Transforming Internal Formations pt. 6
The line between the simple recognition of what is happening right now, and transformative insight that radically restructures what can happen right now, is non-existent. No line! No difference! Your darling mind does not care what falls under the gaze of loving awareness. Awareness has no agenda. That is its superpower. But even your mischievous afflictions, wily, subtle, slippery as they are, don’t have any agenda. They don’t “want” to be any which way. Sometimes they take the shape of desires, but that’s different. In that case you can say, hopefully with some skepticism or humor, I want. “I want to get enlightened, lol.” But the way that they consistently and invisibly shape the story of the present moment is not desired by anyone or anything. It is structural, functional. They have an inclination towards coherence with prior manifestations, but not towards some desired result. When a crucial part of that structure or function falls under the gaze of awareness, it becomes visible as conditioning and loses its credibility. This can be a slight weakening, or if the seeing is vivid and the implications are clear, a complete collapse of the causal power of that condition. When the condition no longer has any causal force, some part of the chain of conditioning is broken and the shape of what arises changes noticeably, noticeably if and only if awareness has been continuous enough to recognize change. As I said in relation to progress, this is just a label we put on things based on the fact that we have noticed them being a certain way, and now we notice that after a certain point what arises doesn’t match with our memory.
Why, oh why, do I belabor this point? Am I so insecure about my word-count? No! It is so that sons and daughters of good families understand that insight is not a definable experience. It only looks that way when you are paying attention to your meditation. Transformation can go completely unrecognized. Jim Bootman is going to notice some aspects of his transformation only because he is looking. In another story, it might happen totally unseen. The process has a life of its own. This un-owned human flourishing is one of the most beautiful things in the world, I declare. If you want to see this depicted in a narrative form, I highly recommend the book When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson. Or, if you have the stomach for a very dark comedy, watch The Kid Detective. But don’t read too much about it first! It would be a horrible shame to spoil that movie. Both of these stories have much more pedagogical force than anything I can say on the topic.
Transformation of a Peripheral Formation
Jim Bootman is in a bad mood, and he has been, off and on, for nearly three weeks. He is not necessarily discouraged with regards to his practice. In fact, he is more capable than ever of embracing the tensions and anxieties that come up in relation to his work, but the recent emotional turmoil is only indirectly connected with cobblery. The inciting incident, as far as he can tell, was an ordinary evening intervention from Priscilla when he had failed to return home from work on time. Although he had always found these to be the most strained of his interactions with his wife, they had become completely routine. Through persistent practice, however, he had started to notice some of the minutia of this routine. First of all, he noticed the almost mechanical regularity of his response, the spoken rebuttal to his wife’s intrusion on his work, and some of these phrases started to linger in his thoughts long after the interaction, little snippets like:
- “You’re always…”
- “You never…”
- “I knew you’d…”
These intrusive little bees would buzz in and out of his bonnet over the course of the evening and long into the next day, accompanied by dull surges of an unpleasant warmth in his chest and throat. He found near cousins of these feelings and the tensions that accompanied them in every strained interaction with his wife. This subtle disharmony was previously dismissed as “just the way things are,” but it began to stick out like a sore thumb, and to put it plainly, Jim didn’t like it. It had begun to bother him more than his workplace anxiety ever did.
Then, something else happened, a bunch of little somethings that came together in a way that Jim would not be able to articulate himself, but which we can piece together from our vantage point. Once, when he told his wife in exasperation, “I knew you’d be down here to interrupt me,” he had the frank recognition that this wasn’t a lie. He had been anticipating the arrival of his wife for some time. From that day on he was able to recognize, without fully being able to name it, the sense of anticipation that preceded these little explosions and the tension that came along with it. We will not be shocked to learn that Priscilla was dropping hints, consciously, in that she would routinely announce when she had evening plans and would need help, but also unconsciously in the way she carried her own tensions. Jim had not previously paid much attention to these tells, but he had always noticed them, and now he noticed the way that they accumulated into a tense anticipation that his wife would soon “disturb his work.” Diligent practitioner that he was, he set about relaxing those tensions when he recognized them.
And so, one evening while working late, when Jim had been unusually successful at relaxing his body and mind, something totally unexpected happened, which is that the arrival of his wife was totally unexpected. At that moment, not only was Mr. Bootman free of the anticipation of the evening’s conflict, but his habitual anxiety had also receded to a distant background hum. Jim Bootman was present, unguarded, and pleasantly absorbed in his work. More than ever before in his professional life, he was ready to experience a big, big feeling, and when his wife opened the workshop door, he did just that. He experienced a searing, uncontrolled surge of something like rage that extended from the pit of his stomach to the top of his head. His face flushed instantly. He slammed his work down on the table, and wheeling around towards the door, shouted, “God damn it Priscilla! Would you leave me the hell alone?”
