What would you do if your lifelong search for wholeness finally reached the finish line?  If the problems you devoted your life to solving were suddenly revealed to be intrinsically without substance?

About a month ago, I had a dream that I was standing on the shore of a vast body of water bigger than a lake but smaller than an ocean.  I went out into the middle of the water and began building an enormous mountain.  I piled high all sorts of rocks and dirt, boulders and gravel.  A real “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” sort of project, I was feverishly committed to making real and making known a deep inner truth.

I spent decades building and piling until I had created a vast peak rising from the water, a mountain visible for miles and miles.  I returned to the shore and stood in a stream of people walking by on the sidewalk.

“Look!” I yelled.  “You must see!”  The mountain was so great, that no one could ignore it any longer.

A few people looked, saw the mountain, and gawked, their eyes growing wide as if to say, “Ah yes, there is a mountain there!”

In the moment that just one passerby acknowledged my mountain, I felt a wave of relief.  A release.

And the whole mountain disappeared.  It faded before my eyes in less than a minute.

I was pleased but wondered, “All that work, all those years, just for that?”  I had a sense that it was all necessary, but I also sensed that I had dedicated a lifetime of effort and ambition to something that required only a moment to fulfill.

The mountain, of course, is what I have spent most of my life trying to accomplish:

(1) Fix my broken self, the image psychiatry gave to me long ago.  Find emotional and spiritual wholeness.  Wake up.  Become strong, invulnerable, happy, and enlightened.  A source of joy and healing and unconditional love to everyone.  Essentially, become perfect.

(2) Get the world of psychotherapy to see that their approach to human suffering is stunted, even sabatoged, by their assumption that intense pain is abnormal and a sign of disease.  They are missing big pieces of the puzzle and perpetuating some forms of suffering in virtue of pathologizing it.  Many aspects of psychotherapy are just extensions of common cognitive fallacies, like the fundamental attribution error.  According to the fundamental attribution error, we tend to attribute our own behavior to circumstances and context while attributing the behavior of others to ingrained, lasting personality characteristics.  We see how circumstances bring out the worst in us but when someone else fails, we neglect their environment and wonder what is wrong with them as a person.  I wanted to prove to the world of psychology that I am not broken!

I was looking for vindication like a prisoner bonding with and adopting the worldview of their captor, but all I really needed was to allow myself to see and believe in my own intrinsic wholeness.  To find what I already had.

Vindication has been forthcoming.  There was the book by Anne Wilson Schaef, Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science, that fell into my lap, so to speak, and opened with a professional apology (see A Long Awaited Apology).  It spoke to my heart so profoundly that it shifted the tectonic plates of my energy body, to put it colorfully, and I have not been the same since.  (There, the passerby finally noticing my mountain.)  My graduate advisor is stirred and impassioned by my dissertation, which provides a huge missing link (the developmental connection between concepts and sensory experience as the etiology of many human emotions).  She believes it will make a major contribution and alter the way cognitive psychotherapy is practiced.  That pleases me, but to be honest, I no longer care about fixing psychology.  (And the mountain disappears.)  That would be pouring new wine into old bottles.

And I no longer care about fixing myself.  I am not broken.  I was never broken.  And waking up is not so hard when it is the only thing you want.  Luminosity is a constant companion.  Why did I ever think I needed to climb a mountain for it?  Or build one?  What a crazy detour from my true self who stood by patiently the whole time, giggling at my mashed potato sculptures.

A scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I am no longer driven by pain.  Not by my pain.  Not by the pain of others, because they are perfectly whole too, and everything they are experiencing is their own beautiful, creative life project designed to lead them back to that realization.  All of my ambition was predicated on the elimination of problems.  Where are there any problems?  I have been walking around in a daze, quite unused to this total, peaceful lack of ambition.

So I am left with a question that encompasses not only my career but my whole identity, my existence as a single mind, my position on a timeline as an isolated entity in three dimensional space:

Now what?

To which I answer… “Yes.”

