You don't move in the direction of being by doing fancy meditations or yoga poses, going to retreats & workshops, getting rolfed or whatever, being blessed by gurus, chanting, eating special food, going to sacred places, or any of that rigmarole. None of that helps; it's a waste of your time and money. You develop by living well: you come to inhabit being more fully because you make the right choices as you go through your everyday day, living the life you already have. The core of the practice of being pleasure or any other path forward is doing a good job of living your everyday life, day after day: contending.
Contending is living life at face value. Not some calculated life, not the imaginary life you project out there with your expectations and your habitual ways of seeing things and reacting, but the messy one you're trying to ignore, the one right in front of you. Stop imagining life, stop working the angles, stop scheming and let life in just how it is. Live your life, not some escapist fantasy, and not some "yeah yeah, seen it before, same-old same-old" mental movie you project onto the unique, irreplaceable moments of your life. Look and see what's actually there; live that life. Life at face value is life just how it is, free of fantasy and expectation.
What you do with life is live it; living means doing something, contending means doing something. Life is completely uninteresting and you're completely stuck unless you do something. Sure, it's better to do the right thing, but lots of times you don't know what that is. Do something; it's better to be wrong than nothing at all. If you don't do anything, you're stuck where you are. You don't want to stay there, believe me. That's not the greatest neighborhood to be in after dark. Do something.
To develop you need fear; fear is an indispensable companion on the path forward. You need the fear of death to make progress; that's really the only fear there is. You need to be afraid to die without developing; dying without making significant progress is a dirty shame. Let your fear of death prod you into doing something with your life.
Fear is an important part of what you push against in the struggle to become. Don't try to overcome the fear of death or make it go away; anything that takes away your fear of death is wrong. The fear of death is taken away by drugs, hypnotism, charismatic leaders, mass hysteria. These all cut you off from being, from what's right. Anything that cuts you off from being is profoundly wrong; if there was such a thing as evil, that's what it would do. But evil's not a thing, it's just a lack. Evil is failing to develop; evil is dying without making progress. It's just a temporary lack, a sad state of affairs rather than a malevolent force.
Stand up to the fear of death and let it move you; face fear with courage. Most of the time, the courage you need to develop is not the courage of a heroic moment, of standing up to the fear of death, but ordinary everyday courage. The courage to do what's right even if someone disapproves, or you're uncomfortable doing it, or it makes you look stupid. The courage to stand your ground in small, undramatic moments every day. Most of the time, developing is a matter of living with everyday courage. It's important to focus on what you need to do most of the time; exceptional moments call up their own resources.
Everything you've ever tried to make your life better has been a form of avoidance, of lying to yourself, and it hasn't worked. The answer is not to try something else! And that includes the practice of being pleasure: don't try this on as your latest spiritual fashion so you can admire your imaginary progress - go away. If that's how you're thinking, you're not ready for this, and you won't like it; it's not for you.
Instead of trying something new, you have to do what you've been avoiding all this time: you have to turn your attention onto your life; you have to pay close attention to what your life is really like right now. You can't make your life better until you turn and face how it is, how it really feels with no distractions and no self-deception. You've been trying to get away from what you don't like about your life, but that's exactly what you need to turn and face. You need to turn and face your life as it is, down to the bitter dregs. Nothing truly good will ever happen until you do that.
Work and play are the wrong way to think. Seeing what you do as work, play or some mixture of the two distorts your life. For most people, that distortion is a serious barrier to living a richer, fuller, deeper life; it's a mental barrier to becoming.
Work is an unfortunate necessity, right? Nobody wants to work; you do it because you have to. You work because you have to pay the mortgage and buy all the stuff that needs buying, or because you don't want to be called a bum. You watch the clock; you can't wait to get off work so you can go play. Even you so-called workaholics do it because you have to, not because you want to. Work's a drag.
Play can go one of two ways. One approach is play as anti-work; it has to be shallow no matter what and it can't be serious. "Hey, take it easy man, don't make this into work!" The other approach is to make play just a variety of work you don't get paid for. "Shut up and have fun, goddam it."
Separating the qualities associated with work - like focus, discipline and planning - from those associated with play - like joy, enthusiasm and relaxation - creates a bad situation no matter what you call it. As you begin to consider your life in the context of contending, please forget about work and play. Just focus on living your life at face value.
