Life stages and motivations

George G Clark, 4 November 2009

As I move from cradle to grave my motivations change. I assume it is the same with most other people. The following matrix offers a map that helps me (and thus perhaps you) to make sense of what is going on.

The matrix draws loosely on Hindu typologies with the four life stages crossed with the four main types of motivations. The typologies are more or less self-evident but they are described elsewhere.

Note that the axes have a very loose time dimension with a shift from (1) students motivated by pleasure through (2) householders motivated by success (wealth, fame and power), and (3) retirees motivated by duty (to your community and to your higher Self) and then to (4) saints motivated by liberation (and the fearless peace that passes all rational understanding).

		Motivations
		Pleasure	Success	Duty	Liberation
Life stages	student	1
	householder		2
	retiree			3
	saint				4

 

·         In the modern, materialist world few people advance beyond seeking pleasure and success as householders.

·         The path of desire for pleasure and success is mainly for the student and the householder.

·         The path of renunciation involves duty and liberation and is mainly for the retiree and the saint.

·         In the Hindu tradition the retiree is also called a forest dweller. For such people pleasure and success are seen as too trivial to satisfy their total nature. They thus rest in silence and solitude so as to dutifully make the inward journey and thus turn their minds around.

·         The saints have turned their minds around. They neither hate nor love anything. Time and place have lost their hold. “The mere presence of these (people) in a society to which they no longer belong, by its affirmation of ultimate values, affects all values … the super-social and anonymous life of the truly poor person who voluntarily relinquishes all obligations and all rights, represents (Hindu society’s) quintessence.” Coomaraswami (1957)

 

The sixteen boxes make divisions and edges that are sharper and clearer than my experience of life to date. I have been a lifelong student and never married or had children. I have lived in seven different countries where hedonism and workaholism were close companions and a source of much pleasure and success. I am now 60 years old and have been semi-retired for ten years. These days I reckon myself to be world weary but reasonably motivated to dutifully seek liberation by treading the path of renunciation.

 

So there are rough edges but the map helps me to make some sense of what goes on in my head as I move from cradle to grave. How about you?

 

 

 

 

What people want

George G Clark, 04 November 2009

Different people want different things, and patterns change with age and experience. By mapping the most usual patterns we can figure our own present and possible future patterns^[1].

So what do people want? Hinduism recognises four great aims - pleasure, worldly success (wealth, fame and power), dutifulness to society, and liberation. The first two involve satisfying selfish desires and the second two involve moving beyond selfish desire.

There is nothing ‘wrong’ with any of these and it is possible (if unusual) to be a selfish pleasure seeker who dies happy and content. Many people, however, eventually weary of chasing fleeting pleasures and worldly success. They feel, often in mid life, as if there must be more to being human than this. There can then be despair (the legendary existential crisis!) and a change of direction from the path of desire to the path of renunciation.

Note that the path of renunciation has two variations - (a) a push away from ‘lesser’ things (the legendary world weariness) and (b) a pull towards ‘higher’ things. And there are two paths on the road to higher things - (a) selfless service to the community (duty beyond the call of the selfish ego) and (b) retreat from attachment to worldy stuff and thus, through stillness, to spiritual liberation.

 

“Pleasure is not wicked but it is too trivial to satisfy one’s total nature.” Smith (p14)

“The glamour of yesterday I have come to see as tinsel.” Anon

“ Wealth, fame and power - you can’t take it with you.” Anon

“The guiding principle is not to turn from desire until desire turns from you.” Smith (p17)

“When they find themselves crying ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!’ it may occur to them that the problem stems from the smallness of the self they have been scrambling to serve.” Smith (p18)

“There comes a time when one asks even of Shakespeare, even of Beethoven, is this all?” Aldous Huxley

“What if the interests of the self were expanded to the point of approximating a God’s eye view of humanity?” Smith (p23)

“Detachment from the finite self or attachment to the whole of things - we can state the phenomenon either positively or negatively. When it occurs, life is lifted above the possibility of frustration and above ennui.” Smith (p240

“Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.” Gandhi

 

So - where would you pinpoint yourself on the map?

