The Good Enough Yoga and Decisive Therapy, Being Sufficient Unto Your Own Your Joy

I was tempted to call this "Why Perfection is the Enemy of the Good" but decided otherwise.  You'll see why.

Oh so much time in the traditions of yoga has been devoted to claims about perfection.  We might next review all of the Sanskrit words but what’s important about them is that all suggest finalities and outcomes unlike those that require further revision.  There are lots of ways to and around such perfection.  We’re perfect originally.  We can realize our perfection.  God is perfect.  Perfection liberates us from the conditional world because perfection is unconditional reality.  The perfect [insert Self, realization of no-Self, etc.] brings with it recognition of changeless immortality.

If I were feeling all of my scholarly urges I would provide endless documentation, but the case wouldn’t change, it would sound even more ubiquitous and inescapable as the essential ideology.  Nothing about perfection, however, would sound any more convincing.  For that you’ll need a dose of belief, lots of mystical claims, and a willing heart for all you’re not yet.  You’ll need to believe perfection is a good idea and that you, well maybe not you, but someone can achieve it.  Then you’d be in the “what do they really mean by ‘perfection’ business” so that we can understand claims better and just how we measure up.  So let’s think a little bit more about perfection. 

Rajanaka may be the only tradition with yoga roots that rejects perfection, not only as spiritual aspiration but, more importantly, as a fact.  Perfection is either spurious or meaningless, but in every way it’s a terrible idea.  At best, we’re stuck with a belief that belies our mortal experience. What exactly do we experience that is perfect?  God? The Self? The relinquishment of Self?  What about the world does not change or is exempt from the terms of change?  If change is perfect too then is all change perfect or do we need to be persnickety about correct perfection? Or, to put that differently, what would possibly be a good thing about perfection if it’s unlike all experiences except itself?  We’d be holding out for the one thing that’s just not like anything else.  Elmo knows.  Or like That One of Rg Veda 1.129, perhaps he does not know.

If ever a word deserved scare quotes it’s “perfection.”  Or is it that like “wire-tapping” the word just doesn’t mean what it says?  Of course, no words can perfectly express “perfection.” Inexpressibility  confers the Ineffability Defense, which means that the concept is real beyond expression.  This is a claim so lame that it warrants capital letters and scare quotes.  We just can’t say it or express it but perfection is, and not because we just say so.  Really?

If we’re to redeem “perfection” at all it’s probably in using the uttanita tactic.  This is the fancy idea that when you turn an idea inside out, upside down, and invert to mean its opposite, you get something better, even more true.  Zen does this with masterful legerdemain when it declares “imperfection is perfection.”  Now we are asserting that everything we experience in the current form of its own existence is what we mean by perfection.  So however those cherry blossoms are doing, from bud to dead flower and everywhere in-between, well, all of them are perfect.  This is a lot closer to reality not only because it admits change as the norm of reality but also because it recasts perfection in terms of homeostasis.  That means that things are as stable as they can be at any given moment because otherwise the change we experience would be recognized more clearly by the word “instability.” 

Truth to tell, what we are talking about is not merely what we notice or fail to notice.  What we are describing is how everything in its state of ordinary crisis is working with and against forces of change in ways that admit and resist change.  The result of any living process of ordinary crisis is stability or, if you like, perfection insofar as this means that things are being themselves even though they are in every moment participants in structures and systems of change.  No one thing controls its own circumstances or outcomes.  When things can’t admit or resist change effectively enough then homeostasis fails to maintain enough ordinary crisis and we are able better to observe the change, sudden or gradual.  Sounds a lot here like Buddhism until we push Buddhists a little harder on their claims that change is the problem with existence, not simply the true state of affairs.  Buddhists never think perfection is being just good enough.

But if we start with crisis is ordinary and what we need to be is just good enough, we’re onto the critical Rajanaka ideas.  We like to say yathā…tathā, which means “as much…so much.” But let's be clear that being good enough is not the same as settling for less, compromising, or otherwise relinquishing the better just to get by.  Let me also preface this by saying that my teacher made this argument well before I think he fully comprehended the implications of Darwinism.  However it seems clear that his critiques of traditional yoga perfection claims line up well with ideas that follow from the core of natural selection’s explanations of evolution.

