無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Why Does This Keep Happening To Me?

You always end up in relationships with guys who like to conserve water by not flushing. You always argue with your girlfriend about how many ex-girlfriend tattoos you have (what’s her problem, anyway??). You always get stuck with chicken-beheading duty down at the ranch. Why don’t things change? Why don’t you ever have any luck?

To put it bluntly, you’re not ready for change. You’re not ready to change. You’re used to and comfortable with things the way they are. One way to look at it is that you haven’t learned what you’re “supposed” to have learned from a particular level of experience, so you can’t move on. You’re doomed to repeat it. Everyday is Groundhog Day (imdb | amazon).

Bill Murray and friend in Groundhog Day

What? Does the universe really conspire to provide you with experiences that are valuable lessons? Are you really the center of the universe, a special snowflake? Yes and no. It’s simply that whatever level of consciousness, emotional development or morality you’re at is how you’ll experience pretty much everything. For the purposes of self-development, reality is absolutely (haha) subjective. Your understanding of every experience you have is filtered through your own unique perspective. Hell, even if you are capable of being aware of having a certain experience is based on your interpretative framework, your ability to be aware of it in the first place. The universe doesn’t have to prepare a conspiracy of lesson plans for you. The way you perceive any experience is itself the teaching. (But you are a special snowflake! Who’s a special snowflake? Yes, you are! Daddy’s wittle fluffy-wuffy special snowflake!)

You're a special snowflake! =^.^=

Thus you do not change because your understanding of reality remains fixed. If you always interpret a similar experience in the same way, you will always have the same experience. If you always respond with the same action, you’ll always get the same result.

So how do you break out of your current reality? If you want to experience something new, if you want to change, you have to develop a new understanding, a new perspective, and then respond accordingly. Or you can do it the other way around and change your behavior first, see what happens, and then develop a new interpretive framework.

Developing a New Perspective

For social relationships, the easiest way to gain a new perspective is to take that of the person with whom you are in relationship with.

For example, how could she do that to me? I don’t know, that’s a good question, isn’t it? Let’s actually try to answer it.

Adopt her perspective for a moment with compassion. Have you ever done something like that? Could you ever do something like that? Once you have developed some compassion for her perspective, it looks less and less like she’s wronged you. You may have simply expected more from her than she’s ready to give. Maybe she doesn’t express her affection in ways that you need (some respond more to words, others deeds, still others physical affection). Can you still be upset at her when you can empathize with her perspective? Well, yeah, I guess you could, but you’d start to feel silly about it after a while.

Taking another perspective like this allows you to take back control over the situation. You can not easily control another person (at least not without being a major dick). You can not easily force them to change (most of us aren’t ready to, right?). But you can control how you interpret the situation and how you respond. Since reality is subjective anyhow, changing your perspective of the situation will actually change the situation. That doesn’t mean you always get what you want; it means you can control whether not getting what you want will upset you or not. (It might, however, help you stop looking for what you want in the wrong places…)

(Note that the Integral 3-2-1 process describes a similar, more detailed way of using perspectives to work through your own psyche. It’s an excellent technique for dealing with your Shadow.)

New Action: Outside the Comfort Zone

Changing your behavior entails taking new action. You can tell when you’re taking new action when you’re outside your comfort zone. So if you want to take new action that will lead to growth, you have to do something you’re afraid of (not mortally, of course, don’t go skinny dipping in piranha-infested waters because you misunderstood me). Tim Ferris even argues that defining your fears may be more important than defining your goals. Generally, facing your fears will change your reality fairly automatically. You’ll be doing things you never imagined that you could do. You gain confidence. Your sense of self expands.

Note that while moving outside of your comfort zone when you’re ready leads to growth, being forced too far outside your comfort zone leads to trauma. A 13-year old needs to begin getting away from his parent’s authority and care to learn to assert his independence. A 3-year old who is taken away from caring parents can be psychologically scarred.

Under the Blanket: Inside the Comfort Zone

Oh wait, so there’s a comfort zone? Yeah, which means if you’re not changing, you’re in it! And that’s perfectly fine. You don’t need to be changing all the time, just know that if you’re all comfy under the covers, you’re not growing. You change when you’re ready (which would probably be about when you’re complaining about your life, if you needed a hint). When you want to move on to the next set of experiences, you know what you have to do.

