Robert Augustus Masters Q&A Part Eight
March 20, 2006
A. Marianthi asks:
1. I have a question on a stage of inner growth where all structured paradigms/practices seem to fall and fail.
In my situation at present (at age 61 and over half of those years spent in faithful´growth practices´) I have included and transcended (I hope): the ´spiritual bootcamp´of family life and dharma-by-the-book obligations, the ´yogic bootcamp´of do´s and don´ts, its Kundalini leaps and Guru dazzles, the I´ve-figured-out-what-this-is-all-about-and-I-have-the-means-for-smooth-sailing-ahead´(including psychotherapy) and I find myself in freefall, where I simply can´t swear allegiance to anything or anyone anymore. I just do the practices that work at any given time such as (at present): meditation, dreamwork, chants, asanas and mindfulness in my work. But now there seems to be no elation or expectation of any particular goal or reward (enlightenment, superconsciousness...). Simply feeling more like ´myself´ seems good enough. And, I´ve withdrawn from friends who want to enthusiastically pull me into any structured belief and action system of growth, including those I had applauded in the past.
Now, Robert, would you say that a stage such as my present one is: healthy?, indefinite? inescapable? a territory I will learn to know and love? familiar?
Robert answers:
To me, where you’re at is healthy. From what you’re saying, you’ve paid your dues, done your time in various disciplines, pretty much outgrown the need to belong to a particular structure/system/paradigm.
It sounds like you’re touching the point of methodless methodology regarding your evolution. No more maps to lug around, no more textbooks to rely upon, no more teachings to hold you up, no structuring that you cannot do without. All the techniques you’ve learned, all the methodology, all the practices, are nonetheless still within reach, but your need to reach for them has dramatically lessened. This is worth celebrating; you can even invite your ego to the party, just so long as you don’t let it hog the scene.
As we learn (after spending sufficient quality time surrendered to structure) not to rely upon nor necessarily impose structure (both outer and inner), we can let it naturally arise and take shape from our relationship and interactions with our environment, human and otherwise. Living this way weans us from the security — the eventually deadening security — of operating from behind a preset structure or methodology, leaving us in a position that requires an appropriately creative response from us. Such creativity keeps us fresh, open, alert.
I’ve done my work from this “position” for the past two decades and only grow increasingly fond of doing so. I don’t mind not knowing what to do next during my work, because the necessities of the situation almost always reveal useful directions (unless of course I’m busy looking elsewhere). If the direction I’m taking seems to not be doing its job, I immediately let it go, and into the clearing created by its departure arrive new directions, intuitions, intimations. Are they mine? Yes and no.
The whole thing looks effortless, and feels effortless in the sense that intense creative output more often than not does itself, even as it consumes us. With no techniques or practices to have to fall back on, I am freed to use methodologies in spontaneously creative ways. For example, I may use Gestalt for a bit, teasing out and clarifying a troublesome polarity in a group member, and then bring in another “seat” to deepen and illuminate the dynamics underway, and then shift the whole unfolding into a structure that involves the entire group, doing so in a way that helps group members to feel not just like observers or even participants, but also like co-creators of what is going on. I have a more central or captain-ish role, but the feeling of everyone being in it together, and not just intellectually or physically, is very liberating, generating an even safer environment for deep work.
When we’re ready to stand free of needing our methodologies and practices, we find a much deeper kind of support.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
B. Jana/Plasmafly asks:
1. Since you see people in a healer-guide capacity perhaps you have a perspective on where we are as a collective. Are we further along than say the 80's. What are the necessary traits we need to build now to create an integral mandala of self. Is it transcendence, health, life-purpose, collective eco-sociopolitical structures, hope-faith, visionary capacity, creativity, communication, loyalty, awakenness/awareness, care-sincerity?
Although there are lots of signs of progress and people are making great contributions, it seem peripheral to the main thrust of civilization which is still heading for the cliff face. So what do we do, each attend to our own lives, make our little contributions, and wait for the hundredth monkey effect to take hold?
Any thoughts on what if means to be part of the human race at this point in our history?
