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CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK: CHANGE IS REALITY BUT PERFECTION IS AN ILLUSION

© Dick Rauscher

Abstract

This article was written back in 1997/98. It is a bit redundant but it does contain some of my early thinking about middle path, perfection, change, evolution, the primitive ego, the sources of pain and suffering, and unhappiness. I have included this article because it contains a broad overview of my early thoughts on these subjects.

It is common for most humans to grow up with the belief that we can somehow change who we are by a simple force of will through the pursuit of perfection.

We learn very early in life that if we want to be loved, we must try hard to be white, right, and good in everything we do. We must keep struggling to try -harder –to- do- better. A common childhood rhyme says “Good, better, best. Never let it rest, till the good is better and the better is best.”

Trying harder and harder to do better is a common belief that results from a primitive and simplistic early childhood reasoning process called black and white thinking. This is the process of splitting the world into either/or, right/wrong, and good/bad. This kind of thinking can be seen in virtually every field of human knowledge from the narrow mono-logical worldview of most post-modern science and the aggressive defense of pre-logical mythology of fundamental religion.

Because black and white thinking is not in touch with the complexity of life and reality, the inevitable result of this type of unsophisticated and primitive thinking is violence, suffering, a sense of inadequacy, and depression. When we are not in touch with reality, we will experience pain and suffering. The reverse is also true, if we are experiencing pain and suffering, it is certain that somehow, we are not in touch with reality.

The spiritual practice needed to heal the wounds caused by black and white thinking is simply learning to see the world is shades of gray; some times called both/and thinking. I refer to this more sophisticated thinking process as “walking the middle path”. Let us explore for a moment the source of black and white thinking, and what it might mean to “walk the middle path” in our day to day lives.

I would like you to close your eyes for a moment and take a short journey with me to the headwaters of the river of life. Imagine it’s early morning on a normal day of your life. You get your robe and your cup of coffee and you walk down the hill from your house and settle into the grass to watch the sunrise over the river that runs past your home.

As you sit quietly on the bank of this gently flowing river, picture a blue sky, a few billowing white clouds, a warm breeze playing gently with the grass and wildflowers around you. The bees and the butterflies move lazily from flower to flower. The birds send their songs out to mix with the warm sunlight that touches the earth so delicately.

As you sit quietly on the bank of the river of life with your coffee in hand, picture in your mind, the things that might happen to you to you on this imaginary day of your life….and see in your mind’s eye each of those events as something that floats past you on a wooden raft out on the river in front of you.

Imagine that some of the things that will come down the river of life today will bring you pleasure and you will like them. You will reach out and grasp hold of those things. You will take them off the raft and keep them by your side. You will then begin to worry of course that someone or something will take them away from you. So you will hang on tightly to them and try to keep them close at your side.

By the end of your day there sitting on the bank of the river, you will have accumulated a large pile of this good stuff that the river provides. You will then begin to think about how you might get more of these things you like and then of course you will begin to think about insuring them, protecting them, where you might keep them, and getting the money to buy more of them. This desire to accumulate more and more of the good things that come down the river of life will soon lead to suffering.; It is called greed.

However, some of the things that the river will bring to you will be things that you won’t like; things that will bring you pain; things that will cause you fear. You will get angry and try hard to push these things away from you if they come too close to you. Even though Scott Peck reminds us that the avoidance of legitimate pain is the source of most suffering in our lives, still you will try to push the painful things away.

By the end of the day, you will be very tired from your efforts to push these things back out onto the river of life and you will become fearful, worried, and anxious that the river of life might bring you more of these painful things tomorrow. This desire to avoid pain will soon lead to suffering. It is called denial and avoidance.

But if you can simply sit quietly and gently on the bank of the river of life, aware and fully conscious, simply paying attention to the rafts on the river, you will begin to notice that the river of life not only brings things to you, it also take things away.

No matter how hard you try to hang onto those things you like, the river of life eventually takes them away. Your health fades, people you love will die, your cars will wear out and rust, you will begin to tire of your job and career, the cut grass you just mowed will continue to grow, the weeds in the garden will return, the children will grow up and leave home.

And no matter how hard you attempt to avoid or push away those things you don’t like, you will become aware that the river of life eventually takes them away too. The pain you felt when you lost your job, the pain of your divorce, the pain of your children leaving home, the pain you felt when someone you loved died, all eventually fades and disappears down the river of life; including the fears that control much of your life and which will mostly never happen. They too will pass quietly down the river of life and fade away into the distance of time.