Freedom: Self-Development, Anarchy and Spirituality

Freedom is understood in many different ways by different people at different levels of intellectual, moral and spiritual consciousness. It is the masculine in us all that seeks autonomy and freedom (as noted by David Deida and others). The feminine yearns for fullness and relationship. This is yet another manifestation of emptiness and form as the masculine and feminine. We all have both the masculine and feminine within us whether we are men or women, but these aspects of us may be at very different stages of development. Nevertheless, the masculine within all of us seeks freedom.

Revolution

When I first started ‘waking up’ a few years ago, I became interested in Anarchism. Like many people with a liberal background (see previous article on the individual and socio-cultural environment), I was impressed by how social structures constrain and limit people. 

Most people who don’t take the time to think about themselves and their environment simply adopt the values and culture supported by the social structures around them. Using our individual-environment model, we can say that the environment feeds strongly into the individual, but most individuals simply regurgitate this feed of values and culture back into the environment, contributing little to its growth and evolution. Most of us are like the human batteries in the Matrix (what would we ever use for analogies had that movie never been made? , never questioning the reality or legitimacy of the environment presented to us.

At the time, I determined that if the social structures were forcibly changed, that individuals could be changed, in this case freed, as well. This is true to a large extent, of course, but it also neglects the role of the autonomy of the individual, one of the very ideals we are trying to realize through social change in the first place. That is, it focuses solely on how to change the society to effect change in (”freeing”) the individual. It does not consider how it may be possible to develop the individual to change society.

The Individual is the Society

I became conscious of problems with a solely revolutionary approach to freedom as I began reading Krishnamurti. As a rational Atheist kneeling at the altar of Science, I was naturally skeptical of this don’t-follow-gurus-preaching-guru. But as I read The First and Last Freedom, my skepticism turned to confusion (I was largely inspired to begin having an open relationship even though it has almost nothing to do with what Krishnamurti was saying) and then interest and respect. Although the romantic notion of revolution was alluring, Krishnamurti’s cautioning that all revolutions lead back to the status quo resonated with me. He noted that the means are the end (violence leads to violence) and that revolution, as it is a reaction to a tyrannical government, is ultimately defined by it. A revolution is often just that. Another turn of the wheel. How can revolution effect real change if the individuals in that society don’t also transform themselves?

The T.A.Z.

I reread Hakim Bey’s (pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson) T.A.Z. and his poetic argument that the individual himself need only free himself to live as a free Anarchist. He simply need not accept the given social structures and cultural values to determine his own freedom. T.A.Z. also takes the Anarchist dinner party analogy to its artistic conclusion. Bey, in his beautiful poetic essays, explored how spaces (like pirate utopias) and the collection of people who inhabit them can espouse many Anarchistic ideals through their emergent behavior. He called such spaces Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.s). Early ravers, the Burning Man Festival, the music of Bill Laswell (which is how I came to first know of Bey back in high school) and many others have been influenced by the T.A.Z.

Self-Development

Following Krishnamurti into the present through Deepak Chopra (Chopra was inspired by what Krishnamurit had to say, but believed he would be better able to express it to people) and through Steve Pavlina (his article on 10 reasons never to get a job was the catalyst that first began my journey of awakening in the first place), I was led into the world of self-development. I had once been extremely skeptical and dismissive of self-development material, but I was soon reading and gaining respect for even the likes of self-help giants like Anthony Robbins. Soon, it wasn’t just self-actualization, but other specialized areas like personal finance, seduction and fitness. 

Self-development is ultimately about taking control of your own life according to a lifestyle of your choosing. Its practices and philosophies can be tools in discriminating in what values you choose to inherit from your culture and what you develop in yourself. As you change and become more conscious of yourself and your relationship to society, you influence your environment in turn. This is, of course, the opposite of a political approach to freedom like revolutionary Anarchism, focusing on changing the individual rather than society, with complementary strong and weak points.

