Take Me Home, Country Roads

Last week I returned to West Virginia to be part of a wonderful conference celebrating resiliency. The organizers were two women who had at one time beeen my students at West Viginia University, in the Public Health Master's course called Prevention through Resiliency. Their imaginations were captured and their hope was inspired by the potential to awaken the innate health and strength in all people to elicit well-being, regardless of the presenting circumstances. They left that course dedicated to sharing what they were learning, joining an effort to create a new vision for prevention that was promulgated for nearly 12 years through the West Virginia University School of Medicine.

So it was that a more than a hundred people gathered last week in Flatwoods, WV, to celebrate the human spirit and share ideas about the many ways to strengthen the partnership of health that is the foundation of 3-Principles-based work. And so it was that we were all reminded that simple truth, told uniquely from each heart, reconnects us to the spiritual bonds that all human beings share: the energy of life that is our essence; the capacity to create thought that generates our ever-changing realities; and the awareness that brings us the sensory experience of what we have thought. Mind, Thought and Consciousness: these three principles, once seen, set people free from living as victims of their own imagination. They explain how we are always making up our own realities, each in our own way according to the way we are using and holding our thinking each moment. They show us that if we leave our thinking alone, trusting that it will change naturally, we will always come back to balance, back home. To put it in silly terms, they show us that we are like the Weebles of our childhood. We have a built-in self-righting mechanism. Remember them? Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down.

That's why the Principles are taught as "prevention," because as people truly see how their thinking works from the inside out to create their reality, they know how to avoid the downward spiral of upsetting thinking. They know they can trust their innate resiliency to lift them to safety. They know the vortex is no more real than any other of the infinite thoughts they could bring to mind.

The man who discovered the Principles, the man who was the primary teacher of many of us "old-timers" in this work, put it this way. "The solutions to outwardly complex probems created by misguided thoughts will not arise from complicated analytical theory, but will emerge as an insight, wrapped in a banket of simplicity." (Sydney Banks, The Missing Link, p. 139) Insight is a moment of wisdom that takes us home, beyond whatever thinking we are stuck in, and reveals some deeper, clearer truth. Insight is the pure and gentle flute melody that is heard when the clangorous brass quiets down. We always know it because with it comes a positive, quiet confidence, a sense of security in our understanding of where we are and how to navigate through life.

As we listened last week to the insights from so many people, told fresh in their own words, and felt the joy and vitality of people who have come home to the wisdom that Mr. Banks said "cleans the channels of your mind and brings sanity into your life," we all were joined in compassion, warmth, love and hope. We renewed our faith that every person in the world, no matter how tragically or intensely caught up they may be in a cyclone of negative thought, is only one insight away from a totally different experience.

And at the end, as people always do in West Virginia, we sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads." We joined voices and hearts in that simple call to be "in the place where I belong". We rededicated ourselves to the vision for humanity that Mr. Banks expressed at the end of The Missing Link:

"With wisdom, people see beyond the filters and biases of race and culture, to realize the beauty in everyone. Such understanding enables people to stop fearing and distrusting those who are different, to see the commonality of human beings regardless of cultural differences. Wisdom applied to society would do more than anything else to halt the ethnic clashes and wars the world suffers from today." (p. 136)

Those timeless words were written in 1998. And we remain, timelessly, one moment, one thought, one insight, away from peace. We are never really lost. We are never far from home.

The antidote to rage

It doesn't seem so long ago that anger was not a socially acceptable behavior. Persistently angry people were referred to "anger management" or other help so they could calm down and settle things peacefully. People who exhibited rage were seen with compassion, but were considered to be in an emotional state that required immediate treatment before they did something terrible to themselves or others.

How did we get to the point where rage is now accepted as a common, even positive, emotion? How did we come to be talking about voter rage, public rage, rage against this or that, as though it were constructive and likely to result in something good?  Who thought it was a good idea for rage to become "all the rage"? And how did we ever buy that?

Frankly, I think this is a strange and disturbing twist of human understanding. Rage is a downward spiral of thought and emotion that cannot lead to healthy, wise, or positive outcomes. It cannot because people who are enraged are not in their right minds as long as they remain enraged. They are alienated from others who do not see things exactly as they do, and wrapped up in the swirling ribbons of their own most frightening or upsetting thoughts. On top of that, they are creating an internal biochemical stew that will, if unrelieved, lead to chronic health problems and a shortened life.

Rage has no relationship to circumstances, although the more people feel rage, the more obvious it seems to them that their rage is being caused by something outside themselves. That's the danger of unrelieved and misunderstood rage, and the reason enraged people lash out -- it makes sense to them in an enraged emotional state to try to get relief from destroying the thing that appears to be making them angry, appears to be obstructing their view of life, appears to be a threat to their understanding of the way it is and the way it should be.

I used to share a chart (see below) with some of my classes to show how thinking we do not recognize as our own thinking looks like "reality."

Once we find ourselves in the "black box," it appears to us that the thoughts we hold are quite obviously the way it is, and we are quite obviously right, and anyone who sees things differently is somehow defective. This is a subtle point. Wars are fought; murders are committed; drastic decisions are made on behalf of the ideas and belief systems we would die for before considering changing our minds, but still, people taking an unremitting stand for those ideas would acknowledge that there are others in the world equally committed to totally different ideas. Despite the stakes, there is an understanding that we -- individually and collectively -- have created systems of thoughts and beliefs  that are so important to us we would do whatever we could to preserve and protect them.  But we still know that others feel equally strongly about their beliefs; we understand that we live in a world of separate realities. So we take our stands with passion, determination and conviction, but without rage. We remain capable of calm decision-making and we remain able to consider consequences, unintended or not. We remain able to be touched by other human beings, by the common human experience of commitment to our particular ways of thinking. 

