Zen and the Art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design – Read Now and Download Mobi

Praise for
Zen and the Art of Making a Living

Comments from Career Professionals

“Zen and the Art of Making a Living is one hell of a book. I [feel] that [it] really challenges What Color Is Your Parachute? for leadership in the career field. Nice job!”

—Daniel Lauber, author of Non-Profit and Education Job Finder President, Planning Communications, River Forest, IL

“After fifteen years, four thousand clients and authorship of my own career counseling program, this is simply the best book in its field that I have ever seen! I have reviewed almost all career counseling books, programs and strategies available. None is better than Zen and the Art of Making a Living.”

—Jim Fritz, V.P. Program Development, Access Influential, Inc., Denver, CO

“Over the past six weeks, I have read and digested your book Zen and the Art of Making a Living. As a therapist and educator, I found your writing very readable and informative. More importantly, on a personal level I was struck by the depth at which many of the ideas resonated in my psyche. I was impressed with the scholarly yet deceivingly simple marriage of the ideas you presented. Your succinct, clear melding of Archetypes, Zen, and Career seemed so appropriate in dealing with the ‘Fallen heroes’ I travel with daily. I see your work as a source of inspiration for many men and women.”

—Larry Dick, L-M Dick and Associates, Alberta, Canada

“[Our staff enjoys] your book, and, of course, we share the book with our students. Your ideas about meaningful livelihood are important to me and to my students. Your book with its basic principle of choosing to be in control of one’s career is very valuable to these people. It helps us to help them to create their new reality.”

—Lou Smith, Re-Creating Your Future, Dallas, TX

“First I would like to say thank you in a very large way! I was given your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, last March. I am an outplacement consultant…and also have a private practice working with people in career and life transition. It is the best book and most aligned material I have ever come across…. Since receiving the book, I have been recommending it, not only to my clients, but to other consultants, career centers, and friends. I have probably recommended it to several hundred people so far. I acknowledge you for an epic and powerful piece of work. It makes my life a lot easier and is a great way for me to support my clients…. Again, thank you. Your work is very important at this time.”

—R. B., outplacement consultant, Colorado Springs, CO

“I have been a career counselor…for the past ten years. In all of this time, I have not found a book that is as effective and well rounded…. Your book has become a fixture in my career center. But beyond its appeal to me, I think it finally takes career education in the many directions necessary to establish, not only one’s identity, but an assessment of what makes work meaningful to an individual. Few, if any, texts I’ve worked with in the past have accomplished this.”

—M. R. H., career counselor, Seattle, WA

“I am writing this letter while enthusiastically making my way through Zen and the Art of Making a Living and wanted to express my reaction and thanks. For three years, I have run the Women’s Outreach Program for a community college in New Jersey, guiding women towards careers through empowerment, education, and support. I am grateful that there are career counselor/authors out there, like yourself, who affirm and give flesh to the things we try to do on a daily basis…. Your work reminds me what the path means and [of] the necessity for tending my own psychic garden so that the fruits of a value-laden life will be mine. Thank you.”

—A. F., career educator, New York, NY

“I am a career/placement counselor located in New York City. I wanted to thank you for writing such a wonderful book. It seems…the unfortunate trend is for people to keep their work and emotional/spiritual lives separate. I believe the integration of the two is the very essence of happiness in one’s work life, and I was glad to learn that someone [had] elaborated so eloquently on the topic. I also loved the way your book was laid out—it is very user friendly and interactive, without losing its deeper meaning. Thank you.”

—A. S., career counselor, Brooklyn, NY

Comments from Readers

“How can I possibly express the life-transforming realizations your book has helped me to see? I truly feel blessed to have found it. It’s given me a whole new perspective on work and couldn’t have come along at a better time in my life. I’ve been longing to make a career change for many years, and your book has inspired me to go for it.”

—Dave Powell, Newman, GA

“I am writing to you to let you know how much I enjoyed and benefited from your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. I found it fascinating, stimulating, meaningful, and helpful. You truly helped me to resolve to take the first steps on a new path (my quest) for which my heart and my mind have been yearning for years. It has served not only as an invaluable resource for information and ideas but also as a source of wisdom and a jumping-off place for discovery. I thank you for writing it.”

—Jeffrey R. Kastin, La Jolla, CA

“I recently discovered your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. It’s the best career planning book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read quite a few. Unlike most career planning books, your book deals with the deeper issues of what work (and life) is all about.”

—D. S., San Francisco, CA

“Thank you. Thank you graciously, passionately, joyously. I had lost purpose…and your book provided a mirror, a process, a background, chunks of wisdom, assurance…. My ‘work’ has just begun, of course, but your book really reaches me. It sings to me. I wanted to say thank you for your work, for putting me back on the Way, for re-awakening me.”

