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Breaking Character
There are many ways to write a song, there are many ways to paint a painting, and there are many ways to release ourselves from the chains of disconnection, confusion, and unhappiness. Hence: breaking character is an art.
———
We celebrate birthdays and holidays because we need excuses to remember to feel joy, to give, to love. But we can learn to make life itself the celebration. That is part of what The Art of Breaking Character is for.
———
All religions, spiritual traditions, and schools of psychotherapy teach us how to shed the limitations imposed on us from the inside of our own minds that keep us chained to confusion, dissatisfaction, suffering, disharmony, and disconnection from Reality itself. Whilst they may describe this in many different ways, they speak of a single, universal process of conscious evolution and expansion that involves the healing and resolving of all trauma, and the gradual awakening of all dormant parts, capacities and insights to unlock the ‘True Self’, ‘Deep Self’, ‘True Nature’, ‘Higher Self’, or ‘Divine Self’. This process, what we might call “breaking character” is therefore the universal process of forgetting who we think we are so as to remember who we actually are.
———
“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ”
― Carl Gustav Jung
———
The goal is surrender, but you are free to control the conditions in which you surrender. This is why breaking character is an art: because we are free to choose our means of liberation.
———
Breaking character is in many ways an ongoing practice of releasing control of that which we previously thought we needed to control. This is why faith and surrender are so essential.
———
In a play, or on film or television, a character is always severely limited, because their lines are largely fixed, and the events of their life pre-determined by the scriptwriters. Even superheroes cannot act or speak with real freedom – because no one becomes more free by becoming a character – even where they may appear to – because becoming a character means stepping into conditions about what one is allowed to do, say and be.
———
‘You’re under no obligation to be the person you were 5 minutes ago.’ – Alan Watts
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Thought and the Intellect
Thinking about your feelings instead of feeling them is a bit like trying to eat your train ticket instead of getting on the damn thing. You have missed the point entirely. You will be busy throwing up in the bin as your train heads off without you.
———
There is a limit to how peaceful thinking can be – and very often it is nothing of the kind. Real peace emerges as thought fades to silence.
———
“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
———
Whatever you think people are referring to when they talk about God, you are missing the point if you imagine they are talking about an idea, a concept, another object of thought. They are talking about an experience – one the intellect cannot grasp, thinking cannot contain, and that our sheer capacity for thought and intellect so often stand in the way of.
———
Constant thinking is ideal for achieving fleeting, insubstantial rewards in life. Releasing the need for constant thinking is ideal for true and lasting happiness. A tough choice.
———
‘You paint yourself white
And fill up with noise
But there’ll be something missing.
Now that you found it,
it’s gone.
Now that you feel it
you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.’
(Nude, Radiohead lyrics written by Thom Yorke)
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The World As Consciousness
The process of Breaking character is undergone most efficiently and effectively by those who have shed the confused idea that the world is somehow inanimate and mechanistic at its core. We are, it seems, living cells in a conscious organism we call Reality, capable of giving birth to awakeness and aliveness because it is, itself, awake and alive. You may be very resistant to this idea, and deplore the use such words as “God”, “Brahman”, “spirit” or “soul” – but beware: you shall remain confused about many things until you learn to truly consider the world as consciousness.
After all, the kind of mental gymnastics necessary to explain something like consciousness, morality, beauty or creativity by reference to the mass, position, spin, charge, or momentum of unconscious matter will require of you the cognitive load of God Herself. Like trying to make origami out of mashed potato, you have chosen the wrong materials to begin with, and so you find yourself expending extraordinary effort and getting precisely nowhere.
———
If you have not yet add the positively jarring experience of recognising the irreducibility of conscious experience – that the feeling of falling into love, or into a swimming pool, or into bed with your neighbour’s spouse cannot be reduced to descriptions of matter without reducing the experience itself out of existence; if you have never noticed that no description of the taste of chocolate – not to mention the entire substance of your inner life – could ever come even remotely close to capturing the actual felt, lived experience – I can assure you, you will.
———
Is consciousness an illusion? Does the optical illusion create the paper on which it is printed? Does the light create the screen on which it is projected? Can the container of illusion be the product of an illusion?
———
What created consciousness? The question does not make sense. Nothing creates consciousness – for consciousness is that which creates.
———
“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”
― Alan Watts
Can something inanimate, lifeless, mechanistic ever be said to explore?
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Morality
‘Morality is the child of love’ (Sri Nisargadatta), or love reflected in action.
Morality is also the truth of our underlying unity reflected in action – or, since our underlying unity is the deepest truth there is, we might prefer to say this shorter and sweeter:
Morality is Truth reflected in action.
———
Ideally, in the long run, our morality becomes an expression of love calibrated by wisdom.
———
Self-transcendence is the goal of both awakening and morality. Morality is self-transcendence (in action), just as awakening is self-transcendence (in consciousness). Hence why the two so often arise together: why awakening feeds morality, and morality feeds awakening.
———
I am not me. You are not you. If we act this out, we act morally.
———
All reasonable moral systems or philosophies are based on the transcending of self-concern. What they often miss is the metaphysical grounding for this principle. This grounding becomes clear when we consider existence as a single Organism experiencing itself through an illusion of separation, akin to the dissociative states experienced by some humans. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense why we are rewarded for transcending self-concern, and why it feels like there is something deeply, cosmically correct about doing so: in transcending the self, we are tapping into our deeper nature, and our moral action becomes an expression of our ultimate unity with that nature.
———
Morals are relative. Morality is absolute (because it is an expression of the nature of reality: conscious, interconnected, One).
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The Totality of the Self
Being made of the same essential stuff or substance – energy that shifts endlessly between forms – our psyches share a universal potential for every emotion (fear, grief, anger, shame, hatred, surprise, disgust, guilt, joy, love, etc.) and for every quality born from them or distorted by them (kindness, cruelty, humility, power-lust, compassion, deceit). Not all of these will surface in a single lifetime, but any of them can, given the right conditions. The long journey of breaking character demands that we recognize and accept this full spectrum within ourselves – the Totality of the Self.
———
The totality of the self: “the self contains all things,” as a mentor once said to me. Any shape life can knock your mind into, it can knock mine into as well. Every human mind is infinitely malleable, for good and for ill. The extent to which we deny this is the extent of our repression.
———
The same fangs crunch apples as do thighs. The power of the fangs is amoral. What we choose to sink our teeth into becomes a matter of understanding what’s good for us or not.
———
Repeat after me: “I am not good. I am not bad. I am total. I am whole.”
(what we call ‘good’ – real good – emerges naturally from the fuller embodiement of this totality, this wholeness.
———
Our self is already total, it is just obscured. Our job is only to let go of that which obscures it. There lives our underlying nobility, and our access to ‘the Love that has no opposite’.
———
You, me, Keith Lemon, Ted Bundy, Ramana Maharshi, Moses, Mother Teresa and everyone else under the sun and moon – we’re made of the same essential stuff, and the psyche that emerges out of this same stuff – in all cases – can bend in every direction.
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Repression
The mind automatically and unconsciously pushes down emotions, traits, and other parts of ourselves to avoid overwhelm and survive the challenges we face. Much of this happens in childhood, when we are wide open, highly sensitive, and more of our potential is visible and vulnerable to the pressures of the world. Yet at any challenging moment in life, we can repress into the unconscious what we cannot yet bear to face. This process, called repression, is entirely reversible, but until we recognize its effects, it will continue to keep hidden everything in us that we secretly long to reclaim.
