The Art of Self

One of the inherent frustrations among Westerns in modernity is the quest to discover one’s purpose, sustainable contentment, and further making a livelihood out of meaningful work. Daily we are subject to an overwhelming barrage of scripts that promise to make us safe and happy yet fail to do so.  Hence the notion of happiness is generally connected to moments in a day that must be maintained by rising above boredom or repressing chronic, internal anxieties or stress that would quickly exhaust the average person if it were not for material consumption, the technologies created to “save time” and the need to be always doing something.

Carl Jung said that with all this resistance and distraction, consciousness is still pressing forward "to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped." Hence there is a disunity with oneself that breeds discontent. A critical atmosphere thus must develop—the necessary prelude to conscious realization. This is a quiet call from within to listen, to pay attention to the hidden, to possess the secret imprisoned in inescapable egotism yet gradually to be revealed by way of discovery, a natural progression within all of us that often goes unnoticed or unheard until it is late in life. It is the inner voice that begs your reflection now and over time and promises wholeness, completeness, human flourishing.

While I have been on this path for many years, I recently came across an exercise in Friedrich Nietzsche’s  Schopenhauer as Educator that essentially was written to provide an a starting point to youth or any searching individual who is willing to chase a set of probing questions over time as a method to assist in the cardinal yet byzantine task of knowing oneself. Nietzsche begins, and I recommend as a threshold this project.   

How can one know himself? It is a dark, mysterious business: if a hare has seven skins, a individual may skin himself seventy times seven times without being able to say, "Now that is truly you; that is no longer your outside." It is also an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down toughly and directly into the tunnels of one's being. How easy it is thereby to give oneself such injuries as no doctor can heal. Moreover, why should it even be necessary given that everything bears witness to our being – our friendships and animosities, our glances and handshakes, our memories and all that we forget, our books as well as our pens. For the most important inquiry, however, there is a method. Let the young soul survey its own life with a view of the following question: 

Here is Nietzsche’s method laid out in the form of questions. I suggest take several weeks to do this. Lay out your musings on paper or document; keep coming back to it and lay it out, expand it as described below.  The numbering is mine for which I recommend following before moving to the next phase. I have provided some alternative translations in the brackets.

[1] "What have you up to now truly loved, [2] what has drawn your soul upward, [3] mastered [dominated] it and blessed [uplifted] it too [at the same time]?" [4] Set up these things that you have honored [revered objects] before you, and, maybe, they will show you, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of your own self. [5] Compare these objects, consider how one completes and broadens and transcends and explains another, [6] how they form a ladder on which you have all the time been climbing to your [true] self: for your true being lies not deeply hidden in you, but an infinite height above you, or at least above that which you do commonly take to be yourself.

Finally Nietzsche exhorts, “There may be other methods for finding oneself, for waking up to oneself out of the anesthesia in which we are commonly enshrouded as if in a gloomy cloud — but I know of none better than that of reflecting upon one’s educators and cultivators.” Here (the method above) Nietzsche gives us a place to start—consider those who have informed use over time, the various people and actions of others that have influenced us and have in part breathed life into us or imparted to us a model of what we intrinsically view as genuine and worthy of holding on to which may well inform us about the person we are and wish to be. 

Hope against Cynicism and Naivete

Maria Popova of the website Brain Pickings, in an interview with Krista Tippet argued, “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. I try to live in this place between the two to try to carve a life out [hone a niche] there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism.”

Here Popova practice provides an elegant example of a well-adjusted, thoughtful person who tackles via “a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why." It is a public example into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

Here I unpack the above statement a bit as it oscillates with my idea of gentle cynicism as a way of navigating the challenging territory between and to prevent full-blown cynicism while working and hope.  For me gentle cynicism is dealing with the limitations of a world juxtaposed with the social and moral issues of the day filtered through narrative, poetry, philosophy and social ethic (tools for critical thinking).

Here is a visual, continuum model that places “hope” as the mean good.

  Cynicism      gentle cynicism     Hope      mediocrity       Naiveté    

   -----------------------------------------> <-----------------------------------  

      Critical Thinking                         Unreflected Life
   [Self-protective resignation]                         [Blind resignation]

But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better [telos]. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive; we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Hope seeks out possibility, requires necessity, and is the proper relating of self to itself.  (Paul Ricoeur).  In Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, Ricoeur writes that despair comes from the self misrelating to itself. The misrelation is not recognizing what the self is, which is synthesis of the infinite and the finite. Hope, conversely, is a proper relating of the self to itself, especially concerning the expectations one has of oneself. Expect too much of self, then one may despair of attaining one’s goals; expect too little of self and one may well despair of ever accomplishing anything at all.  

Hope theory (CR Snyder) is the perceived capacity to derive pathways to desired goals (in relation to mean goods) and to motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways. Here hope is a positive motivational state that is based on an interactively derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal-directed energy) and (b) pathways (planning to meet goals).

