Robert Augustus Masters Q&A Part Twenty
April 16, 2006
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A. leela asks:
Robert,
I get so much from everything that you share, but this is standing out for me these days...
“by putting our passion into leaving our prisons rather than trying to make them cozier or sexier (so that we, to take but one example, no longer confuse the eroticizing of unresolved issues with sexual freedom).”
I am finding it VERY challenging to watch this pattern in people in positions of power or in “committed relationships.” I feel like I am so keenly aware of the damage done to others from these positions and I desire to see that pain end. Its hard to enough to witness it in myself and others when we are going about our day to day (not as therapist, ministers etc), mostly due to the fact that I am still processing the pain I have caused other or they have caused me by acting on those passions that cozy up our prisons. Lately I find myself dealing with loved ones who appear to be doing everything they can to keep those bars in tact while thinking or acting like they are doing the opposite. The lines between keeping a higher perspective and my own emotional reactions are getting harder for me to separate. How do we differentiate our personal judgments from a higher principal? The example of Marc Gafni comes to mind. His pathologies are not something many of us are free from on some level, but his acting on them while in a position of power adds another level of damage. I don’t think he would have had the power within himself to stop his behavior, it required exposure, removal from his position & hopefully therapy to address the issues. Where is that line between witnessing this and exposing it? What is our personal responsibility in speaking out when we know? Are we guilty of enabling the pathology when we witness it and do nothing?
I also ponder the idea that we seek out exposure on some level too. Like do people put themselves in a position to be exposed because that’s how they are asking for help? Are we robbing others of lessons potentially learned for their benefit by remaining silent?
Thank you,
~leela
Robert answers:
What’s the appropriate thing to do? No one-size-fits-all answer hangs out here, for we’re stepping into the ambiguity-laced, multileveled terrain of morality, which only gets increasingly nuanced and complex as we mature (which doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it is always hard to crystallize into fittingly precise action).
We can -- and need to -- take strongly unequivocal stands in certain situations, even when the sense of what’s moral seems to be not much more than a shapeshifting phenomenon in a multiperspectival pool of possibilities. In this, we consider a situation from various levels and angles, adjusting our lenses and gathering as much relevant data as we can, and then, after letting it all settle (ideally in the unbounded openness of Being), we tune into which action (including doing nothing) has the strongest or most compelling intuitive pull for us.
This, of course, requires a capacity to hold -- not juggle, but hold, contain, even embrace -- different perspectives at the same time. And not just cognitively -- emotional literacy is also crucial, so that we can clearly factor what we’re actually feeling into our exploration of the situation. Our rationality (and transrationality), along with our meditative capacity to provide sentient spaciousness for whatever’s arising, best serve us morally when their findings are scanned/absorbed/evaluated by our feeling dimension (and I mean our nonreactive, consciously feeling dimension) before we take our moral stand.
Let’s consider emotion a bit more, especially with regard to its relationship to rationality: It is not uncommon to view emotions as being lower or more primitive than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity. Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of our emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or kept functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions.
Implicit in this attitude is the common identification of emotion with subjectivity — in the sense that subjectivity is a failure to be objective — an identification that may be justifiable if and when emotion is irrational or egocentric, but not if it is also sometimes rationally informed.
One can be objective and emotional at the same time, as when a releasing of tears washes away an ossified stance, leaving us not in a particular position, but rather aware of possible positions. Research suggests that the openly felt, unrepressed presence of emotion can significantly contribute to mental and social skills. The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. An impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions. Feelings are needed for making truly rational decisions. Without emotional intelligence (EQ), intellectual intelligence (IQ) means little. But put together EQ and IQ, plus some spiritual intelligence, and moral intelligence is more than possible.
So are ethical decisions best conducted in the absence of emotions? Not necessarily. If emotions are ways of viewing and evaluating (a primarily noncognitive evaluation, but an evaluation nonetheless) our world, then they are already deeply implicated in ethics, whether at the level where emotion is little more than a sense of liking or disliking, or at the level where emotion is a complex, somatically rooted yet mentally sophisticated (and perhaps even rational) “reading” of a given situation.
Okay, back to our situation...Sometimes arriving at a solid decision is not much more than a no-brainer. For example, if your spiritual teacher is fucking you and telling you to keep quiet about it while telling all his students that a good spiritual teacher never ever fucks his students, then blowing the whistle on him is a pretty clear option -- a gift to the other students, and also to the teacher. By exposing him, you are serving the well-being of all involved, regardless of the hurt that may arise. Another example: You find out that your neighbor is beating up his wife regularly; you’ve heard it a few times, and now have seen the bruises and black eyes, and are so outraged that you take action (bringing in the police, social services, etcetera). Again, a no-brainer.
Other times it’s a lot trickier. Your friend’s husband is, you one day discover, having sex with her best friend (X), who also happens to be a close friend of yours. What do you do? You know you’ve got to do something. But you’ve got to take into account certain factors: Your friend and X run a business together that supplies most of their income; your friend has told you that she would divorce her husband if he ever cheated on her; X is emotionally very fragile, with a history of suicidal ideation. So it’s a judgment call. You take all of the above into account, plus other factors (like the kind of relationship you have and want with each woman), notice how you feel as you let the whole thing settle in you, and see what intuition kicks in most strongly. Let’s say you decide to confront X; you don’t know how she’ll respond, but you do know that you expect her to put a halt to her affair. You might also want to tell your friend what has happened, or you might decide to leave that to X. You might also confront your friend’s husband. And so on. And it’s not just a matter of simple confrontation; the way in which you deal with each person is very important. For example, given X’s emotional fragility, you may want to handle your confrontation with her with extra care, perhaps already having some suggestions ready for her as to where she might go for professional help. And you may also want to put the whole thing in the open, trusting that your friend and her husband won’t necessarily separate -- you may think of how horrible it would be if your friend doesn’t discover what’s happened until much later, and then finds out that you knew all along and didn’t tell her. So you can see that whichever way you go, there are risks. This, however, need not paralyze you, but rather only remind you that you cannot know the full outcome of your actions. All you can do is act with all the integrity and care of which you are capable.
