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CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK: CHANGE IS REALITY BUT PERFECTION IS AN ILLUSION
by
Dick Rauscher
Abstract
This article was written back in 1997/98.
It is a bit redundant but it does contain some of my early thinking
about middlepath, perfection, change, evolution, the primitive
ego, the sources of pain and suffering, and unhappiness. I have
included this article because it contains a broad overview of
my early thoughts on these subjects.
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It is common for most humans to grow up with the belief that we can
somehow change who we are by a simple force of will through the pursuit
of perfection.
We learn very early in life that if we want to
be loved, we must try hard to be white, right, and good in everything
we do. We must keep struggling to try -harder –to- do- better. A common childhood rhyme says “Good,
better, best. Never let it rest, till the good is better and the better
is best.”
Trying harder and harder to do better is a common belief that results
from a primitive and simplistic early childhood reasoning process called
black and white thinking. This is the process of splitting the world
into either/or, right/wrong, and good/bad. This kind of thinking can
be seen in virtually every field of human knowledge from the narrow mono-logical
worldview of most post-modern science and the aggressive defense of pre-logical
mythology of fundamental religion.
Because black and white thinking is not in touch with the complexity
of life and reality, the inevitable result of this type of unsophisticated
and primitive thinking is violence, suffering, a sense of inadequacy,
and depression. When we are not in touch with reality, we will experience
pain and suffering. The reverse is also true, if we are experiencing
pain and suffering, it is certain that somehow, we are not in touch with
reality.
The spiritual practice needed to heal the wounds
caused by black and white thinking is simply learning to see the world
is shades of gray; some times called both/and thinking. I refer to
this more sophisticated thinking process as “walking the middle path”. Let us explore
for a moment the source of black and white thinking, and what it might
mean to “walk the middle path” in our day to day lives.
I would like you to close your eyes for a moment
and take a short journey with me to the headwaters of the river of
life. Imagine it’s early
morning on a normal day of your life. You get your robe and your cup
of coffee and you walk down the hill from your house and settle into
the grass to watch the sunrise over the river that runs past your home.
As you sit quietly on the bank of this gently flowing river, picture
a blue sky, a few billowing white clouds, a warm breeze playing gently
with the grass and wildflowers around you. The bees and the butterflies
move lazily from flower to flower. The birds send their songs out to
mix with the warm sunlight that touches the earth so delicately.
As you sit quietly on the bank of the river of
life with your coffee in hand, picture in your mind, the things that
might happen to you to you on this imaginary day of your life….and see in your mind’s
eye each of those events as something that floats past you on a wooden
raft out on the river in front of you.
Imagine that some of the things that will come down the river of life
today will bring you pleasure and you will like them. You will reach
out and grasp hold of those things. You will take them off the raft and
keep them by your side. You will then begin to worry of course that someone
or something will take them away from you. So you will hang on tightly
to them and try to keep them close at your side.
By the end of your day there sitting on the bank of the river, you will
have accumulated a large pile of this good stuff that the river provides.
You will then begin to think about how you might get more of these things
you like and then of course you will begin to think about insuring them,
protecting them, where you might keep them, and getting the money to
buy more of them. This desire to accumulate more and more of the good
things that come down the river of life will soon lead to suffering.;
It is called greed.
However, some of the things that the river will
bring to you will be things that you won’t like; things that
will bring you pain; things that will cause you fear. You will get
angry and try hard to push these things away from you if they come
too close to you. Even though Scott Peck reminds us that the avoidance
of legitimate pain is the source of most suffering in our lives, still
you will try to push the painful things away.
By the end of the day, you will be very tired from your efforts to push
these things back out onto the river of life and you will become fearful,
worried, and anxious that the river of life might bring you more of these
painful things tomorrow. This desire to avoid pain will soon lead to
suffering. It is called denial and avoidance.
But if you can simply sit quietly and gently on the bank of the river
of life, aware and fully conscious, simply paying attention to the rafts
on the river, you will begin to notice that the river of life not only
brings things to you, it also take things away.
No matter how hard you try to hang onto those things you like, the river
of life eventually takes them away. Your health fades, people you love
will die, your cars will wear out and rust, you will begin to tire of
your job and career, the cut grass you just mowed will continue to grow,
the weeds in the garden will return, the children will grow up and leave
home.
And no matter how hard you attempt to avoid or
push away those things you don’t like, you will become aware
that the river of life eventually takes them away too. The pain you
felt when you lost your job, the pain of your divorce, the pain of
your children leaving home, the pain you felt when someone you loved
died, all eventually fades and disappears down the river of life; including
the fears that control much of your life and which will mostly never
happen. They too will pass quietly down the river of life and fade
away into the distance of time.
