How do we turn towards presence and awareness rather than tighten into
fight/flight? That's really the inquiry we keep encountering over and over again.
Maybe just to clarify one thing that I think comes up a lot, which is, when I
talk about not controlling, when I talk about seizing from all the managing, I'm
not talking about inactivity. The process of shifting out of the egoic
fight/flight is a process of coming into presence with what's here and then from
that presence responding. In the Zen tradition, they say responding
appropriately, that the whole path is responding appropriately rather than
from an egoic reactivity. When we respond appropriately, we're responding from our
deepest intelligence. We're responding from our heart.
One of my favorite examples of this... Tom Wolfe wrote... in his book he wrote about... in the 1950's
these highly trained pilots in the US Air Force and they were
set for this life/death task of flying at the highest altitudes that had ever
been attempted before. So they were going beyond the Earth's denser atmosphere and
what they found is that, and this is to their horror, was that the laws of normal
aerodynamics no longer applied out there. So all the ways they would normally fly
didn't work (this is in "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe) and the plane could skid
into a flat spin. It was like a cereal bowl, he says, on a waxed formica counter
and then start tumbling, not spinning and diving, but tumbling end over end, so it
was whacked-out trying to fly out there. And what they would do when it went out
of control, is they would get frantic and try to
stabilize by applying correction after correction (this is the pilots), and the
more furiously they manipulated the controls, the wilder the ride would
become. So then they would start screaming helplessly into the intercom
saying, you know, "I've tried X, I've tried Y, I've tried Z, what do I do next?" and
they would be screaming this as they were plunging to their deaths.
So this tragic drama occurred a number of times until one pilot (and this was
Chuck Yeager) inadvertently struck upon the solution. So when his plane started
tumbling he got knocked unconscious. He wasn't trying to control anything, he was just knocked unconscious.
The plane pummeled towards Earth, when it reinterred the planets denser atmosphere,
he came to, and that's when the more, the classical navigational strategies, could
be re-employed and he, you know ,steadied the craft and he landed safely so he
discovered the one life-saving response, the only life-saving response, he could
do. And it's don't do anything. You take your hands off the controls. This is Wolfe:
he says, it's the only choice you have and it counters all training and even
basic survival instincts, but it works.
So, I'd like to say the same goes in
spiritual life, which is that when things feel like they are totally out of
control, let them be. You take the hands off the
control. All our normal strategies of fight/flight will only... like those
frantic pilots, mostly our strategies take place in this spinning of our mind
that is trying to battle against how it is, that's trying to solve it, to fix it
to make it go away. When it's out of control take the hands
off the controls. Now, you don't do what Chuck Yeager did, necessarily. It's not
getting knocked unconscious, it's actually coming into consciousness, like,
okay, what's going on in this moment, and now
this moment, in this moment. It takes courage because as I mentioned trying to
control things gives us a sense that maybe we're going to be on top of it, but
it's a false sense. In fact the only refuge in those moments is to take the
hands off the controls, come into present and then as we really inhabit
presence, there will be an intuitive way to respond to our world that most serves.
