The Long Dark part 2

A follow-up to The Long Dark, Part 1.

A couple weeks ago, a Substack piece of speculative fiction triggered a one trillion dollar market sell-off. Essentially, the article asks, what happens when AI starts doing tasks better than people do and white-collar workers shift from “secure” to “maybe not?” 50% of our consumption comes from the 10% highest earners. Mortgages are based on the assumption of 30 years of continued employment. What happens when the main driver of our economy, the spending of people with disposable income, stalls?

What happens when all the assumptions that gird our current “way of life” buckle? How do we prepare for the Long Dark?

I want to start with a funny story because it’s on my mind (and the rest of the post is not funny). I play morning pickup soccer twice a week. An email goes out the day before, saying “Pickup soccer, 10am.” However, most people want to play in the first game because that game is “better,” so people actually show up earlier and the first game usually starts around 930am. Some who get there after 930am complain that the email said that the game starts at 10am, so they should be allowed into the first game. I want to ask them: if the email says 10am, but you know that the first game starts at 930am, if you want to get into the first game, what time should you get to soccer?1

My friend Patricia Madsen says that the fastest route to unhappiness is arguing with reality.

I met my new friend Sam while staying in Ojai this winter. When Sam was growing up, he was really athletic and outdoorsy. But then in his 20s, he had just finished leading a cycling trek across the United States for nine teenagers when a car accident caused by a drunk driver left him paraplegic. He lost his ability to walk, his sexual function and his bladder and bowel sensation. His whole life had suddenly been turned upside-down. A week after his injury, his doctor took him off morphine and he was suddenly was hit with (1) physical pain and (2) the emotional realization of being paralyzed. His identity was tied so much to being active. His immediate desire was to kill himself, because without use of his body what would he be?

But irony of ironies, because he was paraplegic, lying in pain in the hospital, there was no way to kill himself. In his despair, he heard an Inner Voice call to him: “Do yoga.” He laughed bitterly, without his body, how could he do yoga? But then he remembered that the foundational practice in yoga is to breathe. So at that moment he decided to breathe deeply, as deeply as he had ever had. And breathing deeper and deeper, Sam found awakening. In his words:

“Somehow, I managed to surrender to the experience by connecting to the power of my breath and spirit and I had a profound shift in consciousness where I saw that who I really was could not be defined by the circumstances of my life. I was able to let go of my ego and expand into an awakened state.”

Throughout the years, friends and acquaintances would comment on how gracefully and resiliently Sam seemed to move through the challenges of his life. This is not to say he did not feel depression, or face further physical challenges. He was bedridden for over four years due to pressure sores, and spent two of those years in hospitals. To make income, he started coaching high level executives on finding their own inner strength, at times lying in his hospital bed unable to move:

Well, I realized early on in what had happened to me that there was no one to blame … that I couldn’t blame myself, I couldn’t blame the person who was responsible for what happened. It just was what it was and you can either look at things through the lens of this is a terrible thing, this is this awful thing that happened. Yes, it was challenging but if I judge it as terrible, I judge it as awful, then I stay stuck in that situation.

The longest period I was bedridden was seven and a half months. I did not get out of bed, lying flat on my back for seven and a half months. When that happened, I was fully cognizant of the fact that there was no one to blame, there was nothing to blame. I was just there having an experience. I was owning my power by being fully accountable for the experience that I was having.

I might not have liked the experience that I was having but I was being accountable for my feelings about the experience that I was having and a lot of people don’t … They fall in and out of accountability for the experiences that they’re going through.

A lot of people can unknowingly get caught in that mindset, that life is just a burden and it’s never living up to what their expectations are of it and your job isn’t, living up to your expectations, your relationships aren’t living up to your expectations but that’s a very anti-adventurous spirit.

I asked Sam’s partner Melanie if Sam ever was upset by his condition. She responded:

“No, I’m the one who gets more upset. Like when we get to a hotel which says it is wheelchair accessible and then we get there and there’s no way to get up to the room. It infuriates me. But Sam doesn’t look at what he can’t do; he only looks at what he can do, and does that.”

In other words, Sam assents to reality. And because he assents to reality, he is happy.

So here it is: I don’t wish for you to become paraplegic. But I do wish for you the inner freedom that Sam has found.

Whether we know it, or not, most of us react to life as victims. — Faces of the Victim, Lynne Forrest

Ram Dass is of my spiritual guides and he talks about the mistakenness of his psychedelic days:

When we are spiritually immature, we want to get high. Maybe we want to get high on psychedelics, like Ram Dass did,2 but more likely we want to get high on being more successful, more correct, more helpful, more special, more knowledgeable, or more safe. What’s your drug of choice? Whatever it is, you want more, because it makes your ego feel more in control.3

When we want to get high, we separate life into good events and bad events, like piles of laundry. But by judging life as good and bad, we stay stuck in suffering. The secret turn is realizing, like Sam, I might not like the experience that I’m having but I’m accountable for my feelings about the experience that I’m having. Most people don’t want to be accountable for their feelings about their experience. How many times have you been in an inner conversation like this: This [good/bad] thing happened, so I felt [good/bad]?4

When outer circumstances dictate your experience, you are not free.