What your mind can do is really limited, but it's quite capable of messing your life up. Your mind's a useful tool in the thick of life, helping you solve problems and figure out how to go forward. In the thick of life, your mind's weaknesses and bad tendencies are countered and corrected by everything else that's going on in the situation you're in, internally and externally. In the thick of life, you do things and solve problems without thinking about it, without thinking twice. Those phrases point to the right way for your mind to work, in concert with everything else: your mind works best when you don't have time to stop and think about it.
Sometimes you think it's necessary to stop and think, to figure out what to do next, but it's almost always the wrong thing to do. When you stop and go mental, you usually cut everything else off and rely solely on your thought processes to figure out the next step; that's sending one of the weakest players out and sidelining the rest of the team - not the greatest strategy. Instead, move forward with all of you: senses, body, feelings, mind. Encounter the situation and let it touch you; then it's possible to contend.
Thinking instead of living is trying to figure things out in advance instead of simply experiencing them. Instead of trying to figure out how something's going to be in advance, go into it so the figuring can happen naturally once you're in the middle of it. Your mind is always wrong about how something is going to be. That's because your mind is shallow, superficial, one-dimensional, and life is always deep and rich and multidimensional. But if you've figured it out in advance, that's probably what you're going to end up with: a shallow, superficial, one-dimensional version of life, because all you'll let yourself experience is the mental version you've already figured out. Racial, ethnic and class-based stereotypes are a familiar example: you see the stereotype, the mental category, and you miss the person. The most extreme and destructive example is the sin of idolatry: the human attempt to reduce God to a set of scriptures, stories, or ideas.
A particular challenge that has to be overcome on the way to living well is getting trapped by satisfaction: complacency. As you enter the later stages of becoming you'll feel a very deep sense of satisfaction. It's tempting to settle into that, especially after all you had to go through to get to it. But this is where the real work actually begins, and complacency with what you've accomplished and where you are is possibly your worst enemy now.
Complacency is not an enemy in the early stages of becoming; in a sense it's what you're working toward: enough external accomplishment that you can really afford to feel complacent. Since you went through that phase, you know all about complacency as you enter the later stages; you miss it. The middle stages have been a long uncomfortable passage, and you're ready to rest on your laurels. You probably can't avoid resting there for a bit, but you need to get over the idea that this is where it's at and you've got it made as soon as you possibly can, because you're really not much of anywhere. If you hang out there longer than necessary, you can get very stuck, and stuck is stuck: miserable no matter where it happens. Don't bring human misery with you into the later stages of becoming; it's really no longer needed or appropriate.
Once you make your way through the early stages of becoming, there's never again room for complacency. Satisfaction is just a moment to take a breath before plunging on. At a certain stage of development, further into the later stages, you permanently escape the danger of complacency; you know there's no resting. If you're feeling complacent, satisfied with where and who you are, it's a very bad sign; it means you're stuck, no ifs ands or buts. You are not complete; don't indulge in the delusion that you are.
Contending is living with everyday courage, living life at face value. Contending is surrendering to being; being calls the shots and makes the choices rather than your mind, your feelings, or someone else pushing you around. Contending is facing whatever life brings you and getting what it has to offer. Contending is not being afraid to love, to follow your passions and plunge wholeheartedly into the beauty and richness of life. Love other beings unreservedly; development requires abundant loving.
Contending is also standing up to duress and hard times. You think of duress as something to be avoided, something to escape. Think of it instead as a resource for development. Face duress with courage, looking for what you can get out of it; you'll experience hard times very differently. This is part of what I mean that life's pains don't have the same meaning once being becomes the center of your life.
You can't escape duress. You may have comfortable circumstances, so you don't have to contend with cold and hunger, but you can't insulate yourself from death. Even the most insulated life has plenty of duress. You either contend, or you indulge in some form of turning away: paralysis, denial, self-pity, despair, apathy, entertainment. Turning away denies you the value you could get from life, and slows your development. Choose instead to stand and face duress; that's the way forward.
Contending is looking life in the eye, holding your ground, and not complaining. Holding your ground doesn't mean you overcome, beat the odds, win the battle. It just means you don't back down, you don't turn away. Winning is irrelevant to being. Contending doesn't mean staring your trials down, either; contending is marked by openness, not combativeness. Contending is an act of being: being is out in front so life can touch you and being can call the shots. Stay with what life brings you and don't turn away with any part of yourself and your experience of life will be transformed, you'll understand it on completely different terms, and you'll develop. Sometimes very rapidly.
