2018-05-10 - Callings by Gregg Levoy ==================================== Many-Hued Howls This book was a loan from a friend. I would not describe the writing as concise, but i found a few gems. Mainly, the idea is that callings are liminal, requiring much patience and persistence to hunt and drag out into the open. Below are quoted sections that caught my eye. Intro ===== This book is about religion in the original sense of the word--re-ligare, to re-connect--to remember what has been dismembered: our own selves, the deep life within us that is a strong "religious" impulse despite whatever outward waywardness our lives may exhibit. It is the sense of 'religion' that psychologist William James meant when he described religion as "the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things," to remember what we already know. Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn't make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won't make sense without. This latter part, continually pushing out from within us with a centrifugal force, keeps driving us toward authenticity, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, against terrible odds, and against the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour. The channels through which callings come--whether dreams and symptoms or intuitions and accidents--are like oracles of any kind. They aren't meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely dispensing information. They are to be approached for dialog, entered into spiritual correspondence - what the poet William Butler Yeats called "radical innocence." Their answers are typically metaphoric, paradoxical, poetic, and dreamlike, and they require reflection and conversation. It is precisely the quality of fragility, he [Ilya Prigogine] says, the capacity for being "shaken up," that is paradoxically the key to growth. Any structure--whether at the molecular, chemical, physicalc, social, or psychological level--that is insulated from disturbance is also protected from change. It is stagnant. Any vision--or anything--that is true to life, to the imperatives of creation and evolution, will not be unshakable. Calls keep surfacing until we deal with them. The difference that any of us will ultimately make in the world is equivalent to our throwing a stone in the sea. Science tells us that because the stone is lying on the bottom, the level of the water _must_ have risen, but there is no way to measure it. We must take it entirely on faith. Chapter 1 ========= By turning on our devoted attention, by becoming students of our lives, archivists of life's details, we may distinguish the calls that are raining on us constantly, though they are obscured by our inattention. This is typical of the rational mind. It is the nature of the beast whose habitat is an era and a culture that mistrust and denigrate the impulses of the deeper brain--intuition, feeling, sensing, instinct, dream. These functions of our guidance system are rejected by the rational within us in part because they're primitive, in part because we can't measure and control them, and in part because they smack of the feminine. We disassociate with them because they scare us. Unfortunately, for us, much power is embedded in the deep brain, including survival skills and many of the underground flumes through which callings well to the surface. Self-awareness also requires that we have _curiosity_ about ourselves, Tart says. We need to resurrect the sort of basic inquisitiveness we had as children, that we usually directed _outward_ ... Through some trial and error, I have discovered that often the best bait to use in luring a call is a little space. We need time when we're not engaged in what the Taoists refer to as "the ten thousand things." When we give off nothing but busy signals, calls simply don't get through. There's no room for them. [media fasting] not tuning into radio, TV, [Internet,] magazines, and newspapers for a period of time. Start with an hour then build up. [It helps you be better able to discern your own voices from those of your culture.] "You have to be willing to step into a mysterious unknown situation and listen to the creative response within you, whether it be music, a voice of wisdom, an inspirational idea, or a calling to just be spontaneous." "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Death is a strip search. It points the barrel of mortality at your head and demands to see what you have hidden under your garments. It also asks the question "What do you love?" Chapter 2 ========= The answer is in the outcome, she insists. "What is the _feedback_ your life gives you? Is your energy growing or shriveling? Moving or getting jammed up? Is your life deepening? And don't jump to conclusions about results. Maybe you have to wait for more evidence before deciding what a thing means." The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind--the one that _knows_ things--so it's impossible to know for sure. But if you're willing to sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and contradictory meanings, then your unconscious will always be a step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. You'll therefore do the right thing, although you won't know it at the time. One