———
Continuous repression isn’t merely unwise, unhealthy, and unsustainable – it’s energetically inefficient. Beneath the surface of our awareness, the psyche works tirelessly to keep a buffet of unwelcome feelings at bay. It deserves a rest.
———
We do not escape what we run from in ourselves. We simply carry it on our backs. It weighs us down tremendously – but at least we don’t have to look at it.
———
Many people think they’re letting go, when they’re really pushing down and shutting away. This isn’t release — it’s holding on while telling ourselves we’ve let go. Meanwhile, those who seem to be ‘holding on’ are often doing the harder, healthier work of true letting go — by letting in the emotions that arise from life’s more difficult experiences, so that they can actually pass through us and be let out.
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The Spirit Body
If you do not believe in the spirit body, it is simply because you have little or no experience of it. It is not something you can find under a microscope, nor put into a medical scanner – at least not any I know of – because it exists on the inside of perception. It is experiencable and explorable exclusively from the inside, via energetic introspection.
———
Upon prolonged meditation it becomes apparent that the body is more than a physical machine. Energy appears to arise from places beyond three-dimensions of space we think of as the physical world. The more one persists in opening to the internal world, the more evident it becomes that the body is a portal, not a box.
———
The spirit body is clogged up by false beliefs and unprocessed emotions. These hinder the flow of energy. We unblock the system by releasing false beliefs and feeling what we once did not feel safe enough to feel.
———
Upon prolonged meditation it becomes apparent that the body is more than a physical machine. Energy appears to arise from places beyond three-dimensions of space we think of as the physical world. The more one persists in opening to the internal world, the more evident it becomes that the body is a portal, not a box.
———
The spirit body is clogged up by false beliefs and unprocessed emotions, which distort our view of ourselves and the world. These hinder the flow of energy. We unblock the system, and thus undistort our perception, by releasing false beliefs, and feeling this now-unstuck energy as emotion.
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Trauma
Distortions in the spirit body are also known in psychology or psychotherapy as trauma. They are as Gabor Maté says, the product of ‘not what happened to you, but what happened inside of you as a result of what happened to you’.
———
Trauma, what psychotherapist Peter Levine calls ‘the tyranny of the past’ – weighs us down with a lifetime of unprocessed feelings, undigested pain. If we wish to be lighter, our task is simple, albeit not easy: learn to feel again – shed the past.
———
Trauma is often not dramatic. Make no mistake: subtle (or not so subtle) indoctrination to the young boy that he must be exclusively ‘manly’ or ‘a real man’ – and thus not cry, not get scared, not wear pink, not frolic, not prance, not be compassionate, empathetic, nurturing, sensitive or sensual – this too is trauma. For this conditioning now lives in the boy as fear and shame of much of his actually healthy inner potential.
———
Trauma is a debt for the soul that must be paid if we are to become like light.
———
We can talk about the ego as the sum total of all trauma. – Artem Boytsov
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Fear
A most universal trauma is the trapping of vast amounts of fear inside of us to form what is known by some as the ‘body of fear’. This is the emotion that underwrites our experience of being separate from the world, creating the experience of living in a landscape that is essentially hostile and alien to us.
Processing fear is much less scary than it is in the imagination. When there is no narrative attached to the fear, it is experienced as a set of purely physical sensations, which, even when quite intense, can be strangely peaceful to watch release from the body, like unclogging a drainpipe, or scratching an itch inside one’s bones. All there is left to do is to get used to this particular flavour of discomfort, and then watch as the fear falls off us like a skin we have been secretly dying to shed our whole lives.
———
We tend to be deeply distorted toward being far more afraid of things than we need to be — and so the world appears scarier than it actually is, because scariness is something painted onto the world from within perception itself. It’s not that there’s no connection between our fears and real dangers; it’s a matter of proportion.
When ‘a lion emerges from the bushes’, fear keeps us safe by shocking us into action – to flee, fight, freeze, or, occasionally, if the ‘lion’ speaks our language, fawn. But we are sorely mistaken if we imagine that we must carry fear around with us, as though safety depended on keeping our hands forever clenched into fists. If we need to fight, our hands will form fists on their own – or better yet, remain open so we can pick up a weapon to defend ourselves.
Besides, releasing trapped fear is not rejecting fear but integrating it – befriending our natural capacity for fear so that our relationship with it becomes properly functional: arising only when needed in the present, and no longer distorting our vision by painting past dangers onto an imagined future.
———
The release or shedding of fear is not a mental shift. It’s not a matter of saying, “I’ve decided this no longer scares me.” It is an energetic release. We fear things because the body holds fear as blockages in the energy pathways of the mind–body–spirit system. The release of fear may be initiated through contemplation, but the release itself is physical – a series of sensations that, though often painful, are entirely manageable to the extent that they are accepted and surrendered to.
———
“There is absolutely nothing fundamentally to be afraid of” – Alan Watts. All fear of what is not present, actual danger is therefore imagined. We do not need to carry round fear in our system. Our body will generate the physical sensations of fear if there is a real danger. But we are paranoid people, and we seek an exaggerated degree of control, and so we imagine an array of fears that are not present, based on misinterpretations of past threats, and hold this fear in our system so that we can remain ‘safe’. In fact we are wearing ourselves down with stress and anxiety because we cannot let go of the sense that we must preemptively guard against threats that do not exist. Trapped fear makes uncertainty scary. Fear released turns back into its opposite: safety, aka. Love, the foundation of our emotional lives.
———
It is remarkable how unaware most people are that fear lives within them as discrete pockets of unprocessed energy. Fear is not a mental phenomenon, even if part of it is experienced as such. The mental unpleasantness of fear (fearful thoughts) arises in response to the body’s sensations of constriction – the mind rushing in to interpret, explain, justify, suppress, or amplify them. Releasing fear is not a matter of thinking different thoughts about the object of our fear, but of turning away from fearful thoughts toward the scary sensations themselves. Through this practice, the fearful thoughts begin to dwindle too.
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Anxiety
Anxiety is the product of a mind fighting on two fronts: the perceived external threat, and the internal fear that emerges as a result of the perceived threat. Both are considered as attackers, enemies. The collision of them both makes us feel destabilised. The irony is that when we learn to face the internal exeprience of fear directly as raw physical sensation, anxiety dissolves – for it turns out that anxiety was nothing but our mind’s resistance to and refusal to face this experience of fear itself.
———
We are afraid of fear because we do not understand it. What we really fear is the overwhelm of emotional entanglement – the conflation of physical sensations with a mental story, thought or belief. When we confuse these two, fear becomes F E A R ! ! ! ! and then we tend to resist it. This resistance creates a flavour of instability and discomfort we call anxiety.
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Shame
A core fear we all seem to share is what we might call the fear of ‘death-by-exile’ – the primal fear that we shall be rejected from our tribe and left to fend for ourselves, likely leading to a quick demise.
This creates the conditions in us for shame, which says, albeit unconsciously, “I must remain essentially adequate (and ideally lovable) to those around me so that I do not risk this ‘death-by-exile’.
