A TIME TO PAUSE

A TIME TO PAUSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 4, 2009

“We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), American clergyman

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We live in a time of uncertainty, not that any other time was certain, but people in many other times conducted their everyday life without paying much attention to calendars and schedules, to wearing a watch and being slave to it, being panic driven by deadlines, and appointments, while trying to live rigid, sequential, structured, fixed and committed lives.

It is assumed that progress is our most important product, that he who hesitates is lost, that without pain there is no gain, and wherever we are whatever we’re doing we could be somewhere else doing better. Anxiety is not a symptom of our time. It defines our time, and is the hidden rhythm of everyone reading these words.

This goes against the grain of the harmony and flow of life towards what we call “happiness.” We live in a contrived mechanistic universe and force ourselves to appropriate happiness through psychotherapists, personal trainers, television gurus, self-help books, meditation, prayer, and Buddhist mantra, as if we were machines amendable to reengineering our mental attitudes before pausing to ask ourselves a few simple questions:

(1) Who am I? Not who should I be, who would I like to be, where would I like to be, but who am I, right now? In many ways, the person we are at ten, we are at twenty, at thirty, at forty, and beyond.

Circumstances change, but we carry our geography with us. That geography has a mental landscape of attitudes, values, beliefs, biases and experiences. That geography determines who we are, how we problem solve, and interface with others. Chances are we are unaware of this geography.

As a consequence, nine-tenths of our behavior, Freud would say, is unconsciously driven, which finds us taking action at the wrong time in the wrong way and under the wrong circumstances. If true, then it would suggest we are slave to that self we have never befriended.

(2) Can I change? Should I change? If I change, what do I gain for what I lose? Ah, now we are digging into that unconscious. The Dalai Lama would say we must first change within ourselves before we can change conditions outside ourselves. Others have echoed the same sentiment, but the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist, and would a Buddhist lie?

William James, Carl Gustav Jung, Aldous Huxley, Alan W. Watts, Thomas Merton, and Joseph Campbell to name a few Westerners have said the same thing, but probably not before they had previously explored Eastern thought.

We of the West don’t think of change as something “within,” but something we must do, that is, something we must destroy and reconstruct. Consequently, we must scrap things as they are, and look for replacements with our disposable driven mindset.

We feel there is something missing in our spiritual-temporal, psycho-temporal, physio-temporal, bio-temporal and socio-temporal patterns. We compare and compete, imitate and emulate, going from one fad to another.

Since the 1930s, faddism has been fueled by Jung’s break with Freud, by the Beat poets’ embrace of Zen in the 1950s, and by the counterculture’s linking of psychedelic drugs and Eastern mysticism in the 1960s, by the psychological dimension of Eastern thought in “alternative” lifestyles and programs such as EST in the 1970s, to the actualizing psychology of Abraham Maslow and his “Hierarchy of Needs” in the 1980s, to the humanistic psychology of Erich Fromm and Karen Horney to flow psychology in the 1990s, and ever onward and upward.

We have an identity crisis, and keep reinventing our psyches to make room for another explanation of our plight and paradox. We have turned to the East, as if those of the East have no such lack. It is another end run to avoid considering the second question first (should I change?) before we launch into another war against ourselves to change for the sake of change. We tend to put the cart before the horse and wonder why we never get anywhere.

(3) What should I be doing? The answer is implied in the question. It is what you are doing, now!

We have been conditioned to seek meaning and purpose in our lives not realizing that we cannot escape either one. The purpose of our life is what we are doing right now, not tomorrow but right now.

If we are a student, that is our job and the purpose of that job is to maximize the benefit of the work to enhance our ability to move on to the next level, which is working for a living. The purpose of being a student is not to get good grades, not to accumulate a lot of diplomas and degrees. The purpose of being a student is to learn how to think, how to conceptualize, assess and calibrate experience in terms of our problem solving capability. At the same time, being a student is meant to enrich our imagination, deepen our perspective and enhance our comprehension of the world.

Once we move to the next job, which may be our livelihood, the purpose of that job is not what we get but what we can give to the effort in a concerted effort to effectively utilize our inherent ability.

