As my marriage failed, I turned to porn's perverse edge. I found a website called Ghettogaggers.  On it, white supremacists treat Black women like subhuman orifices. In one snippet, a man poured a woman's own vomit down her throat.

Some of these had sequels, meaning the women returned for more.

Hey u. I know you expected to wake up and c my beautiful though grimy morning sunshine face. I hope this letter will suffice.

I'm gone. I guess u noticed, but I wanted u 2 know y. See baby, I'm in love. I know, who would have thunk that a kid-of-a-bitch like me could fall, but I did. I really wish it could have been with u, baby. I really do. Cuz I dig you a lot and everything, but I'm about more than just making love. Cuz when there's no love, baby, you can't make nothing good.

I almost wish I were there to share your morning with u, to taste your awakening mouth, the stuff from your sleepy eyes. Nobody tastes as good as u do 1st thing in the am.

This love thing really throws you for a curve, man. I mean, my new baby is sexier than sex itself, but the body is nothing like yours. I never thought I would be able 2 leave that body of yours, but there u r and here I am, with only a few regrets and some scars to remember u.

I would feel worse about leaving u if u didn't have that body of yours, baby. But I know u won't be alone for long, so I don't feel 2 bad. In fact, I feel alright. My momma always told me 2 share. I'm sharing u with the world again. I'm sure it missed u like I'm going 2, 1 of these days.

You know, I trip on how happy we could have been. I really did dig u baby, do dig u, but it's tough 2 chain a soul like mine. Not that I'm so special or anything, but sometimes my ego starts ghetto blastin' so loud that I think it would be foolish to waste all this badness on 1 cat, 'specially one like U (don't take that the wrong way though, okay?)

So I guess that's all she wrote for us, huh? I'm sorry if we didn't have the same ending in mind, but the story still goes on, u know? I mean, there'll be different bodies, there are always different bodies, but it's all the same story. I guess that's y u have to make

moves, shake it up a little, u know?

Even though this letter is getting long and my hand is getting tired, I don't feel like I've said what I wanted 2 say. But I guess I don't have to explain myself 2 u. U know me better than I know myself.

Maybe that's why I'm leaving, huh?

Keep smiling,

Niia

It's funny how we take steps

Away from the ones we love, nudging them quietly toward our periphery.

We use time and space to create distance, unbridgeable gaps

As if to say "See? You don't know me so well

After all."

Yet we sadden when no one understands, we feel alone

Which is what we thought we wanted-

Enough space to swing our arms

And not hit anyone.

We give and love, briefly,

Long enough to notice this lover is not worthy of such giving and loving.

We use words and their absence to create distance, taking untraceable steps

Farther and farther away.

Still, we miss hands to hold, knowing glances

And a protective, possessive arm around us.

We have shaken it free and now dance

Without a partner or an audience 

to compromise us.

So the question arises:

What to do with all this space?

It could seat several comfortably,

Leave room for entertaining guests, hell,

We could fit a king in a bed this size.

But there is no king, no guests, no several sitting,

Talking amongst themselves. Nobody

But us, making hollow-heeled echoes in our empty space

That bother no one

But us.

She sure flirts with him too,

Touches his shoulder and laughs uproariously

Just as you spot them together outside.

And sure, you find her long, blond hairs

All over his sweater, jacket, and backpack,

Which you stand holding while he runs back inside

To say goodbye.

Unsure, you hang up the phone

When you hear her background banter,

A tinkling chandelier

Moved by a brusquely closed door.

When he has to borrow money

Because he bought her lunch.

When he already has plans for Saturday

Night.

So you figure if you give him your body

This Friday when he has no plans,

Maybe he’ll let you read his poems,

Pick your little brother up from little league,

Already know what pizza toppings you want.

So why the surprise on Monday

when he lends her his car?

Sometimes everything inside sighs, whisper-like.

Sometimes something makes you feel complete.

And you don't need laughter or holding

hands. You have all you need,

sometimes, somewhere inside.

It's in your reflection as you clean the windows,

languid springtime sun flitting filtered through.

The image becomes clearer as you scratch the surface.

The world and, superimposed over it, the faintest you.

Sometimes, in distilled light, if you look close enough

and your skin has chocolate reds in it,

you can see rainbows in the pores of your cheek,

hiding under delicate eaves of eyelashes.

And even though the rainbows can be explained away

by photons and light refraction,

it doesn't make them any less special.

It's the way you feel walking in sunshine.

Not sweltering summer sun that makes you sweat sexy,

for those walks- on the beach or, if you're lucky, on hot city pavement

are meant for the eyes of others, all the men

who have nothing to do and no choice but to adore you.

You are directing your own pornography, softly hiding it

in the loping hips and the swishing thighs.

"Girls! Girls! Girls!" the men sigh,

leaning against the nearest object at the height of their swoon.

If you're unlucky and your skin is chocolate red,

sometimes they lean on a jealous girl.

Her eyes follow you too, spewing venom on your well-turned heels.

But you just keep walking through her hateful puddles,

stopping traffic and, at times, business as usual.

"Girls! Girls! Girls!" you say in your shimmying ass.

No, the walks that are for you are in spring,

where you embody the feminine.

You make the wind gasp, bend the trees.

And when you sit, all the leaves want to cast patterns on your face.

Sometimes, if you sit in the grass or a snazzy outdoor café,

you eat and drink your fill, making poetry with your spoon.

When you finish, satiated, the floral print of your dress

tightens just slightly at your waist. You do not cover it

with your white cloth napkin. You are not ashamed.

You simply sit straighter and stroke the fabric with a clandestine hand.

You are beautiful as Buddha;

you are an icon cast in the most wildly unrealistic browns and reds.

And sometimes you are completely at peace.

These times are not few and far between

if you take time to know

that you are the most perfect imperfection.

But if you are ignorant, you will pass each day in cowardice,

waiting for happiness to approach. You will be a scarecrow

(instead of being beautiful and lucky), hung in a field

in the middle of nowhere, watching the world unfold

around you like unstarched sheets.

And you will stay there, hanged and crucified,

ignorant and full of nothing important,

scaring things away for the rest of your life.

You mustn't miss the springtime sweetie, nor let it miss you.

You are much too delicious for that.

Beginner’s mind refers to the practice of having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. The complete involvement of the senses, heightened focus, excitement, revelation, attention and care are all part of what is considered beginner’s mind. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Buddhist monk and influential teacher of Zen Buddhism in America Shunryu Suzuki advises us never to know what we are doing. This isn’t meant in an “ignorance is bliss” way, but rather in a way where you give your full attention to something, drinking in the nuances experienced by each of the senses in the present moment. Suzuki explains, “Suppose you recite the Prajna Paramita Sutra only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it” (1-2). The original attitude would be an awareness not only of the words, but of one’s self in relationship to the words—the feel of the words tangling or slipping from the tongue, the meaning of the words as taken at first glance rather than after deep interpretation and reflection, an awareness of the sound and timbre of one’s own voice alight, of a dry or scratchy throat, the size of the font, the glare or warm-casted shadow from the light in the room. After that first recitation, some of these elements would be lost or changed, one’s focus shifted to new things that the new level of familiarity enables.

Beginner's mind is able to recapture the mind-blowing nature of a first trip to the circus for a child (or the strip club for an adult)—with its colored lights and awesome sights, frights, heights and delights. It is able to bring back the firstness and newness of experience, even if you yourself are the clown (or the stripper). I ask you, reader, can you remember the first time you did something? Rode a bike? Went on an airplane? Finger-painted? You had no idea what you were doing, but you were intently focused on figuring it out. Your senses were picking up on everything around you—the wind against your face as you pedaled faster, all the buttons to push in the armrest of your window seat, the gooey swirls and streaks following your fingers’ every move. You were at once in the present moment.

In his essay entitled “Beginner’s Mind,” Darren Henson describes beginner’s mind as “developing a sense of awe, a feeling of excitement and wonder when approaching or re-approaching a subject of investigation… You can learn something new even if it is a subject you have already explored…. If you keep looking you’re bound to see something new, this in itself can be very exciting, wonderful, and awesome” (Iron Palm). Buddhist Abbess Zenkei Blanche Hartman says that “It is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgements [sic] and prejudices. Beginner's mind is just present to explore and observe and see ‘things as-it-is’” (Chapel Hill Zen Center). Gloria Karpinski calls beginner’s mind “The teachable mind, empty of opinions and sureties and therefore empty of limitations” (91). Karpinski's notion of a teachable mind is an important one. A teachable mind does not know the thing it is being taught and it is willing to learn it. It is what in Buddhism is sometimes called “don’t know mind.” This mind is open to any possibility because it does not know what to expect and, as such, has few or no expectations. Most of us want to have teachable minds. We want to continue to learn, continue to be taught, surprised, and awed by life and the world around us. We want to discover new things about ourselves, about our friends, family, and lovers, about our work and our passions, so we can add depth and richness of understanding to our lives. In the fast-paced whirlwind of contemporary American culture where people prefer sound-bites to meaningful conversation, it is valuable for us to learn to stop. Look. Listen.

Children, naturally, are full of beginner’s mind. They walk around, excited and curious, exploring their surroundings with their eyes, hands, tongues, endeavoring to experience everything around them. Spending time with children is said to give adults a “second childhood” because they are able to experience things from the child’s perspective. They are able to laugh at bubbles or smell and taste a blade of grass as if for the first time. This is because they are cultivating beginner’s mind simply by witnessing a child brimming with it. Abbess Hartman confirms this idea, saying that to practice beginner’s mind is to engage a childlike (though not childish) attitude toward the world around us. “I think of beginner's mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. ‘I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?’ Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgement [sic], just asking ‘what is it?’” (Chapel Hill Zen Center).

Hartman gives an example that shows clearly what she means:

Earlier this week I was having lunch with Indigo, our small child at City Center. He saw an object on the table and got very interested in it. He picked it up and started fooling with it: looking at it, putting it in his mouth, and banging on the table with it—just engaging with it without any previous idea of what it was. For Indigo, it was just an interesting thing, and it was a delight to him to see what he could do with this thing. You and I would see it and say, "It's a spoon. It sits there and you use it for soup." It doesn't have all the possibilities that he finds in it (Chapel Hill Zen Center).

Hartman concludes that “When he spoke of ‘beginner's mind,’ I think Suzuki Roshi[1] was pointing to that kind of mind that's not already made up. The mind that's just investigating, open to whatever occurs, curious. Seeking, but not with expectation or grasping. Just being there and observing and seeing what occurs. Being ready for whatever experience arises in this moment” (Chapel Hill Zen Center). This type of open mind bespeaks an engagement with the present moment, rather than the neurotic past or the wistful future. The objective of beginner's mind is to draw oneself back into the present moment.

Krishnamurti describes awareness, which is seen by him and by Stephen Levine as synonymous to beginner’s mind:

Being aware does not mean learning and accumulating lessons from life; on the contrary, to be aware is to be without the scars of accumulated experience. After all, when the mind merely gathers experience according to its own wishes, it remains very shallow, superficial. A mind which is deeply observant does not get caught up in self-centered activities, and the mind is not observant if there is any action of condemnation or comparison. Comparison and condemnation do not bring understanding, rather they block understanding. To be aware is to observe—just to observe—without any self-identifying process. Such a mind is free of that hard core which is formed by self-centered activities. (125)

Suzuki’s reasoning for the importance of beginner’s mind is that “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few” (1). By having a beginner’s mind, one does not close off possibilities, nor judge one choice better than others, because one is aware that one does not know what on earth is going on. Or if one does, it is with the awareness that it is simply a shot in the dark, trial and error. Beginner’s mind helps create a space in which to experience, to be, promising that life is not a nihilistic existence without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. The experience itself is the value.

This runs counter to our drive—perhaps instinctual, perhaps culturally learned—to know-it-all. Abbess Hartman explains that even children start to want to be know-it-alls. She writes, “Children begin to lose that innocent quality after a while, and soon they want to be ‘the one who knows’” (Chapel Hill Zen Center). She feels this drive is understandable, but very limiting. Part of the problem with being “one who knows” that Hartman conveys is that it leads to expectations and potentially to suffering.

We all want to be the one who knows. But if we decide we "know" something, we are not open to other possibilities anymore. And that's a shame. We lose something very vital in our life when it's more important to us to be "one who knows" than it is to be awake to what's happening. We get disappointed because we expect one thing, and it doesn't happen quite like that. Or we think something ought to be like this, and it turns out different. Instead of saying, "Oh, isn't that interesting," we say, "Yuck, not what I thought it would be." Pity. The very nature of beginner's mind is not knowing in a certain way, not being an expert… As an expert, you've already got it figured out, so you don't need to pay attention to what's happening. Pity (Chapel Hill Zen Center).