Robert answers:
I sense that we’re collectively starting to turn an evolutionary corner, but we’re having a hell of time making the needed turn, mostly because too many of us are driving with our eyes shut and our feet pressing both accelerator and brake. Whether or not we enter a saner humanity on a sufficiently large scale depends on all kinds of factors; two that seem foundational to me are (1) waking up, and (2) taking (and putting energy into) actions that primarily arise as a result of waking up. And what catalyzes such awakening? Challenging conditions, of which we have an overwhelming abundance.
It helps to remember that there’s no such thing as an insignificant act. What you consider to be a minor contribution may turn out to be major. Because of this, it’s worth doing whatever you’re doing with as much care, clarity, and presence as possible, even it seems terminally mundane.
Many old structures are starting to show signs of crumbling. Their massive weight may give the impression of long-lasting solidity, but more and more of us are losing interest in buying that impression. The fact that such structures still hold an enormous amount of power means that they have to be approached with great skill, a skill that best arises from well-rooted wakefulness.
This means, among other things, not getting stuck in us-versus-them stances, and letting ourselves really get, right to our core, that what we do to another we do to ourselves; for more on this, here’s an essay from my book Divine Dynamite:
Taking Care of Our Opposition
It can be quite a test when we are confronted by the darker, more painful dimensions of those circumstances set in motion through our choices and actions. In the presence of such unpleasant conditions, we ordinarily tighten up, shrink, rigidify, withdraw, go numb, or otherwise diminish ourselves, ricocheting between defensiveness and submission, as though there’s nothing else we can do.
Just as we tend to inflate ourselves through association with pleasant circumstances, we also tend to deflate ourselves through association with nastier circumstances, assuming the role of victim, through which our capacity for responsibility is abandoned for the shrinkwrapped righteousness of self-blaming or other-blaming. Thus do we pollute ourselves with blame’s developmentally arrested morality and its supporting cast, in the melodramatics and ethical sewage of which guilt and vengefulness take turns masquerading as conscience.
Trying to make sure that we are safe from the unpleasant -- as exemplified by insuring ourselves to death -- only guarantees our keeping it and its worrisome ramifications in mind, where it contextually festers and reproduces with itself until it is literally fleshed-out, translated from the hotbed of its mental blueprinting into all-too-solid reality.
Awakening exposes -- once our honeymoon with spirituality is over -- what is not working in our lives, revealing key changes we need to make or at least open ourselves to making, but if we persist in obstructing, sabotaging, or faking such changes, we will very soon be realigned with our snore, dreaming that we are really living.
The good news is that as lost as we may be in our dreamland wanderings, oppositional forces inevitably will get in the face of the part of the dream that assumes it is us.
Opposition is inevitable and necessary, exposing flabbiness of spirit and every kind of complacency and mediocrity, generating situations that invite us, incite and enliven and challenge us, to Wake up, to hone and ground our alertness, to test and retest our ability to not be sucked in by our reactivity and mechanicalness.
As we begin to shed our blinders --or allow an increasing transparency -- and to make the changes that we know we must make, all kinds of obstacles arise. Doubts may multiply, dread may colonize us, resistance may flatten or blitz us, family and friends may turn away from us. We may then understandably want to turn back, to exit the chrysalis in reverse, to numb and dumb ourselves down. Thus do the old ways pull at us. Familiarity is so seductive.
If we don’t deal well with our difficulties, we may take up residence in disembodied rationality or metaphysical escapism, finding therein a consoling numbness. Or, more commonly, we may settle into a denser state of being, not leveling out until we have found a degree of opposition -- or contractive force -- that we can generally make good use of, rather than merely tolerate.
We don’t get to move on until we are truly ready to do so, and that decisive shift arises not just from our mind and feeling self, but from our core of being, including within itself -- and this cannot be overemphasized -- the essential energies of whatever in us opposes it.
Before we can embody a deeper life, we must be able, more often than not, to remain grounded -- that is, centered not by egoity, but by Being -- not only in the presence of discomfort, unpleasantness, and opposition, but also in the presence of our reactivity and aversion to such challenges. This involves a skillful befriending and acceptance of insecurity, providing sufficient safety to let go of playing it so safe.