If I had you take some time to reflect on different situations in your life, you
would know the difference between the ego of doing that occupies the swathes
of time where we're really tense and tight, and on our way somewhere, and
trying to get things done, and trying to get other people to do things a certain
way, and there's just a tightness. We know the difference between that and the
moments where there's some sense of what's called "being in the zone" where
it's not so much of a self "doing". It's, kind of, we are responding and engaged
with the with the currents and, you know, where there's a sensitivity, in a sense,
that the universe is doing it, we're being guided in some way. Yet as most of
us know, the egoic activity is what's most familiar. We get some satisfaction,
it's temporary. This is the thing with false refuges, is you do get a little bit
of a benefit, so it keeps you hooked, like we cross things off the list and we get
a temporary sense of relief that lasts about 2.7 seconds, and then back we are
to the next thing on the list, but there's a sense of well I'm this I'm
doing this as I want to get my way and we get our way and that feels like a
success, although we've won the battle and lost the war
when we get our way with other people. We might, you know, get the
temporary benefit of feeling like we've prepared or defended against an
attack or some damage. You know, we might feel like we, you know, our wile
got us through some terrible circumstances. My favorite damage
control story is of a young man working in a supermarket, some of you might
remember, he's in the produce section and this older guy says he wants to buy a
half a head of lettuce. So the guy goes into the backroom and he says to his
manager, "You know, some jerk wants to buy a half a head of lettuce", and then he
realizes the guy is standing right behind him, and he said, "and this gentleman
kindly is offered to buy the other half!" [Laughter] So the manager is pretty
impressed. Later on in the day, he finds this employee, and says, "As you know I really like
the way you handled that, you know, that was pretty cool. I was impressed
by the way you got yourself out of that situation. We like people who think on
their feet. Where are you from, son?" The young man says, "From Canada." "Why'd you leave Canada?",
the manager says. "Well," the young guy replies, "there's nothing but whores and
hockey players up there." "Really?", said the manager, "my wife is from Canada!" [Laughter]
"Really?!? Who did she play for?" [Laughter]
So, you know, we get certain benefits from having an ego that's
that's quick on its feet, so to speak. The truth is that we will continue and, as we
all know, having an ego, that's a well-functioning ego, is part of the
equipment we need to survive on planet Earth. The question is, are we identified
with it? Do we know how to draw on who we are that's beyond the ego? And we will
only begin to step out of the unhealth-some ego-doing when we recognize the
suffering that's there. When we start to really get how much our obsessive
thinking is keeping us from connecting with ourselves or connecting with others,
when we get how are blaming is creating separation, when we get how are our
defensiveness is stopping us from really discovering something that might be true,
we begin to open up. And there are some zones that can become very clear when
we're in control mode and realize this is really causing pain. One of them is,
you know, we start recognizing how we are, in some way, trying to control our
experience of another person dying, or of our own or of our own mortality.
I remember one woman that I was in touch with, and I wrote about this in "True
Refuge", was struggling and fighting valiantly to keep her husband alive. She,
they, had tried everything. And he was clearly dying, but when he mentioned it
to her, her response that particular day was,
"Oh, darling, don't talk about that right now. You're having a good day." After she
said that, she felt this big gap between them. She realized she had created a distance
in her denial. And her prayer was, to please let me be present with what's
true, let me just love him through this, not deny what's happening. So that's a
form of control, is denying the pain that's here, denying the loss, not
being willing to to name it or say it. And we start seeing that, or perhaps our
way of dealing with mortality is, anger, or bargaining, or any of the classic ways
that we try to stay in charge. We start noticing that and realize that we're
losing a precious opportunity to be more intimate with ourselves or a loved one.
Another way that it might become apparent as if we're fighting aging,
because we'll lose, I promise. [Laughter] But we can see it that there's a sense
of the insult of aging and feeling beleaguered by it and struggling to try
to keep your body, your mind, your way of being, looking different than it is
and in some level sensing something's wrong. Okay, that's the control, this
judging and striving. And there can be a sense of that is getting in the way of
living the moments. We can see it not as clearly when there's controlling
addictive behavior. It's, like, well, I've got to control this. It's going to do me in.
I see it a lot with overeating and yet the control mechanism is usually self
blame, or punishment , or restriction, which I've found always leads to fuel more
addiction. Controlling only temporarily gives us a sense that something's
working. It backfires. You can see it with controlling difficult emotions in our...
..in our hearts that we either deny that
we're suffering, or we in some way try to fix it, try to make it go away, rather
than just be with it. But take the hands off the controls. Now one of the big places
we go into trance is controlling each other.
And that is the place that often needs the most attention. Can we stop expecting
others to be the way we want them to be, can we stop trying to make others
cooperate with our idea of how they should behave? So we begin to see the ego
strategies of how we withdraw our affections, or we threaten, or we punish,
and get the suffering. This is getting in the way of intimacy. These lives are
short. You'd see it with partners, the rules we have, and parents, the way they
use, you know, guilt to try to create a certain behavior and how it backfires
into resentment. One little girl was sitting in the... watching her mother do
the dishes at the kitchen sink and she suddenly noticed her mother had several
strands of white hair sticking out, in contrast to her brunette head. She looked
at her mom and inquisitively asked, "Why are some of your hairs white, mom?" And her
mother replied, "Well, every time that you do something wrong and make me cry or
unhappy, one of my hairs turns white." [Laughter] The little girl thought about this
revelation for a while and said. "Mommy, how come all of grandmas hairs are white?" [Laughter]