Mindfulness & Meditation

Beginner’s mind is engendered through the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is described by Vietnamese Zen luminary Thich Nhat Hanh as knowing “how to observe and recognize the presence of every feeling and thought which arises in you” (37). This is done by bringing all of one’s attention to the present moment, observing without judgment what one is doing, feeling, and thinking. It is through being uniquely in the present moment that one can ascertain beginner’s mind, for one can grasp that this moment is truly unlike any other. Mindfulness, Hanh reveals, confirming Levine and Krishnamurti, “is the life of awareness: the presence of mindfulness means the presence of life, and therefore mindfulness is also the fruit. Mindfulness frees us of forgetfulness and dispersion and makes it possible to live fully each minute of life. Mindfulness enables us to live” (15).

Mindfulness can be practiced while walking or doing simple repetitive tasks. Walking meditation helps to break down habitual automatic mental categories, "thus regaining the primary nature of perceptions and events, focusing attention on the process while disregarding its purpose or final outcome." Similarly, performing a simple task such as washing the dishes can become an exercise in mindfulness. Hanh describes this process in The Miracle of Mindfulness. He writes,

While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions… If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not… alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash our dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking our cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life (5).

Mindfulness can be also cultivated through training in the practice of meditation. One can see mindfulness as a kind of meditation, or as “meditation off the mat,” bringing to everyday life and the outside world the attention and care that one brings into meditation itself. Meditation is a discipline of consciousness, beyond the conditioned, "thinking" mind. It is recognized as a component of almost all religions, and has been practiced for over 5,000 years, but it is also practiced outside religious traditions. Thomas Merton described it thus:

To meditate is to exercise the mind in serious reflection. This is the broadest possible sense of the word ‘meditation.’ The term in this sense is not confined to religious reflections, but it implies serious mental activity and a certain absorption or concentration which does not permit our faculties to wander off at random or to remain slack and undirected. From the start it must be made clear, however, that reflection here does not refer to a purely intellectual activity, and still less does it refer to mere reasoning. Reflection involves not only the mind but also the heart, and indeed our whole being (43).

Merton saw the intentions of the meditator as quite lofty. He writes:

In study we can be content with an idea or a concept that is true. We can be content to know about truth. Meditation is for those who are not satisfied with a merely objective and conceptual knowledge about life, about God—about ultimate realities. They want to enter into an intimate contact with truth itself, with God. They want to experience the deepest realities of life by living them. Meditation is a means to that end (43-44).

Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual and/or psychophysical practices and emphasize different goals – from achievement of a higher state of consciousness to greater focus, creativity or self-awareness, or simply a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind (Wikipedia). Meditation has been defined as: "self regulation of attention, in the service of self-inquiry, in the here and now" (Wikipedia). Different techniques of meditation vary in their focus. In most forms of meditation, the meditator sits comfortably and silently, centering attention by focusing awareness on an object or process (usually the breath, but also a sound: a mantra, koan or riddle, a visualization, or an exercise). The meditator is usually encouraged to maintain an open focus. In their work "Meditation: Concepts, Effects and Uses in Therapy,” Alberto Perez-De-Albeniz and Jeremy Holmes describe this focus:

The meditator, with a 'no effort' attitude, is asked to remain in the here and now. Using the focus as an 'anchor'... brings the subject constantly back to the present, avoiding cognitive analysis or fantasy regarding the contents of awareness, and increasing tolerance and relaxation of secondary thought processes (Attracted Actions).

There are other ways to meditate as well. Concentration meditation is another form of meditation that is frequently used in varied religions and spiritual practices. Forms of meditation that use visualization, such as Chinese Qi Gong, concentrate on flows of energy (Qi) in the body. Other meditative traditions, such as yoga or tantra, are common to several religions, but can also occur outside of religious milieus (Wikipedia).

Zazen and Non-Duality

The practice of meditation aids in the development of beginner’s mind and the quality of mindfulness. Meditation can take place sitting, lying down, or walking. In Japanese Zen Buddhism, seated meditation is called zazen. The aim of zazen is just sitting. That is its sole goal. If you sit, you have done it. Suzuki says, “These forms are not the means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind. There is no need to obtain some special state of mind” (25).

The traditional posture of zazen is seated in lotus position, with folded legs and an erect but settled spine, but one may modify this position with a meditation bench or even sitting upright in a chair. Sitting in the full lotus position is done for a good reason, however. Suzuki explains:

When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh, and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they have become one. The position expresses the oneness of duality: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one; if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent (25).

This idea of “the oneness of duality” is an important one, as it serves as a beginning to probing our linguistic and cultural dependence on binary or dichotomous thinking and understanding them for what they are—usually false and often destructive. Through zazen we begin to hold the contradiction of something being both two and one by embodying the contradiction, or “being a crossroads,” as Gloria Anzaldúa phrased it in Borderlands/La Frontera. This embodiment and experience of the oneness of duality makes it true. Others can disagree, but the experience of it makes it necessarily true for us. In zazen, it is the experience of non-duality that is embodied in the posture. One need not be able to get into lotus position to enjoy zazen, however. There are several other postures that can be effectively used.

Suzuki advises us of more details of the zazen posture:

The most important thing in taking the zazen posture is to keep your spine straight. Your ears and your shoulders should be on one line. Relax your shoulders, and push up towards the ceiling with the back of your head. And you should pull your chin in. When your chin is tilted up, you have no strength in your posture; you are probably dreaming. Also to gain strength in your posture, press your diaphragm down toward your hara, or lower abdomen. This will help you maintain your physical and mental balance. When you try to keep this posture, at first you may find some difficulty breathing naturally, but when you get accustomed to it you will be able to breathe naturally and deeply…. You should not be tilted sideways, backwards, or forwards. You should be sitting straight up as if you were supporting the sky with your head (26).

Again there is a deeper meaning to this practice:

This is not just form or breathing. It expresses the key point of Buddhism. It is a perfect expression of your Buddha nature. If you want true understanding of Buddhism, you should practice this way. These forms are not a means of obtaining the right state of mind. To take the posture itself is the purpose of our practice. When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind, so there is no need to try to attain some special state (26, my emphasis).

Suzuki’s words echo J. Krishanamurti’s contention that “Freedom is in the beginning, it is not something to be gained at the end.” Although one often thinks of enlightenment as the goal of meditation, Suzuki reminds us that the real goal of meditation is to be without a goal. The true objective of meditation is to sit in a certain way for a certain amount of time on a regular basis, giving the practice as much of our full attention as we can. He reminds us that we do not need to know Zen in depth, in fact we cannot if we want to cultivate beginner’s mind.

The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen. Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very careful about this point (22).

Breathing takes on a more meaningful role during meditation, though the process of inhaling and exhaling does not really change. The breath becomes a conscious connection with and an understanding of the ways and workings of the universe. Without the breath, we cannot be. Our bodies would cease to function without breath. And yet the breath is a function largely independent of our will. We do not consciously regulate it. It simply, elegantly, is. We know that we are poised on the brink of a momentous possibility, but that is no better than this very moment.

The embodiment of this experience renders the practitioner not just an observer or a thinker but a participant in and an example of the beliefs. On breathing, Suzuki writes:

When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all (29).

Breathing too is a tool for fostering understanding and embodying the idea of non-duality. Suzuki explains this connection:

Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. “You” means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and “I” means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors. This kind of understanding is necessary. This should not even be called understanding; it is actually the true experience of life through Zen practice (29).

When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything. Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent (31).

In Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh explains one pragmatic reason why the practice of conscious breathing is important.

While we practice conscious breathing, our thinking will slow down, and we can give ourselves a real rest. Most of the time, we think too much, and mindful breathing helps us to be calm, relaxed, and peaceful. It helps us stop thinking so much and stop being possessed by sorrows of the past and worries about the future. It enables us to be in touch with life, which is wonderful in the present moment (11).

What conscious breathing does (on one level) is train the mind. The mind is like a playful puppy that we must train through repetitive instruction of “not that, this” so that he can happily coexist with us. Left to its own devices, our minds, like a playful innocuous puppy, can destroy our happiness and peace, leaving mental piles of dog shit and shredded shoes of emotion. In training our mind through conscious breathing, we are better able to examine its contents.

Like training a puppy to go potty outside, meditation is intensive training in bringing our minds, whenever possible, gently back to the present moment. We are most often thinking about something in the past or future, very seldom focusing our attention and energy on what is actually going on right now. If we are arguing with our partner in this moment, also present are the unresolved issues of yesterday and worries about the future. Sometimes we are looking to the past for meaning, hoping our understanding in the present will help in the future. Other times we are looking at the present through the lens of the past, leaving little hope and limited options for the future. We are very rarely cognizant of what is actually going on in the present moment, of what actually is. Hanh promises that "If we keep breathing in and out this way for a few minutes, we become quite refreshed. We recover ourselves and we can encounter the beautiful things around us in the present moment. The past is gone; the future is not yet here. If we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life" (12).

Unwittingly, we have already begun a practice of embodying non-duality and non-attachment simply by sitting. To take the posture itself is the purpose of the practice. Even the crossing of the legs in the lotus position, we have seen, is construed as embodying non-duality. These concepts will be invaluable for us on our path, whether our goal is a spiritual one or simply a wish for better health and more fulfillment. Whether this awareness occurs while sitting, doing yoga, or walking, alone or in a group setting, the ultimate purpose of meditation is bringing its practitioner to the awareness of now. There is only one now, only one present moment, lived and experienced in myriad, perhaps infinite, ways throughout the universe.

The Mental Workings of Meditation

The first thing you might notice in meditation is that—like a rocket—your mind takes off in about a thousand different directions, each taking you further and further away from the present moment. It seems almost impossible to quiet the incessant chatter in your head. Although Suzuki tells us “If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come, and let them go” (32), it’s a heck of a lot more difficult than one might imagine. His counsel is based on his assertion that concentrating on something is not true Zen. “The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.” (33). His reasoning is also practical. “When you try to stop your thinking, it means you are bothered by it. Do not be bothered by anything” (34).

In Zen Training, by Katsuki Sekida, he equates the meditating mind to boiling water:

When you sit down to practice you will almost certainly find that your mind is in a condition like boiling water: restless impulses push up inside you, and wandering thoughts jostle at the door of consciousness, trying to effect an entrance on the stage of the mind (66).

In A Gradual Awakening, meditation teacher Stephen Levine describes the restless internal dialogue by describing its preoccupations:

The internal dialogue is always commenting and judging and planning. It contains a lot of thoughts of self, a lot of self-consciousness. It blocks the light of our natural wisdom; it limits our seeing who we are; it makes a lot of noise and attracts our attention to a fraction of the reality in which we exist (2).

One might say that the thoughts of the “self” obscure the light of the Self. The noise of internal dialogue brings our attention to the different activities of the conditioned mind, or the mind attached to its beliefs about what is and what should be. This mind is unable to pull itself out of its attachments and suffers because of it.

Krishnamurti similarly describes the restless mind in meditation.

So our problem is that our thoughts wander all over the place, and naturally we want to bring about order. But how is order to be brought about? Now, to understand a fast revolving machine, you must slow it down, must you not? If you want to understand a dynamo, it must be slowed down and studied, but if you stop it, it is a dead thing, and a dead thing can never be understood. Only a living thing can be understood. So a mind that has killed thoughts by exclusion, by isolation, can have no understanding, but the mind can understand thought if the thought process is slowed down (4).

This slowing down that Krishnamurti describes affords us a moment in which to engage with our thoughts. We do not have to have nor examine our thoughts in “real time.” Instead, we can examine our thoughts, turn them over, trace their history, and ponder their future. We can create a space between stimulus and action in which we are not as deeply indentified with our thoughts.

Levine explains the basic concept at the root of all thoughts of this conditioned mind:

At the base of the conditioned mind is a wanting. This wanting takes many forms. It wants to be secure. It wants to be happy. It wants to survive. It wants to be loved. It also has specific wants: objects of desire, friendships, food, this color or that color, this kind of surrounding or some other kind. There’s wanting not to have pain. There’s wanting to be enlightened. There’s wanting things to be as we wish they were… Therefore, much thought has at its root dissatisfaction with what is (13).

