Spiritual Double Vision

SPIRITUAL DOUBLE VISION

By Bill Cottringer

     Wow do I feel like a fool! Imagine spending 62 years of climbing a success ladder, getting closer to the top rung only to find out you had your ladder placed against the wrong damn building? Goal setting, achievement, learning, improving, reaching, self actualization, climbing, competing, phew!…I am just glad I am not like the Russian atheist who with his dying breath muttered, "oops!" Fortunately I have time left to regroup.

     I am sorry to have to say that 95% of the definitions of success are all probably wrong. It is like looking at a blank page of paper and finally realizing that all that matters is the edge of the paper, despite the size of the paper, its color, or all your fancy writing on the page. Or, it doesn't really matter how much food and water you have consumed if you are still hungry and thirsty.

     Many earlier psychologists programmed us into believing that life was a free-for-all quest for growth, self-improvement and complete self-actualization. It certainly seemed like a reasonable and worthy goal to focus on, especially on the rebound from Freudian pathology, disease and failure.  But there is a serious flaw in striving to close the gap between your real and ideal self. You imagine the gap and any attempts to close it will be futile because the finish line will keep getting further away, (just like the Social Security income limit), the more you do. You simply cannot run fast enough, try as you may. All you can do is get more out of breath.

    There is but one real quest in life that can actually be achieved; unfortunately it gets very misunderstood and terribly miscommunicated. This one real quest is to get to know yourself so that you can be yourself, not wasting time chasing after the imaginary shadow of greatness that Tatum O'Neil was so good at portraying in the Paper Chase.  Now I know what I mean when I tell my daughter Abigail, "just be yourself Abby," in response to her unhappiness about not being liked and popular in school.

    I think the Garden of Eden story in the bible needs to be updated. Our civilizations' "fall of man" came about by two inventions—the mirror and camera. These wonderful inventions have created and perpetuated the greatest illusion of all time. This is the illusion that we have a self that we can "see" apart from the one we are. This sense of a separate self starts the paper chase for "success" because of all the other separate selves ahead of us, or worse yet running past us as we are walking or crawling.

     By seeing another self apart from the being we live inside of, we get this very real distinction between us and the rest of life, including the separation of who and what we really are from the infinite potential we can imagine in our abilities for greatness—all the while increasing this fantasy by sadly watching others pass us by at warp speed or running past them gloating.  This gap between what we sense to be true and what we imagine to be possible causes some major frustrations and failures in life. In fact the nagging sense of a "gap" between where we are and where we want to be may be the start of all brokenness from addictions to crime to relationship failures to extreme mental illness.

     This imaginary "fracture" we have created with mirrors and cameras and now software like PhotoShop and Outlook Express is a widespread epidemic. It is the most commonly held reality that doesn't get questioned. It causes most of us to miss the 5% truth from all the rest of the illusory distractions that seem so real, but eventually lead us to be empty-handed and wondering what we have missed.  The only truth or reality that is dependable is the oneness, interdependency and togetherness of all things and the only thing we ought to be doing is putting everything back together again the way it was.

     Separating this and that and chasing for more in our eternal search for peace of mind is a quest doomed to failure, just as becoming "better" is. Better than what?  We human beings waste precious time doing this and that, while the rest of life gets entertained by just being and taking it all in. Doing gets temporary results, while being gets permanent ones; and permanent results are much more satisfying than ephemeral ones.

    What we need to be doing is to replace this and that back to where they came from—heads and tails are the same coin. We can't be our best selves until we know our present self. So in a sense we are running away from ourselves in attempting to improve ourselves, when we should forget about this whole illusion of improvement and just concentrate on being ourselves. This means accepting our limitations, stop grasping at greatness and just do as Mother Mary and the Beatles suggested: Let it be.

     I suspect we confuse the nagging sense of greatness we feel inside with our self. That may be the ultimate act of egotism. The nagging greatness we feel inside is a densely packed atom of God deep in our souls, just to remind us that greatness is little. And when we understand that paradox, it can become anything we previously imagined.  

     The nice thing about life is that I can now climb down my ladder that has been against the wrong building and either work hard to move it to the right building and start climbing again, or just sit for awhile and be amused at everybody else doing the same thing. Or I am sure I could imagine something else to do or just be. I guess it depends upon who I really am. .

     Now in conclusion, if I could declare a universal law it would be:  Have more fun playing the game than trying to figure out how to win. But instead, maybe I can offer these two simple suggestions:

1.      Know thyself.

2.      Just be yourself.

Oddly, you will have a difficult time not succeeding, unless you are still thinking about it.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow Secrets:  How Dogs Live Simple Lives and People Don't. He can be reached for comment and questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net