If you are aware enough, it will become clear to you that the river
of life is always changing everything in your life. At some point you
will become aware that reality is change! And if you meditate a bit longer
on these insights as you sit patiently on the bank of the river of life,
the river of change, you will discover for yourself one of the simplest
and most important truths you will ever encounter. Change is a reality
of life. Change is reality.
Without change there could be no life. Without change there could be
no creation. Without change the Universe itself could not exist.
Therefore, in a universe where change is reality, there can be no fixed,
rigid, or unchanging ego generated black or white certainties, absolutes,
or absolute truths. In a universe where change is reality, they simply
cannot exist. All black and white beliefs and categories generated by
the ego mind have nothing to do with reality. Mind, therefore, can only
be pure consciousness that simply observes the grayness of what is.
The fixed, rigid, unchanging ego generated categories called right opinions,
wrong opinions, good categories, or bad categories, are simply subjective
illusions of the mind; beliefs that are attempting to stop change. Can
we see that for ourselves?
The great spiritual Mystics of every culture
and faith remind us that when we see the world in dualistic blacks
and whites, and insist that our ego owns “the” truth on any given issue, we will bring
pain and suffering to ourselves and the world. The Mystics also tell
us that when we try to avoid change, which is reality, by grasping too
hard to those things we like, or pushing away too hard those things we
don’t like, we are “pushing the river” and again, we
will bring pain and suffering to ourselves and the world.
They gently remind us that when we push the river and try to stop change,
we will bring pain and suffering to ourselves because we are attempting
to stop creation itself. We are trying to stop the entire Universe.
So if reality is change. And change is reality. Then how do we work
with reality and change ourselves in ways that we would like to achieve.
How do we get out of the swamp of despair that results when we use simplistic
black and white thinking that leads us into striving for perfection and
avoiding failure?
The answer is very simple and requires only two things. First, we must
increase our self consciousness. We must know who we are presently, and
specifically what it is we want to change about ourselves. We must learn
to love ourselves and remember that we are human. We must remember that
perfection is an illusion. Secondly, we must learn to consciously walk
the Middle Path in life, in the gray between black and white, because
when we are off the middle path, we are pushing the river and will bring
pain and suffering to ourselves. If there is pain and suffering in our
lives, it is a certainty that we have somehow strayed from the grayness
of the middle path.
Lets take a look at each of them.
First, increasing our self knowledge and becoming People of the Ren.
In ancient times, there was a society of people that met with their
teacher. His name was Confucius. These people were call People of the
Ren, or People of Love. These people spent most of their lives in the
process of chung-shu.
Chung was the practice of looking inward for self knowledge. If they
shot an arrow and it missed the target, they did not blame the arrow
or the wind, they looked at their own shooting. If they did not feel
respected, they explored their own ability to respect others. If they
did not feel loved, they examined carefully their own ability to love
others.
Each person was required to spend many years in the practice of chung
under the teaching of Confucius before he would commission them and send
them out as People of the Ren to bring shu to the world. Shu was empathy
and compassion. Without deep self-awareness and self-knowledge it is
impossible to be empathic and compassionate; with ourselves or others.
If we are truly committed to growth and change within ourselves, we
must become People of the Ren, not because it is right or wrong, but
simply because we have no choice! We must learn to be with the reality
of who we are right now, because regardless of how hard we try, the reality
is, we can only change what we know and accept about ourselves.
Self-creation from who we are now into the person we would like to become
requires self-transformation through the process of change called evolution.
But the best map in the world is useless unless you know where you are
on the map. In other words, there is no map, approach, technique, or
theory of self-transformation that will be useful without self-awareness
of who we are right now. Without this self-knowledge, we cannot consciously
evolve, transform, grow, or change. We live our lives very much like
sleep walkers unconsciously shuffling from room to room.
Therefore, a first step of increased self-awareness that can lead to
self-transformation is that of beginning to pay close attention to our
beliefs, our opinions, our certainties, and the many ways we divide the
world into the simplistic categories of either/or, black and white, right
or wrong, and good or bad.
When we discover this kind of dualistic thinking in ourselves, we need
to pay close attention so that whenever this kind of simplistic thinking
comes up we are immediately self-aware.
This self-knowledge is important because when we only have the two categories
called black and white to work with emotionally, we will always be struggling
or compulsively working to try harder and harder to do better, to be
perfect; to be white, right, and good. Remember, the only other color
in black and white thinking is the swamp of depression and despair called
black, bad, wrong, and failure. It is a very short step from perfection
into the swamp of failure and despair.
WALKING THE MIDDLE PATH
The next step required in the creation of, or evolution into, the person
you want to become, is that of developing a very clear vision of who
that new person looks like that you want to evolve into. This brings
us to step 2. Learning to walk the middle path.