—E. J., Haverhill, MA

“Just had to tell you—I’ve had the ‘ultimate’ Zen experience with your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. I was thoroughly ‘stuck’ in regard to career decisions…. I bought the book and immersed myself in it, vowing to ‘do’ the book as quickly and as thoroughly as possible so that I could get myself to decide upon a direction and get on with my life…. I am busily doing the next step I need to take, career-wise. I do not know exactly how and where this step will lead me, but my next step is obvious, and I have finally admitted that that sort of clearness is all that matters to me.”

—C. B. I., Worthington, OH

“I have just ordered from a favorite local bookstore ten copies of your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. What a wonderful out-of-the-blue gift to friends and not-so-friends alike. This is a WORK!…What a work! For both the spiritual life/philosophies AND [as] a practical workbook…There ain’t none—not like this! Thank you.”

—C. K. L., Perrysburg, NY

“I picked up a copy of your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living: by page ten, I was on the phone trying to locate your phone number. Thank you for writing this most wonderful expression of love. I have always considered work as a person’s primary art form; your book is the first time I’ve run across the idea put forth so totally and helpfully…. Thank you so much for giving and sharing.”

—R. S., Marion, IA

“Thank you for your time and energy in writing Zen and the Art of Making a Living. Of the books I have read, yours will be listed as one of the most influential in changing the way I think and live.”

—S. P., Silver Spring, MD

“I am amazed at the talent of Mr. Boldt in so many ways. Certainly, his ability to organize a very lengthy publication in a way that takes each individual through the process so they can understand it and actually achieve the desired outcome, in itself is a tremendous accomplishment…. His talent in writing effectively, clearly, yet [in a way that can be] understood by people of various educational backgrounds is a beautiful talent. Most importantly, his eloquent style, his words come from a place within himself that is truly real. I thank him from the bottom of my heart and soul for helping me and many others to change their lives…. Words cannot express the thanks for the gift he has given so many.”

—C. M., Westport, CT

“Your Zen guide to creative life was a lifesaver. It was the Zen wisdom and the myths and your love beaming from every page that took me back to my real home. Thank you for existing, Laurence. Thank you for the book.”

—I. G., St. Jean-Gonville, France

“I recently finished reading your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living, and wanted to thank you for writing such a fine piece of work…. Your book has given me inspiration on using my diverse skills within my life instead of trying to conform to somebody else’s set of ideals for my career…. Since reading your book, I’ve had the opportunity to express the artist in me. I recently landed the lead role in a music video. In addition, I am currently writing a script based on true life experiences…. Again, thanks for writing Zen and the Art of Making a Living.”

—T. H., Boston, MA

“Before graduating from college, I wasn’t quite sure what occupation I would choose for my life’s work. Fortunately, I read your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. As a result of the insights I gained from your book, I’ve chosen the path of an entrepreneur and have come to discover my purpose in life.”

—B. K., Mishawaka, IN

“I love your book Zen and the Art of Making a Living! The view it shares resonates deeply in me, and also the spiritual dimensions it addresses hit home…. Thank you. Thank you.”

—C. J., Brooklyn, NY

“I am a forty-eight-year-old white male who is coming to the end of his primary professional career. About a month ago, I found your book. I have found your work fascinating. It has changed my life…. I have bought three copies of the book (only because the store didn’t have more) and given them to friends. Without exception, everyone feels that your book is outstanding and enlightening. They all say it is changing their lives for the better, as well. This is a long-winded way of saying ‘Thank you. Thank you more than you will ever know.’ Your book is nothing short of a miracle.”

—T. W., Gaithersburg, MD

“Your Zen and the Art of Making a Living created an eye-opening impact with me. I’ve found what’s calling me…. I’m pursuing it, and I’m at the point of catching it and riding it home. Thanks for your dedication. It helps.”

—D. L., Los Angeles, CA

“Thank you for your excellent book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. I find it thoughtful and thought provoking, helpful and insightful…. I have a great pleasure in recommending your book to my clients.”

—D. G., Los Angeles, CA

“I just wanted to tell you how very much I have enjoyed your book, Zen and the Art of Making a Living. All the time and caring, effort and excellence that have been crafted into your work have made it a trusted and very useful companion.”

—J. M., Aptos, CA

“Your book Zen and the Art of Making a Living is brilliant and inspiring. It is a major breakthrough in the usually very dry realm of career-seeking. I am honestly in awe of the amount of time and hard work you have put into creating it.”

—A. H., Port Orchard, WA

ARKANA

ZEN AND THE ART OF MAKING A LIVING

Laurence G. Boldt is a nationally known writer and career consultant based in the San Francisco Bay area. He has given speeches and conducted workshops across the country and been featured in such publications as New Age Journal and Newsweek. His previous books include How to Find the Work You Love (Arkana, 1996) and Zen Soup (Arkana, 1997).

