As I awaken, a wave of something rises up in me—something gelatinous and dark—and I feel my ego-mind scratching at the door that has held it at bay during six hours of unconsciousness. It wants to eat, attack or play. Whatever its particular desires, it is desperate to reassert its sharp, shrill place in my otherwise peaceful field of awareness. We have a bargain, we two, after years of uneasy battle. It will come to heel, and even stay put for a while, permitting me to sleep, meditate, or walk through the woods or along the beach. But sometimes our detente breaks down, and on pre-dawn morning like this one, it rears up boldly: “All is lost,” it growls, “Nothing can be done to fix this mess.” At trembly times like now—and I too have felt gutted by what’s in the news—I hear its doom-and-gloom voice not as a warning but as a temptation. Like the delicious desire to fall asleep in a snowbank on a sub-zero day, or that giddy moment on a bridge when you can almost taste the sweet, empty oblivion of leaping into the void. “How very easy it would be,” the mind whispers.
But although it is only four in the morning and such thoughts coil around me like snakes, I push away the opium pipe my ego-mind holds out to me. I will not give myself over to its narrow interpretation of what is possible or who I must be. Haven’t I already learned that it is not to be trusted? That in any given situation, it will focus on what will go wrong, how there is no point, for are we not all doomed to die in any case? If not in the self-immolation of climate change then from a madman’s megalomania or cancer or an asteroid? Is this not the same voice that has repeatedly argued all along my life path that there’s no point in going to work or making the bed? “Why bother?” it whispers. “Go back to sleep.” I know from experience how easy it would be to make a bargain that would temporarily help me avoid the discomfort that comes with aliveness, especially in difficult times. To fall into a half-sleep to smooth out the edges of the circumstances I must negotiate, the sadness, disappointment, and grief that inevitably comes banging at the door of my human house.
If we are relatively privileged, or when reality happens to be fulfilling our expectations and matching our preferences, our spiritual practice may seem sufficient. It may even be that we feel most “spiritually evolved” when we are healthy, safe, have money, feel loved, and live in a stable social and political environment. But when the medical diagnosis comes, the house burns down, or fascism is licking at our heels, it may unravel. Then we may become like a puppy whose practiced ability to sit and stay evaporates when real world challenges arise, a squirrel, the mailman, a child on a bike. How inconvenient that when I most need my little dog to remain self-possessed, to remember his skills—both for his safety and my sanity—he’s most likely to lose his shit! Just so, many spiritual enthusiasts can keep it together on the meditation cushion or in the serenity of a kayak, but go bonkers when the world rudely asserts itself.
In the aftermath of such breakdowns, I remind myself that most such practices are undertaken precisely with such acutely difficult times in mind. Few of us lift weights merely in order to return to lift weights again and again, but, rather, to develop strength to propel us through the vicissitudes of real life. Nor do many of us go to therapy to become better at being therapized. So too, few us sit and meditate to become master meditators but do so in order to better access our true nature, making it less likely that we will lose ourselves next time the world does what it is going to do.
To put it a different way, it helps me to keep in mind that the human experience is meant to include difficulty, and so it is not an existential aberration or a colossal mistake that we experience bodies that degrade or that others—both individually and en masse—will make us want to weep from the apparent stupidity, nastiness, and shortsightedness of their choices. We are here for this. And once I stop thinking of life challenges as a rip off, then I can actually focus on responding to them in more or less skillful ways. However, when we get caught up in a protracted loop of this-shouldn’t-be-happening thinking—when it is, quite evidently, HAPPENING—we cannot constructively focus on addressing what is now at hand. And when we get lost in this-should-not-be-happening-to-ME thinking, we risk becoming seduced by a disempowering, chronic victim consciousness that is a hallmark of the ego-mind.
The upside is that it may be during such times that we uncover our hidden assumptions. If I now feel shock and disillusionment about the national situation, does this not suggest that I had believed it should and would be otherwise? Why, despite all the evidence of its ubiquity across time and place, do I sometimes feel almost personally affronted that so many people in “my” time and place are behaving in ways that are cult-like, cruel, and greedy? I wonder how much of my current attraction to despair and indignation is rooted in assumptions that whatever is happening is happening to ME, and that it should not be happening because I really, really don’t want it to.
Is it possible that, deep down, I somehow imagined that, if I played earnestly and by the rules—if I were a “good person”—then my individual (and collective) life would get progressively better? Had I been carrying the belief that if I wrote campaign checks, knocked on doors, and maintained an optimistic, grateful attitude, then external reality would comply and live up to my preferences? Of course, I am not prescribing or endorsing quietism or resignation. I fight for causes and people I believe in and will continue to do so. An ethicist by training, I not only feel the moral wrongness of so much that has been unfolding, I can analyze it and rail against it like the pro that I am. Further, I choose to honor, respect, and feel the feelings I have been feeling, including anger, fear, grief, and more.
I’m not discounting the value of emotion, then, but nudging myself away from a cheap form of sticky self-pity that tempts me in times like these. And even as I exercise self-compassion about my inclination to take it personally when others behave stupidly, ignorantly, or cruelly—especially when that behavior impacts me—I know that remaining in that almost intoxicating space of personal woundedness is an indulgence that the ego-mind is eager to exploit. It would prefer to keep me so rooted in righteous indignation that I would become clumsy and muddled. I would be like the mother of the kid caught shoplifting, so focused on the damage to her own self-image she can barely see her child. I would be like the guy diagnosed with cancer, so outraged by the unfairness of his illness that he can’t properly assess his treatment options. Obviously, outrage and indignation are normal—perhaps even psychologically healthy for many of us—but when we get stuck there in repeat mode, we reopen our wounds again and again as we lick them.
Until our emotions of indignation and offense begin to transmute into something less personal, we can’t be as skillful or as clearheaded as this moment in history desperately needs us to be. We will be susceptible, not just to sadness, anger, grief, and other human emotions, but to a despair so dark and grandiose it could only have been invented by our gollum-like ego. But to tend and nurse our wounds, as many of us are now doing, does not require that we build monuments to them. And we need not agree to sacrifice our precious inner peace to prove to ourselves or to others that we take seriously the damage and danger of these tumultuous times.
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