First, crisis is the competition and conflict that includes cooperation as a strategy to create recursion: things that reproduce mean to reproduce again, without any required awareness of how such desire manifests in them.  These are the grounds for what I’m calling here our ordinary crisis.  We’re making efforts, consciously or not, to persist with the kinds of change that support our persistence.  Who ever knew just how important Vishnu is to our mythologies of persistence  now that weunderstand sustainability as the process of the next viable option.  We can leave aside for now how we humans can defeat ourselves by poor choices, our somatic selves try (without trying, uttanita alert here) to sustain homeostatic parameters.  Let’s for the time being try to stay within the dynamic of viability--- because that’s how we stay alive.  What makes this yoga is that we are doing what the universe is doing to us in order just to live.

This process of making the good enough choice reflects our relationship with nature as living things.  We were all good enough to make it into the world and in every moment are just good enough to keep making it.  We didn’t do any of these things alone but that part of the system is also about viable choice making.  We spend a lot of time as human beings trying to improve our viability in everyday life ---we talk about meditation, food, exercise, happiness in relationships--- but everything gets cockeyed once we elevate that process of improvement to any sort of perfection.  Perfection is a positive detriment to our well-being.

Clearly we can learn how to be more viable and attend our ordinary crises more efficaciously.  The Vedic world made that clear in its live long and prosper aspirations but then failed again when it fixated on perfection in its methods.  These folks admitted desire and death just fine but then lost the plot when it came to claiming their methods for achieving their ends were immune to change and foolproof perfect if performed perfectly.  This is not unlike modern scientific empiricism’s claim that facts are true when all they actually mean is resilient.

Let’s make a point about how we can revise our yoga to be more mimetic to what mortal life as we understand it is actually offering us.

First, let’s abandon perfection for a process of viability and call that the value of being good enough.  This will demand from us more need for assessment and critical judgment.  It will require us to appreciate situations, like choices, to sometimes be worse, worse-er, and worst and not just better.  Best will have to mean for now and that raises all of the questions about how we measure and brings with it the pratfalls of relativism.  But at least we’re working with change without claiming to control all of its terms.  We’re in the unhappy situation of admitting our vulnerabilities as key features of our ordinary crisis but the alternative is the fantasy of perfection.

The next piece is the challenging part.  Since perfection is impossible, which is why it overwhelms our choice making, causes us stress, and emotionally cripples us, we have to become more decisive for the good enough.  This is the path to better rather than continuing to follow after the false aspirations of perfection.  The key here is not that we somehow choose the correct good enough, it is that we go through the two step process.

First, we need to take seriously what we think is good enough and then we decide.  Our decisions are never perfect but when we are more decisive than not, we’ll feel better, we’ll do better, and we stand a better chance of living with our decisions.  You mean, we could be wrong?  Won’t that lead to an even greater disappointment because we were decisive?  Actually, we’re on to an important point here.  Being decisive may not always lead to the best choice but decisiveness itself is where the power of the yoga, the connection, creates the far better alternative.  Thinge only thing less helpful than indecisiveness is holding on to or holding out for perfection.

We may regret outcomes, we can know we’re always working with incomplete, unfinished, or insufficient information, but it’s the power to decide that gives us a better shot at happiness than any other strategy.  There’s a lot more to say about how to make the better choices but this point needs to be clear enough.  Who decides and who is good enough to decide?  Those are questions of power and privilege for another day.  Let’s just assume for now ---that’ll have to be good enough for now---that we are all good enough to decide and deciding is really what’s good enough.   This will show us that good enough is really what everything is when it's at its best.   Our joy lies as much in the processes we need to become better at being decisive as it does in the choices we make.  Take that, Dr. Pangloss.  I’m off to read Candide.  Again.

A Conversation with Trust, Faith, and Keeping It Real

I don't think anything could make me want to sky dive.  I'm not averse to the thrill or even the possibilities of death.  I could trust everyone involved, including myself, and still not want to do it.  The world holds out more possibilities for trust than I have inclinations, much less faith.  Skydiving is someone else's religion to me.  I'm okay with that.  I'm looking for a different kind of experience when I go looking for the conversation I want to have with trust, faith, and keeping it real.