It’s also important to look deeply into our motivation for whistleblowing. At times, it may be admirable -- just a wanting to serve the greatest good for all involved -- and other times, it may be less-than-admirable, as when we are acting from jealousy or revenge, wanting to expose the offending others for the simple pleasure of seeing them suffer, even as it looks as if we’re doing something noble.
Exposing wrongdoing can be an unambiguous task, but it is not so straightforward in many cases; would you, for example, turn in a woman who stole from you in order to feed her children? What if that desperate act of hers was the only way she could feed her children at that time? There are plenty of examples like this. We may see a friend doing something we don’t approve of, and we cut them a lot of slack (more than we would grant a stranger), perhaps mentioning to them in private that we don’t feel so good about what they’re doing, but not to the degree of cutting them out of our lives.
For most of us, such compromises are not all that uncommon. Does this mean that we are not moral people? Not necessarily. Morality is much more than a set of rules; in its more mature stages, it not only involves a context-driven, transegoic interpretation of those rules, but also a decision-making capacity that may not depend at all upon those rules. At a certain point, we discover what is more moral than morality, and hitch our action tendencies to that, for better or for worse.
Prior to that, we are, to varying degrees, operating in the dark; all we can do then is take maximum advantage of whatever light and other resources we have, make our choices, and live as best we can with the consequences of those choices.
What’s the appropriate thing to do? No one-size-fits-all answer hangs out here, for we’re stepping into the ambiguity-laced, multileveled terrain of morality, which only gets increasingly nuanced and complex as we mature (which doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it is always hard to crystallize into fittingly precise action).
We can -- and need to -- take strongly unequivocal stands in certain situations, even when the sense of what’s moral seems to be not much more than a shapeshifting phenomenon in a multiperspectival pool of possibilities. In this, we consider a situation from various levels and angles, adjusting our lenses and gathering as much relevant data as we can, and then, after letting it all settle (ideally in the unbounded openness of Being), we tune into which action (including doing nothing) has the strongest or most compelling intuitive pull for us.
This, of course, requires a capacity to hold -- not juggle, but hold, contain, even embrace -- different perspectives at the same time. And not just cognitively -- emotional literacy is also crucial, so that we can clearly factor what we’re actually feeling into our exploration of the situation. Our rationality (and transrationality), along with our meditative capacity to provide sentient spaciousness for whatever’s arising, best serve us morally when their findings are scanned/absorbed/evaluated by our feeling dimension (and I mean our nonreactive, consciously feeling dimension) before we take our moral stand.
Let’s consider emotion a bit more, especially with regard to its relationship to rationality: It is not uncommon to view emotions as being lower or more primitive than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity. Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of our emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or kept functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions.
Implicit in this attitude is the common identification of emotion with subjectivity — in the sense that subjectivity is a failure to be objective — an identification that may be justifiable if and when emotion is irrational or egocentric, but not if it is also sometimes rationally informed.
One can be objective and emotional at the same time, as when a releasing of tears washes away an ossified stance, leaving us not in a particular position, but rather aware of possible positions. Research suggests that the openly felt, unrepressed presence of emotion can significantly contribute to mental and social skills. The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. An impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions. Feelings are needed for making truly rational decisions. Without emotional intelligence (EQ), intellectual intelligence (IQ) means little. But put together EQ and IQ, plus some spiritual intelligence, and moral intelligence is more than possible.
So are ethical decisions best conducted in the absence of emotions? Not necessarily. If emotions are ways of viewing and evaluating (a primarily noncognitive evaluation, but an evaluation nonetheless) our world, then they are already deeply implicated in ethics, whether at the level where emotion is little more than a sense of liking or disliking, or at the level where emotion is a complex, somatically rooted yet mentally sophisticated (and perhaps even rational) “reading” of a given situation.
Okay, back to our situation...Sometimes arriving at a solid decision is not much more than a no-brainer. For example, if your spiritual teacher is fucking you and telling you to keep quiet about it while telling all his students that a good spiritual teacher never ever fucks his students, then blowing the whistle on him is a pretty clear option -- a gift to the other students, and also to the teacher. By exposing him, you are serving the well-being of all involved, regardless of the hurt that may arise. Another example: You find out that your neighbor is beating up his wife regularly; you’ve heard it a few times, and now have seen the bruises and black eyes, and are so outraged that you take action (bringing in the police, social services, etcetera). Again, a no-brainer.
Other times it’s a lot trickier. Your friend’s husband is, you one day discover, having sex with her best friend (X), who also happens to be a close friend of yours. What do you do? You know you’ve got to do something. But you’ve got to take into account certain factors: Your friend and X run a business together that supplies most of their income; your friend has told you that she would divorce her husband if he ever cheated on her; X is emotionally very fragile, with a history of suicidal ideation. So it’s a judgment call. You take all of the above into account, plus other factors (like the kind of relationship you have and want with each woman), notice how you feel as you let the whole thing settle in you, and see what intuition kicks in most strongly. Let’s say you decide to confront X; you don’t know how she’ll respond, but you do know that you expect her to put a halt to her affair. You might also want to tell your friend what has happened, or you might decide to leave that to X. You might also confront your friend’s husband. And so on. And it’s not just a matter of simple confrontation; the way in which you deal with each person is very important. For example, given X’s emotional fragility, you may want to handle your confrontation with her with extra care, perhaps already having some suggestions ready for her as to where she might go for professional help. And you may also want to put the whole thing in the open, trusting that your friend and her husband won’t necessarily separate -- you may think of how horrible it would be if your friend doesn’t discover what’s happened until much later, and then finds out that you knew all along and didn’t tell her. So you can see that whichever way you go, there are risks. This, however, need not paralyze you, but rather only remind you that you cannot know the full outcome of your actions. All you can do is act with all the integrity and care of which you are capable.
