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Bonds
that Make Us Free, Part 19: Same Reality, Different Interpretation
by
Terry Warner
Editors'
Note: We consider this an important book, so much so that we gave
it to all of our adult family members. If you have not been reading
this, you may get a taste of it with this part, and then go back
and start at Part 1. Parts
1 through 18 are available in Meridian's
Book archives. In case you missed it, read Part
18.
In
Part 18, we discovered that
the light that will dispel the darkness of our eyes is constantly
available, pouring toward us in an uninterrupted stream. Upon this
truth hangs our hope.
And we actively
attend to and appropriate that light, but in a perverse way that
turns it into darkness. We don't cut ourselves off from it; we vigilantly
misconstrue it and simultaneously keep our attention away from the
light that would flow to us from other, more positive relationships.
Upon this truth hangs our despair.
It follows that
what we need is not more light—not any additional understanding
of right and wrong. Light is abundantly available. We have access
to plenty of outside help. What we need is to receive the light
straightforwardly and to respond as we feel directed.
Yielding to
the light is deceptively simple. Remember Philip, the impatient
husband in Part 16? We considered
him in both a self-righteous version, Philip I, and a childish one,
Philip II. Imagine now a Philip III. Like the others, he comes home
late, envisioning a quiet evening with the children, only to discover
an awful mess that requires a few hours of clean-up. Like the other
Philips, he feels that he ought to help his wife, Marsha, with the
cleaning. But unlike them, he simply helps her. No resentment. No
fanfare. No secret wish for a video camera on the wall to record
his performance. It goes without saying that he would rather be
doing something else less taxing and less disruptive to his plans.
Or at least he would rather be doing something else if Marsha didn't
need him. But she does need him, and so he prefers to help her.
He savors no sense of superiority or triumph as he works beside
her. Nor does it occur to him to blame her or anyone else, because
he doesn't need to justify or excuse himself for anything.
Philip III cherishes
exactly the same hopes for the evening and encounters exactly the
same mess and confronts exactly the same wife and children as his
self-righteous and childish counterparts. He is addressed by exactly
the same light, offered the same guidance, placed under the same
obligation. But he doesn't distort this light; he has no need to.
Is it unrealistic to say that he sees Marsha as needing his help?
Would it be going too far to say he's glad he's home to help and
perhaps even wishes he had been able to get home earlier? Is he
able to see exactly how things are with Marsha because he's not
concerned about himself? Yes. He sees her clearly because he is
not accusing her and distorting his understanding of her situation
and feelings. Quite apart from the state of his physical surroundings,
he lives in a blaze of light.
Conscience
without Stress
People
who chronically interpret others defensively and self-protectively
think the Philip IIIs of the world are naive and even stupid and
in any case set up to be taken advantage of. They cannot believe
a person could be better off seeing others compassionately and actually
wanting to help where help is needed.
This is the
moral skepticism of a corrupted conscience, which experiences doing
right by others as a drudge, a sacrifice, a favoring of others'
needs over one's own—or else a self-righteous project for
"goody-goodies." As we have seen, doing the right thing
is never an easy, natural, welcomed opportunity for a corrupted
conscience.
But when we
simply do what we think is right—when our conscience is clear—we
have a wholly different experience of invitations to right and wrong.
We may scarcely notice, or not notice at all, that something is
being required of us. It doesn't strike us as hard to treat other
people considerately because we have no reason to think those people
don't deserve it. Our responses flow easily from us, without restraint,
because we are simply allowing ourselves to be as we really are.
The "promptings" that come to us don't have that burdensome,
"ought to" feeling. They seem more like the invitations
and opportunities they are than like demands.
This explains
why, when we search our past for episodes of "doing right"
or "doing our duty," we are unlikely to recall, under
that label, the moral invitations we've experienced and obeyed.
They didn't seem like calls to duty. When we became aware of others'
needs, we made no fuss about doing what they required, because we
weren't chalking up points for ourselves on a mental scoreboard.
For that reason we don't remember them as times when we did anything
remarkable. In contrast, the occasions we are most likely
to remember are the times when we resisted doing the right thing
and therefore found it difficult and admirable to do. Our sensing
of right and wrong, of how we ought to respond to others, is like
a current in which we float downstream: We seldom notice it until
we try to swim against it.
This is one
reason why it is mistaken to get discouraged when thinking about
self-betrayal. We tend to call to mind only a portion of the evidence
relating to our moral character—we remember the unworthy acts
and not the worthy ones, because the latter were acts we took no
notice of at the time. Very likely we have performed many worthy
acts we did not notice at the time and consequently don't recall.
We ought not to overlook the fact that we simply and straightway
do much and perhaps most of what we feel we ought to do.
