Ever Forward

I once knew a man named Creed. Just Creed. Creed was a dreadlocked,
African American, handmade-conga-playing veteran of the Vietnam War. I
never saw him when he wasn't wearing spandex pants, and fringe-lined,
calf-length buckskin moccasins. Usually, he wore a pony express cowboy
hat with crossed rifles pinned to the upturned brim, and a buckskin
jacket with foot-long fringe on the back and sleeves. Creed once told
me something I've never forgotten, something I've gone back to more
times than I can count in the fifteen years since the conversation:

"Be what you are or go home, baby."

A great deal of struggle and suffering in life comes from the
inability to let yourself be what you are. But you have to do it.
Before you can change, or improve, or establish goals, you have to
experience yourself as you are. To do that, you have to be able to
laugh at yourself.

It's very interesting that the word humor shares common roots with the
word humility. Humility is this: simple residence in what is, with a
constantly expanding view of it. If you can't laugh at what you see
when you look at yourself you'll never look. And if you never look,
you'll never know who you really are. Your dreams will die and your life
will slip past, un-lived.

As you grow in humility, in the ability to laugh at yourself, you come
into fuller contact with stuff to laugh at. Some of it might not seem
funny. Some of it might be very difficult. But as your humility
deepens, you will be able to accept it as true. It's there, like it or
not. Accepting it helps you manage it. Rejecting it, pretending it's
not there, leaves it loose in your being, free to wreak havoc. It can
show up in how you treat others, how you are in relationships, how you
deal with responsibility, how you go about your job. Mostly it just
pollutes how you feel about life.

Fortunately, the alternative is awesomeness. I mean the true meaning
of that word, not the pop-culture meaning -- although I mean it in
that way, too. Being what you are means revealing a unique brand of
awesomeness. For some reason this makes us afraid. We'd like to be
awesome, but awesome according to accepted standards, not
ground-breaking awesome. There's too much risk in that. And yet we
are, each of us, awesome in our own way.

The most awesome people you meet take themselves very lightly. They
just let it be true. That builds an inner momentum that can't be
stopped. It's the best definition of detachment I can think of: the
ability to laugh at yourself. What is detachment but the ability to
not get hung up on details? Just let it be true. Any attempt to
penetrate the now, to simply be, means developing the ability to
experience what you find when you get there. If you cling to the
details it will be unbearable. But if you can laugh you'll become ever
more comfortable in the now, ever more ready to wrestle
with your fears, ever more able to work with your weaknesses.

Ever more humble in your awesomeness.

Eventually, the now will feel like home. And so will being awesome.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

As a navigational term, attitude refers to the orientation of a craft,
an airplane for example, to a particular point of reference, like, say
the runway. A bad attitude can mean a crash landing. In it's origins,
attitude is connected to the word aptitude, which means "general
suitability."

More broadly, attitude is how you go about life. It's the sum total of
all you have learned and experienced, coming together to provide the
basis for your response to a given situation. It's your angle of
approach, your posture, your orientation to a particular point of
reference.

Your attitude is a crucial influence on how you experience reality.
What you get when you enter a circumstance is almost always a
reflection of how you entered, what you brought in with you. Entering
a situation is like coming in for a landing. In life as in air travel,
a dysfunctional attitude can lead to trouble.

Too often, attitude is involuntary, unconscious. We operate on
autopilot. It's bad news if a plane tries to land on autopilot. No
less so for people. If we enter into circumstances from a bad
direction, we're in for a hard time. Attitude can be very subtle so
regular evaluation is very important to understanding why we
experience life as we do.

Pilots have instruments for this evaluation, and if they don't use
them landing the plane can be tricky. People have instruments, too:
the memory, intellect and will. Clutter in these faculties gums up the
perspective and causes problems with your angle of approach. Once
you're in a difficult spot it's hard to get out, because of the
clutter in your instruments. With a distorted attitude you just don't
see clearly, you can't perceive the truth, so you can't act
accordingly.

The goal is a habitually useful attitude. It doesn't have to be rosy
or constantly cheerful. Realistic is much better. But realism has to
allow for the miraculous and the extraordinarily positive, or it's not
realism. A realistic attitude factors in all possibilities as
legitimate and therefore allows you to genuinely apply energy toward
positive goals.