It’s also important to look deeply into our motivation for whistleblowing. At times, it may be admirable -- just a wanting to serve the greatest good for all involved -- and other times, it may be less-than-admirable, as when we are acting from jealousy or revenge, wanting to expose the offending others for the simple pleasure of seeing them suffer, even as it looks as if we’re doing something noble.
Exposing wrongdoing can be an unambiguous task, but it is not so straightforward in many cases; would you, for example, turn in a woman who stole from you in order to feed her children? What if that desperate act of hers was the only way she could feed her children at that time? There are plenty of examples like this. We may see a friend doing something we don’t approve of, and we cut them a lot of slack (more than we would grant a stranger), perhaps mentioning to them in private that we don’t feel so good about what they’re doing, but not to the degree of cutting them out of our lives.
For most of us, such compromises are not all that uncommon. Does this mean that we are not moral people? Not necessarily. Morality is much more than a set of rules; in its more mature stages, it not only involves a context-driven, transegoic interpretation of those rules, but also a decision-making capacity that may not depend at all upon those rules. At a certain point, we discover what is more moral than morality, and hitch our action tendencies to that, for better or for worse.
Prior to that, we are, to varying degrees, operating in the dark; all we can do then is take maximum advantage of whatever light and other resources we have, make our choices, and live as best we can with the consequences of those choices.
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B. Jana/Plasmafly asks:
Since you seem to be Mr. Passion himself, I would like to ask you a question about habit vs. passion.
I am fasting at present and it makes me aware of how my life is just a series of addictive habits. And that even an integral life is a series of life-supporting habits rather than self-destructive ones...swapping good habits for bad.
This does not seem to be congruent with a passionate life for habit seems to be the antithesis of passion. While on autopilot life cannot touch us, the known is boring, the bored brain is a dying brain...a dying life.
Beyond the realm of good and bad habits, how do you suggest establishing "Flow" and passion in ones life?
The first place I am starting is my breasts, which have been sorely neglected over my life. I am starting to massage them every night to reinstate my hormones and try to get some feeling back in my body. They say the breasts are affixed to the genitals...well mine aren't, at least not yet. Thus I start at the physical level with the good habit of breast massage until further hints on the passionate life from you are offered.
One thing I have noticed with my steady decline in passion is that I can no longer readily conjure feelings-thoughts-images of inner worlds, future visions and potentials like I used to when my soul felt more alive, tho I still have a vivid dream life it too lacks potency and purpose.
Part of the problem is the background high endorphin level I have experienced for years, I have to do something that will counteract the eternal buzz, and bring more "excitement" to my nervous system.
Robert answers:
Habits are self-reinforcing recurrent behavioral patterns. At one end of the spectrum, they are relatively harmless and even beneficial (a regular exercise habit, for example), and at the other end, they are destructive (a narcotics habit, etcetera). Habits vary not only in the degree of attachment brought to them, but also in the degree of consciousness granted them. Some habits graduate from routines into disciplines, while others remain adolescent, turning away from good intentions and well-scrubbed morals, preferring seedier hangouts, where they have the power to keep us serving them. Once our habits have us more than we have them, then addiction is a more appropriate term than habit.
Habits can include enormous passion, intense passion, passion that more often than not outshouts and bullies other imperatives in us. But it’s a passion that, however huge or stormy or hot, is nonetheless boxed in and framed by the habit that it’s serving. We’ve all seen others being very passionate in contexts that do nothing for us; you might, for example, watch curling on TV for hours with rapt, happily drooling attention, while I have to switch the channel immediately upon realizing that curling is filling the screen (if you don’t know what curling is, shame on you). Or I might have to have not only a banana in my late morning protein drink, but also have to have it when its skin is already generously mottled with brown blotches, whereas you are fine having a banana or not, and don’t care if its skin is yellow, brown, black, or even green. Of course, these are not addictions (and I don’t care if my wife says that I have a banana addiction, because I absolutely know that I don’t), but they still do contain some passion, however ridiculous they might seem to the uninitiated. Other habits, like arguing over stupid shit at the worst possible time (those doing time in the trenches of immature monogamy have a near-monopoly on this), can get really impassioned, draining away the energy needed for more useful pursuits.
Perhaps our most interesting habit is egoity, the detailing of which I’ll leave for another time, other than to say that it’s a habit with a mind of its own, and that truly and consistently recognizing it -- and not just intellectually -- as a habit is among the hardest work we’ll ever do.
Passion...Essential to bringing more passion into our lives is the practice of liberating it from the confines of habitualness. Think of it as letting the prisoners out, even though it’s not quite that simple. Passion doesn’t necessarily mean no containment or no restraint, anymore than it means screw the consequences. Abilities for both fitting containment and full-out (and responsible) expression of passion must be cultivated. Boundaries are often needed (if only to be kept on tap) when passion arises strongly, but it’s best if they are tailored to fit the current situation; otherwise, we’ll tend to slip into mere mechanicalness in the expressing and sharing of our passion.
The bigger we are when passion arises, the better; when we are our true size, passion has all the room it needs to find its most fitting expression.
If you want more passion in your life, you need to stop putting energy into practices and behaviors that don’t serve you. Check out your habits to see how much juice they are getting from you, and make a list of the ones that are simply draining or enervating you, and pick off one a week (or maybe even one every couple of days) from which to withdraw your energy. A habit fast. If this is really difficult, consider doing some deep therapy to uncover the roots of whatever habit seems to have you in its grip. Put your passion into recovering the passion that’s locked up in less-than-life-serving habits. It’s an adventure worth taking, a journey into what you’ve likely spent most of your life fleeing.
And, rather than trying to manipulate your way into increased passion, put some energy into directly facing the very deadness, stuckness, or pain that your desire for more passion is an escape from. Instead of trying to generate passion, make room for it to emerge. If you want to invite even more passion, get more vulnerable, more transparent, more open to all that constitutes you. Risk getting so close to another that you are opened beyond your every idea about yourself.