So first a few assumptions that I think we can agree on.  The world burns and everyday seems a far more dangerous place.  The American situation with North Korea serves as a kind of benchmark for reality, not only for real shared political terror but for the challenges we face closer to home and within ourselves.  Robert Litwak has succinctly made the choices clear enough when he writes, "bomb, acquiesce, or negotiate."  Does anyone really believe that our worst choice is negotiate?  We're going to need to negotiate with our trust and credibility first.  That needs to happen before our other negotiations.

What are the terms of a more serious conversation about the value of trust and the importance of credibility?  What do we take to heart?  That is not only the etymology of credibility ---le coeur, courage, creed, śraddha in Sanskrit--- it is the very heart of the matter.  How we feel always tells us about what we are thinking.  Making that connection between feeling and thought, well, that is what we call “yoga.” It seems more necessary than ever that this spiritual conversation is about what “keeping it real” means as far as we can and take with equal importance just how these issues of credibility spill into our public discourse.  Our religious lives are political, our spiritual lives cannot operate outside political and social circumstances, and our politics across the globe are straining credulity and credibility.  What is a living human spirit to make of all this?

We need to feel what we can trust and that means we need to have some “good” reasons, even if they are merely tacit, implicit, or inferential.  It becomes paralyzing to our everyday humanity not to be able to put stock in relationships on which we depend.  And let’s make no mistake about it: our fields of relationships are the very source of our self-confidence.  The alternative is truly miserable:

“It’s an environment of fear that has hamstrung the routine functioning of the executive branch. Senior advisers are spending much of their time trying to protect turf, key positions have remained vacant due to a reluctance to hire people deemed insufficiently loyal, and Trump’s ambitious agenda has been eclipsed by headlines surrounding his unproven claim that former President Barack Obama tapped his phone lines.”  (cited from http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/trump-white-house-paranoia-236069)

It is difficult to live in an environment in which competing agendas mean there is too little trust and too much suspicion.  We need confidence to feel safe enough to put ourselves at risk.  And without risk, nothing important can ever happen.  We can’t love without risk, invent or think or feel without inviting risk.  And we can’t risk unless we can trust.  Some modicum of safety and confidence must underwrite the requisite invitation to secure risk.  It’s that oxymoron ---secure risk--- that helps us define which relationships are worth having and empowers those we need to grow and explore ourselves further personally and socially.

We need secrets too and we need safe places to keep them and to tell them.  “We are the secret that the universe is telling,” was something my own teacher said many times.  He meant that there is always three-fourths more hidden by our limited mortal human condition than we can ever uncover ---his point was less mystical, more practical and, dare I say, transparent?  Our spiritual task is to imagine how we participate in something far greater than ourselves.  We rarely mean by that how we must address our limitations.  Being spiritual is indeed about expansion into that greatness that encompasses us.  But our task becomes truly meaningless unless we take the unfinished business of what we do not know, what is hidden from us and defined in terms of our embodied self.  That embodied self is not limitless, not free from boundaries, and is wholly dependent on more than its own self-sufficiencies.  It’s easy to posit a mystical self that has no such boundaries or conditions but, for some of us, this is just another ancient alt-fact.  If that alt-fact is somehow true, the evidence is not public enough to be verified beyond one’s own experience.

Here lies the crux of confidentiality: we need more than our own experience in order to trust our own experience.  We need other benchmarks, relationships, and evidence.  This means that we need more than ourselves to trust ourselves.  Without that, delusion is nigh and paranoia, without having to be a social fact, becomes part of our inner conversation.  Trust requires a heart that is reaching out to check in on itself.  It won’t be enough just to reach into that heart.

We can talk a great deal about authenticity, revelation, and the need for self-transparency in the cultivation of a candid inner voice.  There is nothing like honesty and the light of day to remind us of the importance of establishing credibility with the world around us and with our selves.  To reach further in we have to reach out because living on the island of self means living with other selves.  The alternative is an insularity that only self-validates without regard to anything greater than one’s self.  This might be the very definition of delusion or, for some, enlightenment.