What do you want?

 

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^[1] This note draws heavily on Huston Smith (1991) “The World Religions - Our Great Wisdom Traditions.” ISBN 0062508113

Rise out of the bog

George G Clark, 2 November 2009

Today there is a feeling of being bogged down, of not seeing the big picture. But the big picture has at least two dimensions - intellectual (objective knowing) and intuitive (subjective feeling).

Think of biogeochemical cycles[1] - eg for water, carbon, nitrogen, etc. These restless flows of stuff can be intellectually studied but they can also be emotionally appreciated. They can be talked about using the cold 'it' language of science but they can also resonate numinously with 'intimations of immortality' and thus infuse the soul with the hallowed sense of Oneness. The 'interconnectedness' of Ecology sits easily with the 'interbeing' of Buddhism.

The other day, while passing some robustly healthy potato stems and leaves, there was a sudden, if brief, burst of numinous wonder. There was a sense of awe at the plant process of sucking in air, water and dung and using the energy of sunlight to transform them into roots, stems, and leaves; and then into flowers and fruits with seeds. And all around were other plants working their variations on the theme. Restless, dynamic churn in a constantly evolving complex system that had no boss or blueprint. An impression was made and it stuck.

Recalling the insight helps me rise out of the bog.

 

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[1]  "Although the Earth constantly receives more light from the sun, it has only the chemicals from which it originally formed ... Because chemicals operate on a closed system and cannot be lost and replenished the way energy can, these chemicals must be recycled throughout all of Earth's processes that use those chemicals or elements. These cycles include both the living biosphere and the nonliving lithosphere (land), atmosphere (air), and hydrosphere (water)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogeochemical_cycles

Strategies of Conflict Resolution

Strategies of Conflict Resolution: "A popular way of describing conflict resolution strategies is in terms of winning and losing"

Donald Rothberg on KenWilber

Laing quotes

R. D. Laing - Scottish Zen Psychiatrist  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_D_Laing

 

"From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful."

 

"Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world."

 

"Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years."

 

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

 

"A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad."

 

A crisis of perception

Dr Deepak Chopra explains how the environmental crisis directly challenges the way humanity perceives reality. Science has spent hundreds of years making distinctions that don’t really exist. As a result, we think of ourselves as separate from the environment. The reality, he explains, is that we humans are an integral part of the environment – and that the environment is part of us.

Watch the short video

Not making chutney

George G Clark, 30 September 2009

This morning there are no urgent calls on my time so I am free to do whatever 'I' want. But this can be viewed as problematic as there is presently a lack of clarity about who 'I' am let alone what 'I' want. The following thought train was set in motion by the quote at the bottom of the page.

Words and concepts are not subtle enough to capture the constant flow of nuances that are thought and felt; but, at the moment, the territory to be mapped links to 'world weary', 'burn out', 'depression' and 'low self esteem'[1]. Google and Wikipedia offer a broad range of wordy, conceptual unpackings that have their uses: but these lead to 'knowing about' rather than to 'first hand knowing' - to intellectuality rather than to intuition - to head stuff rather than to heart stuff.

The goal of first hand knowing is intuitive and subjective in-sight rather than what might be called objective, intellectual out-sight. Most of us are familiar with the intellectual out-sights that populate upfront consciousness and, at a push, we can 'explain' them in some quasi-reasonable manner. So how might we 'explain' intuitive insight? Is it possible to develop an objective, intellectual outsight regarding subjective, intuitive insight?

Yes. And there is no need to invoke mumbo jumbo or magic. The unconscious has its causes and conditions rooted in nature, nurture and chance. And there is constant flux. And there is some room for manoeuvre. By using the heart/mind (conscious and unconscious) this way rather than that your mental state will move in this direction rather than that.

