Every Little Thing She Does – Part 2

I have long prided myself on my “open mind,” thinking myself both skilled and practiced in such matters as “suspending assumptions,” “holding the question,” “surfing uncertainty,” “stepping outside of the culture,” “challenging the dominant paradigm,” “hanging out on the fringe,” “balancing paradox,” and “not collapsing the waveform of possibility into the hard matter of belief.”

I did seminars with Landmark Education, where I learned to make distinct the many stories, reactions, and assumptions that ruled my behavior, and trained in the art of living beyond those habits of thought, belief, and action.

I read, studied, re-read, and spoke about the fabulous novels of Daniel Quinn, who skillfully and artfully called to question the fundamental stories, urgings, promptings, and mandates enacted by the dominant global culture. So thoroughly did Quinn’s ideas become my own that I “became the message.” I am B.

I crawled into the rock tumblers of relationship – in two separate intentional communities, in two marriages, and in the raising of children – and slowly allowed my rough surfaces and sharp corners to be smoothed and polished by the grit of mistakes made and the sand of time passing.

I read Scott Peck on “community” and David Bohm on “formal dialogue” and Thomas Lewis on “the limbic brain” and Daniel Kahneman on “cognitive biases” and “heuristics” and “thinking, fast and slow,” and I worked with Sally to create, facilitate, and participate in a series of “dialogue circles,” which sought to move participants beyond the confines of their own egoic viewpoints, and into a larger, shared group wisdom.

I sought, more and more, to walk the spiritual path of sanity and healing, seeking to relate, with ever growing clarity, to “what’s so as what’s so.”

I was on it. I had it under control. It was handled. I considered my ability to step beyond my assumptions, stories, beliefs, and habits to be one of my greatest assets. My superpower. My work in this world. My path to evolution, fulfillment, growth, learning, and purpose. It was my answer to the question: why am I here?

So imagine my surprise, when I demolished an inner wall I never even knew I had, to find, on the other side, that there’s a thick, hot cable of right-and-wrong judgment, habituated and unconscious need, and black-and-white thinking running directly through the core of my being.

I may have thought I was standing in Rumi’s field, but I still had one foot planted firmly in the land of rightdoing and wrongdoing.

Who knew?

(Part 3 Coming Soon)

(Read Part 1 Here)

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