Notice in “what should I be doing” the focus is on becoming when it might better be spent in being in the moment.

We suffer from a culture driven by “it’s not my job?” We put ourselves in the prison of the task we are committed to do as a student, and the job we are paid to do as a worker, and are careful not to go beyond the bounds of that arbitrary demarcation as if in a steel cage without any access to do otherwise.

We have forced a “should” into what we are doing as if we had no say in the matter, playing the victim, looking for pity, and then wondering why we have little sense of freedom.

(4) Where can I find the guidance, counsel, understanding, friendship and acceptance that I crave? The short answer you already know. Everywhere you have looked has ended in disappointment. Am I right? Where have you looked? Ah, now we are getting somewhere.

You have looked for the perfect friend, for the person you can unload the secrets of your existence and know that they are safe with that person; know that that person will accept those secrets, those missteps unconditionally and still remain your friend come hell or high water. Does such a person exist? Of course that person does. You have not found that person? I’m not surprised because you have been looking everywhere but the right place, and that is in your own heart.

We have a taboo against being our own best friend. We see that as narcissistic, egoistic, self-centered and arrogant. But have you asked yourself why that is so? Most people you meet are in various stages of denial. Most people wouldn’t recognize themselves if they ran into themselves in a mall. I know.

I’ve conducted experiments where colleagues profiled each other. These profiles were placed on the wall and each person was asked to identify his or her profile. None could. Not a single person saw him or herself as others did. Why? Because people are too busy constantly changing and adjusting their masks that they don’t recognize the person behind the mask, but others do.

Is this the case with you? If it is, you either dislike, despise, regret or would prefer not to know the authentic person that walks in your shoes. That is unfortunate because that is the truest person that has your best interests at heart when it is allowed to surface. Evidence of this malady is easy to test.

Another person who is likely to know you best and to have your best interests at heart is that person you have married or with whom you have partnered in life, or if you have not married or partnered that person who works closely with you every day. You may fool yourself but you don’t fool them.

Yet, when you want to bounce an idea around, and get credible and relevant feedback, do you turn to them? I don’t think so. You turn to an expert, a shrink, personal adviser, television guru, self-help book, acquaintance or colleague, not to that one person who knows you best, yourself, or that second person that knows you better than anyone else, your partner.

We flatter professionals by thinking them to be far wiser than we are, and double that flattery by implying that these strangers know what is best for us while our partners do not, when our partners have a vested interest in our well being. We have failed to realize, or choose not to appreciate that others have a hidden agenda, and wish for us to react to life experiences as they have reacted to theirs, to make their hypotheses our hypotheses. That is why so many of us have lived second hand lives.

(5) What is happiness? The question implies happiness is a job like an occupation, yet in a way it is.

A life worth living involves some activity, and activity whether we receive financial or spiritual compensation justifies our time on earth. We were born to be useful in the service of others.

Happiness is not something you seek. It is something you are, not something in the distant future but what is happening right under your feet. It is built on virtue with truth as its foundation, a process of doing not an outcome for the effort.

We are always trying to define happiness only to have it ever allude us. We think if we were rich and powerful, admired and envied, and had everything we could ever possibly imagine, the fulfillment of our every desire, we would be happy, but this defines misery, not happiness.

In identifying ourselves with having, and not being, we become a mind never at rest and always in distress.

Happiness is love made visible in work and play in constantly discovering and creating new dimensions of what our minds will allow. It is the joy in the activity of the doing not separate from the doing or product of the doing. So many of us confuse happiness as a duty that must be sought and not the happiness of duty that is experienced.

Happiness doesn’t change, as we get older; we change in our appreciation of happiness as we age.

We are born with a bias that leads us towards or away from the fulfillment of happiness in the course of our lives. We think of happiness as the citadel of pleasure and satisfaction forgetting that the foundation of happiness is built on pain and struggle, and the sweet taste of satisfaction for the sacrifices we make when something worthwhile has been achieved.