Let me explain.  We approach so much of life poised to pass judgment on what we see and, if we are displeased, fabricate a solution.  We are hammers, and everything is a nail.  Much ambition is fueled by a burning desire to fix.  We approach each other with the same attitude.  Not only do we evaluate what we see, we assign value labels and make predictions about how others will serve us or injure us in the future.  In other words, we form whole inner worlds just to keep track of whether things are good or bad, whether they will continue to be good or bad, and how we can turn the bad into good and keep the good good.

What effect does this approach have on our well being?  My six year old has misbehaved in school for more than a year.  His teachers complained.  Eventually, it was decided that Erik would receive an evaluation of his behavior every half hour throughout the day, every day.  Every day, he came home with a sheet upon which either a happy face or sad face was circled for each half hour increment.  My son would come home crying, “I got two sad faces today!”  Two out of twenty, but that didn’t matter to him.

He clearly articulated his overwhelming helplessness and frustration about getting all happy faces.  His misbehavior was quite clearly a coping strategy for dealing with massive grief and anger associated with his father leaving the country.  Without any other coping strategy, we were essentially asking him to immerse himself in pain that was too big for him.

With time, his behavior grew much worse.  He was adopting what his teachers referred to as an “antagonizing role.”  He was being “bad” with flare!  I believe he concluded that if he could not win, he would go out with a bang and be the “sad face” boy his teachers painted him to be.

One night, I overheard my son speaking to my mother on the phone.  “Guess what, grandma!” he said.  “Today, I got all happy faces.  You know, I’m turning out to be a good kid after all!”

His words, exceeding his years, revealing his awareness of the framework we had all stuffed him in, broke my heart.  He was playing our game, the game that told him he was fundamentally “a bad kid,” with innocent enthusiasm.  What had I done?

I spoke to his principal and related my impressions.  She agreed that the intervention should stop.

At the same time that the ill effects of the sad face intervention were becoming clear, my approach to my son was dramatically shifting.  I gave up on trying to “cure” him or mould him into the perfect child.  He was, quite often, beyond my coping ability.  Oh the stories I can tell!  Like wrapping my body around him and holding him down for hours until he fell asleep, all the while trying to keep him from scratching and biting me.  With no other options, I would just grip his arms and legs, lie there, and cry quietly while reassuring him that everything would be okay.  No, I gave up.  I did not give up on him.  I gave up on my “interventions.”  I had no other choice but to meet each moment as though it were the only moment in existence.  I began to respond to his behaviors without judgment just as I would open an umbrella in the rain.  Not wondering how long it would rain or what the rain meant for my future.  Just responding.  Just opening the umbrella.  That simple.  Most importantly, I did not judge myself either.  If opening the umbrella meant ignoring him for twenty minutes while listening to music on my headphones and finding calm again, I just did it.  If headphones were impossible, I just did not do it.

Soon, every moment became lighter and lighter, buoyant, radiant.  Every moment has been so infused with joy, there are nights when my son is screaming and throwing things, and I am giggling and glowing while I grab his arm, pick up the toys, and sit him in the corner.  And he sees my glow, and he glows too, and he is changing so profoundly that I want to cry with relief and gratitude to the cosmos.

Mothers, bow in reverence to your “broken” children.  Lovers, bow in reverence to your “broken” partners.  They will teach you everything you need to know about entering the flow of existence and waking up to bliss like you cannot imagine.

And bow in reverence to your “broken” self or your “broken” life.  Open completely, breath it in, and I promise your wholeness will become immediately apparent.

Are you walking around giving happy faces or sad faces to everyone you meet?  How will that change who they are, how they see themselves, and who they become?  Are you assigning a happy face or a sad face to every experience?

Stop the sad face intervention and begin to see wholeness everywhere you look.  At first, accustomed to problem solving, you will not know what to do with yourself.  Respond without judgment and leave the rest to the universe.

You are an active, living element of realization, the realization that this oneness is manifesting from an infinity of perspectives.  No judgment or action is necessary beyond your fluid participation in the movement of this moment.  That is what.