An attitude check is a simple choice: how will I address this person?
How will I deal with this situation? How will I handle this adversity?
When attitude becomes uncontrollable, when you can't adjust it, there
is work to do. The application of faith helps clear away fear and
fantasy about the future which affect how you meet the present. The
application of hope clears out regret, anger or humiliation about the
past, which also affect how you engage right now. The application of
love starts the ball rolling by firing up the will to make a change in
attitude.

The best attitude is the myth mind. With the myth mind, everything
becomes a quest, an adventure. You start to set goals with an
eagerness about working toward them. The task of clearing the debris
from your memory, intellect and will is itself an adventure that
requires a mythical understanding. Imagine yourself as an abandoned
space ship with monsters lurking onboard. You have to clear out the
junk, kill the monsters and take control of the bridge. Do you want to
get off the planet of insecurity and negative inner experience and
head for more prosperous regions? Then you must decide to undertake
the task of taking back your ship, and set about it with a stout heart
and a willingness to struggle.

Simplistic but useful.

And with the will cleared of debris, the myth mind can function as the
primary navigational tool in life. Myth mind seeks the adventure of
the now, and recognizes that the now is always an adventure. Where
ever you are, whatever you're doing, you're up to your neck in
adventure because you are trying to achieve something, something
great, and nothing that happens to you is unconnected from that goal.
Getting out of bed is the next thing on the list of items that will
land you that perfect job, or that sense of peace. Do it. Do it well
because how well you do it determines the outcome of your dreams.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

"Good King Wenceslas" is a Christmas carol written by John Mason
Neale. It's based on the life of Wenceslaus the First, Duke of
Bohemia, who lived in the tenth century.

Metaphorically, Wenceslas is Jesus. Like the story of Jesus, the song
is a portrayal of transformation with deep insight into the inner
workings of reality. Like the teachings of Jesus the song reaches down
into the mythic structures of basic human experience -- the place
where the demands of life are revealed to be life giving.

The song tells the story of a king and his page who venture the winter
night to bring gifts of basic comfort to a poor man. They spotted the
man gathering firewood far from home on St. Stephen's Day, the day
after Christmas, and along their journey to reach the man's house, the
king's page is overwhelmed:

"Sire the night is darker now,
and the wind blows stronger.
Fails my heart, I know not how,
I can go no longer."

It's not a complaint. It's a simple observation of the reality of his
situation, which is radically different from complaining. The words
read like a prayer. The page is standing in the truth, the only place
in which real prayer can happen, and the only place from which
transformation is possible. His circumstances have driven him into
consciousness in a way the comforts and safety of the king's castle
never could. Out there, in the snowy woods, the page finds
opportunity.

Here's a line-by-line translation from the song, turning poetry to
prose. First, the king's reply:

"Mark my footsteps, good my page."
Translation: Remember that I've walked this ground, too. I've felt
what you feel. See, those are my footprints. Remember what I've taught
you and do what I do.

"Tread thou in them boldly."
Translation: Give it all you've got. We're on an errand of love. Trust in that.

"You will find the winter's rage freeze thy blood less coldly."
Translation: Life can be hard and that's just how it is. But if you
love as I do, you'll find strength, creativity, good cheer. You have
to do it to understand.

And the resultant miracle:

"In his master's steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted."
Translation: The page went for it.

"Heat was in the very sod, that the saint had printed."
Translation: It worked.

If love is the efficacious desire for the well being of another, the
good king has nailed it. And so has the page. The key here is that one
line, "tread thou in them boldly." That's the "efficacious" part. You
do what it takes. With that in hand, the storm cannot stop you. Love
transforms and from it springs extraordinary possibility. In the
struggles of life, commit acts of love. The amazing will happen.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

Cluttered memory and intellect result in problematic patterns of
thought and behavior. With debris piled up in these faculties, we
start out on the wrong foot and things get worse from there. If you
can't perceive a situation clearly, you can't manage it effectively.
When the very mechanisms by which you perceive and respond to reality
are cluttered with distortion, you can't possibly achieve your dreams.
It will be very difficult even to know what your dream is.