(6) How do we know if we are happy? Happy people don’t commit suicide; successful people do. Happy people don’t get lost in the jungle of their conflicting and competing drives. They recognize and accept what drives propel and impede them by paying attention to the habits of their hearts.

Happy people have a sense of humor about themselves, which gives them a sense of proportion and balance.

Happy people give themselves the benefit of the doubt whenever they come up short, as inevitably they do from time to time.

Happy people compete with themselves, not with others, for they recognize that imitation leads to a counterfeit life.

Happy people know there is no high brow without a significant amount of lowbrow, no success without failure, no days of rapture without days of anguish.

Happy people are generous with and to themselves as well as with others, and can say “no” without guilt or misgivings when what is asked for is self-diminishing, unreasonable and selfish.

Happy people know there is no escape from aggression and hatred, manipulation and exploitation, and so they are on the alert in self-protection to weigh demands to the cost-benefit to them.

Happy people have a center and are self-creating not self-destructive.

Happy people are not one-sided, two-faced, or self-negating. Happy people find no satisfaction in the misfortune of others, or the idle conversation that generates around people so preoccupied.

Happy people can choose to make money rather than mayhem, crack a problem instead of heads, dominate a field rather than be subservient to it.

Happy people are aware of their instinctive drives and channel them to creative purpose.

Happy people are aware of their flaws and so don’t trip over them by denying their existence.

Happy people know that everyone has their own secret garden; that it is a place of weeds as well as of flowers. Happy people know, too, that shame and sorrow can take root in the same soil as pride and happiness, so they cultivate with care.

Happy people know you cannot barter for happiness, nor place a price tag on it, but you can attain it by paying your dues.

Happy people know happiness is a state of mind, a function of who and what you are, not whom you know and what you have. Happiness can be reduced, as every happy person knows, to your relationship with yourself: are you your friend or foe, confidant or adversary? It is a question of the habits of the heart.

Confident Thinking, then, is meant to give pause and promote the dramatic fact that we are our own authors of our footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, are sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.

The sooner we realize this the more quickly we may overcome the bondage of negative thinking, and of loneliness and isolation, and find true friendship with ourselves and satisfaction in this brief experience called “life.”

Today, it is not the Church that is the path to fulfillment as it has been in the past. This finds us suspended in a culture and time that is in the process of redefining itself in a climate of economic panic and spiritual misapprehension.

We can no longer look for answers “out there,” as we have had in the past. Then, when “they” were wrong, we had a convenient scapegoat to blame. We are on our own, and on our own nickel now.

Secular society is having the same problems that once dominated the Church when modernity hit Western civilization with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of capitalism. We are in the Electronic Age, the Age of the Internet, and we have little mental grasp or moral perception of where it will take us.

Finance and commerce have misplaced their economic compass, and in a panic, federal and national governments across the globe are throwing streams of taxpayer money at problems as if into a bottomless pit.

Meanwhile, society has lost its moral grasp of reality leaving the future up for grabs. We are now in “Nowhere Land of Nowhere Man,” as greed and self-indulgence have caught up with us, while the life of this fragile planet holds precariously in the balance.

Economic Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman calls this “the revenge of the glut,” taking the premise from a speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in 2004 titled “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit.”

Money in 2004 flowed to the United States, and to smaller countries such as Iceland, Estonia and Ireland with the world awash in cash and economic miracles hatching about the globe, only to have the “US subprime crisis” followed by the “Wall Street Meltdown” of 2008 put a reality check back into the picture. Man does not live on bread alone or with the illusion of synthetic wealth.

Asset prices a short four years ago were rising across the globe, currencies were healthy, and everything looked fine, but economic bubbles always burst. Yesterday’s miracle economies have become today’s basket cases; nations assets have evaporated, such as Iceland, Estonia and Ireland, while their debts remain all too real. What is worse, most of these loans were denominated in other countries currencies.

Krugman sees few happy campers, as the damage has not been controlled or confined to the original borrowers. The housing bubble took place mainly along the US coast of California, the Gulf Coast and Florida.

But when the bubble burst, demand for manufactured goods, especially cars and appliances collapsed across the country, thanks to a plunge in exports. That has had a terrible toll on such manufacturing centers as Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, all in the heartland of the United States.