This dissatisfaction renders the present moment imperfect, filled with lack and dissatisfaction. At the root of this satisfaction is desire for things outside of the present moment, and often outside the self. Levine explains:

We discover there are many ways that desire causes this dissatisfaction. There are, for instance, things we want that may never come our way, or things we only get once in a while, or which don’t stay for long. There are also things we get, and, after we get them, we don’t want—which is really disconcerting. Sometimes I see this with my children. They will want something so badly that we’ll go from store to store until we find it. Then, we get it and an hour later they’re saying, “I wish I hadn’t gotten this… I wanted the blue one.” That’s really a heartbreaker. And, that’s in all of us. We want and we want… and nothing can permanently satisfy us because not only does the thing we want change, but our wants change too. Everything is changing all the time (15).

Equally disappointing is the realization that because everything is changing, there is no such thing as lasting satisfaction stemming from things outside of us. Levine remarks on this as well, noting:

The next thing we discover is that nothing we want can give us lasting satisfaction because everything is in flux and nothing stays forever. Whatever it may be—the finest food, the most gratifying sex, the greatest sense pleasure—nothing in the universe can give us lasting satisfaction, it will all come and go. It is this condition which gives us that subtle, queasy dissatisfaction we carry about with us most of the time, even when we get what we want, because deep down we know eventually it will change…. We don’t see reality. We see only the shadows that it casts and those shadows are our concepts, our definitions, our ideas of the world (10).

He offers a filmic panorama of our internal landscape.

If we watch the mind as though it were a film projected on a screen, as concentration deepens, it may go into a kind of slow motion and allow us to see more of what is happening. This then deepens our awareness and further allows us to observe the film almost frame by frame, to discover how one thought leads imperceptively to the next. We see how thoughts we took to be “me” or “mine” are just an ongoing process. This perspective helps break our deep identification with the seeming solid reality of the movie of the mind. As we become less engrossed in the melodrama, we see it’s just flow, and can watch it all as it passes. We are not even drawn into the action by the passing of a judgmental comment or an agitated moment of impatience” (2).

The purpose of meditation is to change and monitor this relationship between ourselves and our desires and wantings.

When the wanting becomes the object of observation, we watch with a clear attention that isn’t colored by judgment or choice; it is simply bare attention with nothing added: an openness to receive things as they are. We see that wanting is an automatic, conditioned urge in the mind. And we watch without judging ourselves for wanting. We don’t impatiently want to be rid of wanting. We simply observe it (15).

Levine’s proposed strategy—to become an observer of the wanting rather than the wanter—divorces the person from their identification with the wanting (as the “wanter”) and places them in the more powerful position of “observer” of an emotion called “wanting.” As “wanter” they can choose only “wanting,” but as “observer” they might choose to observe something else, such as “satisfaction” or “happiness.” By not associating with the identity of “wanter,” the person is able to see beyond the wanting.

Krishnamurti, as I mentioned, also asserts that the process of slowing down one’s thoughts brings order to one’s mind. It enables the mind to be something called “understood,” which I think is perhaps closer to “perceived” and “observed without judgment” than to the intellectual exercise we currently associate with “understanding.” Krishnamurti offers an analogy that is similar to Levine’s to explain what he means by “understanding:”

If you have seen a slow motion picture, you will understand the marvelous movement of a horse’s muscles as it jumps. There is beauty in that slow movement of the muscles, but as the horse jumps hurriedly, as the movement is quickly over, that beauty is lost. Similarly, when the mind moves slowly because it wants to understand each thought as it arises, then there is freedom from thinking, freedom from controlled, disciplined thought (4-5).

Zen teacher and author Katsuki Sekida also notes the importance of deepening our awareness of our inner landscape. In Zen Training, he explains the relationship between meditation’s slowing of the mind and self-knowledge. He writes:

Man thinks unconsciously. Man thinks and acts without noticing. When he thinks, “It is fine today,” he is aware of the weather but not of his own thought. It is the reflecting action of consciousness that comes immediately after the thought that makes him aware of his own thinking. The act of thinking of the weather is an outward-looking one and is absorbed in the object of its thought. On the other hand, the reflecting action of consciousness looks inward and notes the preceding action that has just gone by, wrapped up in thinking of the weather—still leaving its trace behind as the direct past. By this reflecting action of consciousness, man comes to know what is going on in his mind, and that he has a mind; and he recognizes his own being (108).

This “watching of mind” divorces us from our usual attachment to thoughts and emotions in the present moment. We are able to practice non-attachment as we realize that what we are seeing is not really “self” at all, but rather our subscription and adherence to the melodramas of life. The objective of this watching is simply to see what is, rather than participate in the drama. Levine explains:

When we simply see—moment to moment—what’s occurring, observing without judgment or preference, we don’t get lost thinking, “I prefer this moment to that moment, I prefer this pleasant thought to that pain in my knee.” As we begin developing this choiceless awareness, what starts coming within the field of awareness is quite remarkable: we start seeing the root from which thought arises. We see intention, out of which action comes. We observe the natural process of mind and discover how much of what we so treasured to be ourselves is essentially impersonal phenomena passing by (3).

The non-action of seeing and watching gives us access to the roots and complex processes that underlie our beliefs and actions. We are able to simply regard what is, without an attachment to a certain way of thinking or doing. We can watch the internal dialogue rather than participating in it.

Levine stresses the importance of observing without judgment, or practicing acceptance:

The more we accept of ourselves, the more fully we experience the world. The more we accept our anger, our loneliness, our desire systems, the more we can hear others and the more we can hear ourselves (53).

He explains the deeper significance of this acceptance.

When we can surrender into the moment without any attachment anywhere, so that anything that arises is seen as a soft, non-judging mind, we experience completeness. We can be with our loneliness, or our fear, or even our self-consciousness in a very complete way. We see that those are just passing states of mind, and, though they may be painful to acknowledge, the recognition of their presence is the truth and the truth is beautiful. It means really accepting all of what we are (53).

As Levine explains, removing judgment ultimately enables the emotion to move out of the shadow of our self and be observed and understood for what it is: simply, what is. The objective is not to create more pleasing sensations and moments, but to realize the impermanence inherent in both the pleasing and the displeasing moments, and ultimately accepting them both gratefully and gracefully.

Beginner’s Mind: How do you get it?

At this point, perhaps beginner’s mind sounds pretty good, a possible solution to some of the ills of the world. You are ready to sign up, whip out your credit card, call now, or whatever it takes to “get” this thing called beginner’s mind. After so many infomercials, so many advertisements promising you that to be what you wish you need only to buy their product, you are used to being able to purchase pills, books, DVDs, or what have you. You are not used to being asked to do something. “There is no time to do something!” you exclaim, pointing at the unopened workout DVD, the unread “must read” book, the untested recipes in the healthy living cookbook.

Yet I argue that there is time to do something. Let’s create more meaningful practices in our lives! At first glance, our lives may feel too chaotic and too busy to add anything else to them. We so often forget that we do the things we do because we choose to do them. Deepak Chopra writes that “You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices. Some of these choices are made consciously, while others are made unconsciously. But the best way to understand and maximize the use of karmic law is to become consciously aware of the choices we make in every moment” (40). Each item on our “to do” list is chosen by us, even though it seems at times like we have no choice. But it is easier to think that we have no choice than to see ourselves as powerfully controlling our lives. From household chores to social engagements to work or family obligations, we don’t have to do anything! We can be confronted with the same circumstances and make very different choices.

It is in the choices we engender that transformation occurs, and it is in understanding that we are always free to choose differently that we find power. Chopra asserts that our present day situation is the result of our past choices, and that our future will be the result of today’s choices. This is easy to see when talking about something like race or politics, but harder to acknowledge on an individual level. He writes, “Whether you like it or not, everything that is happening at this moment is a result of the choices you’ve made in the past. Unfortunately, a lot of us make choices unconsciously, and therefore we don’t think they are choices—and yet, they are” (40).

He offers some examples and explanation to illustrate:

If I were to insult you, you would most likely make the choice of being offended. If I were to pay you a compliment, you would most likely make the choice of being pleased or flattered. But think about it: it’s still a choice. I could offend you and I could insult you, and you could make the choice of not being offended. I could pay you a compliment and you could make the choice of not letting that flatter you either.

In other words, most of us—even though we are infinite choice-makes—have become bundles of conditioned reflexes that are constantly being triggered by people and circumstances into predictable outcomes of behavior. These conditioned reflexes are like Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlov is famous for demonstrating that if you give a dog something to eat every time you ring a bell, soon the dog starts to salivate when you just ring the bell, because it has associated one stimulus with the other.

Most of us, as a result of conditioning, have repetitious and predictable responses to the stimuli in our environment. Our reactions seem to be automatically triggered by people and circumstances, and we forget that these are still choices that we are making in every moment of our existence. We are simply making these choices unconsciously (40-1).

Similar to Hanh, Levine, and Krishnamurti, the course of action that Deepak prescribes is simply to step back. “If you step back for a moment and witness the choices you are making as you make those choices, then in just this act of witnessing, you take the whole process from the unconscious realm into the conscious realm. This procedure of conscious choice making and witnessing is very empowering” (41-2). This witnessing is something we can bring with us into our everyday interactions by cultivating it in meditation. It helps create and maintain a space between our thoughts and feelings and how we choose to respond to them, between the stimulus and the action. This mental space gives us more of a chance to intentionally choose our reactions. When we are able to divest our thoughts of their immediacy, we are able to exercise greater choice in how we will respond.

[1] Roshi is a word meaning “teacher” in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. She is referring to Shunryu Suzuki

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We have left the land and embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us- indeed we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity... Oh, the poor bird that felt free now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom- and there is no longer any “land.” - Nietzsche

Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that- one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth- the slime and eggshells of his primeval past-… to the end of his days... Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us- experiments of the depths- strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each is able to interpret himself alone. – Herman Hesse

I am proposing a different way of reading, a different method of what to do with the information that our eyes scan and our minds perceive when we read. This method is interested in the reader, and hopes to articulate a way of reading that might lead the reader on a new journey of self-exploration. The objective is to use the practice of reading as a mirror in which our Self might examine our “self.” This is the philosophical Self—the Agent, the Knower, the Ultimate Locus of personal identity, God—examining the shabby patchwork of beliefs and understandings we have crafted from scraps of culture and experience that we identify as “self.”

We don’t often think of reading as something that has different ways of doing. At first glance, it’s just words on a printed page that we scan from left to right. Not much to it. And yet, if we think about it, we know that there are different ways of reading. What a 5 year old does with his mind while he reads is very different from what a 16 year old does, which is very different from what a 45 year old does. Reading a steamy novel while on vacation at the beach is different from reading the job manual your new boss just set in front of you, which is different from reading a breakup letter left for you on the kitchen table. Reading serves different purposes at different times or situations in our lives.

I am talking now mostly of the mental processes involved in reading. To quote my mentor, Santiago Colás, who has the same goal, “I want to share a way of reading; a way of approaching and engaging literature that feeds and is in turn fed by a way of living, a way of approaching and engaging life” (Book of Joys). Colás sees reading as holding the potential to lead to joy by reinventing the practice through reconfiguring its components. He underscores “the capacity to take up the raw materials of the reading process (text and reader and world, affect and intellect, complexity and uncertainty) and find, though [sic] open-ended experimentation, enjoyable ways to rearrange those materials.” My method of reading builds on this idea of reconfiguration Colás describes, as well as on the philosophy of reader-response criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, to a certain extent. I am suggesting an ethical pedagogy of the practice of reading by focusing on the reader’s relationship to the text. This method or way of reading is intended to subtly shift the reader’s mental focus from the characters or the author to the construction of self. Thus, reading becomes a self-centered exercise, one in which we think about how we think. Books become passports to worlds that exist inside of us. We are able to get to know ourselves, slowly, through adopting a completely different approach to reading.

This implies, perhaps asserts, that there is a “way of living” that might be preferable to another. I will own an ethical standpoint in this work, connected as it is to promoting unity through a better, broader understanding of difference and freedom. I will also cop to a pragmatic belief that if the meaning of a given proposition is found within the practical consequences of accepting it, then we might start at the end, envisioning what we would like the end result to be, and then figuring out what we would have to believe in order to achieve that end result. In Pragmatism, William James writes:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? –material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic model in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences (28).

I think that the pragmatic method is a useful one for examining our own thought processes. I have employed this method myself to examine which beliefs support my vision of the world and which do not. I have also used the pragmatic model to examine many of our cultural beliefs—the meta-narratives that presently have currency. Some of the characteristics that I find negative and problematic in American culture are: the materialism and the narrow view of success that it inspires; the unmediated and often excessive consumption; the misconception and misrepresentation of love; the narcissistic individualism; the unhealthy relationship to the body; the dichotomous, linear, univocal thinking. These will be explored at length in this text. I am not prescribing blanket happiness, but I am issuing a blanket invitation to self exploration, so that we might know intimately what stands between us and happiness, if happiness happens to be our objective.