The will is crucial to taking control of your situation. You must
work. You must act. You must undertake the process of healing, of
unlocking your dreams. This happens by engaging in reality. You do
that by going where reality lives: the now. The will is the faculty by
which you return to the now. From there, and only from there, you can
address the clutter in all three parts of your perspective.

But the will itself can contain impediments to its own effectiveness.
Acts of faith and hope meet with resistance when the will itself needs
cleaning out. Two examples of clutter relevant to the will are slave
mindedness and blaming. Slave mindedness is when you insist you are
trapped by your circumstances. Blaming is when you spend too much time
trying to identify the source of your obstacles while doing nothing to
change them. You always have a choice, and understanding your clutter
is just another form of clutter if you do nothing about it.

More broadly, clutter is anything that hinders communication and full
life. If it provides you with a reason to linger in the past or
fantasize (in a positive or negative way) about the future, it is
clutter and it will have negative effects on your life and your
day-to-day experience. Identifying your obstacles is crucial. And
understanding their origins can be helpful in devising a strategy for
dealing with them. But clearing away the clutter is the important
thing and anything that hinders that is the result of a distorted,
distracted will.

The accompanying discipline for this is love.

Acts of love can only take place in the now. The old theological
definition of love is "the efficacious desire for the well being of
another." That should be expanded to include yourself, but efficacious
means you do something about it. A real act of love cannot be
mindless. It can't be distracted. As a discipline for adjusting your
experience, the act has to occur in the now, without reference to the
past or future -- that means you do it for the sake of doing it, not
for some purpose of gain.

As you perpetrate acts of love, real love, you will grow in the habit.
That means you will habitually find yourself in the now, because
that's where love happens. The clarifying effect this has on your
perspective is a happy byproduct. There is an almost chemical effect
when you start exercising love. It begins to dispel self doubt. It
instills confidence (eventually). It overpowers fear, ascribes
purpose, creates balance, and above all enables you to perceive
yourself, and others, as you and they really are, but without
judgement. Love and judgement cannot coexist in the same perspective.
In place of judgement (which is the final justification for all
distortion and the destination toward which all distortion tends),
love injects compassion and forgiveness, empathy and conscience, which
themselves have a vivifying effect on the perspective.

Fueled by the momentum love generates, faith and hope become more
possible, more sensible, more effective. The world becomes a place of
possibility as well as of trial. The truth of things, the luster of
reality, begins to reveal itself amid the twisted demon faces of
fearful experience. The true substrate of reality becomes perceivable
and invites the will deeper in. The will meanwhile becomes more and
more capable of love, more and more inclined to it, and begins to
reverse the cycle of fear-begets-fear to a new cycle of
love-begets-love.

The masters have always taught this. Love is a force of energy, an
aspect of reality, a process found in nature every bit as actual as
osmosis, gravity, or the fusion at the heart of the sun. Once
unleashed, love splinters into myriad benefits each with it's own
special effect on the world, on reality, on experience. And it all
begins with the will.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

The degree to which hope is present in the perspective is determined
by the experience of the past. In the three-part model of memory,
intellect and will, memory is the place where all experience is
contained and "remembered." Remembering can be actual remembrance, but
more often it takes the shape of unnoticed thought patterns or
behavior. It's the impression or echo of past experience repeated in
our current interactions with reality.

Distortions of the memory fall into two categories. First, the memory
can be filled with actual negative or damaging experiences. More
insidious are the potentially neutral or even positive experiences
that were distorted as they came in through the cluttered intellect
and stored in the memory as negative. In this way, self hate begets
self hate. Self doubt begets self doubt. This ongoing distortion is an
after effect of genuine negative experience. It's like a reverberation
taking place in the perspective and it continues to run on until we do
something about it.

Hope is the discipline by which the clutter of the memory is cleared
out. By exercising hope you can redirect the energy of your mind in a
positive direction, a constructive direction that leads to peace and
prosperity. In this respect, hope pertains to the past, because your
outlook is based on past experience.