Of course, we are, most of us, highly afraid of fear itself, and so we tend to avoid even lightly triggering this fear of ‘death-by-exile’, hence why embarassment is something we all seem to avoid like the plague.
———
Growing up, we are unknowingly filled up with shame by our environment. If we were being cynical we could say that this was a kind of psychological warfare imposed on us by people in power – parents, the church, school teachers – who wish to control us by implanting us with a physically painful internal mechanism that keeps us from acting in ways they have deemed improper, or inconvenient for them.
If we were being a little more parsimonious we might consider that this is a necessary part of the arc of the human life – a closing, and then a reflowering. The only issue is no one ever taught us that shame was just the first half of the story. This ‘myth of insufficiency’ it bakes into us awaits a proper ending.
———
Once you understand shame you see it everywhere. We are obsessed with our worth partly because it evades us so relentlessly – and because no one has yet taught us how to recover it.
———
No matter what happens to me, to become ashamed of myself I have to have shamed myself in response to the events of my life, by learning to believe in my own inadequacy, unworthiness, unlovability or deficiency. This means that only I can learn to unashame myself, by developing a deeper and truer understanding of who I am – and by seeing through the lies I have told myself to explain these shame-inducing events.
———
We do not successfully shame ourselves into being good people; we merely avoid rejection, exclusion, punishment, exile. If I am ‘good’ – nice, kind, generous, considerate, polite etc. – just to placate my fear of being seen as bad, or to placate my fear of being ultimately bad or foundationally flawed, I am not really being ‘good’. I am merely engaged in what I hope is an act of self-preservation.
———
You may think you know what shame is, but until you have learnt to heal (=feel) it as purely physical sensations, you will have not seen clearly for yourself its true nature as stuck energetic divinity.
———
The deepest insight about shame: there is no such thing as worthiness, no such thing as deserving love. The statement “I am worthy of love” is therefore still a kind of illusion. It is as though one is standing holding a mirror, saying “I have fixed this broken mirror”. The break existed only ever in imagination.
———
Shame keeps people quiet. It is antithetical to boldness. And we could with a bit more boldness right about now. So we could do with learning to melt a little shame.
———
The belief that you do not deserve love hinders the entrance of love: a self-fulfilling prophecy. The deep re-cognition that it is your God-given right will let help release the shame, and let the love back in.
———
We fear unconditionally loving ourselves (and therefore others) because we have learned (and become attached to) shame-based defense mechansims that keep us believing it is necessary for our survival to judge ourselves and place conditions around our own worth. Once we have taken a bite out of the forbidden fruit and determined that our worth must be conditional – on our covering our private parts with fig leaves, or becoming charming, hyper-successful, beautiful, etc. – we have signed up to a fragile game indeed. It is a self-reinforcing cycle that is broken only when it is realised that the snake is trying to eat its own tail and that all conditions placed on self-love are fabricated and illusions that are waiting be seen through. Most human beings live their entire lives without knowing it is possible to see through this facade entirely, and feel, once and for all enough.
———
Shame says “I don’t deserve love”
Which means
I don’t deserve to feel God
which means
I don’t deserve my own soul, hence:
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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The amount of shame a person caries is a good indicator of the degree to which they are likely willing to ignore their moral compass in order to reassert the self-worth their shame denies them.
———
Psychology is largely clueless as to the deep healing of shame because shame is rooted ultimately in a philosophical fault, not a psychological one. Namely: worthiness/lovability/deservedness – is not conditional. It is a fabrication of the mind that must be unfabricated and seen through to restore wholeness to the psyche.
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Compassion (In Every Direction)
The first direction to offer our compassion, especially if we carry a lot of shame and fear, is to ourselves. Can I see that I am carrying a lot? Can I see myself in this way with kindness?
Terrorists are people too. Why is this controversial to say? Because we assume the only moral attitude is automatic hatred? Because we think any attempt to see the humanity in the “monster” is an attempt to let them off the hook for their attrocities? Or is it, simply, because parsing nuance in such cases is hindered by our emotionality. Unprocessed emotionality and reason do not coexist too well.
Whilst people tend to speak of compassion for the poor, the weak or the oppressed, I tend to focus on compassion for the rich, the evil, and the powerful. I do this to make a point: reserving compassion only for those we recognise as deserving of it keeps intact the idea that there is such a thing as a better or worse human being. There is no such thing. We are all ‘shards of the infinite deity’, as Jung said, cells in a single Organism. There are no wrong players in this orchestra, even if there are wrong notes in the symphony being played.
———
It is easy to offer compassion to those who’s pain we recognise from a mile off. The harder task is to see the unconscious pain puppetting those we usually consider beyond the reach or the need of our compassionate concern – those with resources, with great wealth, capital, power, gorgeous looks, prodigious success, long lists of marvellous successes and accolades. If we can find the compassionate lens for them too we will come closer to embodying the ultimate lesson of compassion: no one can be beyond its reach.
———
If we can learn to offer compassion in every direction, we have laid the ground for a total healing of the self/psyche.
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Judgement
All judgement is self-judgement. We judge ourselves through others. When I judge another, I am experiencing unconscious shame at the sight of something I have not yet accepted in myself, a feeling which I then project outward onto someone else, and then blame them for triggering me.
———
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
― C.G. Jung
———
It is a tremendous relief to cease to render people simple enough to hate with the superficiality of our judgement. Adding depth to our image of others creates an opening for a compassion as natural as the breath.
———
To see a human being in pain where once we saw a caricature, to see depth to the individual where once we saw only a 2-dimensional facade we had projected onto our visual field: this is a tremendous relief – because judgement is a flavour of pain.
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Polarity
Harmonising opposites involves the ceasing of the superficial severing of context from one end of the polarity (eg. “he’s just pure evil”). Reconnecting the opposites, we discover the love in us that is capable of witnessing the whole spectrum.
Opposites must co-exist. If I remove ‘up’ from my perception, I collapse the dimension of height – and with it goes ‘down’. The two were never really two.
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― Carl Jung
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Evil
Evil is a disfigured expression of a psyche entrenched in pain.
———
There is no unforgivable sin, because there is no sin that is not the product of some amount of pain and some degree of confusion.
———
Evil is a broken compass, a force like gravity that pulls one further from one’s real destination by providing one with a false goal: self-reification in place of self-transcendence.
———
Perhaps we should be fastest to offer compassion to those who appear least to deserve it – the truly evil – , since they are burdened not just with the stupendous weight of a trauma-saturated spirit, but have, by the accumulation of such a vast store of unmet pain, become unrecognisable to the average person and thus considered actually undeserving of any kind of redemption.
———
“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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For those who have spent even an eternity chasing control, pleasure, self-reification, self-deification, there is love for you (and in you) too – awaiting your rediscovery. To think otherwise would be incoherent.
———
Since evil is merely the expression of unconsciousness, and since healing or awakening can be thought of as simply making the unconscious conscious, fighting evil means healing unconscious pain, and healing unconscious pain means fighting evil.
———
The enemy is evil (unconscious) activity, not evil (unconscious) people.
———
We are to surrender to the existence of evil – and then we fight against the practice of it
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Embodiement
If we cannot inhabit our bodies, we must live in our minds and learn to overthink. For if we convince ourselves that our feelings are problems amenable to solution in the form of thought, we will never cease thinking, and will forever resist the feelings themselves.