Being nonreactive requires the readily-activated ability and willingness to see and feel whatever opposes us as more than just something oppositional. This means ceasing to submit to -- or feed with attention -- our violent intentions and thoughts regarding our opposition.
Our work is to take care of our opposition. This asks that we stretch and expand and open, permitting ourselves vulnerability, a vulnerability that is a source of strength, especially the kind of strength that is utterly unthreatened by dependency.
Opposition is neither to be ignored nor bewailed. The point is to sensitize ourselves to our adversaries, without shrinking or thinking ourselves into their operational strata, so that we are neither stuck in recoil nor bound up in submission. Our work is to enter into empathy -- however indirect its expression might be, or might have to be -- with them, without necessarily locking horns and minds with them, until we can genuinely wish them well. Loving -- not necessarily liking, but loving -- our apparent enemies is a kind of radical sanity, for in loving them, we are not only ceasing to demonize them, but are also aligning ourselves with their healing. And their healing is none other than our healing.
So, yes, open to loving your enemies, but don’t grovel or grow spineless in such love. Instead, stand tall in it, like great oaks asway in the push and slap of a violent storm, and stand soft as well, like grasses bending and bowing in the same stormwinds, losing none of their dignity in their prayer. Stand not like those who act as if they deserve the whip or insult, but like those who are alerted and further awakened -- and are thus healthily appreciative of -- the whip or insult, for only in so doing will you genuinely be able to love your enemies.
Our need is to know our opposition -- both inner and outer -- intimately, so that we might know ourselves. To stand in the midst of malignant contractedness or gross misunderstanding without abandoning or betraying ourselves is an art to be practiced with great patience and care. This goes far beyond facile notions of forgiveness, and far beyond merely trying to persuade ourselves that we are indeed transforming the negativity in our lives, for not only are softness, pliability, and receptivity essential, but also forcefulness, thrust, and bedrock-firm stands.
Having access to such qualities or responses is not so much a methodology as an ever-fresh art, through which we can touch the all without losing touch with the particular, finding a deepening intimacy with both favorable and unfavorable conditions, doing so not to reach What-Really-Matters, but rather to express and live It.
In taking care of our opposition, we take care of ourselves.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A. Marianthi asks:
1. I have a question on a stage of inner growth where all structured paradigms/practices seem to fall and fail.
In my situation at present (at age 61 and over half of those years spent in faithful´growth practices´) I have included and transcended (I hope): the ´spiritual bootcamp´of family life and dharma-by-the-book obligations, the ´yogic bootcamp´of do´s and don´ts, its Kundalini leaps and Guru dazzles, the I´ve-figured-out-what-this-is-all-about-and-I-have-the-means-for-smooth-sailing-ahead´(including psychotherapy) and I find myself in freefall, where I simply can´t swear allegiance to anything or anyone anymore. I just do the practices that work at any given time such as (at present): meditation, dreamwork, chants, asanas and mindfulness in my work. But now there seems to be no elation or expectation of any particular goal or reward (enlightenment, superconsciousness...). Simply feeling more like ´myself´ seems good enough. And, I´ve withdrawn from friends who want to enthusiastically pull me into any structured belief and action system of growth, including those I had applauded in the past.
Now, Robert, would you say that a stage such as my present one is: healthy?, indefinite? inescapable? a territory I will learn to know and love? familiar?
Robert answers:
To me, where you’re at is healthy. From what you’re saying, you’ve paid your dues, done your time in various disciplines, pretty much outgrown the need to belong to a particular structure/system/paradigm.
It sounds like you’re touching the point of methodless methodology regarding your evolution. No more maps to lug around, no more textbooks to rely upon, no more teachings to hold you up, no structuring that you cannot do without. All the techniques you’ve learned, all the methodology, all the practices, are nonetheless still within reach, but your need to reach for them has dramatically lessened. This is worth celebrating; you can even invite your ego to the party, just so long as you don’t let it hog the scene.
As we learn (after spending sufficient quality time surrendered to structure) not to rely upon nor necessarily impose structure (both outer and inner), we can let it naturally arise and take shape from our relationship and interactions with our environment, human and otherwise. Living this way weans us from the security — the eventually deadening security — of operating from behind a preset structure or methodology, leaving us in a position that requires an appropriately creative response from us. Such creativity keeps us fresh, open, alert.