It's very important to distinguish hope from hopes. Hope can save your
life. Hopes can kill you. But hope is there to keep you grounded with
respect to particular hopes because it's a means of relating to
distinct possibilities. If you're trying to get a job, you have a
particular hope. If you don't relate to this hope in a constructive
way, you'll not only be devastated if you don't get the job, but your
experience of life up until that moment will be grounded in an
illusion, and therefore pass you by. By applying the discipline of
hope, as opposed to entertaining hopes, you take stock of your
attitude and ensure that it is not being influenced by past
experiences. You hope for the best, for a particular outcome, without
investing in it your identity or sense of well being.

Where faith is like a method for navigation, hope is more of a
particular point on the map. Where faith is a preparedness and
willingness for whatever comes, hope pertains more to the specifics,
it's a response to a particular detail. So, for example, when taking a
road trip, you would exercise faith because you don't know how to get
where you're going, and you would exercise hope because you've only
got a quarter tank of gas. You really need to make this trip, just
like you really need to live your life, so you organize your emotional
approach and go for it.

And that's what this three-part model is for: organizing your
emotional approach, clarifying your perspective, knowing where you're
coming from, working with what you've got. Of course there is a lot of
overlap between faith and hope. You can always use the butt of a screw
driver to drive a nail, or the claw of a hammer to open a paint can.
But regarding faith and hope as tools, each with their own best use,
can be amazingly helpful.

Although hope is a means of organizing your relationship with the past
so that it does not hamper your future, it does this by helping you
reenter the now. The future does not flow from the past. The future
flows from right now. That's why it's so important, more important
than anything, to be grounded. No matter how bright your prospects all
you really have is right now. The truth is, the future does not exist
no matter how well you prepare for it.

Real preparation, really aiming for your targets in life requires a
clear understanding of who you really are. With the discipline of hope
you can remove the hinderances of the past that clog the memory with
fear and doubt. This takes a burden off the future. It will leave you
focused, undistracted, quick to respond to opportunity and able to
recognize it when it comes. It will allow you to genuinely believe
that the best can happen and will leave you open to extraordinary
possibility. And it is not possible to be open to possibility, except
through hope in the now.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

The three parts of the perspective -- memory, intellect and will --
each have a corresponding discipline by which they can be cleared of
distortion. This is an idea from medieval patristic theology. Memory
is cleared by hope. Intellect is cleared by faith. Will is cleared by
love.

The distortions that clutter the intellect tend to pertain to the
future. Ideally, the intellect would be constantly occupied with the
now, but when it's cluttered with particles of fear or insecurity or
distracting desire it goes out of tune. Reality is always right now,
but the now seems to emerge from somewhere. Now. Now. Now. That
somewhere is the future.

A cluttered intellect is more concerned with the future than with the
now that emerges from it, because the clutter consists of harsh or
happy ideas of what the future might hold. The expectations we impose
on the emerging now are decorated with our ideas about the future and
shape our experience of life. If the intellect is cluttered with
negativity like self hate, self doubt, or fear for example, it will
stamp each new experience with these characteristics as it comes
through. This puts a negative hue on every experience we accumulate.

That's no way to live.

Even worse is that it happens unconsciously. It's just there having
its effect. It's amazingly subtle and works slowly, over time.
Unchecked it will lead to bad decisions, painful situations, repeated
patterns of abuse, neglect, complacency. It can perpetuate addiction
or simply result in a general immobility in life which creates basic
dissatisfaction. It can only be stopped on purpose and even then it
takes a long time to truly make the adjustment.

Enter faith.

Faith is a tool for altering the intellect so that it no longer
accumulates distorted versions of the emerging now, but the emerging
now as it really is. Faith is doing. Faith is a sense of adventure. It
means the willingness to experience the now as it is. The only way to
do that is to return to the now and directly face any pain, fear or
insecurity that lives there so that it doesn't create distortion.
That's what clutter and distortion of the intellect really are, after
all -- the difficult feelings that we leave unaddressed. They prevent
us from seeing things as they really are.