Theory and practice are not separate spheres; rather, theories are tools and maps for the practice of finding our way in the world. As John Dewey attests, there is no question of theory versus practice. Instead, there is a question of intelligent (or conscious) practice versus stupid (or uninformed) practice. In recent times I have undertaken the project of trying to produce scholarship that has resonance and relevance beyond the academic, into the personal and the lived. William James writes, “Our beliefs are really rules for action… to develope [sic] a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct for us is its sole significance” (28-29). My academic project has been to think about what type of conduct I would like to see produced- in the academy, in the United States, in the world, in myself- and what thoughts and ways of thinking might bring about this conduct. If, as James asserts, “all realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us” (29), I am interested in how realities are constructed and given meaning in light of a given practice.

I call this type of reading mindful because it offers an effective counter-balance to blind subscription to master narratives. Mindful thinking emphasizes the organic or functional relation between parts and the whole. Rather than scrutinizing an object under a microscope, we see it with a wider lens as a part of something bigger. With this lens we are able to see that even our seeing becomes a part of what is seen. Thus, an individual endeavor to understand and master the self has reverberations into our families, our societies, and ultimately the entire world. We cannot change society without changing ourselves.

I see the mindful phenomenon evidenced in the increased popularity of sustainable and ecologically sound living, the augmented awareness of the role of stress and nutrition in health, and even arguably the pull toward community that fuels social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter as indicating that a re-education of sorts has already been taking place. Dissatisfied with the meaninglessness, lovelessness and hopelessness that Cornel West calls nihilism in his book Race Matters, many Americans have sought a restructuring of their beliefs, values, and practices, and they have used mindful means to foster this re-education. Spiritual, self-help, and New Age books frequently become best-sellers, indicating that there is a market out there of people thirsty for a new understanding of themselves, the world, and God. I am interested to see how mindful thinking can be incorporated into academic learning. Of course, I can't set a moral agenda for the nation, nor do I intend to. I am not advocating the enforcement of certain or specific values. I do not see myself as endorsing swapping one fiction for another fiction. Instead, I encourage each of us to cultivate an awareness of one's own values and to bring mindful attention to where they come from, and what they enable and disable for us.

Identity and the Self

The premise of this work is that oppression is not (only) a complex interweaving of insurmountable institutional policies and practices, it is also a condition of mind. If we are able to decolonize our own minds, as everyone from Ngugi Wa Thiongo to Franz Fanon has implored us to do, then we can begin to navigate the landscape before us on our own terms. In Rock My Soul, bell hooks writes, “Used politically in a relationship to governments, the term decolonize means to allow to become self-governing or independent. In a personal sense decolonizing the mind means letting go of patterns of thought and behavior that prevent us from being self-determining” (69). To do this requires us as individuals to look within and examine our beliefs, and ultimately to abandon those beliefs that are limiting. This is a difficult but very worthwhile practice, in my opinion. To some this may sound like mind control. But I would argue that while we cannot control circumstances, we can exercise control over our reactions to them. We need not be at the mercy of our emotions. Through examining the numerous factors that contribute to our beliefs, such as culture, race, family, gender—to name but a few—I think we are able to observe our own beliefs with less attachment and more objectivity.

In this work, I evoke concepts of identity and self. Identity is an umbrella term used throughout the social sciences and humanities to describe an individual’s comprehension of herself as a discrete, separate entity. I think of identity as primarily threefold, consisting of a personal identity (or the idiosyncratic things that make a person unique), a social or cultural identity (or the collection of group memberships that may or may not define the individual), and a psychological identity (or a person’s mental model of him or herself, comprised of self image, self esteem, and individuation). My work draws on the interconnections and fluidity of all three of these ways of looking at one’s identities, acknowledging the multiply-determined ways we identify with the world around us. Identity is not a fixed thing, but rather floating, adaptable, and contingent. Identity is not just what we know; it is also how we know. If we call on intuitive powers, rational thought, gut reaction, dreams, if we are able to express ourselves through drawing, through dance, through words, through song, this is also a part of who we are and how we identify. From within our identity, from inside our world view and our complex network of identifications, we function. Our identity serves as the motherboard of our mental computer, the set of processing systems that tell us what to do with the information coming in.

If identity is the series of identifications that mediate how we know, the self is perhaps who or what we are striving to know. I see the self as being a multi-layered entity, and though I will try to give names to different elements of the self that I explore, one must bear in mind that these are fluid and contingent categories that are in no way hard, fast or definitive. Jiddu Krishnamurti writes his mindful version of the self:

You know what I mean by the self? By that I mean the idea, the memory, the conclusion, the experience, the various forms of nameable and unnamable intentions, the conscious endeavor to be or not to be, the accumulated memory of the unconscious, the racial, the group, the individual, the clan, and the whole of it all, whether it is projected outwardly in action, or projected spiritually as virtue; the striving after all this is the self (126).

When I unravel Krishnamurti’s complex bundle, I see the self as having some identifiable key components. There is, for example, the Self with a capital “S.” This is the spiritual, philosophical Self within us that observes. Rather than the one acting, it is the one observing the acting. It is linked, for some, to a concept of the divine, where this Self might be seen as our God Self, our innermost consciousness that is linked with all other consciousness. With the notion of the Self as God, where “I am” is God, our very existence indicates our godliness. For others, a better image might be that the Self is your primordial, foundational, or true self.

There is another self as well, the “self” with quotation marks and a lowercase “s.” This might be seen as synonymous with the ego. It is a gross accumulation of positive and negative beliefs about ourselves, from “My Auntie always told me I had a nice smile” to “I have my father’s temper” to “Women can’t be president” to “We are all born in sin” to “I’m a failure” to “Nice girls don’t give it up” to “Being poor is shameful.” Furthermore, it is the hidden beliefs that we do not even realize we have. It is what we think everybody else sees when they look at us. Our “self” is constructed around and within these various conscious and unconscious beliefs. Some of these beliefs come from our immediate society, from our parents, friends, or members of our race, social class, gender, or sexual community. Others are taught by our religions, schools, or by the media. Others are ideas that figure into our national identity, the ways in which we position ourselves globally and grow to embody on a personal level many of the things we tell ourselves about our nation. Still others function on a preconscious level and may be erroneous conclusions that we drew on our own based on the dynamics of our family.

Krishnamurti says that this identification process is the essence of the self (22). These messages are tossed to us by friends and family, pushed on us in school and in hierarchical social interaction, vomited on us by corporate advertising telling us what is and is not possible, and for whom. Our “self” is formed in relationship to these imposed beliefs. These beliefs end up creating the very limiting framework from within which most of us operate, similar to Marilyn Frye’s birdcage in her seminal feminist essay, “Oppression.” She writes:

Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere... It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon. It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced (176).

This is what happens to us all. All of us began life as children, bursting with beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is the state of wonderment and awe that comes from experiencing things for the first time (or as if for the first time, but more on this in my post, “Beginning with Beginner’s Mind”). Within beginner’s mind is the joy of an unmediated interaction in and with the present moment, the dizzying stimulation of something genuinely new. We begin life thinking that anything is possible, full of beginner’s mind, full of joy, but day by day, instance by instance, circumstance by circumstance, we are taught and re-taught limiting beliefs about who we are and what it means to be who we are. Wire by wire, the birdcage is constructed. There are mysteries and magic everywhere for a child, but these slowly disappear as we grow up. As we grow out of our natural beginner’s mind, we begin to think we know “how things are,” we know “how it is,” we know “how it goes.” We become “the ones who know,” who have figured it out. Wire of experience by wire of information, we construct our world view, our understanding of how the world works, and our identity within that world, who we perceive ourselves to be in relation to that world. From money to relationships to war to our own bodies, we decide upon a personal meaning for everything in our universe, based on our experiences and what information we have at the time. We make meaning. Our powerful drive to understand and make sense of the universe is the reason we abandon the awesome magic of beginner’s mind.

There is a third self I would like to define: the self, lowercase, no quotation marks. I see this self as both the Self and the “self,” everything that falls under the heading of “who I am.”

The relationship between these selves is well articulated in Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh. In response to the question “Who am I?” God responds:

Whomever you choose to be. Whatever aspect of Divinity you wish to be—that’s Who You Are. That can change at any given moment. Indeed, it often does, from moment to moment. Yet if you want your life to settle down, to stop bringing you such a wide variety of experiences, there’s a way to do that. Simply stop changing your mind so often about Who You Are, and Who You Choose to Be (21).

John Dewey once wrote that “What man does and how he acts, is determined not by organic structure and physical heredity alone but by the influence of cultural heredity, embedded in traditions, institutions, customs and the purposes and beliefs they both carry and inspire. Even the neuro-muscular structures of individuals are modified through the influence of the cultural environment on the activities performed” (30). Our life goals are influenced by our view of who we are, what we are like, the way we would like to be (or would like to avoid being), as well as our perceptions of what is feasible. These perceptions impact more than just our goals, however. As psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Gillett explains in Change Your Mind, Change Your World, “Our beliefs about ourselves and the world alter our perception, our memory, our hope, our energy, our health, our mood, our actions, our relationships, and eventually even our outward circumstances.” (13) Thus, the self as a construct has far-reaching implications for behavior, self-esteem, motivation, and emotions as well as for interpersonal relationships, society, and culture.

When we look at the world around us, we often see and process information that confirms our beliefs while rejecting or ignoring information that contradicts them (Gillett 53). It is hard to admit that our subjectivity is mired in the muck of our culture/s, our family/ies, and our own preconscious inventions. It is difficult to acknowledge that what we thought was objective thought is actually quite subjective. At times it is hard to even see that we participate by observing. As Gloria Karpinski explains in When Two Worlds Touch, “Since the 1920s when Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle, science has been showing us that there is no such thing as purely objective analysis. Our observation of a thing is part of its reality—and our own” (25). Gillett points to physical and mental limitations to explain the futility of thinking in terms of “reality” or “truth.” He writes, “There is no such thing as seeing the world ‘realistically,’ because our very sense organs and brain mechanisms are highly selective in the extent and quality of information they handle” (27). Furthermore, as Gillett explains, “The way we see the world is based on our senses, our language, our innate prejudices, and our personal history” (27). But there is freedom in acknowledging that our truth is not the Truth, but rather it is simply one truth, and it can be a temporary one if it is not serving us. We might accept Antonio Benitez Rojo’s assertion that, “There cannot be any single truth, but instead there are many practical and momentary ones, truths without beginnings or ends, local truths, displaced truths, provisional and peremptory truths of a pragmatic nature” (151).

We cannot see the truth because we cannot handle the truth, quite literally. The so-called “truth” of “what is” contains too much information for us to rationally process.

Gillett gives some valid sensory examples:

We can see wavelengths of light only between about 400 and 700 millionths of a millimeter. This is a tiny proportion within the vast band of electromagnetic waves, of X-ray, gamma-ray, ultraviolet, visible light, infra-red, microwave, and radio wave. In other words, most electromagnetic information simply passes us by…. Our hearing, too, is limited by the capacity of our ears, which hear only wavelengths between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second, and have limited sensitivity and discrimination…. These examples illustrate the relativity of our senses… Since much of what we believe tends to be based on trusting our senses, it reminds us to understand that our senses, for all their magic, are limited and highly selective encoders of information (28-9).

The capabilities of our senses place limits on what we can know of the information present at any given moment.

Gillett also points to the distortions of language as a reason that we cannot grasp truth. “The divisions and generalizations of one language create a different picture of reality from the divisions and generalizations of another.” (Gillett 29) He uses another interesting example:

Richard Bandler and John Grinder tell of a Native American language in northern California called Maidu, which divides the basic color spectrum into three colors. In Maidu there is a name for red, a name for green-blue, and a name for what we would call orange-brown-yellow. In English the rainbow is usually seen as divided into seven colors. So in English a yellow object and a brown object will be seen as different, while in Maidu they are the same color. In physiological reality, the human being is capable of 7,500,000 discriminations of color between different wavelengths of light. So where we draw our lines between colors is arbitrary (29).

Language simply becomes a coded frame, a filing system for the millions of bits of information hurled at us. It is very difficult to see and understand beyond the limits of one’s language.

Gillett makes another distinction about language—that there might be many words for slight varieties of a thing in a culture where that thing is seen as important.

Eskimos have many different words for different kinds of snow; in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, there are over fifty words for “consciousness”; while in Luganda (one of the languages of Uganda spoken by the tribe of Baganda) there are over forty different words for a banana. To them a matoke is completely a different thing from a gonja, while to Americans, they are both just bananas (29).