Energy that is invested in defensiveness and other forms of armoring simply means less energy for other things. Repression and suppression use up a lot of energy. Recognize the passion that can take you over, whether in the form of rage, grief, lust, or ecstasy, and see that when one of them is denied full expression, the others usually cannot be fully accessed. For example, overly contained anger usually means a flattening of grief, a tepid ecstasy, and a shallow lust, but full-blown (and responsibly expressed) rage can almost instantly mutate into full-on ecstasy, uninhibited grief, or mind-blowing lust; and so on.
The more deeply you work on yourself, including going into and through the heart of your core wounds, the more passion will be available to you, and not just emotionally and physically, but also mentally and spiritually. A passionate awakening...
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C. Arthur/adastra asks:
I'm curious about love. What is love, really? In terms of romantic/sexual love, what does it mean to love someone or to be “in love”? How can I tell if I “really love” or am “really in love” with someone? I know you've written somewhere about romantic delusions people confuse with love – could you say something about that? How does love manifest differently depending on one's depth of consciousness or stage of Awakening? How can I open myself more deeply to love, deepen my capacity for love (alone or in the context of a romantic relationship)? How does love manifest differently in masculine/agentic and feminine/communion modes?
Robert answers:
Great questions, which I can only begin to address here...
Love may include attraction, but is more than attraction; love may include appetite, but is more than appetite; love may include kindness, but is more than kindness; and so on.
Eros, philos, agape; love of food, love of basketball, love of ideas, love of erotic play, love of God, love beyond love; puppy-dog love, fanatic love, unrequited love, ecstatic love; so many faces of love, so many forms and ways of loving, experientially so obvious and definitionally so hard to effectively corral (probably because love eludes all of its definitions, including those given below).
So what is love? To me, it is primarily the state and practice of expansively felt communion, whether with one or many or all that is. Love is self-illuminating, life-affirming embrace, the heartbeat of real intimacy, the gratitude-suffused intuition of everywhere-present Divinity.
Love is Absolute Mystery nakedly embracing Itself. The personalizing of this is the essence of relationship. Most relationships get stuck and lost in the melodramatics of this, but it is nonetheless possible for a relationship to reach sufficient psychospiritual transparency to touch what is beyond it through our committed participation in it. Freedom through intimacy. And how? By loving so strongly, especially when things are really difficult, that we cease turning away from that in us (and others) which we usually shun, ostracize, or disown; love, deep love, doesn’t exclude, however fiercely it might deal with certain situations. Ever dying into it are we, like clouds in endless sky.
When our heart breaks and we don’t go to pieces and don’t get bitter and twisted, we are in love’s neighborhood. When we give what we most want to be given, we are on love’s doorstep. When we really get that what we do to another, we do to ourselves, we are in love’s living room. When we include in the circle of our reach all that we are, we are in love’s crucible. When we are in love’s fire, and surrender to it, making good use of both the heat and the light therein, we are zeroing in on Home, deepening our capacity to literally be love.
At a personal level, love is the openly felt state of embracing another’s being. When this is attempted through the abandoning of personal boundaries, love is all but gone, obscured by the resulting fusion (soon to be confusion) that commonly characterizes conventional romance. On the other hand, when our boundaries are not abandoned, but are instead expanded to include the other, we make possible a very deep love. When such love’s exceptionally rich bonding coexists with a naturally succulent, effortlessly mutual erotic chemistry, we can say that we’re not just loving, but are in love, falling/rising/being in love. In the presence of such deep communion (the truly shared heart and shared being), there’s no need to romanticize or otherwise restrict love.
More on conventional romance: When fantasy-centered sexual anticipation or excitation gets an emotionally compelling grip on us, and when we mistake fusion with communion, such romance occurs. It is literally a chestful of lust, radiating in all directions, packed with swooning idealism, deliciously stimulating imagery, and runaway hope, a hope hopelessly enthused about union, true love, and soulmate possibilities (all of which do, of course, occur in mature relationships), a hope nourished and sustained by the dissolution of boundaries. A sweetly narcotic spell of dramatic delusion...
In conventional romance — the separative swoon of false oneness — boundaries are not expanded, so as to include the other, but are collapsed, abandoned, forgotten. Eventually, as the passion loses some intensity and doubts creep in and the dream’s fabric thins, the lovers start wondering where they went wrong, not seeing that what isn’t working in the relationship has been there all along, obscured by the heat of their embrace and the giddy intensity of their fusion. They were but getting it on under artificial light, blindly merging where sensation and idealism meet, dumping their boundaries instead of stretching them. Nevertheless, even though many of us recognize the folly of such romance, we still tend to support it, acting as if it’s still a lovely thing, an essential part of love, when in fact it is not love at all, but only perfumed delusion, marketing a pleasurably consoling dream in which sentimentalized eroticism is mistaken for love, and undiscerning certainty for truth.
And, you may ask, how do we know when we’re in the grip of conventional romance? We feel swoony, off balance, intoxicated, erotically stoned, marooned from our critical faculties, and are unquestioningly immersed in our cult of two, our perfect little bubble of immunity, happily unaware of the rude pricks of reality that our very situation is attracting. It’s a delicious dream, happily feverish and often laced with mystical elements (like boundary dissolution and blissfulness), and therefore not so easy to wake up from, but wake up from it we must, if we are to find and live in real love, the kind of love that makes possible a truly intimate connectedness with both Beloved and beloved.
And how to open yourself more deeply to love? Practice opening in circumstances that typically would shut you down; practice being grateful when you don’t give a damn about being grateful; practice being caring toward yourself when you are beating yourself up for something; do some metta and tonglen practices periodically; practice being caring in the midst of your anger, without, however, shutting it down; practice being compassionate toward yourself when your heart is shut; get into a relationship with another who has a similar commitment to such work, so that your relationship becomes a crucible for Awakening’s alchemy; and don’t forget to cut yourself some slack in all this, for it’s far from a straightforward path, with an abundance of dips and twists and surprises...
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A. leela asks:
Robert,
I get so much from everything that you share, but this is standing out for me these days...
“by putting our passion into leaving our prisons rather than trying to make them cozier or sexier (so that we, to take but one example, no longer confuse the eroticizing of unresolved issues with sexual freedom).”