The trilogy of Hope:

Goals - anchor one’s thinking about the future to specific goals

Agency - those capable of pursuing goals, who believe in their own capacity

Pathways - those that can imagine or plan way to achieve goals step by step along a pathway

Sources:

Huskey, Rebecca K., Paul Ricoeur on Hope: Expecting the Good. New York, Peter Lang Publishing. 2009.

Popova, Maria,  transcript from interview with, “Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age” accessed from On Being, 05/14/2015.http://onbeing.org/program/transcript/7584#main_content.

Snyder, C. R. (Ed.).  Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2000. 

Six Logical Ideas from “Life Begins Again and Again: Seeing the Good in Depression”

Six Logical Ideas from “Life Begins Again and Again: Seeing the Good in Depression”. Melody Harrison Hanson (November 15, 2013)

• We must face the things that might have made us depressed. (environmental, circumstantial, generational, vulnerabilities, human deficiencies, etc.)  
• Through reflection, stillness and rest healing comes. (time spent utilizing one’s strengths, spending time caring for self with simple disciplines/practices)
• Take the wide open spaces, as a Season to Heal. (openness to kairos time, breathing in the spaces that infuse vitality)
• We can heal by asking why/how we were led into this spiritual recession. (process reflections may reveal over time insight of multi-generational patterns that can be tweaked--changed)
• Hope spoken aloud and believed is the path to healing, and it is the way forward to a season of laughter and dancing. (write, re-texting of the found “text”) 
• Awareness and acceptance are all. The coming together of the re-texting via acknowledgment (energy for re-engagement, full acknowledgement of self, other and holy; taking change into the sphere of others) 

Thinning Niche

Thinning Niche is a developmental dynamic I have come to recognize as vital with moving through middle life.

Karl Jung explains that the aims of the second half of life are different from those of the first and to linger too long in the youthful attitude can produce a division of the will. Consciousness is still pressing forward "to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped." Hence there is a disunity with oneself that breeds discontent. A critical atmosphere thus develops, the necessary prelude to conscious realization. There is a natural progress of thinning of one's niche. As Samuel Manashe concisely wrote,

The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him

Samuel Menashe, “The Niche” from Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, published by The Library of America, 2005.

There is a deepening sense that one must in their middle life embrace the conscious awareness and cultivate generative practices that promote human flourishing while the end consciously appears closer.

The Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Standards of Practice (medical model) shares seven attitudes within what is entitled the “Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice.”  

“Seven attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in the stress clinic. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go. These attitudes are to be cultivated consciously when you practice. They are not independent of each other. Each one relies on and influences the degree to which you are able to cultivate the others.”

The Attitudinal Foundation of Mindfulness Practice is as follows:

Non-judging: being an impartial witness [Suspending judgment]

Mindfulness is cultivated by assuming the stance of an impartial witness to one's own experience. This requires becoming aware of the constant stream of judging and reacting to inner and outer experiences that we are all normally caught up in, and learn to step back from it. 

Patience (hardiness)

Patience, a form of wisdom, demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time. It’s learning to distinguish between chronos and kairos, or measured time and seasonal time.

Beginner’s Mind [second naiveté]

The richness of present-moment experience is the richness of life itself. Too often we let our thinking and our beliefs about what we “know” prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We tend to take the ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary. To see the richness of the present moment, we need to cultivate what can be called “beginner’s mind,” a mind that is willing to see everything as if for the first time.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu Suzuki

Trust: become more fully, humanly oneself.

Developing a basic trust in oneself and one’s feelings is an integral part of meditation training. It is far better to trust in your intuition and you own authority, even if you make some “mistakes” along the way, than always to look outside of yourself for guidance.  Our hope is to become more fully and humanly ourselves.

Non-striving: paradoxically relaxing the tension to achieve our goals

Most of what we do we do for a purpose, to get something or somewhere. However in meditation this attitude can be a real obstacle; for meditation is different from all other human activities. While it takes work and energy of a certain kind, ultimately meditation is non-doing. It has no goal other than for one to be oneself. The irony is that you already are. This paradox may be pointing you toward a new way of seeing yourself, one in which you are trying less and being more.

In the meditative domain, the best way to achieve one’s goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment. With patience and regular practice, movement toward your goals will take place by itself. This movement becomes an unfolding that you are inviting to happen within you.

Acceptance: living each moment more fully

Acceptance is seeing things as they actually are in the present. If you have a headache, accept that you have a headache. If you are overweight, why not accept it as a description of your body at this time? Eventually we have to come to terms with things as they are and accept them, whether it is a diagnosis of cancer or learning of someone’s death. Often acceptance is only reached after we have gone through very emotion-filled periods of denial and then anger. These stages are a natural progression in the process of coming to terms with what is.

In the meditation practice, we cultivate acceptance by taking each moment as it comes and being with it fully, as it is. We try not to impose our ideas about what we should be feeling or thinking or seeing on our experience but just remind ourselves to be receptive and open to whatever we are feeling, thinking, or seeing, and to accept it because it is here right now. If we keep our attention focused on the present, we can be sure of one thing, namely that whatever we are attending to in this moment will change, giving us the opportunity to practice accepting whatever it is that will emerge in the next moment. Clearly there is wisdom in cultivating acceptance.

