The Road Less Traveled - SECTION I - DISCIPLINE - Episodes 13 - 14

 

Episode 13:       The Healthiness of Depression

The foregoing is a minor example of what those people with the courage to call themselves patients must go through in more major ways, and often many times, in the process of psychotherapy.

The period of intensive psychotherapy is a period of intensive growth, during which the patient may undergo more changes than some people experience in a lifetime.

For this growth spurt to occur, a proportionate amount of "the old self" must be given up.

It is an inevitable part of successful psychotherapy. In fact, this process of giving up usually begins before the patient has his first appointment with the psychotherapist.

Frequently, for instance, the act of deciding to seek psychiatric attention in itself represents a giving up of the self-image "I'm OK."

This giving up may be particularly difficult for males in our culture for whom "I'm not OK and I need assistance to understand why I'm not OK and how to become OK" is frequently and sadly equated with "I'm weak, unmasculine and inadequate."

Actually, the giving- up process often begins even before the patient has arrived at the decision to seek psychiatric attention.

I mentioned that during the process of giving up my desire to always win I was depressed. This is because the feeling associated with giving up something loved-or at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar-is depression.

Since mentally healthy human beings must grow, and since giving up or loss of the old self is an integral part of the process of mental and spiritual growth, depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon.

It becomes abnormal or unhealthy only when something interferes with the giving-up process, with the result that the depression is prolonged and cannot be resolved by completion of the process.

A leading reason for people to think about seeking psychiatric attention is depression. In other words, patients are frequently already involved in a giving-up, or growth, process before considering psychotherapy, and it is the symptoms of this growth process that impel them toward the therapist's office.

The therapist's job, therefore, is to help the patient complete a growth process that he or she has already begun.

This is not to say that patients are often aware of what is happening to them.

To the contrary, they frequently desire only relief from the symptoms of their depression "so that things can be as they used to be."

They do not know that things can no longer be "the way they used to be."

But the unconscious knows.

It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that "the way things used to be" is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced.

As likely as not the patient will report, "I have no idea why I'm depressed" or will ascribe the depression to * There are many factors that can interfere with the giving-up process and, therefore, prolong a normal, healthy depression into a chronic pathologic depression.

Of all the possible factors, one of the most common and potent is a pattern of experiences in childhood wherein parents or fate, unresponsive to the needs of the child, took away "things" from the child before he or she was psychologically ready to give them up or strong enough to truly accept their loss.

Such a pattern of experience in childhood sensitizes the child to the experience of loss and creates a tendency far stronger than that found in more fortunate individuals to cling to "things" and seek to avoid the pain of loss or giving up.

For this reason, although all pathologic depressions involve some blockage in the giving-up process, I believe there is a type of chronic neurotic depression that has as its central root a traumatic injury to the individual's basic capacity to give up anything, and to this subtype of depression I would apply the name "giving-up neurosis."

irrelevant factors.

Since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognize that the "old self' and "the way things used to be" are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signaling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation.

The fact that the unconscious is one step ahead of the conscious may seem strange to lay readers; it is, however, a fact that applies not only in this specific instance but so generally that it is a basic principal of mental functioning.

It will be discussed in greater depth in the concluding section of this work.

Recently we have been hearing of the "mid-life crisis." Actually, this is but one of many "crises," or critical stages of development, in life, as Erik Erikson taught us thirty years ago. (Erikson delineated eight crises; perhaps there are more.)

What makes crises of these transition periods in the life cycle -that is, problematic and painful-is that in successfully working our way through them we must give up cherished notions and old ways of doing and looking at things.

Many people are either unwilling or unable to suffer the pain of giving up the outgrown which needs to be forsaken.

Consequently they cling, often forever, to their old patterns of thinking and behaving, thus failing to negotiate any crisis, to truly grow up, and to experience the joyful sense of rebirth that accompanies the successful transition into greater maturity.

Although an entire book could be written about each one, let me simply list, roughly in order of their occurrence, some of the major conditions, desires and attitudes that must be given up in the course of a wholly successful evolving lifetime:

The state of infancy, in which no external demands need be responded to

The fantasy of omnipotence

The desire for total (including sexual) possession of one's parent(s)

The dependency of childhood

Distorted images of one's parents

The omnipotentiality of adolescence

The "freedom" of uncommitment

The agility of youth

The sexual attractiveness and/or potency of youth

The fantasy of immortality

Authority over one's children

Various forms of temporal power

The independence of physical health

And, ultimately, the self and life itself.

 

Episode 14:       Renunciation and Rebirth

 

In regard to the last of the above, it may seem to many that the ultimate requirement-to give up one's self and one's life -represents a kind of cruelty on the part of God or fate, which makes our existence a sort of bad joke and which can never be completely accepted.

This attitude is particularly true in present-day Western culture, in which the self is held sacred and death is considered an unspeakable insult.

Yet the exact opposite is the reality

It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life.

And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.

The process of giving up the self (which is related to the phenomenon of love, as will be discussed in the next section of this book) is for most of us a gradual process which we get into by a series of fits and starts.

One form of temporary giving up of the self deserves special mention because its practice is an absolute requirement for significant learning during adulthood, and therefore for significant growth of the human spirit. I am referring to a subtype of the discipline of balancing which I call "bracketing."

Bracketing is essentially the act of balancing the need for stability and assertion of the self with the need for new knowledge and greater understanding by temporarily giving up one's self-putting one's self aside, so to speak-so as to make room for the incorporation of new material into the self.

This discipline has been well described by the Theologian Sam Keen in To a Dancing God:

The second step requires that I go beyond the idiosyncratic and egocentric perception of immediate experience.

Mature awareness is possible only when I have digested and compensated for the biases and prejudices that are the residue of my personal history.