The task is to move to non-egoic mental states that are beyond space and time. This will allow (a) moving beyond the suffering that links to egoic concerns that are rooted in the past and future, and thus (b) first hand knowing of the peace that passes all understanding.

Intuitive in-sight emerges from the practice of stillness such that there is intimate awareness of what the heart/mind gets up to. There is then (a) a letting go of the illusion of individuality and permanence and (b) a manifestation of the ever-present real reality of interconnected Oneness.

The issue has been alive for a long time:

What Really Matters The Buddha refused to deal with those things that don't lead to the extinction of dukkha (suffering). He didn't discuss them. Take the question of whether or not there is rebirth after death. What is reborn? How is it reborn? What is its "karmic inheritance"? These questions don't aim at the extinction of dukkha. That being so, they are not the Buddha's teaching nor are they connected with it. They don't lie within the range of Buddhism. Also, the one who asks about such matters has no choice but to believe indiscriminately any answer that's given, because the one who answers won't be able to produce any proofs and will just be speaking according to his own memory and feeling. The listener can't see for himself and consequently must blindly believe the other's words. Little by little the subject strays from dharma until it becomes something else altogether, unconnected with the extinction of dukkha. - Buddhadasa Bhikkhu[2] from "A Single Handful[3]," Tricycle Winter 1996

 

SO - I use my free time being objectively intellectual about subjective intuition. There is the option of making chutney!

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[1] A neurotic nihilist living in an existential vacuum!

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhadasa

[3] http://www.tricycle.com/30september2009

Money-rich, time-poor

George G Clark, 25 September 2009

There has been much in the news about big time bankers with their bounteous bonuses. Many are said to be 'money-rich but time-poor'. The phrase suggests a thought provoking set of four categories related to the work-life balance. Some initial, gut-reaction thoughts are listed below:

Money-rich, time-poor - Workaholic control freak bosses and factory line workers who are dedicated to work to support their doing and having: they are wage slaves operating in institutionalised hierarchies.

"The devil finds work for idle hands to do."

Money-poor, time-rich - Lazy, work-shy hippies and artists and craftsmen who appreciate leisure and just being: they are usually autonomous, self-employed and a bit anarchic. This group also includes the underemployed and the unemployed.

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Money-rich, time rich - Those with inherited wealth and those in well funded retirement. Also those who win the lottery and give up their jobs.

The idle rich.

Money-poor, time-poor - Those in cheap-labour sweatshops.

The working poor.

Some related articles on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_ethic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workaholic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_aversion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-life_balance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money-rich,_time-poor

let-slip-from-mind

let slip from mind

George G Clark, 14 September 2009

If there is a real ten-ton truck careering down the hill then step out of its way. If you are imagining a ten-ton truck careering down the hill then you can safely ignore it and let it slip from mind.

To change the metaphor, think of a flight simulator and a real plane. The real plane has to be carefully returned to earth before you can safely switch it off: but you can switch off the simulator at any time and walk away - you can let it slip from mind.

So - there are real ten-ton trucks; but less than we commonly suppose! Most often we have the option to withdraw attention from the imagined past and future and to be at peace in the reality of the present moment.  So why do we routinely ignore the option?

Is it because between birth and death we are (a) obliged to meet our essential basic needs and (b) urged to indulge in many extra fads and fashions? To most of us the extremes are undesirable ie joyless, ascetic renunciation at one end, and rampant, frivolous consumerism at the other. So how do we decide where to strike the balance?

It has a lot to do with social programming - but this is not carved in stone! It is an ongoing process that drives and is driven by internal and external forces. And there is some freedom to thoughtfully choose this rather than that.

So do you feel called to let slip from mind the imaginary ten-ton trucks that appear in your fad and fashion simulator? What matters in your life - to what should you give mind space - what is really real?

We don't have to let go, we simply have to not hold on.
Joseph Goldstein