Rage lives in the black box, where we find all our psychological pain because, when we are caught up in that thinking, we have no psychological flexibility, no capacity to stand back from our thinking and reflect on it, no ability to recognize the passion or enthusiasm of others as their commitment to their thought-created realities. Rage is not only a deeply unhealthy and harmful human feeling state, as it spreads and self-reinforces, it prohibits our natural human ability to transcend our own thinking and find solutions and answers that are as yet unknown.

The antidote to rage is understanding it for what it is, a frightening but temporary state of mind. We don't need to manage anger; we need to eliminate it because it is an unhealthy misunderstanding of non-constructive thought. We need to lose our individual tolerance for spiraling into anger and rage because we pay a huge psychological, biological and spiritual price for giving away our peace of mind. We need to lose our communal tolerance (even admiration!) for mass rage because it leads to conflict and gridlock. People operating from the stance of rage cannot listen for solutions or engage in civil discourse to evolve opposing ideas into something better, something that leads to agreement and resolution.

Rage is something we create from our own bad feelings and insecurity. A person at peace and feeling secure does not, virtually cannot, create rage. We could eliminate rage from our lives by caring about how we feel, and losing our willingness to feel increasingly negative, insecure, angry. Those feelings are warning signs that our thinking is taking us down; those are warning signs to relax our minds, leave our thinking alone for a bit, regain our bearings. 

In all of our lives, there is a grandmother, or an aunt, or a friend, who said, "Take a deep breath."  "Sleep on it." "Don't do anything until you calm down." They were offering the antidote to rage.

The Identity Trap

In just the past week, I've had discussions with various people who said the following things. I'm sure you could reflect on your week and come up with similar examples that others have said or you have said about yourself.

"I'm such a Type A. I only do three-day weekends. I'd love to take that cruise with my friends, but I could never handle a long vacation."

"I'm a total shopaholic. I really can't afford this and I'll probably regret it, but once I try on something that looks good on me, I have to buy it."

"I would love to adopt a dog, but I could never do it. I know I would not walk it every day. I'm too much of a selfish free spirit to live by some animal's schedule."

"I'm a nerd. Always was. I'd love to make friends, but people don't like me. So I avoid them."

To sum them all up: "I've locked myself  in a psychological cage, so I can't let myself follow my heart or listen to my common sense."

It's easy to forget where our "identities" come from, and how to let them go if they're not working out for us.  I can't think of any mothers of infants who would say their babies were born Type A's, or shopaholics, or selfish free spirits, or nerds. We look at babies as just little human beings, full of promise and possibilities, who can follow their dreams and inclinations in any direction. We all recognize, with small children, that they will shape their futures the way they shape silly putty, changing their minds often along the way. We laugh and clap when the little boy or girl who wanted to be a sheriff last week decides this week to be an astronaut, or maybe a teacher, or a chef, or an architect. We watch them soar into joy,  droop into sadness, careen into excitement, settle into boredom, and we don't worry about it. We accept without question that children's minds are open fields in which they can run and play, and zig and zag.

Then, if no one tells them how thinking really works, our children, just as we did, grow up and learn to take some thoughts more seriously than others. And the next thing we know, they've created a whole story about themselves, and they start living as though they were characters in a novel from which there is no escape. Who knows where those serious ideas came from? Something a teacher said. Something on TV. Something they started ruminating about all on their own. Something that scared them. Something in a book. Something their parents thought. It wouldn't help to track them down; it doesn't help to analyze them.

What helps is knowing that no matter how a whole construct of thinking about ourselves started or developed, the simple fact is we made it up. We chose, at some point, to think about it and then think about it some more, and then take those thoughts to heart. And anything we make up, we can change. To put it another way. The thoughts we think and take more or less seriously are products of our own power to think. If we don't imagine them into form, they can't get into our experience of reality. We can't help what comes to mind because we can think anything and thinking is a constant process. Thoughts pop into our heads almost at random, invited or uninvited. But we can certainly help what we think about what comes to mind, and how seriously we take it, and what we do with it. We certainly can understand the process of creating thoughts as a human gift, a life capacity that allows us to navigate our path through time. We decide what is just a passing thought and what is a really big-deal, serious, important thought that we need to keep re-thinking and ponder. When we don't realize that we're the thinkers of our own thoughts and the deciders about what to do with them once we've thought them, it's really easy to get caught in a trap of our own making, a set of thoughts we believe are "the way it is" because we've thought so much about them they seem really true.

They didn't start out that way. Every thought that comes to mind has the potential to be a passing thought, or not. Every thought we've taken seriously will pass into nothingness as soon as we leave it alone, let it go, soften our focus on it if and when it pops up again.

It's not really complicated to understand. It's just a matter of an insight into how it all works. I heard a former prisoner talk one time about how he "cleaned up" and stopped committing crimes. "I went to this class about how thinking works while I was in prison," he said. "And I realized that everyone has criminal thoughts from time to time. But only criminals take them seriously. And I didn't have to be a criminal. I could just let those thoughts pass and wait for something better to come to mind."