Gillett points out that ultimately language functions as a handicap. “No matter which language you speak, the divisions are matters of convention which determine how we organize our thoughts and how we classify the world” (29-30). Language functions as an important lens that mediates our experience of the world around us.

Julio Cortázar’s observation was really quite astute, that:

Everything is fiction, that is to say a fable… Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say scripture, literature, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures of the world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures (384).

Upon examination, we notice that what we consider reality is really quite subjective, an invention. How we choose to understand information determines what that information can and will mean. Knowledge is, after all, an invention according to Nietzsche, as Foucault says, “behind which there is something quite distinct from it: an interplay of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, will to appropriation” (14). Thus, the framing itself becomes part of the experience of the thing and, as such, the knowing of it. It is a fiction we choose, and as such we are free to choose differently.

Reading

I contend that, for the most part, we read like we live our lives. We make generalizations and then we filter our experiences so that they confirm the generalizations. Gillett says, “A generalization about life is like a fixed compartment or a square box. If life does not fit the box, we distort it until it does” (31). While many generalizations from experience are good and instructive, some generalizations may become extreme and actually limit the believer. Gillett gives an example of this, showing how a useful generalization might become limiting if it is taken to extremes:

If a boy’s father beat him whenever he spoke out as a child, the generalization that the father is dangerous and that it is probably therefore unwise to speak out in front of him would probably be useful. It is already a generalization because the father is almost certainly not dangerous in all situations. Nevertheless it is a reasonable protective assumption. If however the generalization becomes more extreme, for instance: “Men are dangerous and it is unwise to speak out in front of men in general,” then the boy would begin to distort reality and to limit his choices. When the generalization becomes more extreme still, for example, “People are dangerous and I will never speak out in front of anybody again,” then he lives with an oppressive illusion and his choices are crippled. It may affect every relationship with every man for the rest of his life. Quite automatically he will assume that men are threatening whether they are or not. He will misinterpret benign expressions as hostile. He will even find a negative motive for a kind action: “He only gave me that because he wants to control me.” In short, he cannot see reality because it is distorted by his belief (34-5).

Similarly, when we read, we become readers who “know how to read.” After the beginner’s mind wanes and wears thin, we read generalizations into the text that correspond to our beliefs, and then we push the text to fit this contrivance. We come to both life and texts with satchels of generalizations and stereotypes hanging from us. There are the ones that come from our given culture and country (or cultures and countries), from our school and education, from our class, from and about gender, about body image, wealth, power, about aging and death, just to name a few. We use this information to confirm or justify our relationship to the text, which is often something that we decided long before we ever opened the front cover. We participate while we swear up and down that we are merely observing.

How to Read a Book, the 1970s revised version of the 1940 bestseller, explains in plain language exactly what the title says. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren explain in detail the different levels of reading that exist (which they define as Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Syntopical), and offer practical information on different ways to read. The book explains the activity and the art of reading—how to “come to terms with an author” by understanding their use of terminology, how to determine an author’s message, how to criticize a book “fairly,” how to agree or disagree. How to Read a Book might be seen as a book explaining what to do with the information in a book, how to relate to a text, and even how to manipulate the text according to your own needs. They outline a few concrete ways to configure the elements involved in reading. I think that Adler and Van Doren’s exploration of what one should do when one reads offers a compelling springboard from which to launch my own suggestions of what might be done when one reads.

Reading as an adult is not often an exercise in discovery. It frequently becomes little more than a way to affirm what we already “know” of the world. We choose our genre of choice—news journalism, juicy romance, detective thriller, celebrity tabloid, comic book, instruction manual, academic journal—and we approach the text with a pretty good idea of what to expect, and what not to expect, from it. We do not anticipate finding spiritual nourishment, for example, in Cosmopolitan magazine, and we do not imagine finding a new hairstyle, for example, writ into the stories of the bible. We anticipate new information from reading, but we generally expect for literatures to stay true to genre. These expectations create the circumstances where we are hardly ever disappointed, perhaps because we ourselves are disabling other possibilities.

Adler and Van Doren illustrate this phenomenon, seeing it as reading to gain information rather than understanding.

There is the book; and here is your mind. As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding. If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold. The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met (7).

The majority of reading that most of folks do in everyday life is this one, reading to gain information. This type of reading “is at once thoroughly intelligible to us” (9). We are not fumbling in the language, or struggling with meaning. They explain, “Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth” (9).

Adler and Van Doren make a distinction between reading from which one gains information and reading from which one gains understanding.

Let us take our second alternative. You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you know enough to know that you do not understand at all. You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding (7).

The authors reveal that what they are calling “understanding” is really an analytical frame or paradigm, something that might “throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he [the reader] knows” (9). In this second sense of reading, reading to gain understanding or to possibly reframe our existing understanding, the book has “more to say” than the reader can comprehend. Adler and Van Doren point to an inequality between the author and the reader as a prerequisite of such reading.

Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess (9).

In the academy reading frequently functions similarly, falling into the same two camps but with different percentages attached to them. There is reading that is done for information and reading that is done for understanding, and at times a mixture of the two. While we don’t necessarily attribute it to “inequality,” we can at least acknowledge that texts often have “more to say” than we are able to hear. Many of these are “hard” theory texts that we read together in graduate seminars. Others are literary texts that elude our analytical nets like clever butterflies. Most—perhaps all—are texts that we are translating across some sort of divide—linguistic, cultural, national, temporal, spatial.

Adler and Van Doren ask a valid question- what to do with these texts you can’t understand?

What do you do then? You can take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that trouble you. (“He” may be a living person or another book—a commentary or textbook) (7).

This is a fairly common practice in the academy. We decipher in class together. We often defer to interpretations and readings by others of “difficult” texts. At times we even use the work of others to help us understand what we ourselves think of a text.

Instead of enlisting the help of others, Adler and Van Doren suggest “doing the job of reading that the book requires” (8). This is accomplished in only one manner.

Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves (8, their emphasis).

I am particularly intrigued by this second type of reading that they suggest. In it there is just the reader and the text working with and on each other. This suggests becoming an active and mindful participator with the book. In a sense, the reader becomes the co-creator of the text. We are invited by the text to cast off our usual way of thinking about things, in order to meet the book wherever it is. Rather than casting our net of generalizations over the book, we let it fly free. And as the text soars about the landscape, we are free to choose who we are in relationship to the soaring text, what we are going to do about it, or with it, if anything. I am interested in what we can do in these readings Adler and Van Doren recommend. How can we read in such a way that reading enables us to get to know ourselves? What would have to change about reading itself in order to create these different readings? Can we attempt to rearrange the elements of reading, as Colás suggests, to activate new possibilities?

I believe that reading in a different way will produce different readings, ones that do not necessarily reinforce stereotypes and reiterate damaging social meta-narratives, ones that might invite us to challenge and question our limiting views of ourselves and the world. Thus, reading becomes an exercise in freedom and an invitation to power. There is a way in which we can read texts “to live” as Colás asserts in his work. There is a way in which we can read texts not to dissect them or manipulate them to prove a point, but rather to learn tools for life. These tools can range from the practical to the esoteric, from the mundane to the spiritual.

These readings also engender new ways of knowing, moving the notion of “knowing” out of our heads and into our bodies, growing there to embody the understanding that Adler and Van Doren describe. I call these alternative ways of knowing “feminine” or “Yin,” because they call on more subtle and indirect understandings that are very different from what we often consider “knowing” or “knowledge.” Far from an essentialist reiteration of cultural stereotype, I draw from the Eastern concept of “the feminine” as a necessary energetic force bound to and interdependent with its male counterpart. Gloria Karpinski is an author who is very much in touch with forms of Yin knowing. She will describe a vision she had while meditating, or even intentionally “take” a subject into meditation and report on her findings. She trusts herself as a vessel of knowledge. One of the big myths of Western culture is that knowledge comes from outside the body; her work confounds that idea and encourages others to do so as well.

I define Yin knowledge as knowledge or information that comes from the inside out, whereas masculine or Yang knowledge goes from the outside in. Thus, Yin knowledge would be found in intuition, dreams, experiential knowing, embodiment, and various other forms or directives that come from within the individual. Yin knowledge can also come out of the individual in different forms, such as poetry, myth, art, and symbols. Yin knowledge, for me, encapsulates the many alternative ways of knowing that fall—like the black swirl in the yin/yang symbol—into darkness and outside of normative ways of knowing. Yang knowledge, by contrast, includes what we are told, what we read, and various other directives that come from outside of the individual. Gloria Karpinski defines Yang knowledge in Barefoot on Holy Ground as “specificity, knowledge, hierarchy, dominance, and possession, extremes that led to separations from each other and the earth” (43). The construction of “knowing” in the academy is more often than not Yang—rational, linear, dichotomous thought—and it is privileged and maintained through more widespread and/or more deeply engrained cultural frames. These frames are upheld through interpersonal relationship to and communication of an ideology that seems to breed a climate of fear. More subtle experiential or extra-linguistic ways of knowing are given little currency because they can’t be accurately transmitted from within this framework, and the corporate/academic culture makes it feel risky to try to work beyond the existing frames.

Both masculine and feminine knowledge are ever-present in balanced amounts in everything, though we might not always perceive that fact. Karpinski explains the specifics of the relationship between Yin and Yang. She writes that “The Taoists describe the movements within wholeness as yin (feminine) and yang (masculine). The one is always in process of becoming the other. We are not one or the other; rather we are both. Yin and yang are movements of energies, not identities” (53). Margo Anand confirms this, “Each of us has an Inner Man that is associated with dynamic, active energy; with setting and achieving goals; and with getting things done. This is what the Taoists call the Yang aspect of our nature—the engaged, noncontemplative self. And each of us also has an Inner Woman, a natural capacity for letting things happen, for going with the flow of life without setting goals, for relaxing and being playful. This is what the Taoists call the Yin aspect of our nature—the contemplative, intuitive, communing self.” If we want to read mindfulally, we must approach wholeness by reading in a way that incorporates the feminine as well as the masculine. Karpinski reminds us that “This [is] but an outer dramatization of the collective inner drama, a drama that is neither male or female but human” (43).

Part of the difficulty we have been having with introducing feminine paradigms into the academy is that we have been attempting to use masculinist frames and masculinist lenses to perceive feminine knowledge. We strive to capture multiplicity, simultaneity, and interdependence within a system of linear and dichotomous classifications. This is similar to seeing an iridescent-blue-and-black butterfly pinned to cork in a display case. If we think that we can “know” the butterfly by observing it in the case, we are missing out on most of its story. We have no idea of its starts as a caterpillar, of the goings-on inside the cocoon. We don’t know what it’s like to see a butterfly in an open field. We don’t even know that it flies (though we might assume so based on wing-size and other assessments). Feminine ways of knowing, by contrast, are engendered primarily through experience.

Certain practices help to cultivate Yin knowledge. Two of these elements are beginner’s mind and mindfulness meditation, which draw the attention inward and widen the lens so that we might see mindfulally. The way of reading I am advocating—and practicing—in this book takes the usual elements of reading and combines with them the practice of mindfulness meditation and the practice of creative expression, which often puts us in touch with our beginner’s mind. By cultivating different practices, we can know things in a different way. Practice in this case becomes a revolutionary tool because it is reiterative and re-inscriptive. One key to personal and global change is cultivating a regularly recurring practice that corresponds to and confirms what one wants to see existing in the future, whether that thing be world peace or a new car. This is a literal spin on Gandhi’s words, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” I am not proposing that we abandon other ways of reading entirely. Rather, I am advocating some people sometimes trying something different, ostensibly, reading such that the text is a mirror that reflects ourselves back to ourselves, reading as a journey of self-exploration.

One of the reasons I am advocating for a different method of reading is because I believe that reading books gives us an opportunity safely and intimately examine our beliefs. Books can take us all around the world, deep into different cultures, often seen through the eyes of someone possessing a completely different belief system. They can also take us into the deeper inner workings of lives of people we see as “like us.” The most interesting thing that we encounter when we read is not the “other,” but ourselves. Through our judgments, likes, dislikes, thoughts and emotions—all of which often come out during reading—we are able to get a firmer grasp on what it is that we believe. Like the meditation cushion, reading can create a safe haven in which our thoughts and actions cannot harm another, but can be explored. I truly believe that the combination of reading and meditation might engender some very different understandings of the self.