thing I learned in the speaking classes was that when people speak from their hearts, _everyone_ is interesting. I needed to learn how to be really authentic in front of people, which by itself, i think, is of tremendous value to people. A poetic basis of mind is, in a manner of speaking, the opposable thumb of discernment, because with it we are able to grasp things we simple couldn't before. Still, a calling is ultimately mysterious, and the process of discernment is always a bit of a guessing game. Chapter 3 ========= Sometimes these contrary exertions inside us feel like gladiators tied together for a fight to the finish, and sometimes like swimming bodies of yin and yang swirling around in the same fishbowl. Either way, the opposing forces occupy a space that is like an ecotone, a transition zone between two ecological communities like forest and grassland or river and desert. They compete, yes; the word ecotone means a house divided, a system in tension. But they also exchange, swapping juices, information, and resources. Ecotones have tremendous biological diversity and resilience. [research Fellowship of Reconciliation] Chapter 4 ========= Whatever passions you can specify, know that there are also passions within those passions that constitute their emotional cores, which is what you're _really_ after, the _needs_ your passions satisfy, what you want them to bring to you. Chapter 5 ========= [This chapter is about dream interpretation.] Chapter 6 ========= Like dreams, body symptoms present information of which we're unconscious... They mean something. They have wisdom, metaphoric power, method in their madness. We are not so much responsible _for_ our illness, says author and Buddhist teacher Steve Levine, as we are responsible _to_ our illness. The question is not so much what to do _about_ our suffering, but what to do _with_ it. Change may or may not ameliorate the symptom, depending on how long we've waited before making the change, but it can have a powerful impact on the course of not only an illness but also a life. For instance, among those who have experienced spontaneous remissions--over 90%, Berrie Siegel says, first experienced major, and favorable, change in their lives prior to the healing.... These people, however, didn't make their changes in hopes of effecting such an outcome, but "to do things more appropriate to living than dying," as one man put it. Healing was a _by-product_ of the change. Chapter 7 ========= The things that happen to us are a kind of feedback, and interpreting that feedback is critical to knowing how to proceed. Any family reunion. However exalted we imagine ourselves to be in spiritual and emotional matters, we have only to spend a few days around our families to see how far we still have to go and what in particular we need to work on. We derive meaning from "just coincidence" when an external event matches up with an event on the inside. A synchronicity is a coincidence that has an analogue in the psyche. Depending on how we understand meaningful coincidence, it can inform us primarily through intuition, how near or far we are from what Carlos Castaneda calls "the path with heart." Synchronicities remind us that the world is shot through with mystery and extravagant gesture, and we ought to be amazed that _any_ of it happens. In _The Global Brain_, Peter Russel asserts that meditation and synchronicity are connected. The more you meditate, the more synchronicities you will find. Michael Talbot, author of _The Holographic Universe_ feels that synchronicities not only point to transitions and emerge from them but also tend to peak when the shift is just about to happen. Chapter 8 ========= Art is something we express instinctively. We can use art to bring us in line with our callings. Through art we can also reactivate the mind of the child within us, which knows what it knows with great simplicity and accuracy. Soul is closer to movement than it is to fixity, said Socrates, and loss of soul is the condition of being stuck--fixated on something, as the psychologists would say--and overcome by the downward-pushing forces that govern all moving bodies: gravity and inertia. The arts, being about creativity and therefore about change, are ideal for leading us toward movement... If you made discerning your callings your priority, then the "quality" of your creative efforts is determined by how _honest_ they are, how true the expressions are to your inner experience. The technique called _free association_ abets this process of self discovery. But given half a chance, the unconscious will definitely associate with us, and it is a genius. Chapter 9 ========= Questioning is at the heart of spirit. Journeying, or leaving home for time to go on retreat, pilgrimage, or vision quest, of removing ourselves from the duties and dramas, the relationships and roles that bombard us with messages that may be distracting or irrelevant or even destructive to our emerging sense of self, and that interfere with our asking for responses to our burning questions. "I went to strip away what I had been taught," Georgia O'Keef said, describing her retreat to New Mexico from New York City in the 1920's, "to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free. Simply taking