Oh, Jim Bootman! My heart goes out to you. This is not an episode of Days of Our Lives, so we will not intrude into the aftermath of this outburst. For our purposes, the important thing is that this marks the beginning of Jim’s bad mood, and a sea change in the thoughts and feelings that arise in relation to this long-standing conflict. Heat in his chest has become a constant companion, and although it can usually be tidied away with labels like anger or frustration, more often than not words like embarrassment, shame, or guilt fit equally well. Previously, the whole conflict could be summarized with a simple statement like, “my wife doesn’t understand what it takes to run a business.” Now, a welter of accusatory thoughts arise that strike out in all directions, most of all towards himself. These were dull intuitions in the past, ways of framing the whole situation that had been kept in check by his certainty about his interpretation. Now they blossom into painful indictments of personal failing.
Most importantly, the lid to the box that was holding all of these snakes is nowhere to be found. It was blown to pieces the moment that Jim saw directly that his wife had nothing to do with his outburst. Old rationalizations still clink around in his head like empty tin cans, but they have no credibility. The scathing inner criticisms feel more true, but they also conflict with one another, and with his better sense. In one moment, he is convinced that he must work harder so he can wrap up his work on time. In the next, he is sure that the solution is to lighten up. Then he is certain that nothing will help unless his wife forgives him (which she already has.) Thankfully throughout all of this he has a tiny sunbeam of wherewithal that quietly asks the question, “help with what?” The answer is something that he feels more than he knows: “help me to get away from feeling this.” Luckily, Jim has been training for this.
Jim enters into an intensive period of embracing feelings. His visceral, overarching desire to get away from this whole mess actually serves as an unexpected stabilizing condition because it is present regardless of the shape that the suffering takes in a given moment. Although the thoughts that arise and pass away point in many directions, his mind eventually settles on a very simple formulation of what he is practicing with: a deep wish that things were different. As his heart gradually opens to a frank an unguarded encounter with this volitional formation, the character of the thoughts and feelings once again begins to shift, and he begins to find some footing on a little island we can call, “grief.”
Here, proliferation has slowed noticeably. All of the thoughts and feelings still arise and pass away, but he doesn’t follow them compulsively. Jim doesn’t realize this, but for the first time ever, he is able to reflect on this particular corner of his relationship with his wife, and reflect he does. He loses all preoccupation with his fear of shoes, and to a great degree his practice itself loses all future-orientation. He simply must understand this, this thing right in front of him, no matter the cost.
He finds himself lying in bed thinking back to years ago, before the birth of their sons, when his wife had just moved into the upstairs apartment. Back then, when Jim would work late in the evenings, Priscilla would often join him in the shop. At first, she’d just stop in to see how things were going, or to chat a little, but over time it became a sort of ritual for them to spend the evenings together–Jim, working away, maybe responding absent-mindedly to occasional queries, and Priscilla sitting in the corner with a book in hand. Often times they’d pass an entire evening without uttering a single word. Others, Jim would get so drawn into conversation as to completely forget his work.
Jim is not idly reminiscing. He is experiencing these memories in a way that he has never experienced them before, because he has gained some fluency in the language of his own body and mind, his own heart. Whereas in the past these images were simply chapters in a story that he “already knew,” they now resurface with the full breadth and depth of the felt experience that he has learned to embody. When he remembers working late nights as a young cobbler, he can recognize that then as now he was haunted by the same insecurity, the same anxiety. When he remembers the long evenings with his wife in the workshop, he realizes that those were the only times that he hadn’t felt alone with that anxiety. He now fully appreciates the sense of loss that he felt as the work of raising their sons gradually made those quiet evenings impossible. He remembers seeing the mounting demands that motherhood placed upon Priscilla, hearing the stress and frustration in her voice as she begged him to wrap up his work on time, and how he had instinctively recoiled from that contact with her suffering, how the tension had only compounded his fixation on his work. Finally, when he recalls an overwhelmed Priscilla storming into the workshop one evening, baby in arms, with flaming rhetoric of “fatherly duties,” he does not recoil from the anxiety, tension, sadness, and confusion that he now knows besieged his tender 26 year-old heart. He turns in bed and takes a long look at his wife, propped up on her pillows, reading as usual, and he knows that there is at least one way in which he will never see her again. The next day, after closing shop, he leaves a half-completed resole on the table and mounts the rear stairs to the apartment. Halfway up, his thoughts return to the unfinished shoes on the workbench. As a wave of a certain familiar unrest breaks upon his heart, he smiles.