Spirituality

Another path opened up to me through Krishnamurti and Chopra, that led me away from faith-in-Science Atheism and towards Spirituality. Many spiritual practices are approaches to finding higher levels of spiritual freedom beyond rather than within the feedback cycle of individual and environment. Traditional approaches have largely found this freedom in the ground of being (ultimate freedom and emptiness before time or space). However, most serious modern spiritual practices are concerned with how to manifest this freedom in the world of form as well as being able to realize your true self in the ground of being. Andrew Cohen interprets this as a Kosmic evolutionary drive towards freedom. Ken Wilber sees this drive as unfolding through the lines and levels of development and quadrants of Integral Theory.

Libertarian Socialism

Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Chomsky on Anarchism. Chomsky is sympathetic to forms of Anarchism that are related to Libertarian Socialism in a lineage that goes back to the Enlightenment. It’s interesting that he stresses both the libertarian, i.e. focusing on the autonomy and freedoms of the individual, and socialist, i.e. celebrating the communion and society of individuals, traditions. Indeed, any philosophy of freedom must understand or at least recognize both sides of the individual and environment relationship to be effective in the world of form (though this understanding can simply be a context for a specialization in either side). 

Integration

Reading Chomsky again after several years and within the context of a more spiritual and integral understanding, I realized many of my interests over the past few years were related in terms of this common theme: the search for freedom. I began to see how these different levels of freedom related and flowed into each other. I believe there is a progression, albeit rough and overlapping, in searching for and understanding freedom.

Spiral Dynamics provides a useful model for understanding this progression, as does any other developmental model like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

The basic freedom is freedom from want. Once you have your basic needs of food, water and shelter satisfied such they are not short-term concerns, you are probably living in a structured society that helps provide these resources. But although such a society frees you at one level (basic needs), it imposes restrictions that constrain you in other ways. This is true going all the way up the hierarchy of freedoms to spiritual forms of freedom, each level solves problems of the previous level and creates new ones for the next level to solve.

With this understanding, we can see how self-development tools helps free the individual in several important ways. Self-imposed individual psychological restrictions can be broken through with psychotherapy, dream analysis, seduction community “inner game” techniques, meditative exercises and behavior and habit changing methods. Personal finance, Tim Ferris-style Lifestyle design, and entrepreneurship can help free the individual from debt and time- and wage-slavery. When “free time” is abundant and finances under control and sufficient, one is free to discover one’s own creative passions (one of the Anarchist ideals). As more individuals on the leading edge achieve self-determination and self-actualization, the society and culture itself will advance.

This doesn’t mean that bottom-up change is the only way to go. Top-down approaches are also needed. Chomsky argues that Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists should support social programs in government if they are aligned with their values even though they increase the scope of government and its involvement. Whereas the ultimate goal of an Anarchist agenda is to be free of hierarchical government, religious and other forms of control, the path towards that goal follows a progressive hierarchy of steps. Within a Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory understanding, this makes perfect sense. There is no “skipping levels”. From “blue”, a society must progress to “orange” and then “green” (though of course, in any society you will have individuals at many different levels). This is why if you have a revolution attempting to build new social structures to match a Utopian Anarchist (or other ideological) ideal, it doesn’t work and you get something that is pretty similar to what you started with. The level of social consciousness must develop progressively through a hierarchy of developmental levels before the society at large is ready and responsible enough for such an ideal. That being said, we need the leading edge of social activists and revolutionaries to ensure not only that a society’s social structure upholds its values and morals, but stretches them and pushes them up towards the next level.

The modern spiritual practitioner, if she is serious, can find freedom in the ground of being through meditation and contemplation. Spiritual practice alone helps to literally raise the level of consciousness of a culture. But the spiritual practitioner can bring more to the world of form by developing her other lines (moral, psychological) or by engaging in social activism. By doing so, she expresses compassion for the world of form and those within it by helping them reach the next level of freedom.

As in Defined by Limitations, in each level in the hierarchy she pushes beyond the limits of the previous one, embracing a bit more of the world in compassion. The search for freedom in this world is, like the limitations it pushes past, never-ending, but that does not mean that there is no progression. We can continue to discover and expand into higher levels of freedom, becoming progressively more loving and compassionate for all of manifestation.