Turning away from life simply delays the inevitable. While the delay doesn't make the reckoning any worse when you finally do stand your ground, it seems that way because every time you turn away you injure your own self-confidence and miss an opportunity to develop. Every time you choose to stand your ground and contend, you develop and you gain strength to bring to the next challenge.
Focus on what you need to do most of the time: contending is mostly about life's petty annoyances and distractions. Moments of great danger or tragedy can be easier to contend with because they can shock you into acting directly from being. The miraculous deeds done in dire situations happen when being bypasses the everyday conscious self and acts directly. Miraculous moments don't develop you. Being only asserts command like that when necessary. Once the danger has passed, you go back to being who you were before.
You may have an upside-down view of contending; it's pretty common. In the upside-down view, dire moments are seen as the times you can really make progress, and everyday life is pretty much ignored. Since dire moments don't come around that often, people try to create artificial dire moments by doing extreme practices. But neither genuine dire moments nor extreme practices are useful in development. Living your everyday life well, on the other hand, is very useful; it's where development happens. If it doesn't happen in everyday life, it doesn't happen period.
Like prayer, contending has two strands: passive contending and internally active contending. Passive contending is stepping back to see the situation in a larger perspective: how important is this really? It's letting someone win a silly argument even if they're wrong (according to you), or putting up with obnoxious behavior. It's simply remaining silent and letting something pass when you're just dying to show someone how wrong they are. Being is always looking at the big picture; annoyances don't distract being. Even if you're not in touch with being, pretend to be. Make yourself see the situation from a bigger, more generous perspective. Be greedy in a grand way, happy to trade losing an argument for development.
Active contending is turning toward whatever's coming at you and penetrating it and letting it penetrate you. Rather than just enduring annoyance or discomfort, turn toward it and propel yourself into it. Let it act on you. Active contending will raise your discomfort threshold, and your experience of that annoyance will change. What was annoying or uncomfortable will become neutral and unremarkable. You'll gradually develop comfort not easily dissed.
Don't confuse active contending with intentionally inflicting pain or discomfort on yourself, the whole bed of nails/intentional suffering routine. Life supplies plenty of discomfort, pain, and annoyance; use what's there, don't make shit up. Making up artificial pain to inflict on yourself is just plain stupid. You may choose to do uncomfortable things aimed at development, like taking walks outside in bad weather or going into the wilderness, but that kind of thing only works if it's your idea, if being is calling for it. Don't do somebody else's idea of what you should do to develop, it won't work. Find your own.
Being will always choose whatever leads to development. Your goal is to hand the reins over so being can call the shots and make the choices. Choices, not decisions; decisions are irrelevant. Deciding is mental. In the best-case scenario, your mind weighs all the information and decides on the course of action that makes the most sense. Sometimes you have lousy information; sometimes you make stupid decisions even though you have good information. Decisions may or may not be followed; your mind is impotent. Choices made from being are different. Being doesn't weigh options or consider information; being simply chooses the right thing, the choice that leads toward development. Choices are unassailable; once being chooses, that's what you do, because being is God in you.
You can go through life making no choices at all, just getting pushed around by whatever. If you stand up and choose for yourself, you develop. If you let yourself be pushed around and just make mental decisions, you don't develop. It's that simple.
If being is going to call the shots, being has to be out in front; whatever's in the way, whatever's coming between being and the present moment of your life, where choices are made and the next step is taken, has to be gotten out of the way. Your life is what's in the way. Most of what your life consists of is in the way of being calling the shots. It's important to consider this unpleasant subject in some detail, because when it comes to turning your life around, this is it, this is where it happens or doesn't. There's useless stuff in the way and bad habits in the way, and then at a slightly more refined level there are wrong ways of living that get in the way.
Useless possessions get in the way of being calling the shots. Being is uninterested in most of what you own. If you're busy tending your goods, being is definitely not calling the shots. Instead of life, you have stuff, and your stuff is your life's center of gravity. It's like morbid obesity: you can't live your life because you're surrounded, padded and insulated by rolls and rolls of greasy excess stuff.
You have lots of bad habits that get in the way - things you do, internally and externally, that are useless and obstructive. The major categories here are external activities, mental barriers, self judgment, habitual emotional states and habitual attitudes.
Wrong ways of living are the ways you live so that life can't touch you. If you've made some headway with useless stuff and bad habits, focus on living your life so life can touch you. Turn toward life rather than away. Go after things that draw you; do what you've always wanted to do. Pay attention to and go after whatever:
To be the right kind of living, it has to meet both criteria. On the other hand, just stop doing whatever leaves you grumpy, withdrawn and out of sorts. Pay attention to how things make you feel, and do the things that make you feel better. Duh.