ZEN and the Art of Making a Living

A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design

LAURENCE G. BOLDT

PENGUIN/ARKANA

ARKANA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published in the United States of America by Lightning Press 1992

Revised edition published in Arkana 1993

This second revised edition published in Arkana 1999

Copyright © Laurence G. Boldt, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1999

All rights reserved

Illustrations used with permission of Suzuki, Daisetz T., Zen and Japanese Culture, Bolligen Series LXIV. Copyright © 1959 by Princeton University Press. Illustrations from Zen Painting and Calligraphy by Jan Fontein and Money L. Hickman. Copyright © 1970 by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. Used by permission. Illustrations from The Art of Zen by Stephen Addiss used with permission of Stephen Addiss. Copyright © 1989 by Harry N. Abrams. Lu K’uan Yu (Charles Luk), Taoist Yoga, © Lu K’uan Yu, 1973 (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1973), p. 150. Used by permission. Lu K’uan Yu (Charles Luk), The Secrets of Chinese Meditation © Charles Luk, 1964 (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1964), p. 16. Used by permission. Illustrations from Pelican History of Art. Art and Architecture of India, by Benjamin Rowland. © 1953 by Yale University Press. Used by permission. #28—Yantra of Krsna, courtesy of John Stevens; #32—The six chakra, courtesy of John Stevens; #145a—“Katsujinken,” “The sword that gives life” by Gempo, courtesy of John Stevens; #203b—“Namu amida butsu” by Ryokan, courtesy of the Kimura Collection; and #207—“Dai birushanabutsu,” “Mahavairocana Buddha” by Juin, courtesy of the Kinami Collection from Sacred Calligraphy of the East by John Stevens, © 1981. By arrangement with Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston. Excerpts from Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism by Lama Anagarka Govinda, copyright © 1969, 1991, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME. Used by permission. Excerpts from The Tao of Power by R. L. Wing. Copyright © 1986 by Immedia. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, & Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpts from Winning the Marketing War: A Field Manual for Business Leaders by Gerald A. Michaelson. Published by Madison Books/Abt Books. Copyright © 1987 by Abt Books. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. Excerpts from Getting Funded: A Complete Guide to Proposal Writing by Mary S. Hall used with permission of author. Copyright © 1988 by Mary S. Hall. Continuing Education Publications. Excerpts from The California Nonprofit Corporation Handbook by Anthony Mancuso. Published by Nolo Press. Copyright © 1991 by Anthony Mancuso. Reprinted by permission of publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Boldt, Laurence G.

Zen and the art of making a living: a practical guide to creative career design/Laurence G. Boldt.—Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-1012-0268-5

1. Religious life—Zen Buddhism. 2. Career development.

I. Title.

BQ9286.B65 1999

650.14—dc20 98–55070

When one happens on a book of this kind, he is well advised to throw it away.

Sh-an

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Preface to the revised edition

Preface

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

DOING THE WORK YOU LOVE

Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work

Introduction: The Grail Quest or the Bourgeois Nest?

Chapter 1 THE TAO OF WORK; OR, CREATIVE SELF-EXPRESSION

Chapter 2 ZEN AT WORK; OR, POETRY IN MOTION

Chapter 3 MYTH AT WORK; OR, CRAFTING THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE

Chapter 4 THE WORLD CALLS FOR THE POSTMODERN (BLISSFUL) HERO

ACT I: The Quest for Life’s Work

The Quest for Your Best

SCENE I VISION QUESTING

SCENE II CLARIFYING VALUES

SCENE III POINTING TO PURPOSE

SCENE IV TARGETING TALENTS

SCENE V MARKING MISSION OBJECTIVES

SCENE VI WHAT IF YOU STILL DON’T KNOW?

ACT II: The Game of Life’s Work

Playing the Game: Winners, Losers, and Choosers

SCENE I YOUR NEW CAREER: GETTING A PICTURE

SCENE II REALITY TESTING

SCENE III EVALUATION: NO OR GO?

Act III: The Battle for Life’s Work

Winning in the Marketplace

Scene I TAKING IT TO THE STREET: CHOOSING YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

SCENE II: Scenario I SAILING THE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

SCENE II: Scenario II WIELDING THE FREELANCE

SCENE II: Scenario III CRAFTING THE NONPROFIT FOUNDATION

SCENE II: Scenario IV LANDING THE RIGHT JOB

SCENE III STREET SMARTS

ACT IV: The School of Life’s Work

Learning to Change: The Old Boy and the Student-Sage

SCENE I GETTING THERE: TRANSITION STRATEGIES

SCENE II TRAINING THRILLS: KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

SCENE III CREATING THE SELF-IMAGE YOU NEED TO SUCCEED

SCENE IV HELP!: ENLISTING SUPPORT

SCENE V LOVING WHAT YOU DO (‘TIL YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU LOVE)

APPENDIX A ECONOMICS: SCAR-CITY OR MUTUAL SUPPORT SYSTEM?

APPENDIX B VOLUNTEERING

AFTERWORD

CHAPTER NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

THE END

Acknowledgments

To John Panama

It is no exaggeration to say that this book would not have been possible without the help of many. To all who have contributed, my heartfelt thanks. I am especially grateful for the input of consulting clients and of seminar and classroom participants. The program was originally developed as a response to your interests and desires. Your input has been critical at every stage. Additionally, your kind words have been a tremendous encouragement along the way. Many thanks.