If you are aware enough, it will become clear to you that the river of life is always changing everything in your life. At some point you will become aware that reality is change! And if you meditate a bit longer on these insights as you sit patiently on the bank of the river of life, the river of change, you will discover for yourself one of the simplest and most important truths you will ever encounter. Change is a reality of life. Change is reality.

Without change there could be no life. Without change there could be no creation. Without change the Universe itself could not exist.

Therefore, in a universe where change is reality, there can be no fixed, rigid, or unchanging ego generated black or white certainties, absolutes, or absolute truths. In a universe where change is reality, they simply cannot exist. All black and white beliefs and categories generated by the ego mind have nothing to do with reality. Mind, therefore, can only be pure consciousness that simply observes the grayness of what is.

The fixed, rigid, unchanging ego generated categories called right opinions, wrong opinions, good categories, or bad categories, are simply subjective illusions of the mind; beliefs that are attempting to stop change. Can we see that for ourselves?

The great spiritual Mystics of every culture and faith remind us that when we see the world in dualistic blacks and whites, and insist that our ego owns “the” truth on any given issue, we will bring pain and suffering to ourselves and the world. The Mystics also tell us that when we try to avoid change, which is reality, by grasping too hard to those things we like, or pushing away too hard those things we don’t like, we are “pushing the river” and again, we will bring pain and suffering to ourselves and the world.

They gently remind us that when we push the river and try to stop change, we will bring pain and suffering to ourselves because we are attempting to stop creation itself. We are trying to stop the entire Universe.

So if reality is change. And change is reality. Then how do we work with reality and change ourselves in ways that we would like to achieve. How do we get out of the swamp of despair that results when we use simplistic black and white thinking that leads us into striving for perfection and avoiding failure?

The answer is very simple and requires only two things. First, we must increase our self consciousness. We must know who we are presently, and specifically what it is we want to change about ourselves. We must learn to love ourselves and remember that we are human. We must remember that perfection is an illusion. Secondly, we must learn to consciously walk the Middle Path in life, in the gray between black and white, because when we are off the middle path, we are pushing the river and will bring pain and suffering to ourselves. If there is pain and suffering in our lives, it is a certainty that we have somehow strayed from the grayness of the middle path.

Lets take a look at each of them.

First, increasing our self knowledge and becoming People of the Ren.

In ancient times, there was a society of people that met with their teacher. His name was Confucius. These people were call People of the Ren, or People of Love. These people spent most of their lives in the process of chung-shu.

Chung was the practice of looking inward for self knowledge. If they shot an arrow and it missed the target, they did not blame the arrow or the wind, they looked at their own shooting. If they did not feel respected, they explored their own ability to respect others. If they did not feel loved, they examined carefully their own ability to love others.

Each person was required to spend many years in the practice of chung under the teaching of Confucius before he would commission them and send them out as People of the Ren to bring shu to the world. Shu was empathy and compassion. Without deep self-awareness and self-knowledge it is impossible to be empathic and compassionate; with ourselves or others.

If we are truly committed to growth and change within ourselves, we must become People of the Ren, not because it is right or wrong, but simply because we have no choice! We must learn to be with the reality of who we are right now, because regardless of how hard we try, the reality is, we can only change what we know and accept about ourselves.

Self-creation from who we are now into the person we would like to become requires self-transformation through the process of change called evolution. But the best map in the world is useless unless you know where you are on the map. In other words, there is no map, approach, technique, or theory of self-transformation that will be useful without self-awareness of who we are right now. Without this self-knowledge, we cannot consciously evolve, transform, grow, or change. We live our lives very much like sleep walkers unconsciously shuffling from room to room.

Therefore, a first step of increased self-awareness that can lead to self-transformation is that of beginning to pay close attention to our beliefs, our opinions, our certainties, and the many ways we divide the world into the simplistic categories of either/or, black and white, right or wrong, and good or bad.

When we discover this kind of dualistic thinking in ourselves, we need to pay close attention so that whenever this kind of simplistic thinking comes up we are immediately self-aware.

This self-knowledge is important because when we only have the two categories called black and white to work with emotionally, we will always be struggling or compulsively working to try harder and harder to do better, to be perfect; to be white, right, and good. Remember, the only other color in black and white thinking is the swamp of depression and despair called black, bad, wrong, and failure. It is a very short step from perfection into the swamp of failure and despair.

WALKING THE MIDDLE PATH
The next step required in the creation of, or evolution into, the person you want to become, is that of developing a very clear vision of who that new person looks like that you want to evolve into. This brings us to step 2. Learning to walk the middle path.