Likewise, Europe’s bubbles burst mainly around the continent’s periphery, yet in Germany, Europe’s manufacturing center, production is falling off rapidly, thanks to an abrupt plunge in exports.

That is why Krugman calls it “the revenge of the glut.” The irony and paradox is that people are finally saving, something Americans have been accused of never doing, so now their thrift is killing the world economy as savings exceeds business investments.

This radical departure from the status quo leading to the disestablishment of society, as we know it, is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps war will finally be seen as primitive and primordial. Perhaps, too, the boundaries of nations will give way to good sense, as well as the dismantling of patriotism and the philosophy of “us against them.”

Wars cause unintended consequences as the collateral damage of war can kill the spirit as well as the body of society. The mind, as Milton reminds us, is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. The choice is ours to make. May we as individuals and as global citizens make the connection between sense and sensibility.

In his 1950 Nobel Laureate speech for literature, William Faulkner made a cryptic assessment of the plight of man, which should ring now across the mountains and the valleys, the shallow streams and deep oceans, the narrow streets and broad highways, the modest villages and pretentious cities of this small planet. Faulkner said:

“Until he (the writer) learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

There is a transcendental power in these words. Patterns slowly emerge that reform us unconsciously and then we are swept beyond our consciousness into a life and lifestyle that we not only fail to anticipate but also fail to heed. It has been so throughout history. Seneca put it succinctly: “Men trust rather to their eyes than to their ears. The effect of precepts is, therefore, slow and tedious, while that of examples is summary and effectual.”

Where we are now in our thinking is a part of our history, which is built on the back of great events, which in turn has produced great men. There is no part of this history that is all instruction or all entertainment, but a combination of both.

The palliative pattern of Confident Thinking is that if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. The fact that this is a cliché does not minimize its significance or that there is some truth in the more things change the more they remain the same. The Confident Thinker maintains this perspective, clichés not withstanding, knowing opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but moral authority is written on the tablets of eternity.

Religion and temporal authority are not in a new contentious relationship; nor is it a new experience for the West to be in conflict with Islam and the East. Let us not forget the Holy Crusades. These were a series of wars undertaken by European Christians between the eleventh and fourteenth century to recover the Holy Land from Islam.

In the seventh century, the caliph Omar took Jerusalem. Although pilgrimages by Christians were not cut off at first, by early in the eleventh century the mad Fatimite caliph Hakim began to persecute the Christians, and then profaned and despoiled the Holy Sepulcher. Persecution for a time abated after his death in 1012, but relations remained strained and became more so when Jerusalem passed from the comparatively tolerant Egyptians to the Seljuk Turks in 1071. In the same year, these Turks defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV at Manzikert.

We are now in a new time of the absurd with crimes, follies and misfortunes glutting our diminishing newspapers, slimmed down magazines, and network television news programs, while Internet blogs match and mock the gossip on the street.

French statesman Chateubriandeoyj said, “Grecian history is a poem; Latin history is a picture; modern history is a chronicle.” Erasmus might suggest postmodern history is a farce. There is no give in our give, no ease in our ease, and so the palliative of patterns is to recognize the charade we are in, and move on. Faulkner has sounded the bell.

We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate our character to those we most admire. Since patterns have more designers than followers, and since we trust our eyes more than our ears, we are incalculably influenced by sleight of hand patterns.

Take pretty people on television as pundits and news anchors, film stars as diplomats and ambassadors, books written by cosmetically attractive gurus, and articles written by quasi-scholars. We imitate and conform to their stories in dress, speech, manner, behavior, diet, career and mating, and even in their stuckness.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, reminiscent of Erasmus, uses self-mockery to indicate the folly of our ways. Professional athletes, role models for our youth, now cover their bodies in tattoos. At one time, Brooks tells us, tattoos were used to symbolize nonconformity of the outcast but now they have become mainstream. “Now, everyone has a tattoo,” he says, which means it no longer symbolizes free expression or individuality, but meaningless membership in the meandering mob.