Further thanks is due several dedicated volunteers for their excellent work. Kim Grant is a capable editor whose enthusiasm for the book has been a large part of making it happen. Susan Shapiro’s assistance in typesetting and layout has been indispensable. Sonny King’s persistent and tenacious proofing has saved me from incomprehensibility too many times to count.

I also want to thank several people for making possible the Penguin edition of this book. Thanks to my agent, Peter Beren and to Michael Jacobs for seeing the potential of the book. Thanks also to my editor at Penguin, David Stanford, for his careful handling of the book and his easy manner and good humor throughout.

While I am most grateful to these and others for their efforts, responsibility for the book and all of its shortcomings and errors remains mine. A project of this size is bound to have errors and need revision to stay up to date. We encourage you to write us with corrections, updates, and information you think might be of interest to readers of future editions of this book. Feedback of all kinds is most welcome. Please be advised that, for the sake of time, we may not be able to respond to all correspondence. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Preface to the Revised Edition

In looking back over the nearly ten years since the first edition of this book was published, I am happy to say the career field has come a long way. It is no exaggeration to say that in its philosophical approach and methodology, the field has advanced more in the last ten years than in the previous fifty. There were times in the early 1980s, when I began my career consulting work and the development of the program on which this book is based, that I felt like a voice crying in the wilderness.

At the time, upwards of 95 percent of all career professionals were committed to what I call the “best fit” or “match game” model of vocational guidance. The ol’ “tell me your interests and/or skills and I’ll tell you what you are supposed to be” approach to vocational guidance. (“Better yet, I’ll give you a battery of tests and let my computer tell me what you are supposed to be.”) A process whose dominant, and in many cases only, guidance tool consisted of a mechanistic matching of test results to occupational fields left many cold. My belief that there was a more humane way of doing things, one that would celebrate the human spirit and embrace the innate dignity and creativity within all people, inspired a journey that ultimately led to the writing of this book.

Happily, today there are many more career counselors, consultants, and “coaches” committed to the threefold process of providing a context that: (1) encourages individuals to get in touch with who they really are and what they really want, (2) assists them in formulating career goals based on these insights, and (3) aids them in developing definite plans for the realization of these goals. Many career professionals have told me that this book has played a significant role in helping them to adapt their approach. They’ve told me that it provided them with an alternative methodology that freed them from a philosophical model with which they had long felt at odds.

If we search more deeply for the causes of the dramatic shift in philosophy and methodology of the career field in the past few years, three major ones stand out. First, a creative approach to career development is more engaging, fun, and rewarding not only for the client but for the career professional as well. While the old way of doing things was, in a sense, easier for both the client and the career counselor, it left a lot to be desired for each. Being treated as if he or she could be plugged, like an interchangeable part, into some kind of mammoth job machine was not exactly a spiritually uplifting experience for the client. For the career professional, running people through the same mill day after day, month after month, year after year was not a particularly challenging or fulfilling way to go through life. It was probably not surprising that career counselors working in this fashion were not encouraging people to pursue work they would love!

As better materials have become available, more and more career professionals have adapted their approach. Moreover, in recent years, the career field has been the beneficiary of an influx of talented and highly motivated new professionals—attracted to the field in the first instance by the prospect of making a life out of assisting others in fulfilling their hearts’ desires. Increasingly, this approach to career development is becoming the standard among a large and growing segment of the field.

The remaining two factors driving change in the career field come as a response to changes in the broader society. These are, first, a shift in values among a large and growing segment of the population away from narrow economic definitions of success and, second, the dramatic changes in the workplace brought about by a historic restructuring of the economy. These are themes we will take up at length in a new section entitled “Doing the Work You Love: A Social Movement for the Twenty-first Century”.

Like its methodology, the career literature has also improved markedly in the last few years. In updating the bibliography for the current edition of this book, I’ve had the opportunity to review virtually every new publication that has come on the scene in the career field in the last five years. I am happy to report that there are many good ones, most of which are included in the bibliographies throughout this book. While on the whole, the career literature remains rather dry and soulless, more books are being written with heart and intelligence. Moreover, there are a great many more well-organized, informational resources available today for the career changer. In addition to better materials for those deciding on a career or looking for employment opportunities, more books can be found with down-to-earth advice for those looking to escape the nine-to-five job routine. Incidentally, the revised edition of this book includes a new section on the booming field of home-based business, which, as many are finding, can provide a ticket to a new life.

When this book first came out, the World Wide Web did not even exist. Today, it offers a variety of informational tools, networking resources, and professional services for the career-changer. We’ve included Internet resources throughout this revised edition. Whether you are interested in finding an internship or a place to volunteer, whether you want to start your own business, work freelance, start a nonprofit, do background research on companies, or find out about specific job openings, you will find ways to tap into resources available on the Internet. Those of you with online capabilities will be able to begin immediate research on ideas that occur to you as you are reading this book.