———
The body holds the psyche’s trauma as blockages in energy pathways comprising stuck energy. Becoming more embodied helps create the conditions for the unclogging of the body of this energy as emotion (e-motion, energy-(in)-motion).
———
If you are largely disembodied and spend most of your time in your head, it means very little when you say things like “I just don’t like dancing”, or “I’m not a big fan of physical touch”. If we read between the lines, these kinds of statements really are saying “my body carries pain I refuse to acknowledge and am therefore unconscious of. I have chosen instead to adapt my behaviour to keep it that way”.
———
I have found shame in my cheek, fear on my scalp, and anger in my toes. ‘The body keeps the score’ with unfaultering precision. Each of these began as a small pocket of pain – until I learned how to attend them with a truly relaxed attention. Then, like the TARDIS from Doctor Who, what seemed very small on the outside, reveals itself, upon proper investigation, to be much bigger; these small pockets of pain unfurl into larger physiological responses we call negative emotions.
———
Overthinking is an entirely coherent life strategy if one is determined to never feel any of one’s painful emotions. The cost is suffering and perpetual psychic instability.
———
Being in the body is scary only to the extent that it is unfamiliar – just like moving to a new place. Once we grow a feeling of safety in the body – of trust, faith and surrender – we can handle great intensity of pain without being destabilised or fearful.
———
No tricks will resolve the learned tendency to overthink in the long term except to reinhabit the body and disarm the explosives (feel the emotions) that live there. The more feeling, the less need for thinking.
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Love
‘If your intention in life is to be loved by others, then your life will be filled with obstacles. But if your aim in life is to love, then no one and nothing can stop you.’ – Adan Spencer
———
We can only truly love someone if we can truly see them. We can only truly see someone if we can truly love (=fully accept) them.
———
To claim that love is the answer to all of our problems sounds trite only to those who do not know the extent of what love means.
———
‘Love’ means many things. As a verb we might think of ‘to love’ as being the pure, non-judgemental witnessing of another which, seeing no distinction between observer and observed, seeks to be of service to the well-being of the other as if the two were really one – because they really are.
———
Central to spirituality is the dis-qualifying or un-conditioning of love: for self and Other.
———
To love is to see as God sees. It is to see that everything exists only in relationship. And that everything – everything – has a right to exist, even if upon witnessing it we automatically seek to transmute it. This is the paradox of love we must learn to embrace.
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The Inner Child
“Be present” says the guru.
“I’m trying, but a child inside me keeps interrupting.”
———
In adulthood we are often drawn towards that which life took from us in our childhood, or rather, that which we deemed it necessary to abandon. The traits and energies in others that we find especially compelling are often calling us to reclaim what was once lost, to reintegrate our lost playfulness, creativity, wonder, unabashed emotionality, capacity for healthy anger, spontaneity, silliness, enthusiasm – but now reintegrated into the adult we have become. When we find these things in others, we are tantalised: for we are excited by what we unconsciously perceive as our own latent potential.
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The Character
Unaware that we have learned to play only a limited version of ourselves – the character, the ego, the small self – we cling to and defend this identity as though our very lives depended on it. The character is a mental construct built from resistance to all that we refuse to accept within ourselves. The same walls that keep our identity intact are the walls that keep out everything we long for but cannot yet allow ourselves to be.
———
The character is a structure of resistance, built to shield us from the unconscious. It operates through defences and identifications – through desire, aversion, and rationalisation. Once a self-imposed prism of perception, it becomes a self-perpetuating prison as soon as we leave the environment that shaped it – keeping out what we now most deeply long for.
———
The character keeps us locked in a defensive stance toward life. It convinces us that we have a life to protect, instead of being Life itself – a natural, instinctive vitality that maintains and renews itself. It makes us worry about the past, because it is crystallised resistance to unprocessed pain; and it drives us to fear the future, where we project that pain anew. In doing so, it pulls us away from the only place our body, our awareness and our peace truly live: the present moment.
———
The character keeps us lonely. The less of our true totality we can embody, the smaller is the surface area by which we might authentically connect with others who can really relate to us.
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The Present Moment
We look to the future only when our past does not allow us to be in the present. This is a manifestation of the structure of the psyche.
———
The present moment must be met with non-resistance if it is to be experienced without suffering. Even grave agony only constitutes suffering if we resist it. Of course, to practice non-resistance under physically torturous conditions is tantamount to a superpower, but a superpower that, to be sure, it is possible to learn. Just ask Thích Quảng Đức.
———
Non-resistance is a skill we must learn, and the present moment is the one and only space in which to practice it. The more we notice that experience cannot constitute suffering it we cease to resist it, we find that acceptance of this moment as it is always the sanest and wisest orientation to our experience.
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“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
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“Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.”
― Alan Watts
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Pain and Suffering
Life as we know it is defined primarily by suffering, because suffering is resistance to experience. The extent to which we resist experience is the extent to which we suffer. Hence, liberation from suffering involves developing the capacity for radical acceptance of painful experience and all it contains – this alone brings bliss.
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Resisting emotional pain is destabilising and causes suffering. Feeling pain is stabilising and produces coherence and well-being.
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The most fundamental difference between pain and suffering is that pain can co-exist with peace, whilst suffering cannot.
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Cultivating the Witness
If we are to become like “God”, or rather become That in us which shares identity with God – the Atman – we must see the validity and sacredness for all things as they are. We must not turn our gaze away from that which we hate, fear, or find deeply disgusting or distasteful. It is in turning towards these things and recognising the necessity of their existence unflinchingly that we transmute the experience of aversion back into an experience of divinity.
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“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
― Alan Watts
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“The most important skill on the spiritual path is the capacity to stay with experience” – Artem Boytsev.
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The Golden Shadow
When we shut away what we cannot face in ourselves, we also shut away immense potential. For every trapped bit of shame in the unconscious, a slice of self-worth and rooted confidence waits to be rediscovered. For every fear locked away, a nugget of dormant courage lies beneath. And for all the virtues and wisdom we may think we already possess, there are worlds more waiting to be reclaimed. We may fear expressing these hidden parts of ourselves—our dormant creativity, our untapped joy, our forgotten compassion, or even our quiet femininity—or we may feel ashamed that we contain these things. Sometimes, wells of grief, anger, or hatred simply stand in the way. Yet when we do learn to befriend this unconscious, untapped potential, we discover that the Golden Shadow is always vast and full of riches.
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The golden shadow may be the most enticing part of The Art of Breaking Character. My own experience confirms what Jung said: “The shadow is ninety percent pure gold.”
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We watch movie stars, singers, artists, business tycoons, celebrities, and influencers from afar and we wonder: what if my life were like that? It could be. We tend to raise in popularity those who have shed their conditioning in a way we deem beautiful. And remembering that, at the root—at the nuts and bolts of it—famous people are just human beings being human is extraordinarily motivating.If there’s a will, there’s a way. Everyone can be famous—if by famous you mean “well loved for doing what they love.” And if we experience great envy at the lives of others, perhaps the Golden Shadow is the analogy to hold onto if we want to be moved not by the shedding of suffering, but by the discovery of our tremendous, untapped potential.
