Master of All Situations

A read­er, Mar­i­anne Pow­ers, astute­ly sug­gest­ed I reflect on where I learned to see truth in myself and oth­ers – a won­der­ful task that ought to take just about the rest of my life to fig­ure out. How­ev­er, some­thing did come to me almost imme­di­ate­ly: I remem­bered a book my moth­er gave me when I was twen­ty years old. That book was The Book of Tea by Okaku­ra Kaku­zo, a slim clas­sic of East­ern phi­los­o­phy pub­lished in 1906. Okaku­ra had intend­ed to cre­ate a short dis­course for some Amer­i­can friends and admir­ers aimed to over­come some of the “spiritual mis­un­der­stand­ing” between East and West. Why that book among the many should come to mind so quick­ly is a rid­dle to me. It was only one of many books on East­ern philoso­phies I had begun to read at that time. I liked it because it seemed to cut through the hub-bub of Amer­i­can indi­vid­u­al­ism, prob­ing at some­thing deep­er, more nature-based and more real.

Describ­ing Lao-Tse’s view that the con­cept of total­i­ty must nev­er be lost in that of the indi­vid­ual, Okaku­ra wrote:

…only in vac­u­um lay the tru­ly essen­tial. The real­i­ty of a room was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls them­selves. The use­ful­ness of a water pitch­er dwelt not in the form of the pitch­er or the mate­r­i­al of which it is made. Vac­u­um is all potent because all con­tain­ing. In vac­u­um alone motion becomes pos­si­ble. One who could make of him­self a vac­u­um into which oth­ers might freely enter would become mas­ter of all situations.

My moth­er inscribed part of this pas­sage inside the cov­er and over time I drew clos­er to these words, squeez­ing all the mys­te­ri­ous truth out of them I could find. And so it is no sur­prise that today thir­ty-five years lat­er I find myself writ­ing about open­ness, both inner and out­er. Per­haps I could say this is one step in my learn­ing about “truth-seeing” — this com­mit­ment to let­ting things enter as they will: beau­ty and pain, angels and demons, good rela­tion­ships and poor ones. I believe I have tried to wel­come it all in (even the dark­est parts of the road) and let it teach me what I need to know. I do notice that I am often work­ing with clients who for years have avoid­ed the dark­est parts of their paths; have defend­ed them­selves against it and now need some help being able to reclaim the abil­i­ty to receive — not just the dark but the light that comes with it.

One thing is cer­tain­ly clear: it is not so easy being a vac­u­um as Lao-Tse (through Okaku­ra) sug­gests. Do you know what it is like to walk into a room full of peo­ple that you know or that you don’t know and tru­ly be open? Can you sense your own first impres­sions, both respect­ing and ques­tion­ing them? Can you allow the true form of the ener­gy in the room to come to you or must you shift it or dom­i­nate it in some way? Can you wel­come each per­son just as they are? Can you let them tell their sto­ry in the way they need to tell it with­out it some­how becom­ing yours? Can you lis­ten with­out judgment?

Such old, old ques­tions on the path to becom­ing “master of all situations.”