And lo and behold old feelings and the memories associated with those feelings started coming out. I have repressed–held back, hidden–so much, out of necessity. It is odd, making contact with my 6 year old self, what I was feeling. I stopped asking myself what I was feeling around then, and was not old enough to do it any earlier, although I am sure I expressed myself, as young kids do.
And it hit me that this sort of healing activity is the MAIN activity of spirituality. I was reading my Kum Nye reading earlier, and it is all about relaxation and well being. A spiritual person feels everything anyone else feels. They react the same way in the same situations. But having taught themselves to process emotions, the recover vastly more quickly. They get back to a high baseline, where many people start bogged down in unprocessed emotion, then stay there, and in some cases get dragged down further by circumstances, or perhaps more accurately, their understanding of the circumstances which their unprocessed emotions compel on them without their awareness.
And then it hit me that much of the Big Three (as seen from the chair I am sitting in) is focused on sin and an invisible God, on rules, obeying the rules, breaking the rules, and an invisible hereafter. It is not at all about feeling good, and in fact, all three to some greater or lesser extent want people to feel ashamed, unworthy, and generally like shit because of sins someone else committed, or because of their inability to fully repress healthy instincts like sex, a desire for a comfortable life, and for objects of beauty.
This is absurd. Goodness–real Goodness–flows from a sense of abundance. Generosity of self is the natural consequence of feeling good, just as material generosity is a natural outcome of abundance. It requires no special virtue, no special compulsion.
Here is the thing: if you seek goodness directly, you cannot find it. It is, as Chuang Tzu said over 2,000 years ago, crooked. It is not found in a straight line. It is not found in a simple prescription like “be nice”. It is not found, in my view, in any religious frameworks oriented around ritual behavior. It is found by valuing one’s self, one’s own well being. At some point, perceptive people find that helping others be happy makes them happy, but this point is not reached in a condition of personal emptiness. You can dedicate your life to helping others, and die empty, if you do it from the wrong place. This is my opinion. Some measure of selfishness is required of all honest spirituality. To say otherwise is to adopt a spirit of compulsion in my view.
And I will share two other posts here for my own convenience.
Compulsion is equating 90% with 0%. A healthy person sees 90% as 90%. It is not 100%, but it is not nothing either. Partial measures are always better than no measures, and not everything in life is worth 100%. Most things are not. You save the 100% for the things that are. If you try to treat everything as a matter of life and death, you wind up shutting down much of the world out of necessity. If you have to give 100% everywhere, you have to shrink your world. There is no other choice. You have to shrink your domain of action and thought.
If, conversely, it is acceptable to give 10% to some things, then many more things emerge from the darkness for your consideration.
The other point I wanted to make is that frequently lesser goodness is greater goodness. I have, in my own life, often made things worse for people in the process of trying to make them better. As one example, I see people’s pain when they do not, and have at times spoken of it. Almost always, this is a mistake. They hide their pain from themselves for a reason. Bringing it out increases their suffering. It does not decrease it. They have to find their pain, and process their pain, in their own time.
I think most of the time–and this is a provisional hypothesis, since I don’t have this figured out–it is best simply to mirror what people give you voluntarily. Show them that you hear them, nothing more. Sometimes this is a small consolation in the midst of a vast suffering, but something is better than nothing, and trying to be greedy with your “goodness” can undo everything.
I would actually, to complete the circle, equate trying to do too much with stretching too hard. You activate their impulse towards contraction, and they wind up smaller because they met you. This is incompetence, period.
Don’t be incompetent. This is not a bad rule. And if you figure it out completely, feel free to comment. I’m still looking for ideas.
We are all fools in our own ways. The best we can hope is that we live long lives in which we become a little less stupid each day, which is perhaps close to the Taoist idea of doing more by doing less. Remove what is unnecessary, and the path becomes brighter and simpler.