But it is not merely delusion that imperils, anesthetizes, and disables us.  It is as much the genuine presence of deception.  If delusion originates in the subject, deception finds its source in the object, in other than one’s self.  So the issue of self-trust is once again a matter of reliance and interdependence.  We need good company because our spiritual health truly does depend on the company we keep.  I will return to this as we conclude but we need that all important interlude into “faith” right about here.

I’m skeptical, as ever, to call any worthwhile process “faith” because I find that word laden with hopes and dreams we invent for the sake of insulating ourselves from disappointments and, indeed, from “keeping it real.”  Do we want to know more transparently what we are and will experience, or will we prefer the fantasies that accompany nearly all uses of the word “faith”?  Faith is, at best, a tool and a tactic we can employ for the experiments with trust we need to function in healthy ways.  Unless, of course, you believe your faith saves you, then all I have left is my trust in our differences of opinion.

So if faith means only a requisite supposal rather than rock solid assurance, what are we to make of that limitation?  One can say that faith supposes doubt and leaves open possibilities.  But for my money, “faith” just doesn’t cut it.  It’s lost its edge and while it can serve theists as a productive instrument of their own convictions, it leaves me wholly unquenched and not a little importunate.  I’m trying my best here not to conflate “faith” with trust because the one involves a wishful character while the other demands character.  I may have access to my wishes (much like Republican healthcare plans) but if I can’t afford my wishes then what is demanded instead is a test of character.  Trust tests character while faith merely substitutes for it. These ideas are likely making me fewer friends and raising all sorts of feelings and even objections in you.  That’s because “faith” is such a laden, complex, and often meaningful word to so many: it comes from culture but how much of that comes from you?

Shadows come into play whenever we examine our inner conflicts.  I confess my own traumas involving “faith” involve very unpleasant, nay, tortured conversations with Wilfred Cantwell Smith whose Faith and Belief was published during my graduate years.  Cantwell Smith held my professional fate in his hands and our dissonance didn’t make anything easier for me.  I also made it something of a mission to demonstrate to Dr. Smith that his fundamental thesis ---that faith is a quality of human experience that is the foundation of all religions and is not to be confused with belief--- confused Christian and other monotheistic traditions with other kinds of religions that refuse to be defined by faith. 

I have in mind here particularly the Vedic world, which one can argue requires no faith, no trust, nothing more than the evidence and efficacy of experiments tried and true.  In Vedic ritual the claim is “do this, get that,” and the heart of its doctrine is aptly described in the saying, dehi me dadāmi te, which means, “give to me, I give.”  This is the heart of Vedic ritualism, which by every measure passes the duck-test of religion (it quacks, waddles, has feather and a bill, it’s a duck…).  Professor Smith thought those kinds of religion were magic.  I protested they were, at worst, merely science poorly executed but in fact religions without faith.  One need only trust in the evidence and pursue the most reliable outcomes.  The real miracle in this story is that I escaped with my degrees over Dr. Smith’s strong protestations.   We shared a few personal notes before his death and not only did they include difficult and dear exchanges, they provided me more ways to think about “faith.”  Let’s continue for a moment more. 

I am still more than just wary of how the faith meme, so deeply embedded in western culture, invites us to a too-sunny, too fanciful, too wishful a feeling that skews our keeping it real.  Faith is far too often in the way of keeping it real.  While I don’t expect that to be a popular view, I think it’s an apt description of what people want from their faith.  People want the shiny side up because the alternative requires a lot more work.   The problem is not only what lies on the other end of faith ---doctrines, ideas, and claims that defy any methodologies of evidence---it is also that faith is just too summery and so requires too much yearning, the kind that push it’s shadows into more shadows.  Faith admits shadows of doubt but seeks resolution.  And that is a real keeping it real problem.  Our shadows don’t resolve or diminish.  In fact, the more light we cast on them, the more we see and the more we make.