Awareness of what presents itself to me involves a double movement of attention: silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange.

Each time I approach a strange object, person, or event, I have a tendency to let my present needs, past experience, or expectations for the future determine what I will see.

If I am to appreciate the uniqueness of any datum, I must be sufficiently aware of my preconceived ideas and characteristic emotional distortions to bracket them long enough to welcome strangeness and novelty into my perceptual world.

This discipline of bracketing, compensating, or silencing requires sophisticated self-knowledge and courageous honesty.

Yet, without this discipline each present moment is only the repetition of something already seen or experienced.

In order for genuine novelty to emerge, for the unique presence of things, persons, or events to take root in me, I must undergo a decentralization of the ego.

The discipline of bracketing illustrates the most consequential fact of giving up and of discipline in general: namely, that for all that is given up even more is gained.

Self-discipline is a self-enlarging process.

The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new.

The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death.

For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept, theory or understanding must die.

Thus, in the conclusion of his poem "Journey of the Magi," T. S. Eliot describes the Three Wise Men as suffering the giving up of their previous world view when they embraced Christianity.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? This was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and

death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death. *

 

Since birth and death seem to be but different sides of the same coin, it is really not at all unreasonable to pay closer heed than we usually do in the West to the concept of reincarnation.

But whether or not we are willing to entertain seriously the possibility of some kind of rebirth occurring simultaneously with our physical death, it is abundantly clear that this lifetime is a series of simultaneous deaths and births.

"Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live," said Seneca two millennia ago, "and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die."

It is also clear that the farther one travels on the journey of life, the more births one will experience, and therefore the more deaths-the more joy and the more pain.

This raises the question of whether it is ever possible to become free from emotional pain in this life. Or, putting it more mildly, is it possible to spiritually evolve to a level of consciousness at which the pain of living is at least diminished?

The answer is yes and no.

The answer is yes, because once suffering is completely accepted, it ceases in a sense to be suffering.

It is also yes because the unceasing practice of discipline leads to mastery, and the spiritually evolved person is masterful in the same sense that the adult is masterful in relation to the child. 

Matters that present great problems for the child and cause it great pain may be of no consequence to the adult at all.

Finally, the answer is yes because the spiritually evolved individual is, as will be elaborated in the next section, an extraordinarily loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.

The answer is no, however, because there is a vacuum of competence in the world which must be filled. In a world crying out in desperate need for competence, an extraordinarily competent and loving person can no more withhold his or her competence than such a person could deny food to a hungry infant.

Spiritually evolved people, by virtue of their discipline, mastery and love, are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence they are called on to serve the world, and in their love they answer the call.

They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power, although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people, since more often than not they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways.

Nonetheless, exercise power they do, and in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully.

For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness (which is the way most decisions are made and why they are ultimately proved wrong).

Imagine two generals, each having to decide whether or not to commit a division of ten thousand men to battle. To one the division is but a thing, a unit of personnel, an instrument of strategy and nothing more.

To the other it is these things, but he is also aware of each and everyone of the ten thousand lives and the lives of the families of each of the ten thousand . For whom is the decision easier? It is easier for the general who has blunted his awareness precisely because he cannot tolerate the pain of a more nearly complete awareness.

It may be tempting to say, "Ah, but a spiritually evolved man would never become a General in the first place." But the same issue is involved in being a corporation President, a Physician, a Teacher, a Parent.

Decisions affecting the lives of others must always be made.

The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive. One measure-and perhaps the best measure of a person's greatness is the capacity for suffering.

Yet the great are also joyful.

This, then, is the paradox.

Buddhists tend to ignore the Buddha's suffering and Christians forget Christ's joy.

Buddha and Christ were not different men.

The suffering of Christ letting go on the cross and the joy of Buddha letting go under the bo tree are one.

So if your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.

First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine.

Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy.

Perhaps you may find an answer in the remainder of this book; perhaps you will not.

A final word on the discipline of balancing and its essence of giving up: you must have something in order to give it up.

You cannot give up anything you have not already gotten.

If you give up winning without ever having won, you are where you were at the beginning: a loser. You must forge for yourself an identity before you can give it up.

You must develop an ego before you can lose it. This may seem incredibly elementary, but I think it is necessary to say it, since there are many people I know who possess a vision of evolution yet seem to lack the will for it.

They want, and believe it is possible, to skip over the discipline, to find an easy short-cut to sainthood.

Often they attempt to attain it by simply imitating the superficialities of saints, retiring to the desert or taking up carpentry.

Some even believe that by such imitation they have really become saints and prophets, and are unable to acknowledge that they are still children and face the painful fact that they must start at the beginning and go through the middle.

Discipline has been defined as a system of techniques of dealing constructively with the pain of problem-solving-instead of avoiding that pain-in such a way that all of life's problems can be solved. Four basic techniques have been distinguished and elaborated: delaying gratification, assumption of responsibility, dedication to the truth or reality, and balancing.

Discipline is a system of techniques, because these techniques are very much interrelated.

In a single act one may utilize two, three or even all of the techniques at the same time and in such a way that they may be distinguishable from each other.

The strength, energy and willingness to use these techniques are provided by love, as will be elaborated in the next section.

This analysis of discipline has not been intended to be exhaustive, and it is possible that I have neglected one or more additional basic techniques, although I suspect not.

It is also reasonable to ask whether such processes as biofeedback, meditation, yoga, and  psychotherapy itself are not techniques of discipline, but to this I would reply that, to my way of thinking, they are technical aids rather than basic techniques.

As such they may be very useful but are not essential.

On the other hand, the basic techniques herein described if practiced unceasingly and genuinely, are alone sufficient to enable the practitioner of discipline, or "disciple," to evolve to spiritually higher levels.