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by Thaddeus Golas, 1972
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CHAPTER SIXSelf-ImprovementI hope you will find it encouraging to
learn how these general ideas apply to eliminating evils in yourself, to
spiritual self-improvement. The more bad thoughts and feelings you try to
weed out of yourself, the more there will be. Since I myself have certain preferences for what I want to do, I must
be wary of passing these on as having the dignity of law. Therefore I must
necessarily become even more personal in this chapter, and make my bias
clear. I am lazy, and it bothers me to see people strenuously pursuing
self-improvement goals by methods that will not work, and urging me to do the
same. They are often the loveliest of people, and I would love to join them
if I thought they would succeed. On the other hand, perhaps they know
the goal will never be reached by their means, and I am the fool for exposing
what everyone secretly knows. If we didn't have these games, that would leave
a Void, wouldn't it? I am playing the game of refusing pointless games, which
may be the most pointless of all. Obviously there is a danger here of wandering in circles, but if
someone else knew what was in this chapter, I would want him to tell me, so I
must take a small risk. A structure is any relation between entities that avoids dissolving.
The self that you know as a human being is a structure, an organization of
billions of entities. An odd thing about structures is that they will dissolve both from
success and failure, so the problem, if you want a structure, is to maintain
a tension somewhere between the two. The idea that structures will disintegrate when completely successful
struck me as peculiar, and I made a list of hasty examples: a victorious
empire inevitably breaks up into parts or collapses when it reaches its peak
and is unopposed. A man inherits wealth and "ruins" himself with
dissipation. The genius goes insane. "Power corrupts." "The
good die young." Religions break into schisms and heresies. A dominant
species mysteriously becomes extinct A cell divides in two. The magician goes
mad. Hence people are cautious about success or power too easily gained on
some level. On some level, the structure invokes a self-imposed limit on
success, including success in pursuing spiritual awareness. Spiritual leaders
keep telling us the ego must die to be reborn, but we hold back. The
structure preserves itself. The ego, the mental structure, "feels better" when it has
to contend with the tension of threats to itself. We feel "high"
and energetic when tested by negative possibilities: hard work, discipline,
sky-diving, racing, wars (until Vietnam—the North Vietnamese got high off
that one—the U.S. didn't because it wasn't threatened), illness, fasting,
asceticism, gambling, drugs, careless driving, arguing, paranoia (invented
threats), contending with the devil and black magic, and so on. Of course, if the negative definition goes too far, the structure
will collapse, but somehow that doesn't bother us. We love to worry about
dangers to human survival. (Unless it is a real one, like the atomic bomb or
germ war-fare. Then the risk is "unreal," we are reluctant to think
about it.) As a normal process, we define ourselves, we find out who we are, by
what we disagree with. And we identify others by what is wrong with them: we keep
looking until we find some difference between "us" and
"them." Virtues in others are invisible, not really interesting . We human beings, almost alone among species, have solved the problem
of maintaining negative tension by being our own worst enemies. We can never
completely overcome "human nature" in ourselves or others, so the
game goes on. It is plain that we are getting a reward from all the ghastly
facts of life we complain of: that's what sells newspapers. Negative emphasis results in an intensified structure and a stronger
ego. Even though some of these activities, like self-denial, are carried on
under the banner of spiritual search, the result is the same. On a subtle
level we know that most spiritual endeavors will not succeed, but we go on maintaining
the fantasy that they are admirable. Many of us have no intention of really
succeeding in dissolving our attachment to structure and going to another
plane of existence. But what of those, wise and serious, who zealously pursue
enlightenment by traditional methods? Since we know that negative methods of
getting high will not lead to a stable experience of space, what is it that
makes yoga rewarding? The reason yoga works when it does is in the love expressed between
teacher and student, and in the student's willing placement of attention. If
you limit your experience to phenomena you are completely willing to conceive
of, such as the contents of a cave in Tibet, you will certainly get high
sooner or later. But as soon as you walk out of the cave, you will find people
behaving just as they did before. And if you are not willing to be the cause
of their behavior, and love them as they are, your vibration level will drop.
And then you may preach about how evil the world is, how corrupt cities are, how
sinful people are. Insofar as we are seriously concerned about evil, not just as a
negative-tension game, we should see that we need not be concerned with evil
as a physical manifestation: it is that such manifestations have their
source in space-level concepts that exist in timeless possibility. It is as a
concept that evil is real and is always within us. If we cannot learn
how to deal with it on earth, we will be plagued with it even in heaven. Even if you are not just testing your structure, the motive
for purifying yourself —that you feel spiritually impure—will prevent any
genuine gain until you learn to love the impurity you started with. Can any
being seriously think that he is going to pass through the infinity of time
without ever making another mistake? Quite often a flash of enlightenment will give you this message: Go
back to where you started and learn to love it more. There is another handicap to conventional methods of self-elevation:
if you identify with a status system of spiritual values, it can produce
unloving snobbery towards your brothers. The justice of our relations is
exact, and if you are unloving the results will manifest explicitly. You may
then complain, "If I'm working so hard to be pure, why do these things
happen, why do people hate me?" But there is no purity greater than
love, even when it is corrupt and unwashed. The positive way to define your ego is to be one with the cause of
it: love it the way it is, then freely choose whatever behavior feels good to
you. You won't blow away; you can experience your present structure as a
space-level interaction, and then go higher only if you want to. Changing your vibration level, raising your love level, is the only
action that results in a real change for the better. Group encounters, sexual
freedom, revolution, yoga, diets, asceticism, rock music, dope, all means are
dependent on your interest and creative power to be effective. These are all
good games, but don't try to force yourself past the time when you are really
interested. They work only while your attention to them is aroused. And when
they work too well, too successfully, you are likely to "lose
interest." When you feel your structure turning into energy and then
space, you are likely to pull back, unless you accept what is happening and
stabilize at a new level. There really are more loving games than improving yourself or
reforming other people, or otherwise using negative tension to harden your
structure. Keep in mind that your survival does not depend on any structure. You
are a unity, an entity just like all the others in the universe. When you
ain't got nothing you got nothin' to lose. There isn't anything "wrong" with using negative events to
define your ego, as long as you do it consciously, because you want to. The only
wrongness in any activity is being withdrawn from awareness of what you are
doing. We can play these same silly games with a lot more pleasure when we
are aware of what we are really doing. When you offer people spiritual solutions —or solutions of any kind
for anything, for that matter—you are asking them to give up what makes them
feel active, alive, defined— their ego structure. Be careful—it's
dangerous! Well, just for starters, take it that every human being is a perfect
whatever-it-is right now. Every state of consciousness is perfect and
complete, and does not need to be changed. And every change of consciousness
is perfect and complete, and does not need to be static. I have tried to cover all the possibilities at once with a couple of
maxims: Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with
the cause of all that exists. Whether I feel it or not,
I am one with all the love in the universe. [ Contents | Next Chapter ] home | the leisure party | top of page Last updated: 16th Feb 2005 |