Of course, there is no guarantee that as you learn to break character you won’t begin wanting different things. But that isn’t a real problem – only an illusory one. If I desired something in the past merely because I was acting from a more confused, fractured, and incomplete version of myself – the character – then whatever I’m drawn to as I return to my natural wholeness is, by definition, a truer and more worthy direction. It is not a real loss, as such, but simply a new, deeper alignment.
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Dreams
That our minds produce dreams that seek to show us the patterning of our mind’s own confusion for us to interpret and resolve is clear evidence that we are designed – or rather, destined – to heal, to awaken, to break character.
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Every night, the subconscious weaves together stories of symbols that, if we can discern the shape of the relations between them, will enlighten us as to the resolutions needed for our mind undistort and evolve. That people do not take greater advantage of this is astounding.
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“Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
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Matter and the Brain
The insistence on any form of materialism – the view that unconscious matter alone is capable of producing life and consciousness – is often a highly sophisticated form of cultural and psychological resistance to the inner emotional world that begins to reveal itself when one makes any serious effort to investigate the internal landscape of consciousness. These painful emotions are, in many cases, exactly what must be processed and released for the falsity of this very paradigm to become so obvious that it eventually feels almost laughable.
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Scientists like materialism because it quietly allows them to remain repressed – whilst satisfying their quest for understanding, and intellect-driven status and accomplishment. They seek knowledge in place of wisdom. They wish to conceptualise reality, unaware that they are unconsciously refusing to feel it.
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Where does the nerdy scientist stereotype come from? Nervous, socially awkward, conflict avoidant men and women who love a very specific kind of search for truth, a search built on measuring, mapping, conceptualisting – thinking – and very little feeling. Overthinking, bear in mind, is an escape from the body; the Body Keeps the Score; and the score is the conditioning that stands in the way of the unfiltered present moment cascading into our core from the Source of Creation. The scientist cannot find God because he is too busy doing science, and not busy enough processing his past, or investigating the nature of his mind as a direct phenomenon, rather than as an abstract fact. The scientist thus keeps at bay deeper layers of love, happiness, compassion and insight with his particular angle of approach to the Truth, for his search keeps him occupied with a future in which there will surely be great discoveries, great rewards, great status. Make no mistake – he is still looking for love; she is still looking for God.
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The kind of mental gymnastics necessary to explain such things as consciousness, spiritual experience, morality and creativity by referring to the behaviour and qualities of unconscious matter (spin, mass, momentum, charge, position, etc.): this will require of you the cognitive load of God Herself. Like trying to make origami out of mashed potato, you have chosen the wrong materials to begin with, and so you find yourself expending extraordinary effort and getting precisely nowhere.
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That the brain produces consciousness is assumed unquestioningly, and is treated as so absolutely, blindingly obvious that most people never spend even a moment considering an alternative. I invite you to step outside this reflex by recognizing that it is precisely these unexamined assumptions that offer the greatest shifts in understanding when we dare to question them. After all, the radio does not produce the music, yet the music becomes distorted when the radio is damaged. Correlation does not equal causation.
We must seek the best explanation, not settle for one merely because it appears obvious – especially if, under deeper examination, it reveals itself to be riddled with holes and disastrously limited in its ability to contain real truth. This thing we call the brain is said to be the most complex object in the known universe; do we truly believe that, despite all that complexity, its ultimate nature and deepest functioning would conform neatly to our initial sense of what seems common-sensical and obvious?
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That we believe it is impossible that people could read minds or bends spoons with their consciousness is a sad artefact only of the exceedingly narrow-minded scientific dogma that consciousness must be a product of the brain.
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How does the brain produce consciousness, Alan?
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
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“I do not believe in spiritual awakenings or spiritual experience” = “I have never had a spiritual awakening of spiritual experience” = “I believe in the dogma of the physical brain as a sole producer of consciousness” and/or “I am too scared to find out if I am wrong about this, by properly trying one of the many ways you can reliably induce such experiences”
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Meditation
Meditation is to the mind and spirit what exercise is to the body.
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If you find the world depressing, turn inwards (sensibly). There is another world waiting for you there: one that can nourish you in ways the outside world never can.
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You do not have to do the breathing. Breathing will still occur. It will breathe you – if you let It. If you can just watch the breath, and cease any attempt to control any of your experience, peace will begin to emerge. You may fear this kind of surrender. If so, there is work to do before things become this simple.
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‘The superpower you’re after, which you actually can acquire through this practice, is to realise that virtually all of your psychological suffering, and virtually all of your physical suffering, is a matter of being lost in thought, is a matter of thinking without knowing you’re thinking…Until you learn to meditate… you are just helplessly thinking every moment of your life. You’re having a conversation with yourself, you’re having content – whether its imagistic or linguistic – pour forth into consciousness every moment and so incessantly that you don’t even notice it…Not only does it completely colour your experience moment to moment – if they’re angry thoughts you’re angry…if they’re sad thoughts you’re sad – you become your thoughts. But you also feel identified, you feel like you are the thinker of your thoughts – you feel like a self, completely structured by this flow of mentation every moment.’ – Sam Harris
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“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung
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Resistance to Breaking Character
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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There is no shame in refusing to awaken, in resisting the pull to see clearly the nature of the self and the world. But there is not much love in it either.
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My Dad is uninterested in enlightenment because he imagines total acceptance of experience to be a complete flattening of experience – a kind of perpetual numbing. My dad does not understand paradox – or the incontrastable bliss of God.
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The midlife crisis is the stagnation of the character. The true self wants out. “Knock – knock – knock.”
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Self-Kindness
Talking to oneself with kindness is one of the healthiest things a person can do for themselves.
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Growing up, we were taught, or we assumed, that all our friends would come in the form of other people. No one taught us that it was possible to be a friend to ourselves, and better still: a best friend.
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Being a friend to oneself is easy once we become acutely aware that we would never speak to others in the way we speak to ourselves.
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Self-kindness is a necessity for the release of self-judgement.
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Self-kindness is the most direct path to cultivating a more automatic kindness to others, for “You cannot be more kind to anyone else than you are kind to yourself.” (Artem Boytsov)
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Faith
Craving certainty in matters of the spirit is a refusal to surrender to the implacable mysteriousness of existence. It is an attitude of control that reinforces the crystallization of the character, the small self – the very structure we must release our grip on if we are to find something of lasting value.
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Perhaps our deepest, most spiritually and psychologically destabilizing fear is that the universe at its core has no underlying order: that chaos reigns at the deepest and highest levels, and that any moments of peace, love, or coherence are mere islands of stability, eventually washed away by the carnage that seems to be the essence of existence. This fear may be the most powerful fuel for our resistance to breaking character. It is here that faith becomes essential: we must be willing to try on the idea – and the orientation – that perhaps there is a Goodness or an Order at the heart of existence, one that gives birth to chaos but is not defined by it, and that transcends it nonetheless. This Goodness is often obscured by false beliefs, learned habits of mind, and our dogmatic insistence that such a thing cannot be real. Faith here may then speak to us: “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I I am skeptical of this underlying order only because the harshness of my life so far has hardened my heart, and blunted my capacity to experience deep Love, joy and connection to Reality – so much so that I lost any memory of feeling this underlying Goodness or Order to be, in fact, self-evidently real.”
