The life and times of Isaac Dust
Watching Scotch Mist (a fifty minute film of Radiohead playing songs off their latest album, In Rainbows) makes me want to drop everything, call my friend Eric, and join his band (for the third time).
My favorite moment from the film was this version of Faust Arp, with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing out in the middle of some field at dusk.
I once joked that Americans may just as well elect the next president via a reality TV show: “The Next American President.”
Not only do I believe a president COULD be elected this way, I’m starting to think it’s ACTUALLY happening. Instead of Simon, Paula and Randy we have Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly.
All they need to do now is share the voting results in a suspenseful way, like Ryan Seacrest does:
“Barack [gasp] …You are safe [deep exhale]. You can have a seat. That means Hillary and John, you are in the bottom two. One of you will go home tonight. We’ll find out who, after a word from our sponsor.
[Returning] John, you sang “Working man’s blues.”
Wolf thought you were a bit too white, but he liked the way you stayed positive.
Keith thought your hygiene was immaculate, but he said your delivery was ‘Ho hum.’
Bill liked your energy, but thought you should’ve lost the southern accent.
Hillary, you sang “Black Magic Woman.”
Wolf thought it was your best performance yet.
Keith thought your voice was strong, but that your dance moves could use a little work.
Bill just snarled and called you a “Liberal Fascist.”
America has voted. Hillary, you are…
SAFE! Congratulations, you will be moving on to the finals.
John, I’m sorry, that means you will not be The Next American President.
We’ll miss you around here, big guy.
[Roll video montage]
John, how ’bout taking us out with one more stump speech.
America, let’s give it up one last time for John Edwards!”
So, one of things I’ve been doing these days (other than rehabbing my knee) is thinking about the field of Psychology. I started trying to figure myself out at an early age, was a Psych major in college, and later on grabbed a funky Master’s Degree in East/West Psychology. On top of that, I’ve been working in the field for fifteen years, yet I’ve never considered myself a “psychologist.” This is probably because, in the technical sense of the term, a psychologist is a licensed professional, one who has jumped through a series of hoops which I’ve avoided for various reasons.
Yet, in a broader sense, I am a psychologist, as I’ve dedicated a big chunk of my life to a fairly systematic inquiry into the nature of human experience. As an undergrad, I had a real love-hate relationship to the field. More than anything, I was looking for a method of self-discovery, and what I found was an academic discipline which appeared disinterested in the deeper realms of subjective experience. A “study of the soul” it was not, especially at Binghamton University, where they took a strictly experimental science perspective. The APA (American Psychological Association) seemed to me to be “The Man,” keeping down creative inquiry for the sake of some money-driven status quo.
When I later moved to San Francisco and was exposed to the perspective of Transpersonal Psychology, my mind was blown and I felt like I had finally found my place in the field. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, I felt completely at home and certain that I would be a famous Transpersonal Psychologist who would rock the world with my brilliant discoveries.
But then those fucking APA Nazis pulled the rug out from under me, as I was told the East/West Psychology program would have to be torn down (with only the POSSIBILITY of eventual restructuring) in order for CIIS to meet new accreditation criteria. With student loan debts already at critical levels, it seemed insane to invest tens of thousands more into a program which might soon cease to exist, so I stopped my PhD work in its tracks, wrote a master’s thesis, and got out of Dodge.
Love and Rock N’ Roll took center stage for the next decade, and my work in the mental health field, while engaging and meaningful in many ways, has been primarily a matter of paying the bills. Which brings us to today, as I contemplate the next stage of my journey, the one that will begin when my wife and I return from Mexico in May.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to try my hand at teaching Psychology. The trouble has been — aside from my funky master’s degree giving pause to potential employers — that nearly all academic institutions are locked into the same cookie-cutter, status quo, APA sanctioned curriculum that drove me nuts back when I was an undergrad. So, I’ve been re-examining the landscape, seeing if there isn’t a way for me to operate within the established field while still bringing in the transpersonal and integral perspectives.
I’m sure it can be done, and in the coming weeks I might use this blog to think out loud a bit on this topic.
The sun is bright today, lighting up my room and giving me the false impression that I could go for a walk and NOT freeze my ass off. That it’s even possible for me to go for a walk is mind boggling in a way, as it seems like only yesterday I could barely get back and forth to the bathroom. Yes, the sun is bright and the room illuminated, but my mind is clouded and noisy, and I’m wondering if this whole process of physical rehabilitation isn’t more than just a metaphor for consciousness transformation and deep personal change.
After the injury, I restricted (almost completely) movement in my left leg for six weeks, thinking (wrongly, it turned out) I was doing the safe thing, the right thing. The result was a dramatic loss of functioning in my leg and a shrinking of my world. I couldn’t do very much, and the less I was able to express myself, the more my mind state felt depressed and dulled. When I found out what was actually wrong with my knee (a torn ACL) and was given the green light to move around again, I slowly but surely regained function and watched as my world of possibilities grew, sometimes changing by the day.
Then I had surgery and went back to square one. Since two days following the surgery (when the post-op fog lifted) I have been completely focused on one thing: REHAB. Fueling me is the expectation, the belief that I can and will get better as long as I stay committed to the process. I’m also extremely motivated to return to my wife ASAP. Even though from day to day it often seems as if nothing is happening, nothing is changing for the better, nonetheless I’ve stuck to my guns, and sure enough I continue to make breakthrough advances in my functioning. I actually CAN go for a walk today.
When I was in Mexico, I came to the realization that in order to break through my psychological scar-tissue, I would need to commit to the process of personal transformation by sticking to a “spiritual” rehab regimen, the specifics of which I had researched for more than a decade. Perhaps because I was in an unfamiliar setting and temporarily freed from the need to make money, I was able to follow through on this project with a high level of focus and discipline, and it wasn’t long before I could see palpable results. I felt more intensely alive, more clear-headed, more at home in the world.