Many people who read this book become excited about the ideas contained within as well as the possibilities it suggests to them for transforming their own lives. They want opportunities to dive more deeply into the material and to share this experience with like-minded people in a supportive setting. This edition includes a section on starting a life work development group. I would to encourage those of you who feel so inclined to begin groups of your own.

There are also an increasing number of personal growth and life’s work development courses available through a variety of adult education vehicles. Classes and seminars have sprung up all over the country for finding one’s purpose and for starting home or freelance businesses, as well as other types of entrepreneurial enterprises. A host of educational opportunities is available for those who want to beat the nine-to-five routine or improve their job-hunting and personal marketing skills. In short, the support materials, systems, and networks available to people who are seeking a way to do the work they love have greatly expanded in number and quality in recent years. There has never been a better time to take up the quest for a truly fulfilling experience of work.

A Personal Note

On a more personal note, I want to thank the many people who have taken the time to write to me. Your letters and the stories of courage, compassion, and commitment that fill them are an inspiration and blessing to me. Writing this book was truly a labor of love. I am happy that it has been so well received and gratified to know that it touched so many, so deeply. People have asked me many times if I was surprised by the success of what is admittedly a long, and in certain respects, demanding book. While I never doubted the value of the material in this book, nor that it had an audience, there were times when I did have doubts about how large that audience might be. One day, not long before the book was finished, while taking a break from writing, I was strolling down a city street near my office when a thought of this kind entered my head. Perhaps, I thought, certain parts should be omitted to make the book more accessible to a wider audience. Just then, I noticed a crude sign that someone had taken the trouble to paste onto a street corner mailbox. It read simply: QUALITY IS FOR EVERYONE. I laughed at myself and the play of the universe and went back to work.

Preface

As you’ve probably guessed by now, this is not your usual career planning guide. Many of those books seem to have been written for automatons. This is a career guide for human beings. It’s really a book about love in action, about joy, about beauty, about caring. It’s for people who want to express their talents in meaningful ways that serve others. Its purpose is not to cram you into some category or stuff you into a gray flannel box. Its aim is to assist you in developing what you need to express what’s in you in the outer world. In other words, it’s designed to help you do your thing. If you don’t know what your thing is, it will even help you find it. That’s the good news; and no question about it, this program works.

Now here comes the bad news. Well, sort of…It takes a lot of work. Yes, that’s right, w-o-r-k. It takes “outer work” like research, learning, outreach, and follow-through, and it takes “inner work” like soul-searching, thought, and decision-making. The information in, and the structure of this book will help, but in the end, you are the one making all the decisions. If you don’t like decision-making, you’d probably be better off reading one of those “put you into a gray flannel box” career guides. They have all kinds of neat little tests that tell you what you should be. I don’t know what you should be, and to tell you the truth, neither does any other career consultant—no matter how impressive their tests. Fortunately, you do know.

You may not think so, but you really do know what you are here to do. Many of you are carrying around a great secret that you have yet to let yourself in on. One purpose of this book is to get the part of you that knows to start talking to the part of you that thinks it doesn’t know. Of course, it’s really up to you; you are the active ingredient. Your sincerity, intensity, and desire are what will make this process work for you. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys adventure, you’ll find most of the work in this process challenging and fun. In fact, once you get into it, you will start getting really turned on by the discoveries you make about yourself and the strategies and plans you develop to realize your visions of life at its best.

That’s the action of this book—designing creative strategies for realizing your life’s work. This is a comprehensive career guide. You’ll find many of the same subjects that are discussed in the gray flannel career books. You’ll find information on how to write a résumé, how to assess your skills, how to take a job interview—all the basics. In addition, you’ll find a wealth of information not generally found in career planning guides, information on: starting your own business, working as a freelance, founding a nonprofit corporation, managing multiple careers, boosting your self-esteem, and much, much more.

Most importantly, all of this information will be presented within the context of viewing work as your creative expression of love in action. Right along, we’ll be reminding you of the pitfalls and challenges that face those who have the audacity and the courage to be themselves in their work lives. Traditionally, career success has been defined by externals like salary, benefits, recognition, status in the community, and long-term security. From the standpoint of Zen and the Art of Making a Living, these parameters are entirely inadequate. External rewards may dazzle others, but only your heart can tell you whether you have found fool’s gold or the real McCoy. Being true to yourself is what counts in the end.