I am finding it VERY challenging to watch this pattern in people in positions of power or in “committed relationships.” I feel like I am so keenly aware of the damage done to others from these positions and I desire to see that pain end. Its hard to enough to witness it in myself and others when we are going about our day to day (not as therapist, ministers etc), mostly due to the fact that I am still processing the pain I have caused other or they have caused me by acting on those passions that cozy up our prisons. Lately I find myself dealing with loved ones who appear to be doing everything they can to keep those bars in tact while thinking or acting like they are doing the opposite. The lines between keeping a higher perspective and my own emotional reactions are getting harder for me to separate. How do we differentiate our personal judgments from a higher principal? The example of Marc Gafni comes to mind. His pathologies are not something many of us are free from on some level, but his acting on them while in a position of power adds another level of damage. I don’t think he would have had the power within himself to stop his behavior, it required exposure, removal from his position & hopefully therapy to address the issues. Where is that line between witnessing this and exposing it? What is our personal responsibility in speaking out when we know? Are we guilty of enabling the pathology when we witness it and do nothing?
I also ponder the idea that we seek out exposure on some level too. Like do people put themselves in a position to be exposed because that’s how they are asking for help? Are we robbing others of lessons potentially learned for their benefit by remaining silent?
Thank you,
~leela
Robert answers:
What’s the appropriate thing to do? No one-size-fits-all answer hangs out here, for we’re stepping into the ambiguity-laced, multileveled terrain of morality, which only gets increasingly nuanced and complex as we mature (which doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it is always hard to crystallize into fittingly precise action).
We can -- and need to -- take strongly unequivocal stands in certain situations, even when the sense of what’s moral seems to be not much more than a shapeshifting phenomenon in a multiperspectival pool of possibilities. In this, we consider a situation from various levels and angles, adjusting our lenses and gathering as much relevant data as we can, and then, after letting it all settle (ideally in the unbounded openness of Being), we tune into which action (including doing nothing) has the strongest or most compelling intuitive pull for us.
This, of course, requires a capacity to hold -- not juggle, but hold, contain, even embrace -- different perspectives at the same time. And not just cognitively -- emotional literacy is also crucial, so that we can clearly factor what we’re actually feeling into our exploration of the situation. Our rationality (and transrationality), along with our meditative capacity to provide sentient spaciousness for whatever’s arising, best serve us morally when their findings are scanned/absorbed/evaluated by our feeling dimension (and I mean our nonreactive, consciously feeling dimension) before we take our moral stand.
Let’s consider emotion a bit more, especially with regard to its relationship to rationality: It is not uncommon to view emotions as being lower or more primitive than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity. Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of our emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or kept functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions.
Implicit in this attitude is the common identification of emotion with subjectivity — in the sense that subjectivity is a failure to be objective — an identification that may be justifiable if and when emotion is irrational or egocentric, but not if it is also sometimes rationally informed.
One can be objective and emotional at the same time, as when a releasing of tears washes away an ossified stance, leaving us not in a particular position, but rather aware of possible positions. Research suggests that the openly felt, unrepressed presence of emotion can significantly contribute to mental and social skills. The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. An impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions. Feelings are needed for making truly rational decisions. Without emotional intelligence (EQ), intellectual intelligence (IQ) means little. But put together EQ and IQ, plus some spiritual intelligence, and moral intelligence is more than possible.
So are ethical decisions best conducted in the absence of emotions? Not necessarily. If emotions are ways of viewing and evaluating (a primarily noncognitive evaluation, but an evaluation nonetheless) our world, then they are already deeply implicated in ethics, whether at the level where emotion is little more than a sense of liking or disliking, or at the level where emotion is a complex, somatically rooted yet mentally sophisticated (and perhaps even rational) “reading” of a given situation.
Okay, back to our situation...Sometimes arriving at a solid decision is not much more than a no-brainer. For example, if your spiritual teacher is fucking you and telling you to keep quiet about it while telling all his students that a good spiritual teacher never ever fucks his students, then blowing the whistle on him is a pretty clear option -- a gift to the other students, and also to the teacher. By exposing him, you are serving the well-being of all involved, regardless of the hurt that may arise. Another example: You find out that your neighbor is beating up his wife regularly; you’ve heard it a few times, and now have seen the bruises and black eyes, and are so outraged that you take action (bringing in the police, social services, etcetera). Again, a no-brainer.
Other times it’s a lot trickier. Your friend’s husband is, you one day discover, having sex with her best friend (X), who also happens to be a close friend of yours. What do you do? You know you’ve got to do something. But you’ve got to take into account certain factors: Your friend and X run a business together that supplies most of their income; your friend has told you that she would divorce her husband if he ever cheated on her; X is emotionally very fragile, with a history of suicidal ideation. So it’s a judgment call. You take all of the above into account, plus other factors (like the kind of relationship you have and want with each woman), notice how you feel as you let the whole thing settle in you, and see what intuition kicks in most strongly. Let’s say you decide to confront X; you don’t know how she’ll respond, but you do know that you expect her to put a halt to her affair. You might also want to tell your friend what has happened, or you might decide to leave that to X. You might also confront your friend’s husband. And so on. And it’s not just a matter of simple confrontation; the way in which you deal with each person is very important. For example, given X’s emotional fragility, you may want to handle your confrontation with her with extra care, perhaps already having some suggestions ready for her as to where she might go for professional help. And you may also want to put the whole thing in the open, trusting that your friend and her husband won’t necessarily separate -- you may think of how horrible it would be if your friend doesn’t discover what’s happened until much later, and then finds out that you knew all along and didn’t tell her. So you can see that whichever way you go, there are risks. This, however, need not paralyze you, but rather only remind you that you cannot know the full outcome of your actions. All you can do is act with all the integrity and care of which you are capable.
It’s also important to look deeply into our motivation for whistleblowing. At times, it may be admirable -- just a wanting to serve the greatest good for all involved -- and other times, it may be less-than-admirable, as when we are acting from jealousy or revenge, wanting to expose the offending others for the simple pleasure of seeing them suffer, even as it looks as if we’re doing something noble.