I’ve done my work from this “position” for the past two decades and only grow increasingly fond of doing so. I don’t mind not knowing what to do next during my work, because the necessities of the situation almost always reveal useful directions (unless of course I’m busy looking elsewhere). If the direction I’m taking seems to not be doing its job, I immediately let it go, and into the clearing created by its departure arrive new directions, intuitions, intimations. Are they mine? Yes and no.
The whole thing looks effortless, and feels effortless in the sense that intense creative output more often than not does itself, even as it consumes us. With no techniques or practices to have to fall back on, I am freed to use methodologies in spontaneously creative ways. For example, I may use Gestalt for a bit, teasing out and clarifying a troublesome polarity in a group member, and then bring in another “seat” to deepen and illuminate the dynamics underway, and then shift the whole unfolding into a structure that involves the entire group, doing so in a way that helps group members to feel not just like observers or even participants, but also like co-creators of what is going on. I have a more central or captain-ish role, but the feeling of everyone being in it together, and not just intellectually or physically, is very liberating, generating an even safer environment for deep work.
When we’re ready to stand free of needing our methodologies and practices, we find a much deeper kind of support.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
B. Jana/Plasmafly asks:
1. Since you see people in a healer-guide capacity perhaps you have a perspective on where we are as a collective. Are we further along than say the 80's. What are the necessary traits we need to build now to create an integral mandala of self. Is it transcendence, health, life-purpose, collective eco-sociopolitical structures, hope-faith, visionary capacity, creativity, communication, loyalty, awakenness/awareness, care-sincerity?
Although there are lots of signs of progress and people are making great contributions, it seem peripheral to the main thrust of civilization which is still heading for the cliff face. So what do we do, each attend to our own lives, make our little contributions, and wait for the hundredth monkey effect to take hold?
Any thoughts on what if means to be part of the human race at this point in our history?
Robert answers:
I sense that we’re collectively starting to turn an evolutionary corner, but we’re having a hell of time making the needed turn, mostly because too many of us are driving with our eyes shut and our feet pressing both accelerator and brake. Whether or not we enter a saner humanity on a sufficiently large scale depends on all kinds of factors; two that seem foundational to me are (1) waking up, and (2) taking (and putting energy into) actions that primarily arise as a result of waking up. And what catalyzes such awakening? Challenging conditions, of which we have an overwhelming abundance.
It helps to remember that there’s no such thing as an insignificant act. What you consider to be a minor contribution may turn out to be major. Because of this, it’s worth doing whatever you’re doing with as much care, clarity, and presence as possible, even it seems terminally mundane.
Many old structures are starting to show signs of crumbling. Their massive weight may give the impression of long-lasting solidity, but more and more of us are losing interest in buying that impression. The fact that such structures still hold an enormous amount of power means that they have to be approached with great skill, a skill that best arises from well-rooted wakefulness.
This means, among other things, not getting stuck in us-versus-them stances, and letting ourselves really get, right to our core, that what we do to another we do to ourselves; for more on this, here’s an essay from my book Divine Dynamite:
Taking Care of Our Opposition
It can be quite a test when we are confronted by the darker, more painful dimensions of those circumstances set in motion through our choices and actions. In the presence of such unpleasant conditions, we ordinarily tighten up, shrink, rigidify, withdraw, go numb, or otherwise diminish ourselves, ricocheting between defensiveness and submission, as though there’s nothing else we can do.
Just as we tend to inflate ourselves through association with pleasant circumstances, we also tend to deflate ourselves through association with nastier circumstances, assuming the role of victim, through which our capacity for responsibility is abandoned for the shrinkwrapped righteousness of self-blaming or other-blaming. Thus do we pollute ourselves with blame’s developmentally arrested morality and its supporting cast, in the melodramatics and ethical sewage of which guilt and vengefulness take turns masquerading as conscience.
Trying to make sure that we are safe from the unpleasant -- as exemplified by insuring ourselves to death -- only guarantees our keeping it and its worrisome ramifications in mind, where it contextually festers and reproduces with itself until it is literally fleshed-out, translated from the hotbed of its mental blueprinting into all-too-solid reality.