Some of you may be judging yourselves for not already knowing what your life’s work is. Some of you may feel like kicking yourselves for spending year after year working at something that wasn’t really you. Look, there is nobody here but you and me, and just between the two of us, I’m not perfect either. So take a load off. Relax. Kick off your shoes, loosen your belt. On this journey, it doesn’t matter where you have been. This journey is about where you are going and digging on the process of getting there—one step at a time…

For my part, I promise not to bore you on purpose. I want you to come along for the entire ride, and I know that for that to happen, you’ve got to be having fun along the way. True, some parts of this book may not be as exciting as surfing Waikiki. I’m not going to tell you that writing a résumé is more fun than a night on the town, but it can be more fun than peeling onions, and we all know that if we want onions in the soup, somebody’s got to peel them. It’s the same with writing a business plan or a grant proposal or doing some of the other work in this book. There are times when somebody’s got to do it, and that somebody usually ought to be you. These things may not be intrinsically thrilling, but on the other hand, if you have the right attitude, you can have fun doing them. Most of all, you’ll feel good about yourself for having done what’s good for you.

Why This Book Was Written

I first got into the career field because I recognized how central work is to the happiness of the individual and the character of any society. Work offers the individual the opportunity to share acts of love and beauty, to see himself reflected in the image of his work. By the work that a society chooses to do or not to do, it defines its values and shapes its future. Since work is what we do with most of our waking lives, we must, if we count life valuable, consider what we are working for.

I also realized that today, for all too many, work is drudgery, the thing to do to pay the bills, or a mad chase for material wealth and social status. I saw how bored, alienated, under-challenged, or over-stressed so many are in their work and how their unhappiness at work affects their families, friends, and communities. It seemed to me that the popular conception of work as principally a matter of economics and social status was at the heart of the matter. Many individual tragedies of alienation, emptiness, and despair, as well as community, national, and global problems seemed to be aggravated, if not in fact caused, by this conception of work.

For many who came to me seeking career guidance, a “better job” (as defined by pay and benefits alone) was not enough. There was a real desire for a broader conception of work—one that would reflect the spiritual as well as the material life of man. My search for such a vision of work led me finally to the notion of work as art, the unique creative expression of the individual. (I cannot begin to acknowledge all the influences in shaping this view, though the work of Joseph Campbell, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Alan W. Watts must be mentioned.) The essence of a vision of work as art is inspiration and excellence. Work, inspired in conception and spirited in performance, is art. We will discuss this vision of work in some detail in the section we call “Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work.” As time goes by, I become ever more convinced that this vision contains the seed of a cultural transformation of considerable magnitude.

Even as the conventional notion of work was failing many, so too, the conventional career-planning methodologies that had arisen out of this conception were, for many, inadequate. Many people who were looking for more fulfilling work were completely turned off by the conventional career-planning process. It isn’t hard to understand why. “Vocational guidance” programs were originally designed to help employers “better fit” employees into positions within their organizational structures. They were never intended as a means of helping individuals realize their creative potential or achieve their own best work.

Over the years, career planning and vocational guidance evolved, but this notion of “finding the fit” was carried over as an integral part of conventional career-planning theory. Programs cut from this cloth tended to reduce human beings to collections of personality traits or skills that could be matched with pre-existing job slots. They focused on developing ever more elaborate tests and measures to find the perfect fit. Yet no matter how logical and systematic these programs might have seemed, they often failed to reach people where they lived. Like painting by numbers or dating by computer, something seemed to be missing from these programs—the LIFE of spontaneous engagement. The “best fit” model, after all, tends to view people as static, interchangeable parts in a grand machine, not as living, growing, and conscious beings.

On the other hand, there were books that, while long on metaphysics and ideals, were short on the practical nitty-gritty of making things happen in the real world. People would read these books and get inspired for a time but take no action. It all seemed so overwhelming. They didn’t know where to begin. I saw the need for a program that would speak to people’s hearts and souls, yet be practical enough to help them take definite action.

Over a number of years, I worked to develop such a program. Its purpose is to enhance human creativity in work, and in so doing, to assist people to experience the full joy of living. It has three key ingredients: a spiritual or mythic approach to life in general and work in particular, an emphasis on service, and freedom of choice—a wide range of options with which to construct a viable life’s work.

An Integrated Approach to Work

Why is this one book and not two? What is all this stuff about Zen and mythic archetypes doing in a career book loaded with practical, mundane material about finding a job and all the rest? This is the Zen of it—the spirit in the everyday. Zen is the integration of the spiritual and material—the shattering of any artificial separation we might impose. In the words of Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea, “A special contribution of Zen to Eastern thought was its recognition of the mundane as of equal importance with the spiritual.”¹ It seems to me that in our alienated, fractured modern life, this is a contribution we desperately need—an awareness of the sacred in the ordinary.

But why the archetypes? The purpose of injecting the archetypes is to provide a tool with which we can begin to experience the power of myth and symbol in our lives—to put everyday life in a context that’s mythically and imaginatively involved. How can we do that unless we can do it in our work? We cannot simply skirt around the edges of life; we must honor the spirit of life in all, even in the most practical or seemingly mundane aspects.

The grayness of the gray flannel life is the lack of imaginative or spiritual involvement. By beginning to recognize and consciously work with the archetypes presented in this book—the Poet, the Hero, the Magician, the Warrior, and the Student-Sage—one may begin to experience his entire life in a mythic or spiritual context. Everyday life is experienced as a heroic quest and played as a game. In it, we fight for what we believe in, and we learn eagerly as students, and wisely, patiently as sages. All of this is framed within a poetic view of life—a view guided by the heart, alive with the spirit, and nourished in love.

