The Art of Breaking Character

1 ::  Breaking character is an open game. There are better and worse ways to play the game. There are more and less distorted ways to dance, dress, sing, organise, socialise, moralize, cooperate, fornicate. But this does not exclude the need for – and the joy of – creativity in pursuing the divine.

2 :: All religions and spiritual traditions teach the art of breaking character. The character is always severely limited. No actor becomes more of himself by submgering himself in a role, if for no other reason than that his lines are fixed, and the events of his life pre-determined by the scriptwriter. ::

3 :: 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. ::

4 :: If in doubt on the spiritual path: feel.

5 :: “The most important skill on the spiritual path is the capacity to stay with experience” – Artem Boytsov

6 :: Most religions and spiritual traditions offer grand solutions to our deepest concerns. But many of these claims feel otherwordly, utopian, unrealistic and altogether incommensurable with our day to day concerns, fears, hopes and dreams. The art of breaking character offers a wider lens on the spiritual path that includes every expansion of our personality we may wish to seek out – getting over our fear of public speaking, learning to improvise on the piano, cultivating the courage to approach someone we find attractive, trusting the body’s ability to process emotions without our conscious control. It is of paramount importance that we learn to see that all thought-based limitations share a common feature: they are illusions kept in place by our continual belief in them and our (often unconscious) refusal to feel the trapped emotions associated with those limiting beliefs. ::

7 :: The spiritual path – the art of breaking character – is hard. But so is regular life. At least on the spiritual path we are actively increasing our capacity to be with difficulty. It is also precisely what we are designed to do – the exact kind of difficulty we are built for. ::

8 :: The religious impulse is simply to reconnect to our source. We cannot help but long for this. It drives the scientist’s curiosity as much as the priest’s religiosity. We are all asking the same question in different language: and the answer to all of them is One. ::

9 :: Every action is a refracted yearning towards God. Only when there is no refraction is the yearning pure. ::

10 :: Spiritual awakening – aka. conscious evolution, the journey back to wholeness, the path of enlightenment – involves vast trauma processing that includes such mundane things as releasing shame about being a messy eater, and re-learning to be unabashedly silly as a child. In the end, no stone will be left unturned. ::