in your life, and look for a deeper meaning where you are not the victim, or perhaps you decide that your most appropriate course of action is to throw a drink in their face, stomp on their toe, and move out.  Certainly if there is the threat of violence, creating distance might be a very wise move.

The point, though, is that once you have discarded dualism as the only way to see the world (or just your own pet filters), a range of possibilities suddenly open up, and you will find that you have more energy to perform the actions you do choose.  You will have more emotional reserves to draw upon, and you will experience less frustration and stress.  (BTW, frustration and stress are pretty good indicators that your current set of filters are somehow inappropriate to the situation, maybe a little or a lot.)

It’s not always possible to know the correct filters to use in a given situation.  In some cases you may not have one that works, and this is where dualism dumping has the most value.  Don’t apply a filter.  Simply be present with the event and allow it to be what it is, and accept it as such.  The filters we learned growing up, how we learned to apply them, and the events we encounter all help determine how easy or hard it will be to step back and disassociate from our filters, to realize that my filters don’t define me, but that I define my filters.  However difficult it is for you, or however late in life you are coming to the realization is OK.  You don’t finish a race until you’ve run it and each runner’s experience is their own.

So, start by listening to your own thoughts and feelings, and relaxing when you want to pass judgment.  Just observe, and be present with yourself and your own mind.  Then, practice extending what you learn to the world around you.