The following
dialogue, which comes from Jim Robertson's fertile imagination,
illustrates the flow and serenity of the life guided by the light.
As you read this imagined interview, remember: two people can receive
the same signals, same invitations, and same guidance, but interpret
them differently.
Host:
Snow White, it's been claimed that you weren't the least bit miserable
while you were living with those dwarfs. That's awfully hard to
believe.
Snow White:
There wasn't anything to be miserable about.
Host:
You are a princess. Before you fell into that situation, you had
all sorts of people waiting on you. And then suddenly you were forced
to keep house and fix meals and wash clothes, not just for one man
with the idea that a woman's place is to be stuck at home, but for
seven of them!
Snow White:
They were very kind to me. I enjoyed getting the little place in
order, as best I could.
Host:
In order to feel good about yourself, I suppose—keep up your
self-esteem.
Snow White:
I don't think so. It's just because it needed cleaning.
Host:
You could have made them your servants. They adored you. You were
more experienced and sophisticated than they.
Snow White:
They worked hard all day in the mine. I didn't know anything about
mining, but taking care of the house and the clothes and the meals
was something I could do, so I did it.
Host:
I hope you won't be offended if I tell you that this story reminds
me of Patty Hearst. You made yourself the slave of seven grimy little
miners way below your social class, and not one of them with an
ounce of sex appeal as far as I can see. Perhaps you don't want
to disclose what went on in that little nest, away from the rest
of the world. I'm giving you an opportunity to tell it how it really
was. (Pause.)
Host (continuing):
Well, I can see you're not going to take this chance to set the
record straight. Let's turn to our other guest, Cinderella, who
like Snow White has also undergone a long period of deprivation
and enforced labor. What I can't understand about you, Cinderella,
is how you stood it when the others got to go out in society, to
fancy balls in elegant gowns, and you couldn't.
Cindy:
They didn't seem to enjoy themselves very much. I tried to cheer
them up, but they seemed to like being unhappy. I think I love living
a lot more than they do.
Host:
But even after you got to go to a ball yourself, you were content
to come back to work. Haven't you ever heard the famous saying,
"How're you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've
seen Paree?" How could you ever be happy about your lot in
life once you saw how the other half lives?
Cindy:
I don't think a person's lot in life is a reason for her to be unhappy.
My sisters do, and I feel sorry for them.
Host:
What galls me is that your stepmother never got what was coming
to her. If your story had been fiction instead of real life, you
can be sure she would have!
Cindy:
You want her to be punished? Oh, you didn't know her as I did. I
can't imagine that anyone could have done anything to make her any
more miserable than she was.
Host:
Stop the cameras. We're not getting anywhere at all. This is one
interview that won't get on the air. Nobody's fault, ladies. Some
people just don't interview well.
AN
END TO SELF-BETRAYAL
We have seen
that the light remains abundant and available throughout our emotional
attacks upon others. What we need to do is stop distorting and turning
away from it.
But how? How
can we allow ourselves to receive and accept the truth about the
other person or about ourselves straightforwardly, instead of using
it for our own defensive purposes? What steps can we take to let
our hearts be softened?
Certainly we
can do it by ceasing to betray ourselves, for self-betrayal is the
root cause of the grief we want to escape. But how can we stop self-
betrayal if our best efforts to do right can only be counterfeits
of the right?
An important
clue can be found in Buber's invented word I-You. It is one
word, not two. The I part can't be pried away from seeing
the other as a You. I am the way I see the other person.
This suggests
that we will be able to change ourselves in an indirect way, from
I-It to I-You, if we can allow the other person to affect
us differently. If that person can become a You for us, then,
without deliberation, strategy, expertise, or willpower, we will
become I-You people. Just allowing this to happen will reverse the
transformation brought about by our self-betrayals. The truth about
those we have accused, if we can only receive it without censorship,
resistance, or distortion, will return us to the open and generous
condition of our childhood. It will free us from the prison of our
accusing, self-victimizing thoughts and feelings, for we will cease
projecting a threatening interpretation onto others' and in that
way we will escape our "box." We will become again the
beings we really are when we aren't working hard to be another way.
I want to close
this section with an illustration of this liberating transformation
from an I-It to an I-You way of being. It's Glen's story of how
his Christmas collusion with Becky came to an end.
One Christmas
season Becky befriended a younger woman named Karen. (Her concern
about others and her gift for friendliness has made Becky a surrogate
mother to many people over the years.) Together they decided to
make Christmas presents for certain neighborhood women in need.
Two of those women were invalids, and a third served as an officer
of an international charitable organization and had little time
for herself. Becky and Karen planned to glue fine art prints to
wood blocks with worn-looking edges and varnish them to look old.