The more brightly we burn, the more shadow we create, which means faith too will become yet another tool of yearning to obfuscate rather than illuminate our human situation.  Faith was supposed to help us develop trust in the face of darkness or doubt and so show us clearer boundaries and possibilities.  Instead it becomes a substitute for trust because we want to crowd out mistrust, not just doubt or fear.  We can live with unknowing and say aplenty about the value of holding fast when we can’t know (more faith) but we positively dislike and eschew distrust.  But these too are assets when we stop believing they are mere liabilities.

We seem to think that there is a cure for our deepest anxieties, mistrust, and distrust.  This is where faith fails too many keeping it real tests.  Those needles aren’t going away.  They are part of what has been selected out for survival.  We need them, otherwise it’s unlikely we wouldn’t still have them, and no amount of faith is going to alchemize into unreality the real causes of these feelings.

Our alternative is to find another way to talk about trust, about the quality of values we need to keep it real.  That alternative we might call again “the conversation.”  (The Latin com- is a prefix meaning “with” related to the Sanskrit su- (and having also the same sense as anu-), plus versare, as in “to turn,” directly related to the Sanskrit root /vrt, thus vrtti, vartate, etc. ) So literally conversation is the “act of living with”, “to keep company,” and so “take turns with.”  That’s it, that’s the key right there.  We must stay in each other’s company and take turns.  We must listen and reply, not merely answer and counter but also reciprocate, carry forward, and carry on.

We have to be willing to stay in the conversation, not because trust consummates but because once it does, it must be made to happen again and again.  Lest we forget, “conversation” once meant what we now call criminal conversation, in the sense of either consensual or coercive sexuality.  Provenance reminds us that conversation is never without the real risks that come with all of the implications of intimacy.  And intimacy always invites us to boundaries, exposures, and real dangers.  We can’t have the joys of conversation without the perils, the jeopardy, and the consequences.  That’s where we need to be if embrace the slightest hope to keep this real.  We'll need to create and re-create trust and a keen sense too of what we must not trust.

The Power of Lies and the Value of Myths

Just how do we serve the truth and serve it out?   All of us face this quandary in everyday life.

There’s something far more than discomforting and disquieting going on these days.  We feel like the truth has been eviscerated, that it’s being gutted by a blunt instrument.  Our outrage comes from the fear, the loss, the grief, and the insult.  It’s not merely that the lies are so transparent, it is that their transparency has been emboldened deliberately to defeat our heart’s truest cause.  We want to know ourselves, for all that that is worth.

My grief lies all within,

And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul.

---Richard II, Act 4, Scene 1.

When we torture our souls to uncover our deeper truths, we know it is worth every story we need to tell to arrive at that place of true illumination.  There we will likely find too the shadows and grief but that does not diminish either beauty or radiance.  We'll be far less afraid to go to the difficult places if we know that truth commingles with the unseen and swells with silence to become a greater resource.  We may need to see more than just the light of truth to see in the dark, and that is why the power of myth plays its part in the tangled webs we weave, woven with lies and whatever else we need to make our inner artifice.

There’s the none-too-mysterious feeling that truth itself is under more than the usual assaults, it is being encircled and assailed in ways that shock and menace our grasp of reality.  We are all too aware that we’re being lied to and wondering at the same time if the liars believe what they are saying.

I don’t think we’re surprised that politicians are professional liars but as a storyteller passionately invested in the power of mythology, I mean to take the current situation with some seriousness.  Everyone knows I bristle when the word “myth” is used as a pejorative.  Myths are the kinds of lies we need to tell, the kind that bring us more worth than the calumny of mistruth.  But lies?  Lies make us bristle because we know there’s something terribly wrong going on and if and when we find out, we know we’ve been conned.  That’s crucial.  It is our confidence that suffers because our heart’s very fidelity has been undermined.   I prefer my lies to have a shard of truth and if not truth then real value, like a well-told myth.  Our alarm and distress is otherwise too real.  It’s high time we take up again the power of lies, for better and for worse.

We all tell lies.  I mean the kind we know we are telling, not the sort that suggest our own ignorance of the act.  Let's call those fallacies and put them away for now.  There's the distinction too between omission and commission.  When we leave something out, withhold, decide not to reveal a point of interest, we're in more ambiguous territory than when we deliberately dissimulate.  I want to talk about commissional lies but not because they are simpler to resolve or explain.