Awakening exposes -- once our honeymoon with spirituality is over -- what is not working in our lives, revealing key changes we need to make or at least open ourselves to making, but if we persist in obstructing, sabotaging, or faking such changes, we will very soon be realigned with our snore, dreaming that we are really living.
The good news is that as lost as we may be in our dreamland wanderings, oppositional forces inevitably will get in the face of the part of the dream that assumes it is us.
Opposition is inevitable and necessary, exposing flabbiness of spirit and every kind of complacency and mediocrity, generating situations that invite us, incite and enliven and challenge us, to Wake up, to hone and ground our alertness, to test and retest our ability to not be sucked in by our reactivity and mechanicalness.
As we begin to shed our blinders --or allow an increasing transparency -- and to make the changes that we know we must make, all kinds of obstacles arise. Doubts may multiply, dread may colonize us, resistance may flatten or blitz us, family and friends may turn away from us. We may then understandably want to turn back, to exit the chrysalis in reverse, to numb and dumb ourselves down. Thus do the old ways pull at us. Familiarity is so seductive.
If we don’t deal well with our difficulties, we may take up residence in disembodied rationality or metaphysical escapism, finding therein a consoling numbness. Or, more commonly, we may settle into a denser state of being, not leveling out until we have found a degree of opposition -- or contractive force -- that we can generally make good use of, rather than merely tolerate.
We don’t get to move on until we are truly ready to do so, and that decisive shift arises not just from our mind and feeling self, but from our core of being, including within itself -- and this cannot be overemphasized -- the essential energies of whatever in us opposes it.
Before we can embody a deeper life, we must be able, more often than not, to remain grounded -- that is, centered not by egoity, but by Being -- not only in the presence of discomfort, unpleasantness, and opposition, but also in the presence of our reactivity and aversion to such challenges. This involves a skillful befriending and acceptance of insecurity, providing sufficient safety to let go of playing it so safe.
Being nonreactive requires the readily-activated ability and willingness to see and feel whatever opposes us as more than just something oppositional. This means ceasing to submit to -- or feed with attention -- our violent intentions and thoughts regarding our opposition.
Our work is to take care of our opposition. This asks that we stretch and expand and open, permitting ourselves vulnerability, a vulnerability that is a source of strength, especially the kind of strength that is utterly unthreatened by dependency.
Opposition is neither to be ignored nor bewailed. The point is to sensitize ourselves to our adversaries, without shrinking or thinking ourselves into their operational strata, so that we are neither stuck in recoil nor bound up in submission. Our work is to enter into empathy -- however indirect its expression might be, or might have to be -- with them, without necessarily locking horns and minds with them, until we can genuinely wish them well. Loving -- not necessarily liking, but loving -- our apparent enemies is a kind of radical sanity, for in loving them, we are not only ceasing to demonize them, but are also aligning ourselves with their healing. And their healing is none other than our healing.
So, yes, open to loving your enemies, but don’t grovel or grow spineless in such love. Instead, stand tall in it, like great oaks asway in the push and slap of a violent storm, and stand soft as well, like grasses bending and bowing in the same stormwinds, losing none of their dignity in their prayer. Stand not like those who act as if they deserve the whip or insult, but like those who are alerted and further awakened -- and are thus healthily appreciative of -- the whip or insult, for only in so doing will you genuinely be able to love your enemies.
Our need is to know our opposition -- both inner and outer -- intimately, so that we might know ourselves. To stand in the midst of malignant contractedness or gross misunderstanding without abandoning or betraying ourselves is an art to be practiced with great patience and care. This goes far beyond facile notions of forgiveness, and far beyond merely trying to persuade ourselves that we are indeed transforming the negativity in our lives, for not only are softness, pliability, and receptivity essential, but also forcefulness, thrust, and bedrock-firm stands.
Having access to such qualities or responses is not so much a methodology as an ever-fresh art, through which we can touch the all without losing touch with the particular, finding a deepening intimacy with both favorable and unfavorable conditions, doing so not to reach What-Really-Matters, but rather to express and live It.
In taking care of our opposition, we take care of ourselves.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
posted by adastra at 10:37 AM
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