Finding Resilience, Part One
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Because hardship is relative, everyone suffers.
This is why it is said that the poor suffer from poverty and the rich suffer from wealth. Circumstances may differ but difficulties are encountered everywhere.
And the line between good fortune and misfortune is sometimes blurred past all distinction. Suppose, for example, that many hundreds of people die in a terrible airline accident, which the media proclaims to be the worst disaster in aviation history: everyone whose life this touches suffers most grievously. Suppose further that the next day a similar number of people are aboard another airliner that narrowly avoids an identical destruction, which the media proclaims a miracle because only one life among the many hundreds was lost: everyone whose life this touches celebrates most joyously—except the loved ones of that one victim, for whom it is the worst disaster in aviation history.
Can the suffering of one ever be compared to the suffering of another?
Yet people everywhere do just that, holding on to their suffering like a badge of honor, taking perverse pride in their conviction that they have suffered more than others—and that the wrongs done to them have actually defined them. By believing they have a legitimate right to feel unjustly wronged, people create a wounded self around which the rest of their life comes to revolve. To give up their pain, in other words, would mean giving up who they have become.
Why are we so predisposed to identify ourselves with what has wounded us?
Because our wounds are supposed to make us stronger, nobler, and wiser.
Because healing is supposed to replace the wound.
Because the wound is supposed to return to wholeness.
Not, as many believe, because human nature is defined by crisis.
But because human nature is defined by how it overcomes crisis.
Let us return to the inner path by reminding ourselves that a hurricane will uproot the stoutest and most rigid tree—but be powerless to do anything more than bend the tender and green sapling to the ground. The storm passes and the great rigid self is broken—but the flexible self resiliently returns to its former condition. Though it runs counter to the notions of others around you, giving up your pain—past as well as present—frees you up to create the person you have always believed yourself to be.
This is the I Ching trigram for Water. It symbolizes pitfalls, difficulties, and hardships. It speaks of the need to bring into ourselves the nature of water that flows between the steep cliffs of a deep gorge. By sensing the ever-moving Water within, we train ourselves to achieve inner Resiliency.
Water moves. And keeps moving. It flows around and between and among. It does not linger, does not dwell, does not stay. It lets go and moves along as soon as it arrives. It does not hold onto nor fixate upon whatever it comes into contact with. Water trains us to respond to everything we experience by adapting fluidly, flowing around, and moving past.
What is it within us that can choose to hold onto, or let go of, experience?
Our attention.
Attention must move. And keep moving. It must not dwell on things nor brood on things, since this makes it fixed and rigid, growing increasingly less adaptable and creative with every passing year. Just as rivers flow around mountains on their way to the sea, attention must flow around hardships on its way to self-realization. Attention must begin leaving each moment no sooner than it arrives.
What we pay attention to is of two types—things that capture our attention and things we decide to follow with our attention. Involuntary attention is when we are dragged along by things, while voluntary attention is when we chase after things of our own accord. Although there are many exceptions, involuntary attention is most often captured by concrete objects, whereas voluntary attention most often follows after mental objects.
In neither of these cases is attention behaving like water, which always follows the line of least resistance. When it is captured and held back, it becomes stagnant and unwholesome. When it follows something other than its own course, it reaches a dead-end and is wasted. But when attention follows the line of least resistance, neither external nor internal events can dam it up and prevent its forward momentum. By not getting caught on circumstances, or others’ actions, or the news, or ideas, or emotions, or memories, or goals, or anything at all, attention does not stay behind as the self continues to move through time. On the contrary, when attention flows around everything external and internal, accompanying the self on its pilgrimage of self-discovery, their union keeps us from forming a rigid, inflexible personality—and allows us to grasp the dynamics of what we experience as if they were the movements of our own arms and legs.
Once we make the nature of attention the same as the nature of Water, we discover the First Paradox Of Wisdom: when attention moves freely, we stand perfectly still. By not allowing our attention to stop and linger on anything, in other words, we remain firmly fixed within the unmoving Still Point of Calm. This is not an abstract idea. Rather, it describes the concrete experience of moving along with Change.
Change is continuous, the only constant—but if we do not notice something has changed, it is our experience that no change has occurred. This is precisely what happens when our attention gets fixated on something—change continues but we no longer notice, since our attention is dwelling on something already past. The self continues to move through the present along with the current of Change, but it moves like a sleepwalker, its attention caught on something no longer present.
But in the same way that change does not seem to happen unless we notice it, the past seems to still be present unless we disentangle our attention from it. It is for this reason that many people feel they carry the past around inside them, that they are stuck in the past and cannot free themselves from some traumatic event, that the past is still alive and haunting them. Even though no one wishes to be anything but compassionate with anyone suffering this way, we have to stand back and ask ourselves just what such compassion should look like—should we encourage them to hold on to their pain indefinitely? should we encourage them to dwell on past experiences indefinitely? or should we encourage them to stay present with the current of Change by keeping their attention on what is changing and moving past what has changed?
All this is particularly relevant to our study of the I Ching, since the name I Ching itself means Book Of Change. And its trigram for Water teaches us to respond to hardship by continually viewing it in the present, treating it as a challenge to be met and overcome, rather than continually viewing it in the past as something that has overcome us. By continually paying attention to what is changing moment-to-moment, in other words, we remain rooted in the Center of Calm. By allowing my attention to move freely like Water around all obstacles, filling up every empty place and then moving on, I pass through life without suffering the illusion that everything that occurs around me is happening to me.
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Next week, Part Two of Finding Resilience.
The above is an excerpt from The Spiritual Basis of Good Fortune by William Douglas Horden.
If you’d like to learn more, visit the website: http://spiritualbasisofgoodfortune.com/
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The Toltec I Ching, by Martha Ramirez-Oropeza and William Douglas Horden has just been released by Larson Publications. It recasts the I Ching in the symbology of the Native Americans of ancient Mexico and includes original illustrations interpreting each of the hexagrams. Its subtitle, 64 Keys to Inspired Action in the New World hints at its focus on the ethics of the emerging world culture.
Click here to go to the main site to see sample chapters, reviews and the link to Larson Publications for ordering the book.