The Issue of Beliefs

As I said earlier, it is important that we examine our own beliefs as individuals. Rather than pointing outside ourselves at what is wrong, we can begin to make peace inside ourselves through the type of non-judgmental observation I described in the chapter on beginner’s mind. We can begin to see how our culture and our own individual beliefs are connected. As Krishnamurti remarks, “What we must realize is that we are not only conditioned by environment, but that we are the environment—we are not something apart from it. Our thoughts and responses are conditioned by values which society, of which we are a part, has imposed on us (56-7). Gloria Karpinski puts it thus in Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons In Spiritual Craftsmanship: “Our whole consciousness, expressed through the body, emotions, and mind, is in constant process with our many environments—the immediate ones, the remembered ones, and the ones we fantasize” (84). The repercussions of this are significant, for what we can be and do is limited (more often than not) by our beliefs and their corresponding actions. Karpinski writes in Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage, “Whatever you believe is true—for you. We do not act outside our perception of reality. Whatever shape and structure our belief system takes on any subject is our “form.” Our forms allow us to express ourselves within the parameters of whatever we perceive ourselves to be. Good, bad, possible, impossible—these concepts are meaningful to us to the degree that we believe them” (73). By examining our beliefs, we can see more clearly the ways in which we are complicit with our culture’s morés and practices. We can get to know the ways in which we have been seduced or coerced into participation and compliance with societal norms. We are then better able to pragmatically choose for ourselves if these endorsed beliefs and practices our actually serving us. Intimately understanding our beliefs takes away their power over us, freeing up space in which we can choose our beliefs with awareness. In this section I try to illuminate how beliefs function so that we might have more insight into them.

Richard Gillett quips that “It is more work to maintain a belief than a car” (53). We don’t notice the work that we are doing, however, because it is mostly automatic and unconscious. Gillett breaks down the things that we do in order to “keep our precious beliefs intact.” He describes how we make life choices that both reflect and confirm our beliefs about ourselves and our beliefs about others. He contends, “To some extent we choose situations and people that fit our perceptions” (53). He gives two examples, “A woman who believes that change is dangerous will choose secure relationships and a secure working situation so that she does not have to test out change. A man who believes he is stupid will choose manual work or repetitive mental work requiring little creativity or initiative—in this way he never develops his mind and is able to retain his belief” (53). These people he describes never test the validity of their beliefs. Instead, they choose actions and situations that are based upon their beliefs and help maintain them.

For example, I’m sure we all know (or perhaps are) someone who is always the victim in every story told. Even in stories where the person seems to come out triumphant, s/he insists that s/he was somehow victimized. Energy medicine pioneer and author Caroline Myss has this to say about the origins of victimhood:

Being a Victim is a common fear. The Victim archetype may manifest the first time you don’t get what you want or need; are abused by a parent, playmate, sibling, or teacher; or are accused of or punished for something you didn’t do. You may suppress your outrage at the injustice if the victimizer is bigger and more powerful than you. But at a certain point you discover a perverse advantage to being the victim (116).

This advantage is the reason that the victim often clings to and insists upon that identity. S/he goes to great lengths to maintain the role, filtering out experiences and situations that contradict his/her belief in his/her victimhood. S/he might remember the same situation differently than others who were present. S/he takes the truth and manipulates it to support his/her beliefs. Much of this is done unconsciously, or on a continuum of awareness. Steven Covey writes about this in Principle-Centered Leadership, a follow-up book to his wildly popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He places victimhood at the low end of a spectrum measuring effectiveness, with self-awareness at the high end. He sees victimhood as a lack of self-awareness. He writes:

At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force in your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness (42).

Viewing victimhood in this way acknowledges that while there may be real or imagined limitations existing in the world, we cannot know for sure how much the world is actually oppressing us until we stop oppressing ourselves. For surely we can name at least a few people who have come from circumstances far worse (in our judgment) than our own and have somehow soared far higher than we ever imagined possible for ourselves. We can attribute it to genius or luck, if that serves us. But it is also possible to see these people as able to transcend and transgress the limits enforced by others in order to realize the potential within themselves by simply refusing to believe what the world tells them about themselves.

This type of belief maintenance is done not just with victims but with a variety of identity roles. We look around for evidence that supports our beliefs, and look right past any information that doesn’t, or even contradicts them. We see, by and large, what we want to see. Thus does a belief become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy” smacks of some sort of hocus-pocus, Gillett explains that it is simply the way in which our pre-existing thought causes us to treat others as if our thought were already true. He contends that it is actually our thoughts and actions that call forth in the other the very behavior or quality we were guarding ourselves against.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of the man who believes “women are manipulative” goes something like this: “Women are manipulative, therefore I won’t trust her.” Because she feels treated with suspicion, she keeps her distance from him. Intimacy therefore disappears and they are left with a relationship of emotional dishonesty and mental manipulation. The part she takes in that process proves that “women are manipulative.” Of course, people are hardly ever aware of the mechanism behind the self fulfilling prophecy. Events happen that seem to vindicate the belief-- the man does really act like a brute and the woman does really manipulate, and both are unaware of the strings they pulled to create or manifest that reality in the other (52).

Although we do not notice our own role in bringing our self-fulfilling prophesies to fruition, Gillett argues that we “mold, select from, exaggerate, or distort the past to make it support our current belief. The process is so automatic, however, that we do not even realize our own bias” (55).

We also rationalize contradictory evidence when it does arise. “Rationalization,” Gillett explains, “Is the last ditch attempt, when all else has failed, to make the aberrant world fit the confines of a belief system” (59). We use the imagined future to support our stance, often giving reasons why “it’ll never work” or “it’ll never happen.” We use our imaginations against ourselves to manufacture an undesirable or impossible outcome. We often assume our reality will remain the same into perpetuity. The imagined result, Gillett maintains, directly impacts what we believe is possible in the present. If I believe “I am never going to get out of debt,” I will not bother to attempt to try by changing my spending habits. If I believe “I am never going to lose weight,” I will feel like it doesn’t really matter if I eat this donut now. This keeps us from changing, keeps us stuck in the same cycles.

Our beliefs also impact the future by filtering the past. Ekhart Tolle, a prominent spiritual teacher explains how the past functions to limit beliefs in the present. He refers to the egoic mind, or the mind wrapped up in “self”-consciousness. He writes:

The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In the case of a child who cries in deep suffering because his toy has been taken away, the toy represents content. It is interchangeable with any other content, any other toy or object. The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture. Whether the child is rich or poor, whether the toy is a piece of wood shaped like an animal or a sophisticated electronic gadget makes no difference as far as the suffering caused by its loss is concerned. The reason why such acute suffering occurs is concealed in the word ‘my,’ and it is structural (34).

Tolle explains an important force at play in all of these manipulations, “One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The word ‘identification’ is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning ‘same’ and facere, which means ‘to make.’ So when I identify with something, I ‘make it the same.’ The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my ‘identity’” (35). This identification is ultimately what causes our suffering when we are painfully reminded that we are not the thing we have convinced ourselves that we are. Whatever the identification, whether with a material thing like a car or a house, or with a title or occupation, or with a role such as mother or doctor, or an emotional state like grief or depression, or with one’s race or gender, religion or sexual preference—it is ultimately a construction of our mind, as Tolle asserts, in which we make the thing the same as us. The deep identification with a label or role causes the person to consistently interpret whatever content s/he is given such that it fits into the pre-determined structure that is in keeping with his beliefs about himself. We become in our mind these things that are really little more than practices that we have chosen.

Tolle explains, "What kind of things you identify with will vary from person to person according to age, gender, income, social class, fashion, the surrounding culture, and so on. What you identify with is all to do with content; whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural” (36). This idea of content as separate and apart from structure is a useful one. It shows the mechanisms at work so that a victim, for example, can maintain the structure of his victimhood while changing the content to suit the occasion. So closely identified is the victim with his victimhood that he often does not see the structure, only the content, which in his mind justifies or vindicates his thoughts or actions. It is by examining the structure—the way in which the victim seeks out situations in which he will be victimized, manipulates the elements in the situation to render himself the victim, or only notices situations that confirm his victimhood—that the victim can stop looking at the content and start looking at himself. Victimhood is a locus of power. There is tremendous power in articulating what is not possible, what I can't do, what is not available to me. Many of the prisons in life are self constructed, based upon our firm reliance on limiting beliefs.

The Advantages of Limiting Beliefs

There are many advantages to maintaining limiting beliefs. One advantage is what Gillett calls “the ego advantage.” This refers to the way that “with great dexterity of mind, any belief, however narrow, can be converted into a personal superiority” (44). Gillett contends that we are able to take our weaknesses and turn them—in our own minds—into strengths. He discusses how we are able to see ourselves as superior to others based on a structure that perceives a quality in them as a flaw or disagreeable or negative, then views the very same quality in ourselves as positive. We do this by sugar-coating the trait linguistically and making it in line with our beliefs about what is worthwhile or positive, recasting what we have shunned in another as a prized trait in ourselves. Gillett provides some wonderfully clear examples:

Take the situation of the man who has difficulty in crying or being tender: It is usually much easier for him to think to himself “I’m a man”; “I’m not weak”; “I’m strong”; “I can take it,” than it is for him to admit his own difficulty with, or even disapproval of, tenderness. It is easier to say: “I know what’s best for me” than to admit you are frightened of change because you have an old belief that change is dangerous. It is easier to consider “I am above money” or “money is dirty” than to face the possibility that you cannot successfully sell goods because you do not really believe you are good enough. Quite often underlying beliefs are lightly hidden beneath a sugar-coating of ego, which makes the belief palatable (44).

Thus, our inability to keep a job is seen in ourselves as “free spiritedness,” our unwillingness to commit to a relationship is attributed to our positive quality of “being picky” or “not settling.” We find ways to spin our misdeeds into virtues in our own minds. We then judge others who do not share our limited belief. As Gillett describes, “The man who has difficulty being tender calls the man who weeps ‘soft.’ The woman who is frightened of change calls the person who changes freely ‘inconsistent’ or ‘untrustworthy.’ The man who cannot sell his product thinks of the successful salesperson as a ‘money-grabber’” (45). As he explains, “The worst liabilities can become marvelous assets” (45).

Another advantage to limiting beliefs that Gillett points out is the illusion of safety that accompanies them. Gillett explains, “As long as we stay within the confines of our belief systems, we are afforded a feeling of security. There is no need for the anxiety of uncertainty because any new input will be rejected before it is effective, or else distorted to fit the parameters of our beliefs” (47). Gillett contends that we reject new information, not allowing it to permeate our consciousness, or we force it into accordance with our pre-set beliefs. Gillett asserts that this is true even when the beliefs create dangerous situations for the believer:

For example, women who believe “men are violent” or “I deserve to be mistreated by a man” tend to choose violent men over and over again. Although they are genuinely fearful and do not like pain or humiliation, the “old situation” provides a paradoxical sense of security. The familiarity of a repeated situation, created by a belief, somehow feels like home. We know the score. We know the rules of the game. Spiritual teachers say that it’s necessary to repeat situations until we master what we need to learn. There is certainly a curious attraction to repeat experiences that fit with a limited belief, and this continues until we learn to change the belief (47).

The predictability of the outcome makes the situations feel comfortable and familiar. We know the outcome before we even get to the end, mainly because we are helping create it. When it arrives, we think “I knew this would happen!” Whether “this” is getting rejected by a friend, cheating on a new girlfriend, being bested by a sibling, or feeling abandoned by a parent, our limiting beliefs help bring it to fruition. Gillett explains the mechanisms of such prediction:

Above and beyond all the ways that we maintain our beliefs previously described, we do one very important and insidious thing: we manufacture feelings that support our beliefs. While we often rely on our feelings and often take them as “truth,” Gillet argues that “Many feelings are no more than emotional representations of the restrictions of the mind” (61). In the example of racial prejudice, “A person has to have the prejudice—the misinterpretation—before he or she can feel the hate. Feelings are easily manufactured from attitudes” (61). We often use our feelings to validate our beliefs, ignoring the ways in which they inform one another.

While we may (or may) not be able to control the events that occur in our lives, it is inarguable that we can control our responses and reactions to them. What might be the moment to throw in the towel for most is the moment for a few others to try harder with renewed conviction. What might be life ending for some is life-beginning for a few others. It all depends on our own perspective of the events of our lives, our positive or negative judgments of those events, and who we see ourselves to be in relationship to those events. One guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and becomes a depressed, reclusive alcoholic; another guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and ends up winning the Special Olympics for downhill skiing a few years later. Our choices depend on our perspective.