We long for control only because we fear surrender. We fear surrender only because we have little faith. We have little faith because we cannot see the faith already present in everything we do. Instead, we ridicule a notion of blind, unjustified faith in the unreasonable, imagining we have raised ourselves up intellectually by transcending the need for a consolatory faith. In reality, without a foundational faith, we could not live, nor take a single step into the future.
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Our faith must be blurry, but it need not be blind. We can go looking for grounds for faith.
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If we wish for certainty before we attempt to take a step down the path towards wholeness, we will get precisely nowhere. Faith is required to release the will with conviction. Climbing will not do: we must fall into the arms of God.
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Your inability to have faith is an expression of the fear inside of you – and the mistrustful lens it projects it makes you perceive the future through.
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“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.” ― Alan Wilson Watts
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***From here on is not yet organised***:
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The Healing Process
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jun
The Spirit Body
Models of the spirit body differ in different traditions. It is unwise to get too caught up in such spiritual anatomy. We can unblock the system without mapping it. (There is lesson here about the nature of religion too, if you read between the lines).
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The Spiritual Ego
Spiritual awakenings of all kinds can give rise to entirely new distortions if new identity is formed based on them. These inevitably get added to the karmic to-do list – for they shall have to be shed too.
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Projection
It is entirely natural for us to care for the well-being of others. The nature of reality – sat chit ananda = Being, Consciousness, Bliss – necessitates this. It is only the layers of projection (judgement, fear, anger, etc.) that stand in the way.
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Projection
“It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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Distraction
We consume because it is something to do. We consume because consumption distracts. We consume because we are largely empty – because we do not have a wiser, more nourishing way to fill the void.
The itch – “distract”
Remains intact
Until the ego
Fades to black
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Punishment
Punishing people for their wrongdoing is seen to be entirely illogical when it is recognised that people only act harmfully when they are themselves harmed. All crime is a response to pain, for a psyche free of pain takes no delight in harm.
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The Healing Process
Remember the sunk cost fallacy: it is never too late to start healing. Any movement towards wholeness is a movement towards a better quality of life. Any release of trapped emotion releases love back into the system. Even baby steps on deathbeds: these are still worthwhile.
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Truth
“To have seen the matter from one side only is not to have seen it at all” – Unknown
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Projection
“We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
― Carl Jung
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Truth
The truth heals. If your story still hurts, you have not got to the bottom of it yet.
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Truth
Plato was right: the truth lives inside of us, uncorrupted. It is only obscured.
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Projection
‘Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation’ – Carl Jung
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Sin
One might suppose that… There is no unforgivable sin; the structure of the universe doesn’t allow for it. All debts for the soul (trauma, karma) can be paid. What we have not yet forgiven is simply what we have not yet learned that it is safe to forget.
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Creativity
Creativity, like meditation, is more of an allowing than a doing. Those who are determined to control what arises can never be truly creative (and will find meditation a perpetual struggle).
Creativity
Creativity is innate. We are all connected to the source of creativity. The refusal to create – and the belief that one is not built for creativity: these must be learned. As such they can be unlearned.
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Shadow Work
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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Shadow Work
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― C.G. Jung
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Pride
Pride is to self-worth what stabilisers are to the bike. As soon as it can be let go of, to hang on to it would be a hindrance to one’s real freedom.
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Emotional Processing
When we repress, we block our potential. When we express we release it. The gold in us becomes visible through emotional processing.
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Forgiveness
The harder it is to forgive someone, the more important it is that we learn to – and the more there is to be gained by doing so.
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Science and Spirituality
Why is it valid for the mathematician to postulate higher dimensions by the logic of the symbols on his page, whereas it is invalid for the spiritual seeker to postulate them from direct experience?
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The Limits of Science
We focus on things we can measure because we fear facing the uncertainty of life directly. You cannot measure love or wisdom, after all, and these are to money what diamonds are to dust.
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Beauty
Beauty is a hint of what is to come; what lies on the other side of self-surrender.
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Fear
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The Limits of Science
“[Science] works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
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Religion and Spirituality
Spirituality is the sanitising of false belief, and the emergence of belief-free perception aka. gnosis or direct knowing, hence:
“A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.”
― Alan Watts
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Forgiveness
Be as forgiving of others as you possibly can, for we are all difficult sometimes. And sometimes, we are all difficult. And we all wade through marshes of pain, (whether we know it or not).
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Cultivating the Witness
Are you watching your experience with an agenda? Then you are not purely watching – you are directing. Learn how to be directionlesss. There, then: Love will find you. 🟠
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Illusion
Illusions are real, they are just not what we think they are (just think of optical illusions).The illusion is still there, right before our eyes – we just misinterpret it. The ego is real, fear is real, suffering is real, but they are illusions because we misunderstand them.
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Fear
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Language
“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts
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Fear
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Emotional Processing
Emotional entanglement: when neither the physical sensations of an emotion nor the mental story associated with those sensations are witnessed clearly, but instead are conflated, as if trying to watch the television and listen to the radio simultaneously, rendering two otherwise very manageable phenomena as one indecipherable and overwhelming mess. If complete attention can be brought to the physical sensations alone, this can be enough to prevent mental spiralling. If an appropriate degree of surrender can be accessed and maintained, the emotional energy will release itself and be gone forever. This is how we shed triggers.
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Emotional Processing
Overthinking is compensation for underfeeling. We evacuate to the mind only because we do not feel safe enough to inhabit the body. This is an ongoing balancing act for the psyche – to feel, or to think? To think is to remain entangled in ideas about reality. To learn to truly feel again is to gradually re-inhabit the body and rediscover the safety latent within it.
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Spiritual Teachers
Any spiritual teaching that promises enlightenment wirth some simple phrase as “all you need to do is [insert any spiritual practice]” is offering advice akin to the suggestion that, in crossing the Pacific Ocean, one need only set the compass for America and “keep swimming”. There is some truth in there. But this does not take into account the many obstacles that hinder our ability to follow such simple instructions. You can, I would hypothesise, get fully enlightened by watching the breath unceasingly. But it surely rare to find someone with that degree of conviction in such a simple task. I prefer to break character like it’s a work of art in itself – by living.
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Multiplicity and the Symphony of Selves
“If I know what to do, why don’t I do it?”
Because the “I” that knows what to do is not the same “I” that doesn’t do it. We are a confused multiplicity – until our parts befriend each other and learn to sing in harmony.
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The Reconciliation of Religion
“Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they’ll say you’re crazy and you’re blasphemous, and they’ll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, ‘My goodness, I’ve just discovered that I’m God,’ they’ll laugh and say, ‘Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
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Soothing Mechanisms
Soothing mechanisms are the halfway point between coping/compensation mechanisms and full-on heavy-duty emotional processing – for those who wish to begin swimming in the shallow end.
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Shadow Work
“The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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Courage and Curiosity
We are both attracted to and afraid of whatever will transform us. The tension between these forces keeps the atom of the individual intact. The atom can evolve, react, or transform only to the extent that we learn to identify with the expansive force: the curiosity innate to our being.
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Compensation Mechanisms
The sense of superiority always stems from the unconscious belief that one must prove oneself. It is, in fact, the attempt to prove oneself to oneself through the illusion of augmented value: “my feet are holier than yours.” This can take as many forms as there are feet.