Exposing wrongdoing can be an unambiguous task, but it is not so straightforward in many cases; would you, for example, turn in a woman who stole from you in order to feed her children? What if that desperate act of hers was the only way she could feed her children at that time? There are plenty of examples like this. We may see a friend doing something we don’t approve of, and we cut them a lot of slack (more than we would grant a stranger), perhaps mentioning to them in private that we don’t feel so good about what they’re doing, but not to the degree of cutting them out of our lives.
For most of us, such compromises are not all that uncommon. Does this mean that we are not moral people? Not necessarily. Morality is much more than a set of rules; in its more mature stages, it not only involves a context-driven, transegoic interpretation of those rules, but also a decision-making capacity that may not depend at all upon those rules. At a certain point, we discover what is more moral than morality, and hitch our action tendencies to that, for better or for worse.
Prior to that, we are, to varying degrees, operating in the dark; all we can do then is take maximum advantage of whatever light and other resources we have, make our choices, and live as best we can with the consequences of those choices.
What’s the appropriate thing to do? No one-size-fits-all answer hangs out here, for we’re stepping into the ambiguity-laced, multileveled terrain of morality, which only gets increasingly nuanced and complex as we mature (which doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that it is always hard to crystallize into fittingly precise action).
We can -- and need to -- take strongly unequivocal stands in certain situations, even when the sense of what’s moral seems to be not much more than a shapeshifting phenomenon in a multiperspectival pool of possibilities. In this, we consider a situation from various levels and angles, adjusting our lenses and gathering as much relevant data as we can, and then, after letting it all settle (ideally in the unbounded openness of Being), we tune into which action (including doing nothing) has the strongest or most compelling intuitive pull for us.
This, of course, requires a capacity to hold -- not juggle, but hold, contain, even embrace -- different perspectives at the same time. And not just cognitively -- emotional literacy is also crucial, so that we can clearly factor what we’re actually feeling into our exploration of the situation. Our rationality (and transrationality), along with our meditative capacity to provide sentient spaciousness for whatever’s arising, best serve us morally when their findings are scanned/absorbed/evaluated by our feeling dimension (and I mean our nonreactive, consciously feeling dimension) before we take our moral stand.
Let’s consider emotion a bit more, especially with regard to its relationship to rationality: It is not uncommon to view emotions as being lower or more primitive than reason, doing little more than clouding the skies of rational thought, or muddying objectivity. Thinking clearly is thus often associated with dispassion, or a muting of our emotions; moral decisions are allegedly best made when passion and feeling are either “safely” out of the picture, or kept functionally peripheral to the decision-making process, much like children excluded or kept at a distance from parental discussions.
Implicit in this attitude is the common identification of emotion with subjectivity — in the sense that subjectivity is a failure to be objective — an identification that may be justifiable if and when emotion is irrational or egocentric, but not if it is also sometimes rationally informed.
One can be objective and emotional at the same time, as when a releasing of tears washes away an ossified stance, leaving us not in a particular position, but rather aware of possible positions. Research suggests that the openly felt, unrepressed presence of emotion can significantly contribute to mental and social skills. The practice of distancing or dissociating ourselves from our emotions, especially our apparently darker or more uncomfortable emotions, can seriously disrupt our ability to think clearly and act morally. An impairment in emotional capacity (as perhaps caused by damage to brain regions essential for emotional processing) can actually retard one’s ability to make sound decisions. Feelings are needed for making truly rational decisions. Without emotional intelligence (EQ), intellectual intelligence (IQ) means little. But put together EQ and IQ, plus some spiritual intelligence, and moral intelligence is more than possible.
So are ethical decisions best conducted in the absence of emotions? Not necessarily. If emotions are ways of viewing and evaluating (a primarily noncognitive evaluation, but an evaluation nonetheless) our world, then they are already deeply implicated in ethics, whether at the level where emotion is little more than a sense of liking or disliking, or at the level where emotion is a complex, somatically rooted yet mentally sophisticated (and perhaps even rational) “reading” of a given situation.
Okay, back to our situation...Sometimes arriving at a solid decision is not much more than a no-brainer. For example, if your spiritual teacher is fucking you and telling you to keep quiet about it while telling all his students that a good spiritual teacher never ever fucks his students, then blowing the whistle on him is a pretty clear option -- a gift to the other students, and also to the teacher. By exposing him, you are serving the well-being of all involved, regardless of the hurt that may arise. Another example: You find out that your neighbor is beating up his wife regularly; you’ve heard it a few times, and now have seen the bruises and black eyes, and are so outraged that you take action (bringing in the police, social services, etcetera). Again, a no-brainer.
Other times it’s a lot trickier. Your friend’s husband is, you one day discover, having sex with her best friend (X), who also happens to be a close friend of yours. What do you do? You know you’ve got to do something. But you’ve got to take into account certain factors: Your friend and X run a business together that supplies most of their income; your friend has told you that she would divorce her husband if he ever cheated on her; X is emotionally very fragile, with a history of suicidal ideation. So it’s a judgment call. You take all of the above into account, plus other factors (like the kind of relationship you have and want with each woman), notice how you feel as you let the whole thing settle in you, and see what intuition kicks in most strongly. Let’s say you decide to confront X; you don’t know how she’ll respond, but you do know that you expect her to put a halt to her affair. You might also want to tell your friend what has happened, or you might decide to leave that to X. You might also confront your friend’s husband. And so on. And it’s not just a matter of simple confrontation; the way in which you deal with each person is very important. For example, given X’s emotional fragility, you may want to handle your confrontation with her with extra care, perhaps already having some suggestions ready for her as to where she might go for professional help. And you may also want to put the whole thing in the open, trusting that your friend and her husband won’t necessarily separate -- you may think of how horrible it would be if your friend doesn’t discover what’s happened until much later, and then finds out that you knew all along and didn’t tell her. So you can see that whichever way you go, there are risks. This, however, need not paralyze you, but rather only remind you that you cannot know the full outcome of your actions. All you can do is act with all the integrity and care of which you are capable.