Calling an untruth or a dissimulation a “lie” is to load up on intention and suggest something insidious.  The deceit implied is crafted and perfidious, the liar means to get something both for himself and do something to the victim.  The measures of gain and loss, like intention and purpose, turn the quality of the lie into a richer quantity. 

When we lie claiming moral authority we mean to shield, protect, or do some good.  We do this with our children, not infrequently.  The lie is made using moral responsibility as a justification, knowing full well (or not) that we’re not only fibbing but also a complex judgment call.  This choice to distort or use falsity for some presumed better objective has its own ramifications on the shadow we create for ourselves and in the relationship in which it occurs.  What distinguishes the lie is the honest sense that nothing mendacious is intended, rather quite the opposite.  Our deception means to do some perceived good or, at the very least, prevent something worse.  We’re likely to defend this kind of lie for just these reasons or comparable ones: the lie is somehow the more moral thing to do.

Every claim to possess the moral authority to lie involves assessments of value, purpose, and reason.  Presidents do this when they are protecting secrets and we’re invariably left questioning what we find out and resenting what we don’t when the issues of accountability and transparency are brought to bear.  If we ask when it is okay, by whom, and then bring into the mix all of the rest of the attendant circumstances, we’re left with quite curry of flavors and often no easy way to sort out the ingredients.  What we do as individuals when we put our credibility at risk is assess the importance and value of trust.  We’re getting closer here to the place I mean to take us.

When in politics or religion we lie with commission we’re meant to be part of a larger conspiracy.  We’re supposed to believe that everyone is in on it.  We’re supposed to know what to take seriously, what is meant as hyperbole, exaggeration, embroidery, magnification, or just rant. The key is that everyone involved knows to avoid the contamination and tries to skip the abuse of the truth for the sake of some other perceived goal or rhetorical flourish.  We can include trash talking, extravagant self-inflation (think: advertising), and other kinds of fantasy as being understood as part of the implicit discourse.  Bullshit may be lying but calling it out or not, we’re expected to know the difference without too much offense to the moral high ground.  We can inspired, consoled, cheered, or encouraged and see it as neither sin nor transgression.

If we take just the two kinds of lies we’ve talked about here together I think we can see their common thread.  First, nothing too insidious or hurtful is meant by strategizing to lie.  However dangerous it may be, the artful purpose belies a kind of willful, albeit treacherous benevolence.  Second, the liar’s self-cognizance of the lie itself causes reflection, deliberation, and a kind of heedful awareness that it may produce more than you’re bargaining for and less good than you’re hoping to achieve.

The liar requires a ritual incongruity that can place the lie in the space between what is true and the good one hopes to achieve.  We can think of myths this way too, as occupying a liminal dictation between what we know to be false and what we hope to learn from the value of the falsity, the story, itself.  What we’re after is the value, the real worth of the lie, which we must assess for its costs without full knowledge of its implications and shadows.  The lie, like the myth, needs to reach some threshold of importance to acquire its warrant for telling.  Just what criteria and scales we use to appraise the introduction of lie into our self-composition will be just as significant as the vitality of outcomes.

But it seems to me that one thing is clear.  The mindfulness of our self-deceit is critical.  Lying can be a skillful, critical, and important tactic, part of a larger strategy of learning and imagination.  Alchemizing a lie into a fact is far more dangerous than lying itself.  To use the current term, alt-facts are not simply lies, they are contumacious deceptions that invest in self-deceit as a means to exploit and defraud.  Such mindful self-deceit meant to gull and gouge others isn’t a mere circumvention of the facts or a misuse of the truth, it is a lie told to lie.  And unlike most myths, it is more than a manipulation in the service of the fecund inventiveness that will cause us to entrust ourselves to a greater value and process.  It is feckless rather than infused with cognizance.

Worse still is believing what we deny to be feckless and so inflicting the lie both on others and one’s self.   Lies need to serve us better than this, far better than what we are getting now in the news and from our President.  Lies need credibility and, like a good myth, they need to be told with apprehension of their difference from facts and the sensibility of their complexity.  Let’s make sure we grasp something of the difference here this difference makes.