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America, land of the (buy one, get one) free, home of the brave (consumer). America is shockingly beautiful and poetic in its splendor, opportunity, and power. But contemporary American culture has come to a grotesque point that flouts even the best of the flawed ideals of its founding fathers. In his book America, postmodernist scholar Jean Baudrillard shares his caustic perspective of American hyperreality, gleaned from a coast-to-coast road trip through the deserts and cities of the United States. Beaudrillard portrays America similarly to West, devoid of meaning, hope and love (a result perhaps, for Beaudrillard, of his postmodernist underpinnings). He observes the conflicting ideas upon which this nation is based:

...there is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness of a nuclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, springing not from rootedness, but from the lack of roots, a metabolic vitality, in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, it is the only remaining primitive society (7).

This “primary, visceral, unbounded vitality” sounds to me like spirituality (that is, a concept of spirit, life, or energy), but one that springs from “sex and bodies,” “work,” and “buying and selling.” This vitality Baudrillard describes is uprooted, a belief system lacking in an understanding of the connections between us all, other than in terms of the connections of “sex and bodies” and “buying and selling.” Thus, Americans become Beaudrillard’s noble savages, a pagan culture for whom a dehumanizing form of capitalism has become vital. In his essay “What is Primitivism?” John Fleiss gives a definition of primitivism that seems more relevant to this century than the Enlightenment era in which it was penned. “Perhaps the easiest way to understand primitivism is as a counterweight to the pull of technology. Primitivism as a whole is the positioning of a counter-force to the thrust of technological progress. Given the integrated nature of technological development, primitivism may be the only human-oriented response to technology that goes far enough not to be subsumed by it” (Primitivism). One can see this brand of American primitivism as a response to the hyper-technological, hyper-scientific, postmodern disconnect and discomfort brought about by our unique history and circumstance. Our primitive god is money, our primitive religion is science, and our primitive mantra is “progress.”

Baudrillard’s America is a digital snapshot of an anemic nation. This image is used to illustrate and back his claim that the human experience is a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. According to him, modern society has replaced reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and it has become so reliant on simulacra that it has lost contact with the real world on which the simulacra are based. America is hyperreal in Baudrillard’s eyes because it has blurred the line between mass media and real life, fiction and reality. In an essay which examines the effects of technology and capitalism on culture entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Horkheimer and Adorno say that "real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (126). Baudrillard claims that "in America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic. The break between the two, the abstraction which we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema" (101). Americans want to solve all their problems, save the day, win the race, get the girl/boy, and be the casually affable center of attention—just like the plastic stars of the formulaic movies they know and lovingly, unquestioningly consume. This should not be construed as narcissism, however, according to Baudrillard. "What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness" (37).

Jean Beaudrillard's America offers a poignant, if romantic, outsider's perception. Yet his exterior subjectivity does not detract from his sad but valid commentary on America. “America is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. Is is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet it is all the stuff of dreams too” (28). Cornel West’s depiction of America in mirrors Beaudrillard’s some respects. Yet West attributes America’s paradox not to postmodernism, but to the impossibility of its original dream- to build a free nation on the backs of the unfree. West writes:

The fundamental paradox of American democracy in particular is that it gallantly emerged as a fragile democratic experiment over and against an oppressive British empire—and aided by the French and Dutch empires—even while harboring its own imperial visions of westward expansion, with more than 20 percent of its population consisting of enslaved Africans. In short, we are a democracy of rebels who nonetheless re-created in our own nation many of the oppressions we had rebelled against (43).

Perhaps Baudrillard’s hyperreal America is a result at least in part of America’s self-assured utopic vision of itself being marred by the hypocrisy of its actions toward non-white peoples. As West displays the complex contradictions of revolutionary leaders who were also slaveholders, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he asserts:

The most painful truth in the making of America—a truth that shatters all pretensions to innocence and undercuts all efforts of denial—is that the enslavement of Africans and the imperial expansion over indigenous peoples and their lands were undeniable preconditions for the possibility of American democracy. There could be no such thing as an experiment in American democracy without these racist and imperial foundations (45, West’s emphasis).

White America was asserting its utopian nature at the same time that it was committing genocide against the indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans. It was declaring its freedom at the same time that it was robbing others of their freedom. This practice has extended over time into our foreign policy, forcing our growth and profit at the expense of others. West reminds us that America “truly has become an empire—a military giant, a financial haven, a political and cultural colossus in the world. The U.S. military budget accounts for over 40 percent of the world’s total military spending. It is six times the size of the military spending of the number two nation (Russia) and more than that of the next twenty-three nations combined.” (59) Everything and everyone American is huge, literally and figuratively, taking up more space, requiring more attention, hogging what is available. We are the free world, but we are as reckless with our freedom as a nation as we are unconvinced of our individual freedom.

Baudrillard, by contrast, constructs America as the prototype for a history-less society barraged by signifiers and messages, all centering around the mighty dollar which has self-realized into the "God" in whom "we trust." He concludes plainly, "This country is without hope," (123) but I think that meaning is what is missing from many lives in America. The Last Poets sang, “"Put more meaning into everything you do. More meaning into loving, eating and living and there will be more meaning in you, which means everything!" I believe that our individual actions and choices can impact the greater whole. Even seemingly small choices—like making buying locally grown produce a priority over saving money—can have a profound impact.

This country is not without hope. It is has been, perhaps, in some respects, without meaning... and direction... and dignity. "Dignity is as compelling a human need as food or sex, and yet here is a society which casts the mass of its people in limbo, never satisfying their hunger for dignity, nor yet so explicitly depriving them that the task of proving dignity seems an unreasonable burden, and revolt against the society the only reasonable alternative" (Sennett & Cobb 191). In constantly looking outside ourselves for satisfaction, we are less able to appreciate the abundance and meaning that already exists. But there are possible meanings and directions that we might adopt and pursue as individuals, communities, and a society so that we might live differently, fully, responsibly, with love, dignity, spirituality, acceptance, community and peace at the forefront of our existences. Rather than suffering the maelstrom of meaninglessness that postmodernism thinks into being, we can each choose to impart meaning. Whether we realize this or not, it is what we already do.

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LikeNihilist America: Imparting Meaning into Jean Beaudrillard's Desolate LandscapeCommentShare

It is important that we examine our own beliefs as individuals. Rather than pointing outside ourselves at what is wrong, we can begin to make peace inside ourselves through the type of non-judgmental observation I described in the chapter on beginner’s mind. We can begin to see how our culture and our own individual beliefs are connected. As Jiddu Krishnamurti remarks, “What we must realize is that we are not only conditioned by environment, but that we are the environment—we are not something apart from it. Our thoughts and responses are conditioned by values which society, of which we are a part, has imposed on us (56-7).

Gloria Karpinski puts it thus in Barefoot on Holy Ground: Twelve Lessons In Spiritual Craftsmanship: “Our whole consciousness, expressed through the body, emotions, and mind, is in constant process with our many environments—the immediate ones, the remembered ones, and the ones we fantasize” (84). The repercussions of this are significant, for what we can be and do is limited (more often than not) by our beliefs and their corresponding actions. Karpinski writes in Where Two Worlds Touch: Spiritual Rites of Passage, “Whatever you believe is true—for you. We do not act outside our perception of reality. Whatever shape and structure our belief system takes on any subject is our “form.” Our forms allow us to express ourselves within the parameters of whatever we perceive ourselves to be. Good, bad, possible, impossible—these concepts are meaningful to us to the degree that we believe them” (73). By examining our beliefs, we can see more clearly the ways in which we are complicit with our culture’s morés and practices. We can get to know the ways in which we have been seduced or coerced into participation and compliance with societal norms. We are then better able to pragmatically choose for ourselves if these endorsed beliefs and practices our actually serving us. Intimately understanding our beliefs takes away their power over us, freeing up space in which we can choose our beliefs with awareness. In this section I try to illuminate how beliefs function so that we might have more insight into them.

Richard Gillett quips that “It is more work to maintain a belief than a car” (53). We don’t notice the work that we are doing, however, because it is mostly automatic and unconscious. Gillett breaks down the things that we do in order to “keep our precious beliefs intact.” He describes how we make life choices that both reflect and confirm our beliefs about ourselves and our beliefs about others. He contends, “To some extent we choose situations and people that fit our perceptions” (53). He gives two examples, “A woman who believes that change is dangerous will choose secure relationships and a secure working situation so that she does not have to test out change. A man who believes he is stupid will choose manual work or repetitive mental work requiring little creativity or initiative—in this way he never develops his mind and is able to retain his belief” (53). These people he describes never test the validity of their beliefs. Instead, they choose actions and situations that are based upon their beliefs and help maintain them.

For example, I’m sure we all know (or perhaps are) someone who is always the victim in every story told. Even in stories where the person seems to come out triumphant, s/he insists that s/he was somehow victimized. Energy medicine pioneer and author Caroline Myss has this to say about the origins of victimhood:

Being a Victim is a common fear. The Victim archetype may manifest the first time you don’t get what you want or need; are abused by a parent, playmate, sibling, or teacher; or are accused of or punished for something you didn’t do. You may suppress your outrage at the injustice if the victimizer is bigger and more powerful than you. But at a certain point you discover a perverse advantage to being the victim (116).

This advantage is the reason that the victim often clings to and insists upon that identity. S/he goes to great lengths to maintain the role, filtering out experiences and situations that contradict his/her belief in his/her victimhood. S/he might remember the same situation differently than others who were present. S/he takes the truth and manipulates it to support his/her beliefs. Much of this is done unconsciously, or on a continuum of awareness. Steven Covey writes about this in Principle-Centered Leadership, a follow-up book to his wildly popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He places victimhood at the low end of a spectrum measuring effectiveness, with self-awareness at the high end. He sees victimhood as a lack of self-awareness. He writes:

At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force in your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness (42).

Viewing victimhood in this way acknowledges that while there may be real or imagined limitations existing in the world, we cannot know for sure how much the world is actually oppressing us until we stop oppressing ourselves. For surely we can name at least a few people who have come from circumstances far worse (in our judgment) than our own and have somehow soared far higher than we ever imagined possible for ourselves. We can attribute it to genius or luck, if that serves us. But it is also possible to see these people as able to transcend and transgress the limits enforced by others in order to realize the potential within themselves by simply refusing to believe what the world tells them about themselves.

This type of belief maintenance is done not just with victims but with a variety of identity roles. We look around for evidence that supports our beliefs, and look right past any information that doesn’t, or even contradicts them. We see, by and large, what we want to see. Thus does a belief become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy” smacks of some sort of hocus-pocus, Gillett explains that it is simply the way in which our pre-existing thought causes us to treat others as if our thought were already true. He contends that it is actually our thoughts and actions that call forth in the other the very behavior or quality we were guarding ourselves against.

The self-fulfilling prophecy of the man who believes “women are manipulative” goes something like this: “Women are manipulative, therefore I won’t trust her.” Because she feels treated with suspicion, she keeps her distance from him. Intimacy therefore disappears and they are left with a relationship of emotional dishonesty and mental manipulation. The part she takes in that process proves that “women are manipulative.” Of course, people are hardly ever aware of the mechanism behind the self fulfilling prophecy. Events happen that seem to vindicate the belief-- the man does really act like a brute and the woman does really manipulate, and both are unaware of the strings they pulled to create or manifest that reality in the other (52).

Although we do not notice our own role in bringing our self-fulfilling prophesies to fruition, Gillett argues that we “mold, select from, exaggerate, or distort the past to make it support our current belief. The process is so automatic, however, that we do not even realize our own bias” (55).

We also rationalize contradictory evidence when it does arise. “Rationalization,” Gillett explains, “Is the last ditch attempt, when all else has failed, to make the aberrant world fit the confines of a belief system” (59). We use the imagined future to support our stance, often giving reasons why “it’ll never work” or “it’ll never happen.” We use our imaginations against ourselves to manufacture an undesirable or impossible outcome. We often assume our reality will remain the same into perpetuity. The imagined result, Gillett maintains, directly impacts what we believe is possible in the present. If I believe “I am never going to get out of debt,” I will not bother to attempt to try by changing my spending habits. If I believe “I am never going to lose weight,” I will feel like it doesn’t really matter if I eat this donut now. This keeps us from changing, keeps us stuck in the same cycles.

Our beliefs also impact the future by filtering the past. Ekhart Tolle, a prominent spiritual teacher explains how the past functions to limit beliefs in the present. He refers to the egoic mind, or the mind wrapped up in “self”-consciousness. He writes:

The egoic mind is completely conditioned by the past. Its conditioning is twofold: It consists of content and structure. In the case of a child who cries in deep suffering because his toy has been taken away, the toy represents content. It is interchangeable with any other content, any other toy or object. The content you identify with is conditioned by your environment, your upbringing, and surrounding culture. Whether the child is rich or poor, whether the toy is a piece of wood shaped like an animal or a sophisticated electronic gadget makes no difference as far as the suffering caused by its loss is concerned. The reason why such acute suffering occurs is concealed in the word ‘my,’ and it is structural (34).