The injury and eventual return to the U.S. knocked me out of my “zone,” and I’ve yet to regain my Mexican mojo. What’s irking me today is this: Why is it that I can stick to my physical rehab regimen NO MATTER WHAT, while I can never seem to consistently stick to a set of spiritual practices?
I think it comes down to this: I believe, unequivocally, that the physical rehab will yield results. I’ve been through it before with the other knee, and I’ve seen other people successfully rehab. There’s a well-defined goal that can be realized. On the other hand, I personally don’t know a living soul who seems “enlightened” or truly awake in a spiritual sense. I’ve read about amazing people in books, but I guess I’m not totally convinced there’s even such a thing as enlightenment. At times I really buy into the notion, especially in the wake of a “peak experience,” but even then it seems more a matter of faith. As soon as I lose the sense of connectedness, it’s not long before I lose faith in the possibility of stable spiritual realization.
So, in the space between the last period and the beginning of this sentence, I did go for that walk. I noticed some improvement in my gait, although at one point I encountered some significant resistance as I seized up mid-stride. I felt a crunch as perhaps some scar tissue was broken up. It hurt a bit, but I felt a little freer as I turned to head home. I thought maybe I made a major breakthrough, but the resistance has since returned, along with my limp.
My mother was watching “The Biggest Loser” the other night while I was exercising on the stationary bike. I remarked that it was hard for me to feel much sympathy for these grossly overweight people, much less give them a big pat on the back if and when they lost weight. After all, I said, isn’t that like giving someone a medal for ceasing to bang their head against a wall? I mean, it’s a good thing to lose weight, but aside from the rare thyroid condition or what have you, didn’t these people get fat in the first place because of ignorance and poor choices? Clearly, I wasn’t feeling much in the way of compassion for these people, and my mother got on me a bit, saying that not everybody is as disciplined as I am.
Now the first thing I thought to myself was “Shit — I’m always lamenting my LACK of discipline.” Then I really started to ponder about whether or not any of us really has a choice about such matters, whether or not we truly are responsible for our own misery and/or fulfillment. I’ve been operating on the premise that I, in fact, AM responsible for my own happiness, having seen time and again how I choose the dulling comfort of the status quo when faced with the possibility of deep personal change. So, naturally I assume most other adults choose a life of relative ignorance and suffer the consequences accordingly.
This way of thinking though, does let one off the hook when it comes to feeling compassion, which might be an indicator something is amiss. After all, isn’t compassion supposed to spring naturally and effortlessly from the state of spiritual wakefulness?
Anyway, later on I went upstairs and finished the book The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, and came across the following:
It is misleading to say that somebody “chose” a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind.
This makes a lot of sense to me, as did about ninety-nine percent of what Tolle had to say throughout the rest of the book. Apparently, Oprah liked the book as well, and her stamp of approval put the book in millions of hands. Basically, Tolle subscribes to the notion that the main barrier to spiritual enlightenment is our identification with the mind or ego. He advocates a practice of focusing awareness and attention on present moment experience, particularly the felt sense of the body, as a means of breaking our attachment to thought forms and thus realizing our true, transpersonal nature.
His basic view of enlightenment fits quite well with my own experience, and I appreciate his keen ability to express subtleties of spiritual inquiry in simple, direct language. In fact, he expresses his views in a pretty radical fashion, and it surprises me that so many people read his book. I wonder how many people really “bought” it. It struck me that if one REALLY believed what this guy was saying, the implications would be staggering in terms of how one goes about living one’s life. This certainly has been the case for me, although I’ve been struggling to integrate my transpersonal realizations into my daily life for many years now, long before I came across Tolle’s book.
For the most part, The Power of Now struck me as an articulate expression of what I already know to be true in my experience, at least as I understand it presently. However, I can’t endorse it a hundred percent. At times Tolle slips out of his clear, direct, experience-based language and makes bold, dogmatic metaphysical claims. For instance, he made reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead and claimed one needed a certain degree of consciousness while dying in order to realize “conscious immortality,” or else be subject to “another round of birth and death.” This strikes me as nutty. How in the bloody hell does he know what happens at biological death? And he also equates women’s premenstrual tension with “the awakening of the collective female pain-body” — as if we’re just supposed to take his word for it. Again, this is kinda nutty, and would be quite enough for many to reject everything else he says. And that would be a shame.
I’ll close with another quote from the book that I dig. By “practicing surrender” Tolle is talking about accepting the present moment as it is, which means letting go of thought forms and becoming deeply present to the flow of experience as it felt in the body:
Until you practice surrender, the spiritual dimension is something you read about, talk about, get excited about, write books about, think about, believe in – or don’t, as the case may be. It makes no difference. Not until you surrender does it become a living reality in your life.
There’s an interesting discussion going on at the Progressive Buddhism blog under the heading “The difficulty helping people.”
A commenter named Bill shared the following Taoist story, which I like a lot:
There’s an old Taoist story about a man whose horse ran away. When it happened, all his neighbors came over and said “Gee, it’s really awful that your horse ran away and so forth…” And the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the horse came back and brought twenty really nice wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came and observed how really great it was that this guy now had all these new horses- and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.” The next day the man’s son was out trying to break one of the horses, and got thrown off and broke his leg. All the neighbors came over and talked about how awful that was and so forth, and the man said, “Maybe, maybe not.”
So finally, the next day the army came by conscripting young men to go fight in some war, and they didn’t take the man’s son because he had a broken leg.