This essay appeared in
Robert Augustus Masters Q&A Part Eight. Integral Naked has an ongoing
question and answer thread with Robert. (Currently he's only taking questions on relationships, as he's started work on a new book on integral relationships; any aspect of relationships is open for discussion there.)
Taking Care of Our OppositionIt
can be quite a test when we are confronted by the darker, more painful
dimensions of those circumstances set in motion through our choices and
actions. In the presence of such unpleasant conditions, we ordinarily
tighten up, shrink, rigidify, withdraw, go numb, or otherwise diminish
ourselves, ricocheting between defensiveness and submission, as though
there’s nothing else we can do.
Just as we tend to inflate
ourselves through association with pleasant circumstances, we also tend
to deflate ourselves through association with nastier circumstances,
assuming the role of victim, through which our capacity for
responsibility is abandoned for the shrinkwrapped righteousness of
self-blaming or other-blaming. Thus do we pollute ourselves with
blame’s developmentally arrested morality and its supporting cast, in
the melodramatics and ethical sewage of which guilt and vengefulness
take turns masquerading as conscience.
Trying to make sure that
we are safe from the unpleasant -- as exemplified by insuring ourselves
to death -- only guarantees our keeping it and its worrisome
ramifications in mind, where it contextually festers and reproduces
with itself until it is literally fleshed-out, translated from the
hotbed of its mental blueprinting into all-too-solid reality.
Awakening
exposes -- once our honeymoon with spirituality is over -- what is not
working in our lives, revealing key changes we need to make or at least
open ourselves to making, but if we persist in obstructing, sabotaging,
or faking such changes, we will very soon be realigned with our snore,
dreaming that we are really living.
The good news is that as
lost as we may be in our dreamland wanderings, oppositional forces
inevitably will get in the face of the part of the dream that assumes
it is us.
Opposition is inevitable and necessary, exposing
flabbiness of spirit and every kind of complacency and mediocrity,
generating situations that invite us, incite and enliven and challenge
us, to Wake up, to hone and ground our alertness, to test and retest
our ability to not be sucked in by our reactivity and mechanicalness.
As
we begin to shed our blinders --or allow an increasing transparency --
and to make the changes that we know we must make, all kinds of
obstacles arise. Doubts may multiply, dread may colonize us, resistance
may flatten or blitz us, family and friends may turn away from us. We
may then understandably want to turn back, to exit the chrysalis in
reverse, to numb and dumb ourselves down. Thus do the old ways pull at
us. Familiarity is so seductive.
If we don’t deal well with our
difficulties, we may take up residence in disembodied rationality or
metaphysical escapism, finding therein a consoling numbness. Or, more
commonly, we may settle into a denser state of being, not leveling out
until we have found a degree of opposition -- or contractive force --
that we can generally make good use of, rather than merely tolerate.
We
don’t get to move on until we are truly ready to do so, and that
decisive shift arises not just from our mind and feeling self, but from
our core of being, including within itself -- and this cannot be
overemphasized -- the essential energies of whatever in us opposes it.
Before
we can embody a deeper life, we must be able, more often than not, to
remain grounded -- that is, centered not by egoity, but by Being -- not
only in the presence of discomfort, unpleasantness, and opposition, but
also in the presence of our reactivity and aversion to such challenges.
This involves a skillful befriending and acceptance of insecurity,
providing sufficient safety to let go of playing it so safe.
Being
nonreactive requires the readily-activated ability and willingness to
see and feel whatever opposes us as more than just something
oppositional. This means ceasing to submit to -- or feed with attention
-- our violent intentions and thoughts regarding our opposition.
Our
work is to take care of our opposition. This asks that we stretch and
expand and open, permitting ourselves vulnerability, a vulnerability
that is a source of strength, especially the kind of strength that is
utterly unthreatened by dependency.
Opposition is neither to be
ignored nor bewailed. The point is to sensitize ourselves to our
adversaries, without shrinking or thinking ourselves into their
operational strata, so that we are neither stuck in recoil nor bound up
in submission. Our work is to enter into empathy -- however indirect
its expression might be, or might have to be -- with them, without
necessarily locking horns and minds with them, until we can genuinely
wish them well. Loving -- not necessarily liking, but loving -- our
apparent enemies is a kind of radical sanity, for in loving them, we
are not only ceasing to demonize them, but are also aligning ourselves
with their healing. And their healing is none other than our healing.
So,
yes, open to loving your enemies, but don’t grovel or grow spineless in
such love. Instead, stand tall in it, like great oaks asway in the push
and slap of a violent storm, and stand soft as well, like grasses
bending and bowing in the same stormwinds, losing none of their dignity
in their prayer. Stand not like those who act as if they deserve the
whip or insult, but like those who are alerted and further awakened --
and are thus healthily appreciative of -- the whip or insult, for only
in so doing will you genuinely be able to love your enemies.
Our
need is to know our opposition -- both inner and outer -- intimately,
so that we might know ourselves. To stand in the midst of malignant
contractedness or gross misunderstanding without abandoning or
betraying ourselves is an art to be practiced with great patience and
care. This goes far beyond facile notions of forgiveness, and far
beyond merely trying to persuade ourselves that we are indeed
transforming the negativity in our lives, for not only are softness,
pliability, and receptivity essential, but also forcefulness, thrust,
and bedrock-firm stands.
Having access to such qualities or
responses is not so much a methodology as an ever-fresh art, through
which we can touch the all without losing touch with the particular,
finding a deepening intimacy with both favorable and unfavorable
conditions, doing so not to reach What-Really-Matters, but rather to
express and live It.
In taking care of our opposition, we take care of ourselves.
I am seeking meaningful work.
bio: http://aqalicious.gaia.com/
I spend most of my "forum time" these days on The Integral Pod: http://pods.gaia.com/ii/
"You've never seen everything." - Bruce Cockburn