Tolle explains an important force at play in all of these manipulations, “One of the most basic mind structures through which the ego comes into existence is identification. The word ‘identification’ is derived from the Latin word idem, meaning ‘same’ and facere, which means ‘to make.’ So when I identify with something, I ‘make it the same.’ The same as what? The same as I. I endow it with a sense of self, and so it becomes part of my ‘identity’” (35). This identification is ultimately what causes our suffering when we are painfully reminded that we are not the thing we have convinced ourselves that we are. Whatever the identification, whether with a material thing like a car or a house, or with a title or occupation, or with a role such as mother or doctor, or an emotional state like grief or depression, or with one’s race or gender, religion or sexual preference—it is ultimately a construction of our mind, as Tolle asserts, in which we make the thing the same as us. The deep identification with a label or role causes the person to consistently interpret whatever content s/he is given such that it fits into the pre-determined structure that is in keeping with his beliefs about himself. We become in our mind these things that are really little more than practices that we have chosen.

Tolle explains, "What kind of things you identify with will vary from person to person according to age, gender, income, social class, fashion, the surrounding culture, and so on. What you identify with is all to do with content; whereas, the unconscious compulsion to identify is structural” (36). This idea of content as separate and apart from structure is a useful one. It shows the mechanisms at work so that a victim, for example, can maintain the structure of his victimhood while changing the content to suit the occasion. So closely identified is the victim with his victimhood that he often does not see the structure, only the content, which in his mind justifies or vindicates his thoughts or actions. It is by examining the structure—the way in which the victim seeks out situations in which he will be victimized, manipulates the elements in the situation to render himself the victim, or only notices situations that confirm his victimhood—that the victim can stop looking at the content and start looking at himself. Victimhood is a locus of power. There is tremendous power in articulating what is not possible, what I can't do, what is not available to me. Many of the prisons in life are self constructed, based upon our firm reliance on limiting beliefs.

The Advantages of Limiting Beliefs

There are many advantages to maintaining limiting beliefs. One advantage is what Gillett calls “the ego advantage.” This refers to the way that “with great dexterity of mind, any belief, however narrow, can be converted into a personal superiority” (44). Gillett contends that we are able to take our weaknesses and turn them—in our own minds—into strengths. He discusses how we are able to see ourselves as superior to others based on a structure that perceives a quality in them as a flaw or disagreeable or negative, then views the very same quality in ourselves as positive. We do this by sugar-coating the trait linguistically and making it in line with our beliefs about what is worthwhile or positive, recasting what we have shunned in another as a prized trait in ourselves. Gillett provides some wonderfully clear examples:

Take the situation of the man who has difficulty in crying or being tender: It is usually much easier for him to think to himself “I’m a man”; “I’m not weak”; “I’m strong”; “I can take it,” than it is for him to admit his own difficulty with, or even disapproval of, tenderness. It is easier to say: “I know what’s best for me” than to admit you are frightened of change because you have an old belief that change is dangerous. It is easier to consider “I am above money” or “money is dirty” than to face the possibility that you cannot successfully sell goods because you do not really believe you are good enough. Quite often underlying beliefs are lightly hidden beneath a sugar-coating of ego, which makes the belief palatable (44).

Thus, our inability to keep a job is seen in ourselves as “free spiritedness,” our unwillingness to commit to a relationship is attributed to our positive quality of “being picky” or “not settling.” We find ways to spin our misdeeds into virtues in our own minds. We then judge others who do not share our limited belief. As Gillett describes, “The man who has difficulty being tender calls the man who weeps ‘soft.’ The woman who is frightened of change calls the person who changes freely ‘inconsistent’ or ‘untrustworthy.’ The man who cannot sell his product thinks of the successful salesperson as a ‘money-grabber’” (45). As he explains, “The worst liabilities can become marvelous assets” (45).

Another advantage to limiting beliefs that Gillett points out is the illusion of safety that accompanies them. Gillett explains, “As long as we stay within the confines of our belief systems, we are afforded a feeling of security. There is no need for the anxiety of uncertainty because any new input will be rejected before it is effective, or else distorted to fit the parameters of our beliefs” (47). Gillett contends that we reject new information, not allowing it to permeate our consciousness, or we force it into accordance with our pre-set beliefs. Gillett asserts that this is true even when the beliefs create dangerous situations for the believer:

For example, women who believe “men are violent” or “I deserve to be mistreated by a man” tend to choose violent men over and over again. Although they are genuinely fearful and do not like pain or humiliation, the “old situation” provides a paradoxical sense of security. The familiarity of a repeated situation, created by a belief, somehow feels like home. We know the score. We know the rules of the game. Spiritual teachers say that it’s necessary to repeat situations until we master what we need to learn. There is certainly a curious attraction to repeat experiences that fit with a limited belief, and this continues until we learn to change the belief (47).

The predictability of the outcome makes the situations feel comfortable and familiar. We know the outcome before we even get to the end, mainly because we are helping create it. When it arrives, we think “I knew this would happen!” Whether “this” is getting rejected by a friend, cheating on a new girlfriend, being bested by a sibling, or feeling abandoned by a parent, our limiting beliefs help bring it to fruition. Gillett explains the mechanisms of such prediction:

First, our interpretation and perception of events are distorted to fit into our system of belief. If you don’t like somebody, for example, they look uglier and your interpretation of their motives is tainted with suspicion. Secondly, we selectively remember and perceive events that fit our beliefs, and selectively forget and ignore events that do not fit. If you think the world is an awful place, you will notice and focus on the one dead leaf in a bunch of beautiful flowers. Thirdly, we make life choices that fit our belief. For example, if you are a woman who believes “men are brutes,” you will have a tendency to marry brutes. If you are a man who believes women are manipulative, you will tend to choose manipulative women. Fourthly, implicit in every belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have always found that there is a rational explanation how a belief gets translated into reality (51).

Holding limiting beliefs ultimately makes us less responsible for the outcomes in our lives. As Gillett says, “it exonerates us from action” (49). Why bother when we know it won’t work out anyway? I have had many people tell me what they want to do, and when I give them encouragement and support, they start their list of reasons why they can’t do it. Most of these are projections, “my husband would never let me go back to school,” assumptions, “I probably couldn’t qualify for a loan,” or recollections of past events, “the last time I started working out I pulled a muscle,” or even associations with unrelated information, like “my parents are divorced, so I’m not sure I’m cut out for marriage.” We don’t have to try, don’t have to challenge ourselves. We don’t have to do anything really. And we don’t. We dream of greatness while clinging to our safe, limited versions of what we are and what we are capable of. We determine what causes us pleasure and what causes us displeasure, and we try to live such that we only encounter and experience the pleasurable things. While it is arguable that these likes and dislikes are simply judgments that prevent us from being fully present and accepting what is, I hardly expect any of us to rush out and order a plate of our least favorite food. It is perhaps even instinctual that we endeavor to create a safe and comfortable environment for ourselves, as relatively vulnerable creatures that protect ourselves mostly with our minds. But, over time, for many of us, our preference of safety and comfort takes over and becomes rigid. We know what we like and we’re not too interested in experimenting, not even with things we have never experienced.

Gillett argues that even our body language and facial expressions help to attract the situations that fit our beliefs. He contends that “We are all equipped with an automatic, unconscious understanding of the basic body language that constitutes genuineness” (59). We communicate our beliefs about ourselves with our bodies as well as our minds. “A woman with wide-open eyes, slightly caved-in chest, raised shoulders, and shaking hands is proclaiming through her patterns of muscular tension and the stance of her body: ‘I’m scared—protect me.’ This message acts as an aphrodisiac on all those men who believe ‘I am the great protector.’ Like moths drawn to a light, these men will pursue her one after another” (54). Our body is informed by our beliefs and many of our physical illnesses can be traced to problematic limiting beliefs as well.

Above and beyond all the ways that we maintain our beliefs previously described, we do one very important and insidious thing: we manufacture feelings that support our beliefs. While we often rely on our feelings and often take them as “truth,” Gillet argues that “Many feelings are no more than emotional representations of the restrictions of the mind” (61). In the example of racial prejudice, “A person has to have the prejudice—the misinterpretation—before he or she can feel the hate. Feelings are easily manufactured from attitudes” (61). We often use our feelings to validate our beliefs, ignoring the ways in which they inform one another.

While we may (or may) not be able to control the events that occur in our lives, it is inarguable that we can control our responses and reactions to them. What might be the moment to throw in the towel for most is the moment for a few others to try harder with renewed conviction. What might be life ending for some is life-beginning for a few others. It all depends on our own perspective of the events of our lives, our positive or negative judgments of those events, and who we see ourselves to be in relationship to those events. One guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and becomes a depressed, reclusive alcoholic; another guy gets into a car accident, loses his legs, and ends up winning the Special Olympics for downhill skiing a few years later. Our choices depend on our perspective.

Becoming Aware of Limiting Beliefs

As Stephen Levine pointed out in Meetings at the Edge “…growth is really a letting go of those places of holding beyond which we seldom venture. That edge is our cage, our imagined limitations, our attachment to old models of who we think we are, or should be. It is our edges that define what we consider ‘safe territory’” (44). Understanding that limiting beliefs exist, and that we create our reality with our thoughts to a larger extent than we often acknowledge, is an important first step toward change. We are able to take responsibility for our lives to a greater degree.

The next step is to diagnose and decipher our own limiting beliefs. Some of these will be obvious, others will be much more subtle and obscured. This is where it stops being an intellectual exercise and becomes a personal and embodied one. Gillett gives some guidelines for diagnosing your beliefs.

Get a notebook and sit in a relaxed position. It is important to answer the following questions quickly and without censorship. Allow yourself to be irrational—allow yourself to write down things that you disapprove of or that you are not sure of. Making a mistake will cause no harm, but trying to avoid mistakes will stop you from discovering anything you don’t know… Go over these…questions a day or two later. Do not make any deletions but add on any other thoughts or feelings that come up. Do not be concerned if there are contradictions. You will find that your answers provide a rich supply of beliefs and self-imposed limits (124-125).

His suggestion of an automatic writing process is intended to keep you, the writer, from self-editing. The editing itself would be a form of judgment and, as such, counterproductive to the exercise. He then offers several questions to answer honestly. Some of these are:

“What are my goals in life?” He notes that “They do not need to be realistic in terms of your present situation and they should not take into account anything that anybody else wants or needs from you.” (125)

“What is it that stops me from having these goals right now?” He suggests that “For each goal write down all the things that seem to you to be in the way—aspects of yourself (your body, your feelings, your inner self, your mind, your characteristics), aspects of others, of society, the past, your age, time, loyalties, the inevitable way life is. Write fast. Don’t think too much. Allow yourself to be unreasonable.” (125)

“What do I disapprove of?” He recommends that you “try to make the suggestion into a definitive statement, even if it sounds dogmatic and off the walls. Remember that this is a process of exploration which eventually aims to go beyond the limiting belief. The first step is to have the personal honesty and courage to see what the limiting belief might be.” (128)

“What do the people of things that I disapprove of have in common?”

And then, the clincher, “So what does that make me?” or “How am I different?” or “How am I similar?” Exploring the relationship between your disapproval of others and what that means in terms of your own ego is very interesting.

He then offers a really interesting list of questions that help to identify a lot of beliefs. When you read your responses, they might sound absurd, contradictory, racist, sexist, conservative, unfair, and completely irrational. And that’s okay. The point is not to judge what we think, but to uncover it. The next several questions were quite revelatory for me.

“What were or are my parents’ belief systems?” You can figure this out by remembering or thinking about what they approve(d) and disapprove(d) of? Sometimes your own beliefs will be opposite of your parents beliefs.

“What generalizations about life did I learn from:

My country?

My culture?

My class?

My education?

My color?

My religion?

My gender?

My body image?

My profession?

Other influential people in my life?” (131-2).

Gillett explains, “Once you have dislodged your belief from what you used to think was reality, you are free to create a better belief. Such a simple statement may seem hard to accept at first. Many people have tried positive thinking techniques, only to find them unreal or too good to be true. A limiting belief is, by nature, cynical. When faced with the unlimited, it projects a screen of disbelief: ‘Come on, you've got to be kidding,’ it says. Somehow the old limiting belief is so firmly ingrained in the mind as reality, that the new positive thinking is simply unbelievable” (137). According to Gillett, this simply indicates that there is more work to be done.

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