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The Character
The character (=personality/persona/ego) is a complex coping strategy, a defence built for survival. It is a kind of illusion – but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. The tip of an iceberg is as real as the mass below it. But it is only a small part of the larger structure it hides – shaped to help us become who we needed to be to survive the environment that shaped us.
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The Character
The character loves praise – it helps obscure the sense of inadequacy out of which it’s built. “If you let me think well of myself I can avoid meeting the shame beneath me – the sense of unworthiness from which every character is born.”
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The Taste (for Breaking Character)
The Taste (for Breaking Character) marks an inflection point in one’s spiritual path – when the fruits of practice become undeniable and a natural momentum arises. A genuine appetite – a passion, even – for deeper healing and awakening from the character begins to bloom. The impatience to evolve that comes with it may be delusional, but for a time, it is a good problem to have.
🟢
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The Taste (for Breaking Character)
The discovery of The Taste (for Breaking Character) may come more quickly – or more deeply – through the genuine recognition that breaking character is an art. You can listen to your favourite music, spend time with your favourite people, visit your favourite places, eat your favourite foods (for the most part), and have these things integrated into, even serving, your path. Nothing needs to be sacrificed before you are ready. You alone decide how fast you go, and how you choose to go about it.
Life will throw things at you, of course – fate will hand you moments of grace or gravity, on a plate or a pitchfork – but it will always remain your choice whether to listen for the emerging wisdom or to shut your ears and plead ignorance.This freedom – the realisation that one need not surrender one’s creativity or autonomy to break character (except perhaps near the latter stages of the process) – can instill a deep trust that it is safe, and even profoundly wise, to work oneself into a steady rhythm of breaking character. And in that rhythm, The Taste awaits: the subtle psychological fuel for the healing of past trauma, the shedding of delusion and the awakening of consciousness.
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Repression
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Emotional Processing
“There’s no coming to consciousness without pain.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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The Organism
Ideas or phrases become clichés because they are overused. They are overused because they contain truths worth repeating. From this we might infer that the most clichéd ideas are those that contain the most important truths. Perhaps the most important truth of all is also the most clichéd: I am one with the universe.
Some new language might freshen it up: There is only the Organism. Why is this so profound? Because it implies that the roots of all things connect and cohere within a single, infinite consciousness. Because it tells us what beauty is, what morality is, what love is, and where the meaning of our lives is drawn from. Because it suggests, quite incontrovertibly, that all spiritual and religious traditions are right to have intuited that humanity is “part of something greater” – something which, being the necessary ground of all value, must also be the very bedrock of sacredness itself.
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The Shadow
The unconscious really is u n c o n s c i o u s. You have no idea what’s there until you learn to look without flinching.
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The Psyche
The psyche is the mind, body and ‘spirit’ (deeper layers of consciousness) considered as a single entity. It is a system of energy that is clogged up by falsehoods and unclogged by truth, hence: “The truth shall set ye free”.
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The Shadow
We fear the darkness inside us only because we do not know that is dark only because we refuse to shine the light of our consciousness on it.
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Beauty
In beauty we are teased with a taste of divinity, with no directions to stabilise it, and little chance of understanding it – until we see that it is the same feeling that in other contexts we call peace, love, connection, or safety.
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The Shadow
The light transmutes. The dark merely froths, festers and bites.
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Resistance
Non-resistance is an internal orientation; it does not mean avoiding action, aggression, or even revolution. It simply means ceasing the lie: “This feeling is not happening” or “I must escape this emotional experience.”
We can seek to change our circumstances – by turning on the heat, drinking some water, or overthrowing a government – without trying to escape the emotions we are experiencing. The paradox arises only because most of us have never noticed, or fully experienced, the coexistence of these truths: non-resistance to direct experience alongside resistance to particular circumstances.
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Compensation Mechanisms
Notice every time you think you are better than someone else: you are secretly ashamed of yourself and compensating. Let this be a constant source of humility.
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Compensation Mechanisms
The temptation to try and be liked has been everpresent in my life – to seem righteous, kind, clever, interesting, deep, mysterious, light-hearted, earnest, philosophical. All express an inability to accept myself just for existing – just for being as I am before I try to contrive an image for others.
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Courage and Curiosity
Courage is entirely necessary. Luckily we have all the courage we could ever need – even if at present it lies dormant in us. Perhaps this is the first thing we should go shadow-hunting for.
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Courage and Curiosity
Curiosity is a form of courage: the courage to shine a flashlight into the unknown without flinching. If you know what you are going to find, it’s not new terrain – it’s not curiosity. And if you don’t know what’s there, you don’t know that it won’t petrify you.
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Compensation Mechanisms
The excessive desire to share what we have made, what we can do, what talents we have – so precious, so innocent, and so often an expression of that all-too-common shame-based ache: to have others grant us the self-worth we have not yet learned to grant ourselves. Let this recognition not become itself a source of new shame, as it has so often for me. Let it be merely bring a moment of self-curiosity: “What would it feel like to not feel a need to share my creations and my talents with others?”
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Faith
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Resistance to Breaking Character
“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ — all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself — that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness — that I myself am the enemy who must be loved — what then? As a rule, the Christian’s attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung,
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Truth
What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― C.G. Jung
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The Organism of Reality
Reality is an organism, a single, living Organism. We are (some of) its cells. When we feel this, we call it love.
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Spirituality and Religion
Do not be confused by the seemingly vacuous or alien aesthetics of many spiritualities and religions: our marketing skills do not necessarily grow alongside our wisdom. Besides, until we ourselves have experienced the truth that, for example, the hippie seeks to express through his tie-dyed dungarees and psychedelic tattoos, he will continue to look like an alien to us – or worse: an enemy.
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The Organism of Reality
The Organism watches us from within and without – not like a tyrant, but like a parent who knows the child must learn through mistakes what is true, coherent, and loving. If the child never learns, the parent continues to watch with love. God’s patience is endless.
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Beauty
Beauty is a portal to the goodness at the heart of existence.
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Shadow Work
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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The Organism of Reality
“He sends sunshine and rain to good and evil alike.” – Simone Weil. The Organism knows that each of us must play our part in the divine comedy, and that some roles exist specifically to provide moral resistance.
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The Religious (Holotropic) Impulse
The religious impulse is simply the desire to reconnect with our source. We cannot help but long for this. It drives the scientist’s curiosity as much as the priest’s devotion. We are all asking the same question in different language – and the answer is always the same: One.
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The Religious (Holotropic) Impulse
Something deep within us longs to heal, to awaken. This is why we are drawn instinctively to people, places, and circumstances that resemble those which once wounded us. If we recognise that we are replaying an old loop, we have a chance to unlearn the false lessons that keep us repeating similar patterns. If we do not, we will simply relive the scenario, again and again, until we do.
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The Religious (Holotropic) Impulse
We seek human connection in part because we are concerned primarily with undermining the illusion of separation (hence why lonely humans find solace in keeping pets). The eyes of another human soul reminds us more than most things that our felt sense of isolation is but a false play of light – we are a Split Infinity, always and forever, whether we feel it or not.
