This is not any map you know. Forget longitude, forget latitude. Don’t think about the shortest distance or plotting the most direct route… you cannot divine how this path will lead you finally into the labyrinth of your own heart
Jan Richardson
Summary: When we step back, easing up on our focused seeking, something not seen before steps forward. If our intentions are good, and our aspirations beneficent and inclusive of all, formerly unseen dimensions of the situation at hand come to the foreground. Not surprisingly, as we conclude with this practice, the 10th, it is these dimensions that reveal how we are connected to everything else in a web of relatedness. Seeing that connection, feeling and acting from that reality, brings a wisdom to the whole. We sense the larger context not first seen. This is why we learn to step back. It counterbalances the lean in, focused lens that we use, the one that always wants to be in charge, bringing its benefits but also its limits. We learn to step back more, and catch up with the common habit of leaning in. Let’s see what happens when the more expansive context-rich truth has a chance to be intuited.
De-energizing the default sense of separation
Much of our life effort goes toward being somebody, being special. Lilly Tomlin said it on Broadway in her one-woman super show: “When I was young, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I realize I should have been more specific.” Nothing wrong with this of course when the effort entails developing our unique talents for supporting ourselves and our family, expressing them joyfully and creatively, or putting them in the service or others. And yet becoming a specific special somebody is a false quest when it is about acquiring the big bucks, excessively so, or getting others’ accolades, or proving your worth or loveability, or playing the social status game.
Energize our ordinary and spectacular comm(union)
When we step back from the lens of creating specialness, we accept our positive ordinariness and our solidarity with our brothers and sisters, and all of life. We love our pets, talk to our gladiolas, feel nurtured on our walks by the stream, reach out to our neighbors, smile at strangers. We sense in all the practices—like when we breath, release the future, allow receiving versus work for gain, go grateful–that our lived essence is a common identity and vitalizing energy expressed through all of life.
Thich Nat Hahn, the great Vietnamese teacher and peace-promoting presence in the world (he died in 2022), called this state of connected oneness “interbeing”. In practice 10 we step back from the foreground of details, allowing ourselves to enter into the sizeable energy field in the background of everyday events. This field is the underground current of the hidden river of essences always there for the sensing. We consciously co-mingle with others with the porous boundaries that accompanies the shared energy of the heart. We nurture a more diffuse and extended sense of self in order to add this state of being, this attitudinal mindset, to the localized particular one we have mastered in our work and careers, and in our familial and other duties, by this time in life. This is why we step back.
Bound by a unifying connection
If this all sounds kind of yin-ish, it is. We live in a yanged-out culture of separate things acting on separate things. This modern worldview, useful to a point, has come to see itself as the superior, only-world-view-worth-having. There are and always have been other world views, now being posited by Quantum Field Theory (QFT), from indigenous, pre-scientific and wisdom traditions that describe and appeal to a unifying energy underneath the separateness. And to go a bit historical, after several hundred years of advances in western thinking—hooray science and technology– but also tremendous losses and downsides (pollution, anxiety and the long list of our civilizational ills), our atomistic world view–we are separate from each other and nature. This needs to balance out. It needs an opposite complementary unifying world view.
This is at the center of wisdom—the unifying dynamic field of truth for two seemingly opposite approaches. Yes, picture the Yin/Yang symbol. From the Latin of the ancient philosophers–contraria sunt complementa. Contraries fulfill one another.
Stepping forward too soon, too often, too habitually, we see the lesser and the limited. But the integrated, more complex reality seeps in from the edges of our stepped-back perception not long after we allow it and gain some practice at what to look for and feel. We cover in this last practice, #10 on stepping back and seeing essence, how to help the positive seeping in from the periphery that is always there.
The inner world plays by different rules than the outer one.
In the inscape of essences, what we do to others we do to ourselves. The scales and levels interpenetrate. As above so below is the Hermetic summary for this. We don’t want to fail our brothers and sisters by separating ourselves from them as somehow being essentially different or better. Sense another polarity here? Of course, we differ in some significant ways, but we have a shared destiny as well. In the outer world we get promoted by out-performing others. In the inner world we bring ourselves and everyone else up a notch every time we exercise patience, acceptance, compassion and courage. Every time we become more aware. Every time we use the unifying tools and approaches, from here and the many places like the 10 practices (including the ones below), we sense more of the commonly shared essence of things.
We get closer to our own essence by dropping the limiting beliefs, and breaking the bad habits we have accumulated along the way. These are the very habits that motivated you to read these 10 practices initially or anything that prepared you for them, the same habits that I personally know so well I needed to write about them.