We thought the goal was to get high but the goal was to be free.

The ego want good things always happening and bad things never happening to you. Hence the hedonic treadmill. Hence never-enoughness. But let me tell you, you can get everything you can conceivably want, and bad things will happen to you. Two of my closest friends just hit FIRE, sold their house, and planned to travel the world. But his dad is now dying of cancer. My college dormmate met the love of her life and got married; soon thereafter they were hit in a car accident; when she woke up from her amnesia, in the hospital, broken bones everywhere, she found that he had died. Who has not suffered? Buddha and the mustard seed.

Are we only grateful for good things? Consider two types of spirituality. The first I call the “Santa Claus spirituality,” one that prays and only wishes for good. It’s an immature spirituality. The second we grow into in the second half of our lives. It’s a spirituality where we are able to embrace it all, the gratitude and the grief, and ask to be stretched large by it.

We suffer. But the goal is to be free. What if that is always within your reach? As my mentor Terces Englehart asks:

“What is the experience you’re committed to having?”

I do not wish for your loved ones to die. I don’t wish for you to suffer. But I do wish for you to be free.

Gratitude and grief.

Can we trust, like the Israelites, that the way to the Promised Land is through the desert? — Father Richard Rohr

The separation of good and bad is rooted in how we separate ourselves from our own suffering, and from others’ suffering. Father Richard has always said that the path of transformation is either through great love and great suffering. And suffering sucks. You don’t get what you really wanted. You lose what was precious to you. You made mistakes, and you have great regrets. You were inadequate.

All these things happened to me. I have suffered. You too?

But suffering is worse when your goal is to get high. Because the actual goal of getting high is avoiding reality.

If your goal is truth, truth embraces your suffering. And that’s what we learn as we mature. Surrender. Embracing it all.

Jesuit theologian Walter Burghardt once described contemplation as taking a “long, loving look at the real.” We have to, as Father Richard says, learn to forgive reality, almost day by day, hour by day, for not meeting all our needs. And when we do, we, like Sam, become free.

“We should not be afraid of suffering. We should be afraid of only one thing, and that is not knowing how to deal with our suffering... If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering inside.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Metta (Pali, maitri in Sanskirt) is a Buddhist meditation for “unconditional love for all beings,” popularly translated as “loving kindness.”5 But there’s some part of me that thinks “unconditional love for all beings” is a high bar and triggers spiritual not-enoughness, competitiveness, and egotism:

“I’m more6 loving than those Other People,”7 or “I wish I could be more loving in this situation than I am.”8

I prefer the term that Pema Chodron uses for metta: unconditional friendliness. To me, “unconditional friendliness” feels like a gentle reminder that there’s no one to blame, that the moment is here for my awakening, and that I’m accountable to my experience. That’s true whether we are injured in a terrible accident, a loved one dies, or the economy/society/environment collapses.

Can we meet the moment with unconditional friendliness?

A long loving look at reality.

“May this suffering serve to awaken compassion.” — Bodhisattva’s aspiration

This is not easy. We think we want reality, but living is easier with eyes closed. We think we’re thinking our own thoughts, but we’re really thinking culture’s thoughts. Unless we learn otherwise. We live in a culture that thinks the goal is to get high. In our economy, we spend a lot of money trying to get high. We demand our economy grow 3% a year, so now we’ve doubled how much we have in 25 years.9 Were we lacking in anything in 2001? Or did we already have enough? Yet we always “need” more. Higher, and then higher. If our economy stayed the same, even for a year, we would suffer. Each of us, ever and ever, on the hedonic treadmill.10

We thought the goal was to get high. And when your goal is always to get high, you suffer. Any addict knows that.

The goal is to be free.

“Contemplation is … the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that come from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative prayer is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.” — Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

The word “sin” is so loaded, but the word (Hebrew khata’, Greek hamartia) translates to “missing the mark.” What if we’re missing the mark not because we’re “bad,” but we’ve been aiming at the wrong target? We thought the goal was to get high, but those are our culture’s thoughts. The goal is to be free.

The 20th century French mystic Simone Weil wrote:

“All sins are attempts to fill voids. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but it refuses to be filled. It rejects all substitutes…. It is the holy of holies inside of us, which only God may fill.” 11

We thought the goal was to get high, but the goal was to love. To love it all. And with that, the end of suffering.

Forgiving reality. Amor fati. Unconditional friendliness.

How do you respond to the Long Dark? By loving it all.12

It’s the journey of each of us, isn’t it? I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering. Somewhere along the way, because of life experience, we get cracked or broken. We often lose our way, but in the mystery of the grace and mercy of God, it is that very cracking that becomes our salvation, our way to discover again what we once “knew” but have “forgotten.” — Rev. Dr. Ruth Patterson