Letting Go (or be dragged)

They say that in India there is a particularly clever way of catching monkeys. As the story goes,

hunters will cut a hole in a coconut that is just big enough for a monkey to put its hand through. Then they will drill two smaller holes in the other end, pass a wire through, and secure the coconut to the base of a tree. Then they put a banana inside the coconut and hide. The monkey comes down, puts his hand in and takes hold of the banana. The hole is crafted so that the open hand can go in but the fist cannot get out. All the monkey has to do to be free is to let go of the banana. But it seems most monkeys don’t let go. Often our minds get us caught in very much the same way in spite of all our intelligence. Hence the term “monkey mind” which refers to the agitated, easily distracted and incessantly moving behavior of ordinary human consciousness.

In the meditation practice we intentionally put aside the tendency to elevate some aspects of our experience and to reject others. Instead we just let our experience be what it is and practice observing it from moment to moment. Letting go is a way of letting things be, of accepting things as they are.

Source: https://www.umassmed.edu/PageFiles/63144/mbsr_standards_of_practice_2014.pdf

The Tiny House Movement: A Generative Practice

The Tiny House movement is getting at the human need to live with what is important, removing the excess that pollutes the cosmos and our lives. It is a wonderful evidence of a generative process of preventing 1) overextension of resources which consumerism promotes and 2) rejection for those who have fixed incomes. It helps middle-aged persons/couples to follow the natural process living in a way that promotes caring and giving (vs. consuming) in a responsible manner that benefits one’s community and impacts in a small way the globe ecologically.

See:  “Living Small In the City: With More Singles, Micro-Housing Gets Big”

Health Insurance Provide Considers Providing Coverage for Mindfulness Strategies

Health insurance provider making waves and considers providing coverage for mindfulness strategies for certain patients. 

According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness means “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally.” Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/life/health/mindfulness-in-the-news/article/424657#ixzz3RlO03Kxf

The Role of Courage in Human Flourishing

What is the role of courage in promoting human flourishing? Since ancient times courage has been considered a virtue to cultivate that with other virtues contributes overall to happiness (eudaimonia). Aristotle designated courage as the best state of character in relation to feelings of fear and daring. As a mean good, the state of excess is foolhardiness (over-boldness) and the state of deficiency is cowardice (timidity, fearfulness). Aristotle outlined five types of courage as they play out in endurance of various dangers in society or one's context. There is "civic" courage which is based on a sense of shame; there is "military" or experienced courage, which is based on experience and knowledge of coping with them; another rests on "inexperience and ignorance", the kind that make children play with snakes; there is "expression of hope" which is based on one's previous success(es); and lastly "irrational passion" that may emerge because one is made bold by pain or frustration, e.g., love or rage. (Aristotle, The Eudemian Ethics)

The idea of valor, akin to courage, suggests engagement that is thoughtful in order to not shrink from threat, challenge, pain, or difficulty. While valor is more than bravery during physical threat, it expands to intellectual or emotional stances that are unpopular, difficult, or dangerous. It encompasses the capacity to uncouple the emotional and behavioral components of fear, to resist the urge to flee and face (distancing, isolation) the fearful situation.

Brené Brown, who has conducted important work with human vulnerability and shame, exhorts,

Rather than deny our vulnerability, we lean into both the beauty and agony of our shared humanity. Choosing courage does not mean that we’re unafraid, it means that we are brave enough to love despite the fear and uncertainty. . . When confronted with news of a stranger’s unimaginable pain – a suicide, an overdose, a protest for justice and basic dignity – we have two choices: We can choose to respond from fear or we can choose courage.

Brown provides five applicable examples of how to apply courage in our lives to promote whole-heartedness: 1. Asking for what you need, 2. Speaking your truth, 3. Owning your story, 4. Setting boundaries, 5. Reaching out for support.

We glean from the ancient to contemporary applications of the use the courage that its use for good should be  voluntary and not coerced action. It should involve judgment, i.e., some understanding of the risk and an acceptance of the consequences. At some level, a courageous person should have a disposition to take risks, yet must also overcome a tendency to take unconsidered risks. There is the awareness with courage that it requires the presence of danger, loss, risk, or potential injury. Earl Shelp “Without a sense of danger, risk, or vulnerability, there is no bravery in an act. Bravery is valuable because it allows people to dampen their immediate response to danger and evaluate the appropriate course of action. Bravery involves the mastery of fear.”

Courage is a necessary virtue or element of human capacity to face difficult challenges that are related to the relationships and circumstance that evoke fear and threat in and around us. In the face of challenges we can cower and be less human gravitating to our pseudo-self, or we can choose and develop with our sold (authentic) self the strength to name and tame the emotions of fear and dread and thus mobilize resources to help calm and act in a manner that achieves a higher good.

Sources:

Aristotle, The Eudemina Ethics, Transl. Anthony Kenny. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead. New York: Penguin Group, 2012)

Earl W. Shelp, “Courage: A Neglected Virtue in the Patient-Physician Relationship.” Social Science and Medicine, 18 (1984), 351–360.