As we saw a moment ago, if change is reality, there are no absolutes in this universe. Rights and wrongs, good and bad, blacks and whites, either / or (often called dualistic or simplistic thinking) are nothing but illusions; subjective categories created by our egos to help us in childhood.

To live in reality and avoid pushing the river of reality through the creation of subjective ego generated black and white dualities is what I call living on the middle path.

Very simply, walking the middle path means learning to think in more complex gray categories than the simplistic and immature black and white categories of childhood. The world is not right or wrong, good or bad, black or white. Reality is infinitely complex. The world is gray. The middle path walks in the gray between the categories of black and white and holds them in dynamic tension.

A spiritual practice that can help you develop the skill of walking and remaining consciously on the middle path is that of learning to look for the truth on both sides of any issue. When we learn to hold black and white opposites in dynamic tension and resist the simplistic thinking of either/or, we begin to develop the skill of living more gray and walking the middlepath.

Some call this learning the skill of not-knowing. The less we “know”, the more we can be with the reality of what is. With not-knowing, our self-awareness of both the universe we live in, and the rigid opinions, certainties, and beliefs of our ego will begin to increase.

If we look at the concept of evolution in nature we can learn several important insights about change. First is that nature always evolves from lower consciousness to higher consciousness; from atoms, to matter, to single celled life, to simple life form, to fish, to animals, to humans, to ……?

The second insight is that evolution always lead to increased freedom. Rocks have very little freedom. Single celled life has a bit more. Animals have some freedom of choice, but are still pretty much controlled by instinct. Humans with self-consciousness and self-awareness have the most.

The third insight we get when we look at nature is that of complexity. Evolution always leads to increasingly complex systems. Animals are more complex than flowers, and humans are more complex than animals.

The insight we get from this attention to nature is clear. If we are going to work with the universe, we must consciously work to increase consciousness, freedom (choice), and complexity. Thus learning to walk the middle path is the skill of working with the evolutionary laws of the universe. Another way to say this is that black and white thinking requires little self-awareness, is childishly simplistic, and reflects virtually no freedom of choice. One must be perfect or live in despair in the swamp of failure; one is either right or wrong.

An example of living on the middle path as a means of self-transformation might be simply recognizing through self-awareness that you are not a good speller. That may be frankly the reality of who you are. In black and white thinking you must either work hard to learn to spell or live in the swamp of failure and despair destined to live your life as a bad speller, stuck in the belief that you are an inferior person who cannot spell. A person on the middle path, might accept the reality that spelling is not one of their gifts, and simply choose to keep a dictionary close by.

So to summarize, most of us learn as children to think in very simplistic black and white, all or nothing categories. When we are young, this type of thinking is very helpful to us as we learn to live in a very confusing adult world.

But typical of most childhood strategies, the survival skills that were so helpful for us as children are not very helpful for us as adults who are actually living in this complex adult world. The black and white thinking or survival skill of childhood leads to categories of right and wrong.

It is this simplistic black and white belief of childhood that we can somehow permanently change ourselves from bad to good, from wrong to right, from black to white, and then hold forever this ideal white, right, good self that we have created, that ultimately brings so much unhappiness, pain and suffering into our lives.

But if we believe we can change ourselves through sheer force of will, it would follow logically that others should be able to change themselves too. Forcing others to change and conform to the simplicity of our black and white, right and wrong thinking is the tap root of violence, pain and suffering in our world.

Because simplistic black or white thinking creates only two categories, one is either right or one is wrong. Those who disagree with us are quickly labeled as “wrong”. We gather with others who agree with us and we begin to label those who don’t agree with us as “them”. This leads to racism, extreme nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism. Can we see how this sense of “otherness” caused by the black and white, right and wrong simplistic thinking of childhood is the source of violence, conflict, nd suffering in our world? Can we see this in ourselves?

To walk the “Middle Path” means to walk in the gray between black and white categories, embrace diversity, hold opposites in tension, and find the truth in all ideas and beliefs. The Middle Path is the path of compassion that models a mature adult thinking process that eliminates the violence and suffering caused by the simplistic black and white “otherness” thinking of childhood.

Attempting to change ourselves, others, or the world by force of will, is pushing the river and will always bring pain and suffering. Can we see this in our own life? Can we see that our own self-transformation can be achieved only through the process of evolution and thus requires increased self-consciousness, increased freedom of choice, and increased complexity of thought and interactions.

Can we see for ourselves that love, peace, and compassion can be found only on the middle path when we are willing to empty ourselves of all our ego certainties and learn to see the world as it is, and ourselves as we are; in non-dualistic shades of gray.

9/21/98