It’s also important to look deeply into our motivation for whistleblowing. At times, it may be admirable -- just a wanting to serve the greatest good for all involved -- and other times, it may be less-than-admirable, as when we are acting from jealousy or revenge, wanting to expose the offending others for the simple pleasure of seeing them suffer, even as it looks as if we’re doing something noble.
Exposing wrongdoing can be an unambiguous task, but it is not so straightforward in many cases; would you, for example, turn in a woman who stole from you in order to feed her children? What if that desperate act of hers was the only way she could feed her children at that time? There are plenty of examples like this. We may see a friend doing something we don’t approve of, and we cut them a lot of slack (more than we would grant a stranger), perhaps mentioning to them in private that we don’t feel so good about what they’re doing, but not to the degree of cutting them out of our lives.
For most of us, such compromises are not all that uncommon. Does this mean that we are not moral people? Not necessarily. Morality is much more than a set of rules; in its more mature stages, it not only involves a context-driven, transegoic interpretation of those rules, but also a decision-making capacity that may not depend at all upon those rules. At a certain point, we discover what is more moral than morality, and hitch our action tendencies to that, for better or for worse.
Prior to that, we are, to varying degrees, operating in the dark; all we can do then is take maximum advantage of whatever light and other resources we have, make our choices, and live as best we can with the consequences of those choices.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
B. Jana/Plasmafly asks:
Since you seem to be Mr. Passion himself, I would like to ask you a question about habit vs. passion.
I am fasting at present and it makes me aware of how my life is just a series of addictive habits. And that even an integral life is a series of life-supporting habits rather than self-destructive ones...swapping good habits for bad.
This does not seem to be congruent with a passionate life for habit seems to be the antithesis of passion. While on autopilot life cannot touch us, the known is boring, the bored brain is a dying brain...a dying life.
Beyond the realm of good and bad habits, how do you suggest establishing "Flow" and passion in ones life?
The first place I am starting is my breasts, which have been sorely neglected over my life. I am starting to massage them every night to reinstate my hormones and try to get some feeling back in my body. They say the breasts are affixed to the genitals...well mine aren't, at least not yet. Thus I start at the physical level with the good habit of breast massage until further hints on the passionate life from you are offered.
One thing I have noticed with my steady decline in passion is that I can no longer readily conjure feelings-thoughts-images of inner worlds, future visions and potentials like I used to when my soul felt more alive, tho I still have a vivid dream life it too lacks potency and purpose.
Part of the problem is the background high endorphin level I have experienced for years, I have to do something that will counteract the eternal buzz, and bring more "excitement" to my nervous system.
Robert answers:
Habits are self-reinforcing recurrent behavioral patterns. At one end of the spectrum, they are relatively harmless and even beneficial (a regular exercise habit, for example), and at the other end, they are destructive (a narcotics habit, etcetera). Habits vary not only in the degree of attachment brought to them, but also in the degree of consciousness granted them. Some habits graduate from routines into disciplines, while others remain adolescent, turning away from good intentions and well-scrubbed morals, preferring seedier hangouts, where they have the power to keep us serving them. Once our habits have us more than we have them, then addiction is a more appropriate term than habit.
Habits can include enormous passion, intense passion, passion that more often than not outshouts and bullies other imperatives in us. But it’s a passion that, however huge or stormy or hot, is nonetheless boxed in and framed by the habit that it’s serving. We’ve all seen others being very passionate in contexts that do nothing for us; you might, for example, watch curling on TV for hours with rapt, happily drooling attention, while I have to switch the channel immediately upon realizing that curling is filling the screen (if you don’t know what curling is, shame on you). Or I might have to have not only a banana in my late morning protein drink, but also have to have it when its skin is already generously mottled with brown blotches, whereas you are fine having a banana or not, and don’t care if its skin is yellow, brown, black, or even green. Of course, these are not addictions (and I don’t care if my wife says that I have a banana addiction, because I absolutely know that I don’t), but they still do contain some passion, however ridiculous they might seem to the uninitiated. Other habits, like arguing over stupid shit at the worst possible time (those doing time in the trenches of immature monogamy have a near-monopoly on this), can get really impassioned, draining away the energy needed for more useful pursuits.
Perhaps our most interesting habit is egoity, the detailing of which I’ll leave for another time, other than to say that it’s a habit with a mind of its own, and that truly and consistently recognizing it -- and not just intellectually -- as a habit is among the hardest work we’ll ever do.
Passion...Essential to bringing more passion into our lives is the practice of liberating it from the confines of habitualness. Think of it as letting the prisoners out, even though it’s not quite that simple. Passion doesn’t necessarily mean no containment or no restraint, anymore than it means screw the consequences. Abilities for both fitting containment and full-out (and responsible) expression of passion must be cultivated. Boundaries are often needed (if only to be kept on tap) when passion arises strongly, but it’s best if they are tailored to fit the current situation; otherwise, we’ll tend to slip into mere mechanicalness in the expressing and sharing of our passion.
The bigger we are when passion arises, the better; when we are our true size, passion has all the room it needs to find its most fitting expression.
If you want more passion in your life, you need to stop putting energy into practices and behaviors that don’t serve you. Check out your habits to see how much juice they are getting from you, and make a list of the ones that are simply draining or enervating you, and pick off one a week (or maybe even one every couple of days) from which to withdraw your energy. A habit fast. If this is really difficult, consider doing some deep therapy to uncover the roots of whatever habit seems to have you in its grip. Put your passion into recovering the passion that’s locked up in less-than-life-serving habits. It’s an adventure worth taking, a journey into what you’ve likely spent most of your life fleeing.
And, rather than trying to manipulate your way into increased passion, put some energy into directly facing the very deadness, stuckness, or pain that your desire for more passion is an escape from. Instead of trying to generate passion, make room for it to emerge. If you want to invite even more passion, get more vulnerable, more transparent, more open to all that constitutes you. Risk getting so close to another that you are opened beyond your every idea about yourself.