A Service Orientation

It is a fundamental premise of this book that to attempt to make a career choice, apart from an examination of our values and apart from a consideration of the impact that our doing has upon society, is to make an immature choice. It is immature because it lacks the confidence to face up to one’s responsibility to mankind. “They” are never going to make the world a better place. It’s up to you and me, and we can do it—if we have the love, the courage, and the patience.

We must have the love to go for what we know is right, even if it means paying a price. We who love life must work with life for life, while celebrating the mystery that is life. In short, we must be actively engaged in making the world the best it can be, while loving it exactly as it is. We must have the courage to believe that the world we have dreamed will one day be made manifest and that what we do as individuals makes a difference. We must have the courage to reject the idea of settling for work that is destructive to human happiness, or even indifferent to it. We must have the patience to view the movement toward life’s work as a lifelong unfolding process—not something we can do in a week, a month, a year, or even several years but something that takes a deep commitment and the patience to see it through.

Freedom of Choice

Those who take up their work as a creative pursuit, those who are really working from “the inside out” in a spirit of service, need a wider range of alternatives than the conventional nine-to-five job format alone. While we do offer a complete section on “Landing the Right Job,” we have included a larger palette of colors from which to choose in painting the picture of your life’s work. These include starting your own business, working freelance, and even preliminary information for starting a nonprofit organization. We have sections on creating multiple careers and on obtaining grants, sections on volunteering and on networking, sections on negotiating and on obtaining publicity. We encourage you, at every point, to consider and take advantage of the wide range of available options.

This book is, of course, a transition resource book and hardly the last word. It provides a technology for applying a love-inspired orientation toward work within the existing economic, educational, and social structures. We might add that these structures do not, for the most part, encourage one to be oneself or to serve one’s fellow man in a spirit of love and beauty.

At a later point, a new technology will be required, but this can only gain wide currency when society’s emphasis on economics is broadened to include spiritual and social values, when education has become more a matter of developing the individual than of filling his head, when the organization of work is less centralized, and when the individual members of the society participate more fully in its decision-making at all levels—in short, when we are more spiritually evolved. While this book contains some suggestions for how things might be, it is written to be used with things as they are now. It’s an imperfect book for an imperfect world.

About the Title

This work is an attempt to apply the spirit of Zen to the human activity of living and working in the postmodern world. I am not a Buddhist or any “ist,” but as D. T. Suzuki says, “Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact, it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.” It is in this transcendent sense that I use the word Zen. I am not talking about a particular religion or dogma, or even a historical or cultural point of view, but of awareness and spirit applied to everyday life and work.

To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to “stink of Zen.”

Alan Watts

The “Zen lessons” in this book can be applied as easily by Christians, Jews, Hindus, Moslems, Universalists, agnostics, and atheists as by Buddhists. I trust that the monastic purists will not take offense at my use of “Zen words” but will see the moon I’m pointing at. Still, I will use a minimum of Zen terminology. This is intended to be a popular book, not a book for scholastics or monastics. Where I can find a Western word or metaphor that fits the feel, I will prefer it.

Even as Bodhidharma brought Zen from India to China, so have the likes of D. T. Suzuki, Reginald Blyth, Alan Watts, and more recently, a flood of Zen monastics, brought Zen to the Western world. The Chinese culture into which Bodhidharma planted the Zen seed was significantly different from his native India. In China, Zen (Ch’an) teachings evolved to integrate and express Taoist and Confucian elements. Zen further adapted when Eisai brought the Ch’an teachings to Japan, incorporating the native Samurai and Shinto traditions. As D. T. Suzuki puts it, Zen “is extremely flexible in adapting to almost any philosophy or moral doctrine…”²

For wayfarers of all times, the right strategy for skillfully spreading the Way essentially lies in adapting to communicate. Those who do not know how to adapt stick to the letter and cling to doctrines, get stuck on forms and mired in sentiments—none of them succeed in strategic adaptation.

Zhantang

Now that Zen has reached the West, with its radically different cultural milieu, we can expect still further adaptation. The Western culture has a tradition of social action, particularly among religious or “spiritually attuned” individuals. One might expect Western Zen to adapt in this direction. Additionally, today we are in an urgent situation unlike that faced by the Ch’an patriarchs. Today our world is in peril, both from the threat of immediate death by nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare and from the slow death of environmental degradation, overcrowding, and the destruction of the integrity of the biosphere. This too is, no doubt, bringing a further adaptation of Zen.

When points within this book do not appear to parallel the teachings of Rinzai, Dogen, or even Bodhidharma, remember that they did not live in our time and place. Additionally, and perhaps more fundamentally, every man or woman expresses his own experience of Zen. For me, Zen says simply and emphatically: We are one. This is it. If we have realized this, then to act otherwise is lunacy. Sane or loony, we are all here together, and like it or not, this is it.