Knowing is being level grasp of the truth of a situation. Knowledge is just accumulated mental stuff, abstracted bits of data that may or may not be valid, current and usable. It's highly overrated and subject to decay. Knowledge can help you pass tests, enter professions, that kind of thing, but that's about it. Knowledge will never get you what you want; knowledge is never enough to show you the way. But if being is calling the shots, you'll know what to do.
Knowing is always responsive to the whole picture of whatever situation you're in. If being is out in front, being will grasp the situation and you'll know what to do next. The more you develop, the fuller your grasp of the situation will be and the more resonant your response. It's nothing at all like figuring out, weighing options, processing data - that's all mental, and there's no possibility for being level response, for creativity when you're stuck in mental mode. Where the mind calls on knowledge, accumulated bits of decaying data, being calls on wisdom, the network of living connection to other beings that slowly develops as you do.
In Guidance I talk about the limits of mind, and in Choose or be swept along I talk about the differences between decisions and choices. Knowing is a deeper level than choosing; it's what choosing is based on. When you choose you're still somewhat outside a situation but you allow being to call the shot. Knowing is immediate: the idea of choice is irrelevant because being knows what to do next and doesn't consider anything else. If you can inhabit being fully enough to know, you'll have little need to accumulate knowledge because you'll respond appropriately to whatever situation you're in without having to rely on the clumsy operations of your mind.
Once you've done some active contending with whatever life brings and you've eliminated some of the ways you keep being from calling the shots, you begin to see the possibility of a new way of living. You see that you can actively and creatively move forward and propel yourself into richer and deeper experiences of life rather than just getting more out of whatever happens to come your way, which is what contending's all about. You see that you can engage life. Engaging life is taking the initiative with potential opportunities that need creative management to come to fruition, and outright creating the opportunities you'd like to have that don't present themselves. Engaging life is living creatively, not just responding deeply. Engaging life is a deep level of approaching your life as a work of art.
Engaging life is being strategic about joy and satisfaction. You already know some things that make you a better version of yourself that you don't do very often. You also have some hunches about things that would probably be fabulous that you haven't tried yet. Make two lists: Want more of and Want to try. If you do a good job with your lists, they may look like a great agenda for the rest of your life. But once you start engaging life, I guarantee you you're gonna need completely new lists in months, not years. But that's OK; you'll be having lots of great ideas about what to do next.
Part of what happens when you start engaging life creatively is you quickly become savvy about what does the trick and what's just mental fog. You see that the excitement you crave has nothing to do with some obscenely expensive car; excitement is free, and it's everywhere. It's a quality of being. You start taking back all your desires that got hijacked by the consumer machine; you start finding what you want in the life you already have, which now feels alive and flexible under your hands. You can shape your life so it has whatever you want to have in it. You're living creatively.
Engaging life is actively and courageously surrendering to being. Being is full of ideas for how your life could be richer and fuller, and being is trying to get you to listen right now. Being's initiatives may seem dangerous to your comfort and complacency, but you'll see the beauty in them; they'll be what you're really longing to do and you'll know it.
Contending and engaging have this treasure in common: they're accessible routes for you to inhabit being and commit acts of being. Even the simplest act of passive contending requires you to inhabit being to some degree and act. Active contending and engaging make you inhabit being more deeply and commit more decisive and creative acts. Contending and engaging are how you can move your life forward right now. The very highest level of engaging is presence, which is what you really want, and where this is all headed.
Failure to live well, to contend and get full value from your life, is often caused by the lie of selfishness. This lie says you have to grab whatever you can get in life any way you can, and then hold onto what's yours and protect it at all costs. That lie is a fundamental misunderstanding of the economy of the universe and how everything actually works; it's one of the key terms of exile. The most fundamental active principle of the universe is giving, generosity. The universe is a gift, an expression of God's love. The lie of selfishness cuts you off from the flow of how the universe actually works, which is that everything is a gift and you can't own anything by clinging to it. To receive anything you have to be ready to give it away.