We have used consumerism as therapy for our anxious age, and it has failed. We have attempted to find happiness in self-indulgent lifestyles that have only made us more self-estranged.

Society has been on this treadmill for at least since the 1830s when it was transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial society. Now in a post-industrial society, we Americans display our angst by consuming a quarter of the world’s natural resources while being one-twentieth of the world’s population. To be fair, we are generous to a fault with our money, but prefer to keep our distance from self-involvement with others. We smile a lot on the outside while crying on the inside if the multi-billion dollar pharmaceuticals we spend for depression are any indication. Our vacations are so strenuous that we welcome going back to work to rest. With all that we have and are, we feel broken inside.

We are a society, indeed, of the absurd. Two-thirds of Americans are obese, and the most obese are in the poorest states with the lowest per capita income. More people are dying from obesity-related diseases than from cigarette smoking or alcoholism. To be more precise, a half-million die from such diseases every year. We are a fast-food nation killing ourselves with empty calories. Yet, we spend more than $30 billion a year on diet drinks and diet programs, or we endure liposuction surgery to correct a problem requiring only self-management. Erasmus would have quite a time with that.

We are not happy campers as economist Krugman alludes, or Confident Thinkers because we are looking for the answers in all the wrong places. The way to happiness and Confident Thinking is not “out there,” but in finding that internal governor we have misplaced. That was the implicit message of Faulkner’s Nobel Laureate speech. He is optimistic about the future, but his enthusiasm is not jumping up and down in a frenzy of joy. Elsewhere in that speech he says:

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man and young woman writing today has forgotten the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

A pessimistic outlook is not only true of many popular writers but of cynics in all endeavors. Struggle and pain are aborted for the shock and awe mayhem and gore in video games, films, books and television dramas. Forgotten is that struggle and pain are the complements to the quiet engine of the soul that drives the human heart forward to realize its essence.

It is not charisma; it is not presence, but the silent truth within that resonates between the medium and the message that confidence resides.

On one occasion, I was asked my availability as keynote speaker to a marketing conference with the request for a video. The only video I had was of an appearance on CNBC’s “America’s Talking.” I did not get the job, as I was found not to be charismatic. My content, they claimed, was good but I lacked entertainment value.

No harm no foul they were to be applauded. They made it clear they required a cheerleader, not someone to inspire Confident Thinking. How did I come to their attention? It was a provocative article written on “leaderless leadership” in which I attacked charismatic leadership. Apparently, they failed to appreciate the irony.

They were measuring appeal in the cold medium of television while sincerity is measured in the warm medium of sincerity, which is personal. We appear to be losing our enthusiasm for flesh and blood men of ideas for the flat screen of the empty electronic studio exchange.

Empires once gave way to nations, now nations are giving way to markets, and markets are giving way to cyberspace where the rules of the road don’t match the rules of the waves.

These are exciting but dangerous times. We lack the confidence we had in government, in a common belief system to which all subscribed, or even to the rule of law. Citizens are increasingly committed to conclaves whose solidarity depends on common hatreds as well as clannish loves, and identities of polar opposites to the majority.

For centuries, people have looked to the nation for direction. Now, there are nations within nations of discontented souls that don’t abide by moral authority, the rule of law, or respect for their neighbors’ property or well being, but measure what is good and evil by who is with or against them.

The so-called “melting pot” of the United States has never actually existed. We have been a stratified society from the beginning. The only difference is that tolerance for these stratifications has been consistently ambivalent.

In this mad rush into the future, we have been reduced to being largely on automatic pilot manipulated like puppets on a string. We are waiting to be saved from ourselves against a world in shambles full of folly, pretense and confusion, having lost its way.

When Faulkner claimed man would prevail, he was speaking of the soul, which has the mind of a thousand religions. Each of us is a whole of a piece, and religion is fundamental to that fact. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this in terms of the intimacy of the mind and heart:

“Is there any religion but this, to know that whenever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none see it, I see it; I am aware, if alone, of the greatness of the fact.”

Our life and destiny are one. Confident Thinking has been written to provide some reflection on that pristine idea.

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