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The “Existence” of “God”
Spiritual traditions teach that an encounter with the divine is available only when the intellect grinds to a halt and a pure unself-conscious witnessing of experience takes place. And yet the scientists, analytic philosophers and materialists of the world continue to think themselves out of such a relationship, insistent that if God existed, He must be accessible via conceptual thought. The irony.
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The Taste (for Breaking Character)
Essential Lesson: at a certain point, the process of breaking character reaches a kind of escape velocity, where the ongoing rewards of the process are so obvious, and the future rewards so tantalising, that the process begins to be self-motivating. We see that in shedding the character and all its false beliefs and distorted behaviours, we automatically and reliable become kinder, wiser, saner, calmer, better able to love and receive love, less judgemental, less resistant to everything life may throw at us and yet paradoxically more capable of changing the world around us in the image of our deeper values. We may have spent most of our lives resisting this rediscovery of our potential, for fear of all the pain we might have to face in doing so. Now we have acquired The Taste (for Breaking Character), and feel firmly on the path to our deeper destiny – and this pain can begin fading into insignificance.
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The “Existence” of “God”
God and Consciousness are synonyms. Neither can be properly contained in any real logic because they are experiential container within which all logic operates. They cannot be found among the objects of experience because they are that within which the objects of experience arise.
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The “Existence” of “God”‘
We forget all too easily that we see the world through a lifetime of neurological associations, hanging stealthily over our shoulders, invisible yet shaping how certain words – like “God” and “religion” – sound to us. But we can learn to form new associations if we try. I used to associate having my windows open with fear itself: as though I were leaving a gap for poisonous insects and criminals to crawl in, and secrets to be leaked out. Now I see them as a subtle connection to the outside world.
When we read the word “religion”, we may think we know what it means: delusion, control, dogma. yet beneath the surface our minds are undergoing a vast process of association, of which we perceive only the tip of the iceberg. And from that tip, we boldly stand and declare ourselves unreligious, areligious, agnostic, atheistic, or antitheistic – depending on which vial of denial we have imbibed from our culture and had cemented by the traumatic callousing of our spirits.
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Paradox
To harmonise paradox is to see as God and man – ocean and wave – simultaneously.
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Paradox
Resolving paradox is the harmonising of the separate and ultimate perspectives on the same matter. Through this dual-lens, the world is both meaningful and meaningless, evil is both acceptable and unacceptable (unwise), and wisdom is both necessary and arbitrary.
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Beauty
The degree of beauty experienced is proportional to the degree of self-surrender induced by the beautiful object.
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Beauty
Beauty is bliss, or God, disguised as an external object.
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Beauty
Beauty is a compass.
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Beauty
For a minute there
I lost my self
I lost my seeeeeelf
(Karma Police, Radiohead)
Beauty arrests the will, creating the void into which bliss (=God) can pour.
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Beauty
In beauty, the religious longing (to bind back, to reconnect to our Source) is fulfilled – for a moment – but is immediately confused with the conjuring of a purely external world.
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Power
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
If I cannot love you (because I cannot love the parts of me I see reflected in you), the next best thing is to try and control you for my own pleasure – to wield power over you, so you can become a loveless source of thin satisfaction for me. This is how the absence of love breeds evil, and shows us also how evil is healed only by love – because why would you control someone when you can love them? Why chase pleasure when you know where Bliss lives?
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Beauty
The beautiful object forcefully surrenders the will. When the will is surrendered, a void is created. When ‘I’ am no longer there, there is room for the inrushing of divine bliss. This is why we prize beauty so much, why we hunt for it: because it is the taste of God.
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The Organism
If there is anything we can call an irrefutable fact it is that reality is singular and we are It (The Organism) – how could we not be?. In short: we are One with All. All other domains of inquiry – philosophy, psychology, economics and nutrition – should proceed from this basis.
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The Organism
You are always, only, looking for yourSelf. There is nothing else to look for. This is not solipsism. Our “separate” worlds of experience commune in the experience of the Organism – we just have not yet developed the eyes to see this.
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Beauty
In beauty, the self forgets, the soul remembers.
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Art
Making a piece of art is an act of self-acceptance. If I transmute something hurt or confused inside of me into something I find beautiful, I have begun to see the value in my pain.
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Art
Making art is a process of self-discovery. To be in-spired is to release the ego’s grip on the trap door to the unconscious, and to have the spirits on the other side of that door reveal themselves. Understanding and befriending what emerges, we understand and befriend our own mind.
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The Shadow
“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
― C.G. Jung
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Art
Art is healing because it is an emptying out of what is usually locked away in the unconscious. The lid is taken off the pot, and some of the tension is released.
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Art
Making art is a relief because it relieves some of the stored up tension in my unconscious, and gives oxygen and sunlight to the dilapidated fragments that live there.
Art
Art is underfunded and undervalued almost everywhere in the world, largely because we do not yet understand deeply enough what it does for the human mind – what beauty truly is, and how powerful creativity and artistic expression can be for the collective human spirit. In the West, at least, we love music, film, and television, yet few of us have a serious grasp of why these things matter to us so profoundly.
Beauty is a spiritual experience of the highest order. It connects us to our Source through a felt symmetry between what lies within and what lies without – between what we call “me” and what we are so certain is “not me.” The dissolution of that apparent separation is experienced as bliss.
To know beauty for what it truly is – a divine connection that cannot be reduced to the mere movement of matter – is to see that art is not a luxury, but a necessity: an imperative for the evolution of consciousness itself.
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The Psyche
The psyche is the mind/body/spirit considered as a single entity. Call it a soul if you will. It is a system of energy that is clogged up by distortion (=misperception, untruth, lies) and released (=unclogged) by truth, hence: “The truth shall set ye free”.
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Self-Acceptance
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it.”
― Carl Gustav Jung,
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Transgenerational Trauma
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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Love
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Judgement
It is a profound relief to be ever more free of judgement. To do so we must make contact with the judgement we hold of ourselves.
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Judgement
Judgment is released by recognizing the inherent validity of all things – that ‘good’ behaviour is not born of shame or pride, but of wisdom, and at its highest expression: love – and then working to release the shame that prevents the embodying of that recognition.
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Judgement
Releasing judgement, we make space in our heart for love. Since love is not passive, we do not lose our discernment of what healthy human action and living looks like when we release judgement. We merely cease to be fractured inside by witnessing it. Unfractured, we are a stronger hand to help those in need, those we might once have judged.
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Synchronicity
If reality is understood as a single Mind, it is coherent to imagine that it might be seeking to awaken itself – through two related events occurring simultaneously, without any explicit physical cause. The problem, of course, is that such a thing can neither be proven nor disproven. The wise must learn to recognize when their wishful thinking has gone astray, while still allowing themselves to notice – and even take comfort in – the unverifiable but powerful sense that the Source-of-all-seekers-and-all-awakenings is also working towards the awakening of the seeker.
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Wisdom
“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
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Soothing Mechanisms
Watching films that trigger emotions based on our own inner workings is a kind of soothing mechanism. If we reflect on why certain things made us tearful, how the shape of what we have witnessed my resemble the shape of some emotional patterning in our own psyche, watching television or films may become an opportunity to dig deeper into the psyche without needing to take any drastic measures.
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Soothing Mechanisms
Running clears and creates spaciousness in the mind, and may even be an opportunity for trapped anger to be released through the legs. David Goggins comes to mind.