The economy of the universe works like this: everything's a gift from God, and you have to open up to receive it. You don't own any of it, it's all a gift, moment to moment. Since you're not an infinite being who can contain everything, you have to let everything go through you. You have to pass it on; you have to give it away. If you hold on to what you've got, you dam up the flow and nothing can get in. I'm not saying give away all your goods and go live on welfare or beg on the street. I'm saying pay attention to what's true: everything's a gift, all the time; it's what's going on all around you. Take that in, feel it, find the truth of it. See if it makes you want to live your life any differently.
Never try to force development. Development comes from making good choices in your ordinary everyday life, period. That's too boring for some people; they want something more exciting, more extreme: fasting, drugs, sweat lodges, sleep deprivation, ultrarunning, etcetera. These silly-ass antics are all eventually self-correcting, and usually don't amount to anything worse that wasted time and energy. They only become a problem if you have some "success," if you get temporarily jolted into a higher state. Of course you revert right back to where you actually are once it's over so there is no success, but the yo-yo routine can have three unfortunate consequences, no matter what your level of development:
If you're more developed, you can get into more trouble with extreme stupidity, at least up to a point. I say up to a point because eventually you'll get smart enough not to try anything really stupid. If you're developed enough that your extreme stupidity jolts you momentarily into an experience of the presence of God, you might do something catastrophic right then or afterwards; this is when people jump off cliffs thinking they can fly, or commit suicide rather than face life with an unsatisfied hunger for God's presence.
There's no possible preparation for forced becoming. No amount of fasting or other "purification" is gonna make your drug high stick; it's a drug high, dummy. Development happens on a day-to-day basis, as part of your regular life, or it doesn't happen. Forget about extreme stupidity, and while you're at it forget about swimming with dolphins, forget about pyramids, electronic devices, and mind-altering sounds. Holy places and psychedelic appliances aren't gonna do it for you.
Right now at this very moment you are perfectly placed, perfectly aligned, and perfectly prepared in the exact center of the most exquisitely sophisticated tool for development that could even be imagined: your life. You become by living well; if you don't live well you don't become.
Life is full of possibilities. Many times every day you come to a point where you have several options. There's always at least one option that lets you contend, move in the direction of being. There are always options that let you stay stupid. As you move through each option point, you may not know what the best option is. But if you're paying attention, you'll have a pretty good idea which options are really stupid, and you'll probably have some idea which options may lead to contending. You go through dozens of option points every day; most of them you're not aware of because you do things habitually, never realizing you just missed an opportunity. You fail to live life at face value.
Contending is choosing good options; it's doing a good job of living your life, day to day; you develop as a result. Every action, every thought counts. There's no time off, no mulligans or gimmes. Everything counts absolutely. But there's always another shot, another chance. You'll never, ever run out of chances; that's an expression of God's mercy. You're absolutely stuck with the job of becoming the most developed, transcendent, enlightened version of yourself; you might as well get on with it. Live life at face value; live well.
Everyone on earth has the same task: develop, live up to the promise. You can't help anyone else develop. Development comes in one way only: a person chooses, from being, to do the right thing. You can't develop unless the action comes from you; if you act because of someone's influence or help, there's no development.
It's not just that no one can help you develop, no one can know what's right for another person. No one knows what's right for anyone else. Spiritual teachers can have insights and offer suggestions, but even the most insightful teacher can't know a student's being. Teachers use their wisdom and insight to suggest possibilities to a student, but only the student can choose to develop or not develop, and development can occur only if the student initiates it.
Almost any conceivable human activity can be developmental. If someone's actions seem silly to you, maybe they're developing a quality you already have well developed; it'd be silly for you to do that. If someone seems abrasive, obnoxious or dangerous, maybe they're developing a quality you don't have and it seems dangerous because it's foreign.
Since you can't know what's right for anyone else, you also have no grounds for judging that what someone else is doing is wrong. Someone may be making a choice you fervently believe is wrong, but there's no way you can know that. Almost anything someone else does that you judge to be wrong or find annoying or unpleasant may turn out to be exactly right for them.
Accept that each person has to develop, and no one else can do that for them. Get that you can't help anyone else develop; you have no way of knowing what someone else's developmental needs are. Accept it, get it, and an enormous weight is lifted off your shoulders. You have no responsibility to save anyone else; there's no such thing.
"But what about war criminals, rapists, mass murderers? Does that mean we're supposed to stand idly by and let them murder and rape, because maybe that's what they need to do to develop?" Of course not; don't be obtuse. It's easy to see when someone's doing something that's really bad for someone else. Use common sense.
We're all in this together. We all need each other to contend with so we eventually gain a little wisdom and find our way forward, moving in the direction of being.
| 