The little practices, persistently used, gets us closer to our core. We step back from our busy lives and our habits and we find the more essential version of who we are. Little things over time have big consequences. Things like, “I finally stopped taking in a little too much wine at night and numbing out in front of the tube”, or “I have been listening so much better to my kids recently”, or “I stood up for my colleague at work today” is to the good for you. It is good for all of us. I can’t emphasize this enough. One for all and all for one. This is transpersonal talk and phrases like interbeing, and shared essence, take us to what some call the transpersonal and transformational fields.
By whatever name, the inner landscape is qualitative, so the small acts ripple out and across space and time. QFT (the quantum world) helps explain the transformational fields to some degree, keeping the mystery of it all while mathematically approaching the questions of sub-atomic essence, matter, consciousness, spirit and reality. The outer landscape is much more on the quantity side, flowing in cycles and waves in its own way but overall more spatially constrained and time-bound. The inner landscape understands and appreciates this concreteness and, if wisely used, it also provides the complementary fluid and time-expansive approaches our outer world and external lives need.
Conclusion
Practice 10 is the capstone. It is both the summit toward which we have been climbing, and the river we have been navigating from the start. Doing things inside out again, in this work, we make progress not by leaning in but my stepping back. All our work to this point is in the service of seeing anew, to develop the lens for discovering the essence of things. The lesser lenses, even the helpful ones, limit us when overused. We are stepping back from them. We most likely had wide angled lenses when we were little. Now as adults our job is to regain regular access to a more expansive perspective, taking in the wisdom that comes with the essence-comprehending it affords. With practice 10 we step back from the overly focused lenses of what has been and will continue to be useful habits of efficient doingness. Here, with the practices below, we continue to develop the know-how of efficient beingness. One at a time, we learn how to drop the veils, when we do not need them, that obscure a 360/3-D view at the core of everything.
Practice for Stepping Back, Finding Essence
–Step back, yet again, with a breath. To get us less involved with the either/or, surface dimensions crossing our mental screen, we can take a breath, relax and go broader in our awareness to see what might come up next. Breathing is stepping back step one.
— Go below, to the source of the words and the thoughts: Essence resides as an energy in the pre-verbal, pre-cognitive space that many don’t know exists as a level of consciousness we can access. (In philosophical circles, this level below is called the noumenon, not the phenomenon we take in with our senses.) We have been doing this all along, going pre-verbal and pre-conceptual, starting in practice 1 on mindful mind. Breathing, going to the heart, gets us to the space where we can integrate, correlate and recontextualize our natural thought flows and feelings so they go to wisdom DNA, the bone level of principled knowing.
—Think and allow paradox. Less is more. The closer I get, the farther away I am. Find yourself by giving yourself away.Iain McGilchrist says that paradox is our brains’ left hemisphere putting into language what the right hemisphere already knows intuitively. Love has this paradox in it– what we expect to get from it counts little but what we are expecting to give makes it happen. Giving is the receiving.
—Get less informationally curious, so intuition has a chance. Start observing what is versus analyzing what you think is there, or isn’t, or should be, and causing questions to pop across our mental thought flows through our propensity for endless amounts of information. Curiosity is great for so much. But for stepping back, seeing essences, we need to slow curiosity and look with new eyes. Billy Joel, playing with paradox and essences in his song In the Middle of the Night, puts it this way:
I must be looking for something, something so undefined,
It can only be seen by the eyes of the blind.
Essence level access depends more on our blind eyes, our intuitive knowing, than curiosity. Wisdom-loaded energies can be intuitionally transmitted, especially if we practice.
–Write or talk a poem: You may never read or write poetry. Start anyway. Play with the poetic forms of writing and talking and thinking. Step back from normal language and go to an alternate, metaphoric expression. My love is like a rose, or more like a cool breeze in the spring. (Don’t ask yourself to explain.) The more we use these practices, the more we can sense the always present,all gentle, so potent stillness. We want to feel this deep stillness and act/love/do in the world at the same time.
Such is our goal, stated one more time, as we conclude the 10 practices. Take on the disposition of Love.
But of course, it is only the beginning. And for this beginning, remember these words from St. Augustine 1600 years ago: No one may enter Truth except through Love.
If you missed the introduction to this series and the earlier practices here is the link that started the series. http://www.evocateurblog.com/2023/09/14/ten-practices-helpful-habits-of-mind-and-heart/
And we end with one more aesthetic arrest, in the form of a poem by Artie, that releases our need to control.
Don’t Deepen The Damned Artie isaac
Enthusiastic about slight command
Fixing all in the world on demand,
Blathering confusion
(Because control’s an illusion)
Only deems to deepen the damned.