They thought a grouping of such prints would look handsome on a
wall. They asked me to cut the blocks and scallop and burnish the
edges.
About this time
something happened that I cannot completely remember or reconstruct.
Looking back, I can only suppose that Becky felt differently toward
me from how she usually did as Christmas approached. I say this
because I felt different. Some partial softening in her must
have begun to soften me. I recall being very much in love and vowing
to put my whole heart into anything Becky wanted me to do.
You need to
understand something about this vow. It contained no gritty determination,
no resolve to suppress my wants in favor of Becky's. It was more
like the marriage vow of a person buoyant with love—a vow
without any reservation in it, spoken with the whole of myself.
The resolve issued not from the will but from the heart. A fundamental
change had already taken place in me. My whole desire that Christmas
was to help this person, who was both my wife and my friend, achieve
whatever she had set her heart upon.
So I prepared
a dozen blocks as artfully as I could—a grouping of four for
each recipient. This pleased Becky enormously, and her pleasure
pleased me enormously. The results were so successful that Becky
and Karen decided to make mounted print groupings for other women
they knew, twenty of them, in fact—eighty blocks of wood in
all, each with edges scalloped individually with my jigsaw and carefully
burnt with matches. I did not resent doing this even for a moment.
It was for Becky.
Of course the
two women quickly ran out of prints to mount. It happened that from
museums I had visited all around the world I had gathered a collection
of just the sort of prints they needed—quality prints of works
I especially enjoy. (Often the best reproduction of a piece can
be obtained only from the museum that houses the original, so I
could not realistically hope to replace my collection.) In my former
frame of mind and heart the thought of varnishing any of these treasures
would have struck me as desecration. But I was not in my former
frame of mind. Or perhaps I should say, not as deeply in it as before—I
have to admit that I noticed Karen's superb taste in picking out
some of the best prints. Even so, it surprised me that I felt no
pain at her choices. The project was for Becky's sake, and by comparison
that collection did not matter very much. I was happy.
A day or two
later, Karen appeared at our house with two scraggly pieces of door
casing, wanting to use my radial arm saw to make swords for her
twin boys. I told her not to worry about making them; I would do
it. I bought some fine hardwood and fashioned two neatly shaped
and sanded and suitably blunted play swords—not really for
Karen, but for Becky, because it was the sort of thing she loved
to do for people.
Then came the
time for producing the granola and the raspberry yogurt and the
dried fruit balls for distribution to the neighborhood and our more
far- flung acquaintances. Most uncharacteristically, I took the
lead. I got everyone organized and cooperating in the project. We
had a mountain or two of granola cooling on the kitchen counter
and more in the oven. We were singing Christmas carols. It was still
early in the evening—we had plenty of production potential
still left in us—and out of the blue Becky said something
that stunned me.
"Why don't
we put all this stuff away and just sit around and enjoy being together?"
I said, "What?"
She went on.
"It doesn't matter that much if we don't get all these gifts
finished."
I looked right
at her while trying to register the meaning of what she was saying.
Then she added: "I'm worried about your work, Glen. Tomorrow
you go to the office, and I'll finish this up myself."
I could hardly
believe what I was hearing.
And that's what
we did that Christmas. We worked on some projects, but not frenetically.
We relaxed and enjoyed the season. I accomplished quite a bit at
work. We did not get everything done, which did not bother Becky
a bit. She was sublimely happy.
Though I have
often reflected upon those happy days in that holiday season, I
cannot remember or reconstruct the steps that led Becky and me to
our change of heart. I recall only that one week I was chafing under
her pressures to produce and "just knowing" her to be
almost certifiably pathological, and the next finding her not only
free of the fanaticism I had ascribed to her but on the contrary
sensitive, solicitous, and spontaneous, and, as far as I was concerned,
altogether free of fault.
How could I
have been more mistaken? The truth was, she didn't care about Christmas
any more than I did! How could a human being change so completely?
Preoccupied as I was with this transformation in Becky, I did not
appreciate right away how much the change in her was linked with
an equally dramatic change in me. I looked at her through new eyes,
felt for her from a new heart.
There's nothing
mysterious about any of this: When we abandon our resentments, we
no longer live in a resented world. Others become real to us. We
have a sense of how they feel and what will please them. And pleasing
them is what we desire to do, because we have put away our resentment.
That's precisely what happened to both Glen and Becky, each responding
with more sensitivity and care to the other's growing sensitivity
and care.
In this mutual
consideration, good feeling escalates as surely as ill feeling escalates
in collusion. Each person discovers the fathomless and refreshing
reality of the other. This makes acting considerately toward that
person delightful and in that sense easy—and whatever it costs
in time or means doesn't matter anymore.
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