Living Into Being

This is the last of five posts on find­ing free­dom from roles and life-scripts that inter­fere with effec­tive lead­er­ship and per­son­al ful­fill­ment. If you like, you can hear me read this post.

The oth­er posts are:

The Jour­ney of Unlearning
Lead­ing is Not Act­ing: What Roles Do You Play?
The Cost of the Script
Dis­cern­ing Untruth: Cre­ative Reflec­tion and the Path to Freedom

“Liv­ing into Being” is the phrase I give for life with­out the ham­per­ing effects of sub­lim­i­nal roles. It is a state of open­ness to life and insight into the fic­tions of self. Once self has been “seen through,” there is joy and a sense of deep­en­ing mas­tery — and mys­tery. When neg­a­tive emo­tions arise, they can be tracked ever more quick­ly to a false self, a mask that is still oper­at­ing from the dim cor­ners of inte­ri­or shad­ows, with the goal soon becom­ing not to get rid of what­ev­er is in shad­ow but to reclaim as an aspect of that mastery.

Behind the “fer­ry­man,” the “lone­ly king,” the “weak prince,” “super­woman,” “the mar­tyr,” “the vamp” or “the vam­pire” are the arche­typ­al seeds of ever more pri­ma­ry roles with which we live our lives — or they live us. Car­ol Pear­son con­dens­es these roles into twelve in one of my favorite books, Awak­en­ing the Heroes With­in. Her work under­scores how impor­tant as a human goal it is to appre­ci­ate the arche­types but not live them unre­flec­tive­ly. It seems to me the goal is to learn to step out of them, or above them, giv­ing them their due with­out allow­ing them to own us.

To both appre­ci­ate and move past them is to claim a dis­tinc­tive human free­dom. Carl Jung said it best:

That which we do not bring to con­scious­ness appears in our lives as fate.

And so the process of unearthing from uncon­scious­ness the roles we play out is vital, for it is this con­scious­ness that con­stant­ly kin­dles a sense of choice and com­pas­sion about our own and oth­ers’ lives. There is no inner prob­lem of per­son­al­i­ty so large that it can­not be placed in the con­text of a sto­ry that is liv­ing us — as indi­vid­u­als or col­lec­tive­ly as a soci­ety — if only we can see it and under­stand it. If we can see the sto­ry for what it is, we awak­en as if from a dream. The goal isn’t just to choose a dif­fer­ent end­ing to the sto­ry, to rewrite the script or to become anoth­er char­ac­ter; it is the process of awak­en­ing itself, the act of putting down “the book” from which we are read­ing in order to go live life as it is meant to be lived, out­side the sto­ry of our fic­tion­al selves. Once this is known, it is pos­si­ble to see how the self is real­ly just lay­er upon lay­er of sto­ry, and how oth­ers live out their per­son­al fables, too, from the most pow­er­ful and wealthy fig­ures who appar­ent­ly con­trol social insti­tu­tions such as cor­po­ra­tions and uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ments to the prover­bial “lost souls” liv­ing beneath the viaduct. And it is also pos­si­ble to see how we are con­stant­ly look­ing for the per­fect sto­ry, the one not jeop­ar­dized by oth­ers and is unas­sail­able by events. Typ­i­cal­ly, we tena­cious­ly resist the notion of the self­’s fic­tion­al qual­i­ties for fear of fac­ing what appears at first to be an abyss, an abyss on fire (although that is real­ly only bein­g­less being itself). We hold to our iden­ti­ties, our pre­sumed suc­cess for­mu­las, with more force and vio­lence than to any­thing else. We believe they pro­tect us, yet in the end we find they real­ly pro­tect us from nothing.

I could cite a mul­ti­tude of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, for he is pre­em­i­nent­ly a poet of fic­tion­al selves, full of the ironies of try­ing to main­tain any iden­ti­ty at any cost against an inevitably dark insight:

I start­ed out on burgundy
But soon hit the hard­er stuff,
Every­body said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough.
But the joke was on me,
There was nobody even there to bluff.
I’m going back to New York City,
I do believe I’ve had enough.

Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, New York City — home — is exact­ly the old/new aware­ness that we delu­sion­al­ly cre­ate our own iden­ti­ties, and that we are real­ly not able to ever stop the suf­fer­ing this process caus­es. That’s Dylan’s dark vision of going from one dis­cov­ery of ego and its shad­ows to anoth­er. It makes great art, but maybe not such a good life. My own expe­ri­ence is sim­ply that the less we bluff our­selves, the more the world opens up. The more mar­gin­al­iz­ing roles we see in our­selves, that we under­stand and begin to dis­pense with, the more pos­si­bil­i­ties for hap­pi­ness that can be real­ized. Some­where in his writ­ings, D.T. Suzu­ki, one of the great Zen mas­ters who brought Zen Bud­dhism to the Unit­ed States, says that the ego is as nec­es­sary to human beings as wings are to the bird. I take this to mean that our sto­ries are part of our essence like the wings of a bird, but they are not the bird itself. And once this is known the bird directs the wings, not the oth­er way around. In fact, in real free­dom, there is final­ly no sep­a­ra­tion between the two.

When I think of these moments in which we climb out of our selves, I imag­ine an immense, unknown, pris­tine land­scape, and see­ing at my feet the tiny first shoots of an emerg­ing Spring. There is warmth and light and beside me chil­dren’s voic­es; above me a beck­on­ing blue sky; a cool stream near­by. Noth­ing has changed and every­thing has, reveal­ing only moment after moment of pure choice. Bird, wings; expe­ri­ence, expe­ri­encer. Not two, not one. And only one ques­tion remain­ing — what now shall I do with the free­dom I have been giv­en? (or, per­haps, even more open, what now will hap­pen that free­dom is here?) I believe this is the true begin­ning of a com­pas­sion­ate aware­ness and the work to lead and to cre­ate a bet­ter world. It does­n’t come from any “have to” at all, nor any “should,” not a cause, no mat­ter how wor­thy, but from an ulti­mate­ly cre­ative choice in the face of an incred­i­bly beau­ti­ful universe.

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