As we saw a moment ago, if change is reality, there are no absolutes
in this universe. Rights and wrongs, good and bad, blacks and whites,
either / or (often called dualistic or simplistic thinking) are nothing
but illusions; subjective categories created by our egos to help us in
childhood.
To live in reality and avoid pushing the river of reality through the
creation of subjective ego generated black and white dualities is what
I call living on the middle path.
Very simply, walking the middle path means learning to think in more
complex gray categories than the simplistic and immature black and white
categories of childhood. The world is not right or wrong, good or bad,
black or white. Reality is infinitely complex. The world is gray. The
middle path walks in the gray between the categories of black and white
and holds them in dynamic tension.
A spiritual practice that can help you develop the skill of walking
and remaining consciously on the middle path is that of learning to look
for the truth on both sides of any issue. When we learn to hold black
and white opposites in dynamic tension and resist the simplistic thinking
of either/or, we begin to develop the skill of living more gray and walking
the middlepath.
Some call this learning the skill of not-knowing.
The less we “know”,
the more we can be with the reality of what is. With not-knowing, our
self-awareness of both the universe we live in, and the rigid opinions,
certainties, and beliefs of our ego will begin to increase.
If we look at the concept of evolution in nature
we can learn several important insights about change. First is that
nature always evolves from lower consciousness to higher consciousness;
from atoms, to matter, to single celled life, to simple life form,
to fish, to animals, to humans, to ……?
The second insight is that evolution always lead to increased freedom.
Rocks have very little freedom. Single celled life has a bit more. Animals
have some freedom of choice, but are still pretty much controlled by
instinct. Humans with self-consciousness and self-awareness have the
most.
The third insight we get when we look at nature is that of complexity.
Evolution always leads to increasingly complex systems. Animals are more
complex than flowers, and humans are more complex than animals.
The insight we get from this attention to nature is clear. If we are
going to work with the universe, we must consciously work to increase
consciousness, freedom (choice), and complexity. Thus learning to walk
the middle path is the skill of working with the evolutionary laws of
the universe. Another way to say this is that black and white thinking
requires little self-awareness, is childishly simplistic, and reflects
virtually no freedom of choice. One must be perfect or live in despair
in the swamp of failure; one is either right or wrong.
An example of living on the middle path as a means of self-transformation
might be simply recognizing through self-awareness that you are not a
good speller. That may be frankly the reality of who you are. In black
and white thinking you must either work hard to learn to spell or live
in the swamp of failure and despair destined to live your life as a bad
speller, stuck in the belief that you are an inferior person who cannot
spell. A person on the middle path, might accept the reality that spelling
is not one of their gifts, and simply choose to keep a dictionary close
by.
So to summarize, most of us learn as children to think in very simplistic
black and white, all or nothing categories. When we are young, this type
of thinking is very helpful to us as we learn to live in a very confusing
adult world.
But typical of most childhood strategies, the survival skills that were
so helpful for us as children are not very helpful for us as adults who
are actually living in this complex adult world. The black and white
thinking or survival skill of childhood leads to categories of right
and wrong.
It is this simplistic black and white belief of childhood that we can
somehow permanently change ourselves from bad to good, from wrong to
right, from black to white, and then hold forever this ideal white, right,
good self that we have created, that ultimately brings so much unhappiness,
pain and suffering into our lives.
But if we believe we can change ourselves through sheer force of will,
it would follow logically that others should be able to change themselves
too. Forcing others to change and conform to the simplicity of our
black and white, right and wrong thinking is the tap root of violence,
pain and suffering in our world.
Because simplistic black or white thinking creates
only two categories, one is either right or one is wrong. Those who
disagree with us are quickly labeled as “wrong”. We gather with others who agree with
us and we begin to label those who don’t agree with us as “them”.
This leads to racism, extreme nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and religious
fundamentalism. Can we see how this sense of “otherness” caused
by the black and white, right and wrong simplistic thinking of childhood
is the source of violence, conflict, nd suffering in our world? Can we
see this in ourselves?
To walk the “Middle Path” means to walk in the gray between
black and white categories, embrace diversity, hold opposites in tension,
and find the truth in all ideas and beliefs. The Middle Path is the path
of compassion that models a mature adult thinking process that eliminates
the violence and suffering caused by the simplistic black and white “otherness” thinking
of childhood.
Attempting to change ourselves, others, or the world by force of will,
is pushing the river and will always bring pain and suffering. Can we
see this in our own life? Can we see that our own self-transformation
can be achieved only through the process of evolution and thus requires
increased self-consciousness, increased freedom of choice, and increased
complexity of thought and interactions.
Can we see for ourselves that love, peace, and compassion can be found
only on the middle path when we are willing to empty ourselves of all
our ego certainties and learn to see the world as it is, and ourselves
as we are; in non-dualistic shades of gray.
9/21/98
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