A cluttered intellect will get stuck in the future, mired in some
harsh or happy fantasy, leaving you ineffective. Faith is like a shout
from the now, a message from your full self, calling out to the
partial self in which you have become trapped. It says something like
"Hey! There's more to you than that fear you're feeling! Come back and
see for yourself!"

The key is belief in the possibility of another quality of experience,
belief in transformation through practice, and remembering your
strengths. It's more than just thinking positively. Positive thinking
has its place, but it can easily slip into denial or fantasy. Applying
faith means experiencing what is really going on for you, in truth,
here and now, and from that position of clear honest appraisal,
determining to evolve out of weakness into strength, out of distortion
into clarity, out of aimlessness into vision. Your full self, your
whole self begins to emerge and lead the way. You address your entire
perspective, the whole of your inner condition, not just some
particular situation. (Although particular situations do provide clues
for the work you need to do, they tend to be symptoms, effects of the
distortions of intellect that can no doubt be found all across your
experience if you look for them.)

Applying faith means you recognize the need to return to reality, to
what is, to what you can say for sure, even if that means saying "I
have no idea what's going on here." Applying faith means you detach
from this or that feared or desired outcome, do your very best, and
allow your situation to unfold. You proceed without an idea to rely on
recognizing that you just can't know the outcome.

This makes you more effective in coping with exigency, and it allows
for unforeseen or extraordinary possibility. You stand there willing,
ready to work with whatever turns out, diligently present in the now.
If there is fear or distracting desire, you remember that you cannot
know the future, so any notion of it is false. You recognize that the
impulse to flee the now is just a reaction to difficult feelings that
live there. If you stay and meet those feelings, you get your power
back. You become effective on your own behalf.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

Enhancing the sense of self is an act of housecleaning. With the
clutter removed, what remains is who you really are. Much of the
mental anguish we experience, the tension and anxiety, the lack of
well being -- the difficulties we face while finding our place in life
-- have their origins in this clutter.

The clutter consists of small invocations, diatribes even, intended to
get your attention. They pertain to four areas: yourself, others, the
past and the future. It's interesting about the now that it can never
be a thought. A thought about the now is not the now. So any time
there is thinking in your head that is not needed, for some task or
bit of recall, you are lost in clutter, you are elsewhere than in the
now.

Much of the time the clutter is painful. It may be a harsh memory or
some fear about the road ahead. But it can also be a simple fantasy, a
wish or hope that gains too much traction in your perspective. It's
helpful to consider the perspective in terms of three parts: the
memory, the intellect and the will.

The memory consists of all the experiences you've ever had. It is the
past, right up until one second ago. The intellect is the mechanism by
which those experiences are gathered in. First you perceive it with
the intellect, then it gets cached in the memory. The will is what you
do about the information you take in through the intellect.

Memory distorts the perspective by cluttering it with inaccuracies,
and recalling those inaccuracies in the form of memories: about
ourselves, about others, about the past, or about the future.
Intellect distorts the perspective by twisting experiences as they
happen. It is colored by distortions in the memory which contains
confused versions of experience. The will is what you do about your
situation at any given moment. With a distorted memory and intellect,
the will is misdirected with faulty information, and we behave badly
or in ways that do not serve us.

Much of the time all this happens without our knowledge because we
tend to live outside the now. While we're out, things get out of
control. Think of the mops and buckets in the Sorcerers Apprentice.
When the sorcerer steps out things go haywire. You are the sorcerer
and your life is this amazing, magical, powerful thing with no regard
for itself. It's up to you to manage it and you can't do that from
outside the wizard's tower of the now.

It all adds up to fallacy. Lies. About ourselves, about other people,
about the past, about the future. These lies come to make up our
perspective and we live cut off from reality, even while appearing to
be reasonably functional. But the lies reduce our access to the now,
the home of reality. The door closes on the only place where you can
find the truth about yourself, cultivate it and allow it to show, in
order to access the full range of your possibilities and experience
your Utter Self.

Imagine a world filled with Utter Selves. A world where everyone, or
even just most of us, were living at full measure, using our talents,
sharing our gifts, building our dreams, wielding God through acts of
love and compassion, and holding these things as a priority.

Ever forward.

Loading mentions Retweet