Energy that is invested in defensiveness and other forms of armoring simply means less energy for other things. Repression and suppression use up a lot of energy. Recognize the passion that can take you over, whether in the form of rage, grief, lust, or ecstasy, and see that when one of them is denied full expression, the others usually cannot be fully accessed. For example, overly contained anger usually means a flattening of grief, a tepid ecstasy, and a shallow lust, but full-blown (and responsibly expressed) rage can almost instantly mutate into full-on ecstasy, uninhibited grief, or mind-blowing lust; and so on.
The more deeply you work on yourself, including going into and through the heart of your core wounds, the more passion will be available to you, and not just emotionally and physically, but also mentally and spiritually. A passionate awakening...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
C. Arthur/adastra asks:
I'm curious about love. What is love, really? In terms of romantic/sexual love, what does it mean to love someone or to be “in love”? How can I tell if I “really love” or am “really in love” with someone? I know you've written somewhere about romantic delusions people confuse with love – could you say something about that? How does love manifest differently depending on one's depth of consciousness or stage of Awakening? How can I open myself more deeply to love, deepen my capacity for love (alone or in the context of a romantic relationship)? How does love manifest differently in masculine/agentic and feminine/communion modes?
Robert answers:
Great questions, which I can only begin to address here...
Love may include attraction, but is more than attraction; love may include appetite, but is more than appetite; love may include kindness, but is more than kindness; and so on.
Eros, philos, agape; love of food, love of basketball, love of ideas, love of erotic play, love of God, love beyond love; puppy-dog love, fanatic love, unrequited love, ecstatic love; so many faces of love, so many forms and ways of loving, experientially so obvious and definitionally so hard to effectively corral (probably because love eludes all of its definitions, including those given below).
So what is love? To me, it is primarily the state and practice of expansively felt communion, whether with one or many or all that is. Love is self-illuminating, life-affirming embrace, the heartbeat of real intimacy, the gratitude-suffused intuition of everywhere-present Divinity.
Love is Absolute Mystery nakedly embracing Itself. The personalizing of this is the essence of relationship. Most relationships get stuck and lost in the melodramatics of this, but it is nonetheless possible for a relationship to reach sufficient psychospiritual transparency to touch what is beyond it through our committed participation in it. Freedom through intimacy. And how? By loving so strongly, especially when things are really difficult, that we cease turning away from that in us (and others) which we usually shun, ostracize, or disown; love, deep love, doesn’t exclude, however fiercely it might deal with certain situations. Ever dying into it are we, like clouds in endless sky.
When our heart breaks and we don’t go to pieces and don’t get bitter and twisted, we are in love’s neighborhood. When we give what we most want to be given, we are on love’s doorstep. When we really get that what we do to another, we do to ourselves, we are in love’s living room. When we include in the circle of our reach all that we are, we are in love’s crucible. When we are in love’s fire, and surrender to it, making good use of both the heat and the light therein, we are zeroing in on Home, deepening our capacity to literally be love.
At a personal level, love is the openly felt state of embracing another’s being. When this is attempted through the abandoning of personal boundaries, love is all but gone, obscured by the resulting fusion (soon to be confusion) that commonly characterizes conventional romance. On the other hand, when our boundaries are not abandoned, but are instead expanded to include the other, we make possible a very deep love. When such love’s exceptionally rich bonding coexists with a naturally succulent, effortlessly mutual erotic chemistry, we can say that we’re not just loving, but are in love, falling/rising/being in love. In the presence of such deep communion (the truly shared heart and shared being), there’s no need to romanticize or otherwise restrict love.
More on conventional romance: When fantasy-centered sexual anticipation or excitation gets an emotionally compelling grip on us, and when we mistake fusion with communion, such romance occurs. It is literally a chestful of lust, radiating in all directions, packed with swooning idealism, deliciously stimulating imagery, and runaway hope, a hope hopelessly enthused about union, true love, and soulmate possibilities (all of which do, of course, occur in mature relationships), a hope nourished and sustained by the dissolution of boundaries. A sweetly narcotic spell of dramatic delusion...
In conventional romance — the separative swoon of false oneness — boundaries are not expanded, so as to include the other, but are collapsed, abandoned, forgotten. Eventually, as the passion loses some intensity and doubts creep in and the dream’s fabric thins, the lovers start wondering where they went wrong, not seeing that what isn’t working in the relationship has been there all along, obscured by the heat of their embrace and the giddy intensity of their fusion. They were but getting it on under artificial light, blindly merging where sensation and idealism meet, dumping their boundaries instead of stretching them. Nevertheless, even though many of us recognize the folly of such romance, we still tend to support it, acting as if it’s still a lovely thing, an essential part of love, when in fact it is not love at all, but only perfumed delusion, marketing a pleasurably consoling dream in which sentimentalized eroticism is mistaken for love, and undiscerning certainty for truth.
And, you may ask, how do we know when we’re in the grip of conventional romance? We feel swoony, off balance, intoxicated, erotically stoned, marooned from our critical faculties, and are unquestioningly immersed in our cult of two, our perfect little bubble of immunity, happily unaware of the rude pricks of reality that our very situation is attracting. It’s a delicious dream, happily feverish and often laced with mystical elements (like boundary dissolution and blissfulness), and therefore not so easy to wake up from, but wake up from it we must, if we are to find and live in real love, the kind of love that makes possible a truly intimate connectedness with both Beloved and beloved.
And how to open yourself more deeply to love? Practice opening in circumstances that typically would shut you down; practice being grateful when you don’t give a damn about being grateful; practice being caring toward yourself when you are beating yourself up for something; do some metta and tonglen practices periodically; practice being caring in the midst of your anger, without, however, shutting it down; practice being compassionate toward yourself when your heart is shut; get into a relationship with another who has a similar commitment to such work, so that your relationship becomes a crucible for Awakening’s alchemy; and don’t forget to cut yourself some slack in all this, for it’s far from a straightforward path, with an abundance of dips and twists and surprises...
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posted by adastra at 10:55 AM
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