WHEN CONSCIOUSNESS ISN’T THE ANSWER

I’m standing at the toilet going to the bathroom. My wife is organizing her office.

She’s doing amazing work — confronting her own demons, moving through her process. Blah blah blah.

But while I’m urinating, my mind is also creating a beautiful ontological explanation for exactly what she needs to do to solve her problem.

Frankly, my brain is writing a thesis, and it won’t shut up:

• “Well, it’s obvious, if only she’d confront the consequences of her choices, then she’d have to address it at the front-end.”
• “Like, until you confront bringing a lot of stuff into the house, by having to face the experience of releasing it back into the world, you’ll never change your behaviour.”
• “So she should just start to turn towards that experience, and things will start to shift.”

And then it follows up with:

• “But that’s okay. She’s moving through things in her own process. She’s doing good.”

There are so many layers I’d like to unpack here.

The first layer is my own ontological brilliance.

I can distinguish stuff and see the interplay of habits and our stories about who we are and who we are not and all that. I’m really good at that, and I love doing it.

To say I’m good at that would be an understatement. I’ve devoted my life to this particular area of study, and to understanding the patterns and complex systems that humans are.

If you and I have ever spent any time at all interacting with each other, I’ve probably considered the way you are with me through this lens. It’s hard for me to turn it off.

The second layer is me offering up some conciliatory acceptance of someone else’s process.

So, even though I can see how things should go, I’m okay to let them bump into a wall or do things in a way that isn’t aligned with what I can see for them.

This is the layer of magnanimity. (“Feast upon my generosity, peasants!”)

The third layer is my individual arrogance. It’s the idea that I know what my wife’s process should look like.

More generically, it’s the idea that any particular person I come into contact with has a path, and that I know best what that path looks like.

Internally, this often sounds like, “Well, I just want to help them learn from my own mistakes.”

The second layer masks this third layer. It’s also killed me to let it sit as long as I have before acknowledging and qualifying my arrogance laid bare in the first layer.

This kind of arrogance makes it challenging for me to be with people at an individual level. Like, I meet someone in a crowd, and start to talk to them, and this part of my brain gets fired up and… you get it.

The fourth layer is my spiritual arrogance. This layer is the part of me that believes that I have any idea whatsoever about how any of this should turn out.

At this layer, it’s not just any particular individual I’m in relationship with — it’s the very concept that I would know best about anything, in terms of how things are meant to unfold.

So layer three is: “I know best how this person in front of me should move forward”, layer four could be boiled down to: “I could and do know best”.

In “A Course in Miracles”, one of the lines is, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”.

My ontological brilliance is an incredible tool, inside a structure where it really supports the intended relationship.

But a lot of the rest of the time, it’s a barrier to me simply being with and loving someone. It’s not bad or wrong, or something to be vilified. It’s also not something that needs to be defended.

It’s a tool that is incredible when it’s needed. And the rest of the time, it’s something I can distinguish is in the way of the love I seek to be.