Holy Tensions
After 10 years of meditating, I am still struck by how little of my life is under my conscious control. My mind has a small influence over my body, my body has a small influence over my environment. My conditioning, intrinsic and extrinsic, rules the vast majority of my behavior.
Even that which I perceive to be in my “control” is, from another perspective, simply happening. Narration arises in a running stream, a fraction of a second behind actualization. Each moment pulls hidden dreams, desires and scars from my unconscious up into swells of ego that rise, crest and fall again into negation.
I am just surfing, self after momentary self, with whatever grace & skill I can muster. And yet somehow, impossibly, paradoxically, I can choose.
Because we must all live together, we must be able to predict each other. We are too anxious, too psychologically fragile to bear the fullness of each other's freedom. And so we tell stories that we are individual entities capable of constant self-control. We tell stories that we are full moral agents, with singular motives and drives, choosing each of our actions, moment to moment.
This desire to submit to the realities of our shared fragility, to do right by one another and ourselves, however well-meaning, is also a mechanism by which we cow and bind one another, and allow ourselves to be mastered. This is how fear becomes domination, how righteous anger becomes resentment, how justice becomes vengeance. This is how inner critics become fanged.
People know, on some level, that they are not making every choice, that they are not aware of every influence that leans on their conscience. They know that they are not perfect agents with perfect freedom in all situations. But rather than seek greater freedom - through awareness, through sacrifice, through the adoption of a load-bearing set of principles - they seek heavier chains.
They can't trust themselves, and they know it. So they continue to wield negative conditioning, trapping themselves in cycles of boom and bust perfectionism. The wound of the narcissist and the utopian is the same inextinguishable longing for elsewhere. A yearning for some other place, some other time, some other self.
It is true that if we stopped using the tools of coercion - of conditioning, of manipulation, of violence and exploitation, that the entire human enterprise would come apart. This is not because our nature is quintessentially evil, although we all bear that within us. This is because we are so over-conditioned, so tensely tightened into terrorized psychic shapes that to suddenly remove the threat of punishment would drown us all in a boiling ocean of karma. We have spent millennia performing ceaseless civilizing rituals and attunements, on ourselves and on others, to keep the Old Gods bound in shadow.
We can't stop this at a societal level. We can only escape it at the level of the individual. This is the great Axial Age compromise offered us by Buddha, Confucius and Christ: Not whether we condition, but how we condition, and for what. What are the dynamics of the individual egos we hope to shape? These are questions of extraordinary importance. How do we condition human beings in such a way that they can one day find their way back to freedom?
When we are seeking liberation, we are seeking choice. Not freedom from consequence, or from material reality, but from ignorance and delusion. We don’t actually want control, despite our incessant fantasies. We are miserable when we act on them and fulfilling them would only make our misery complete. What we truly want is the ability to understand our fantasies, and ultimately to withstand them. We want to act on them only when it is beautiful to do so.
We want the ability to choose.
In order to gain this ability, to strengthen and deploy it in our lives, we must both undo our old conditioning and train ourselves anew. We must release the bitterness of our grudges and vendettas. We must forgive samsara for being full of suffering. And we must re-orient ourselves toward Being in a spirit of radical acceptance and faithfulness unto death. We must at once strive and surrender.
There are wonderful spiritual and therapeutic practices that help undo old conditioning. This is the great genius of psychotherapy - the via negativa of epistemic rationality. You do not need to accept what you are not. Who you decide to be - what you display in the light of identity, and what you conceal in the shadow of the unconscious - is a choice. The Western dharma is the same as the Eastern: The self is an illusion. Its boundaries are drawn afresh, moment by moment. You’re doing it right now.
There are many more spiritual practices concerned with training yourself to live in truth, insofar as you’re able. You can find a few of them here on this Substack, in the Encyclopedia Syncretica. You can find countless more scattered across holy books, ancient zendos and hallowed sanctums, but also in trade paperbacks, stapled handouts, public school gyms, Powerpoint slides, earnest conversations between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons.
Any spiritual tradition worth its salt is concerned with conditioning. Any tradition of human growth and development reckons with behavior, with forming the cycles of human drama into beautiful stories: of redemption, freedom, courage, individual striving and will. The journey of the spirit up from the body toward the Divine is a path marked by attainments.
At the same time, all great spiritual traditions emphasize the plain fact of grace: We are not in control. Our efforts are at best vanity, and at worst, hubris. The ego is too small a vehicle, the mind is too limited to comprehend the Divine. Everything is in God’s hands. We know neither the hour nor the day. Surrender your desires, surrender yourself. Enlightenment unfolds until it is suddenly realized.
Two mountains, one sky.
As you practice, as you grow, as you seek out conditioning and self-mastery and the greatest liberation available to you, my wish for you is that you find yourself full of courage. Not the absence of fear, but the ability to accept and bear your anxieties, without distraction, defense or delusion.
To be human is to be ambiguous. To exist is to feel anxious. This is a noble truth. If you can inhabit and integrate this fact of Being, this innate uncertainty that has been with you all your life, you can begin to see for yourself that something compels you despite it. Something drives you, innately, to be what you are, despite your inability to ever know what you are. As you surrender to this, as you give up your efforts and let spirit work its comforting change, my wish for you is that you find yourself full of faith. Not the absence of doubt, but the ability to bear the Great Doubt. Your human inability to be sure about anything at all.
Courage and faith. Striving and surrender. Conditioning and choice. These are holy tensions, a fascia woven across your bodymind, connecting land, bones and spirit, orienting each self after uncountable self toward the possible.
May you trust in your striving, and in That which strives you. May you trust in what you are becoming, in what you are, and in what you have been, all along.