up a bedroll and hitting the road won't generally suffice to alert the forces of enlightenment, however... maintaining a spirit of observance and self reflection is key. We must be intent on spending time searching for soul, moving toward something that represents to us an ideal... Without this intention, our pilgrimages are only vacations, our vision quests are struck blind, our retreats are not also advances. ... Perhaps we're even escapees, people in flight rather than in quest. Being _alone_ [in the wilderness] is the challenge of undertaking a vision quest... A mouse scrabbling around in the underbrush becomes a monster. In any case, we need to know what we're looking for, and by having a clear question, we are halfway to getting an intelligible answer. Questioning is a prerequisite to change and innovation, and without it there is no discovery. A therapist of my acquaintance, Winifred Kessler, once conducted a communication seminar for couples, during which, contrary to custom, the women spent one whole day making declarative statements while the men spent the day asking questions. The result: The women were energized, the men were exhausted. One reason for this, Kessler said, is that those in authority (usually men) make statements, and those not in authority (usually women) ask questions, and it's more energizing to be in authority, to be _an_ authority. The best way to communicate your experience to others, says Foster, is not to talk about it but to live it. "Vision, if it is anything, is your life story in action." Chapter 10 ========== Our past is intricately woven into our calls, and we can learn much about those calls by casting the occasional glance backward. [patterns, shadow side, etc.] Chapter 11 ========== Remember though, that resistance is also a _good_ omen. It means you're close to something important, something vital for your soul's work here, something worthy of you. I had the realization that i and my entire generation, my whole civilization, in fact, are going to be one thin layer of sediment in the side of a cliff some day. Yet precisely _because_ it makes a flyspeck of a difference whether I write my essays or not, somehow this frees me up to write, to follow the calling, to do whatever I want, because there is no failure or rather, failure is already assumed. I'm going to die and be a million years dead, and anyone who might pass judgment on me for my pursuits and mistakes will be a fossil right next to mine in that cliffside. Under those circumstances [impoverished conditions] the notion of following a call seems out of place, almost impudent, a thing of privilege. When it comes to the reasons for saying no to a calling, most of them seem to pale when compared to the issue of basic self-esteem, that core regard for ourselves, that part of us that knows exactly why we should be here tomorrow... Elevating self-esteem though is among the most difficult work there is. Chapter 12 ========== [Wake-up calls] Crisis is Latin for "to decide," and when in a crisis, you have to _decide_ to wake up. If you desire consciously to succeed at a calling, there are also unconscious parts of you, Wilbur says, that don't want to succeed. If you succeed, for instance, that very success will probably demand more and more of your time, time not spent with your family or friends, and part of you knows you're going to hear about it. By not following the call, you keep such a conflict at bay... What all this tells us, Wilbur says, is that some part of us _wants_ every fear, symptom, and neurosis we possess. Some part of us has perfectly sound reasons to play a leading role in creating and perpetuating them. Rather than fighting them--and ourselves--Wilbur recommends that we use active imagination and compassionate listening to reflect on those parts of us and seek to understand them. Chapter 14 ========== Faith contains a certain ferocity, an unspoken demand that to maintain it we part ways with comfort and give up something we have for something we want. Sacrifice... is the price we _all_ pay for growth. Calls are not immutable... Compromise, after all, means promising _together_. Whatever our choices, we have to be willing to renunciate "the infiniteness of our aspirations," says Edward Whitmont in The Symbolic Quest, for the sake of bringing those aspirations into being at all. ... Any endeavor contains more desires and possibilities than you can carry to fulfillment. Something's got to give. Chapter 15 ========== Although our calls are our own, nowhere is it written that we must pursue them alone. Instead of just searching for advice on what to do to respond to you callings, tell others what they can do for you. Guide the guides by telling them _exactly_ what kind of help you need. Chapter 16 ========== Having resolved some of the splits within ourselves, we also become more adept at resolving splits between ourselves and others, and in the world. With the ability to be in relationship to what moves beneath the surface in our own lives... we ourselves may become navigators for others, if only by example. author: Levoy, Gregg, 1955- detail: LOC: BF637.S4 L487 tags: book,non-fiction,self-help title: Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life Tags ==== book non-fiction self-help