*A Note about Language and Grammar

Like the content of this book, the use of language and grammar is at times unconventional. The occasional use of slang or nontraditional punctuation is intended to enhance a conversational tone. Further, since the content varies greatly throughout the book, the style varies accordingly. As for gender-specific pronouns, I use both he and she, not in clumsy combination, but by shuffling back and forth between the two.

How to Use This Book

Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.

Herbert Otto

This is a big book, and it may, at first, seem a little overwhelming. The purpose of this section is to give you an overview of what’s in it—so that you can begin to think about how to get the most out of it. The first step in determining how to use this book is to decide what you are looking for from it. We have found that there are at least five distinct ways in which people enjoy using this book. You may gain benefit from any of these ways or from some combination. We list them below according to the amount of effort required—starting with the most and moving to the least. (The highlights will help you find your way around the book.)

Five Ways to Use This Book

• 1. A Life Work Planning Book: The first way to use this book is as a life work planning book. You certainly don’t have to start from the beginning and work through all the processes to the end. We know from experience that relatively few of you will use it in this way. You can still gain considerable benefit by working at it on a piecemeal basis.
• 2. A General Interest Book on “The Way” or “Art” of Life’s Work: A second way to use this book is to draw on the practical philosophy of creative work presented herein. We have endeavored to present an integrated vision of a postmodern view of work—one consistent with advancing the spiritual life of the individual and the survivability of life on this planet. This vision invites us to view life’s work as an Art, a Quest, a Game, a Battle, and a School. To get a quick overview of these elements and how they work together into a coherent paradigm, see the diagram. At times, it may seem that we are drifting a bit from the subject of work, but this is entirely consistent with the theme of this book—the integration of life and work, sacred and ordinary, beautiful and practical.
• 3. A “How-to” Career Guide: A third way to use the book is as a “how-to” book of specific information. If, for example, you would like specific information on how to research a particular career that interests you, how you might go about setting yourself up as a freelance, how to conduct an effective job search, or how to gain publicity for yourself, your business, or nonprofit foundation—you can simply look up this information in the appropriate sections.
• 4. A Quote Book: A fourth way to use this book is as a compendium of inspiring quotes. Many people find that they enjoy browsing through the book from time to time, finding inspiration and stimulation in a wealth of carefully selected quotations.
• 5. A Career Resource Reference: You can look up additional information sources in the specific sections that you are interested in or in the complete bibliography at the end of the book.
• 6. A Focus for Life's Work Support Groups: Once you have read the book, you may want to start a life’s work support group to assist you in completing the exercises and to provide moral support on your journey to meaningful life’s work.

Zen and the Art of Making a Living

A Practical Philosophy of Work

Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work: Your life’s work is an Art in the sense of expressing your essential self in the world of forms. The inspiration and the discipline of the artist provide a metaphor for a new vision of work. Lessons from mythology can help us to approach a creative psychology of work. (See chapters 1–4)

Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work: Your life’s work is a Quest, in the sense that through it, you discover yourself. Like the heroes of old, those who follow the path of life’s work make of their lives a quest for the shining apparition of their own best selves. (See “The Quest for Your Best,”)

Act II: The Game of Life’s Work: Your life’s work is a Game, in the sense that to fulfill it, you must play roles—such as a career role. Working from a strong sense of a purpose allows you to approach the game with a sense of play. We invite you to choose a “career game” you can get into—then play on purpose. (See “Playing the Game: Winners, Losers, and Choosers,”)

Act III: The Battle for Life’s Work: Your life’s work is a Battle, in the sense that the effort to execute it takes place within socio-economic and temporal-spatial limitations. No matter how good our intentions, how loving our motives, without aggressive action and a knowledge of the marketplace, we may abandon our grand intentions to the realm of mere dreams. (See “Winning in the Marketplace,”)

Act IV: The School of Life’s Work: Your life’s work is a School, in the sense that it is a constant learning process. Learning is essential, both in creating the changes you intend and in responding well to the changes happening all around you. (See “Learning to Change: The Old Boy and the Student-Sage,”)

Life’s Work Planning

Since the other ways of using this book are rather straightforward and conventional, we will concentrate our remaining discussion on using this as a life’s work planning book. The process of life’s work planning can be defined, in a general sense, as creating a picture of the world you want to live in and then organizing your energies into building it. It takes being part dreamer, part builder. If we are not dreamers, our aspirations will be too low, and we will sink into emptiness, leaving nothing of lasting value to those who follow. Yet, if we are not builders, if our dreams are not given the shape, form, and substance of living reality, then they are nothing more than phantoms and platitudes, the mirages we chase to escape a world we are unwilling to confront and love. The true idealist is no dewy-eyed dreamer but a committed foot soldier in the cause of his vision.

While this book is packed with information, resources, and general understandings about the world of work, it is essentially a book of questions. One way or another, you’ll need to answer many of these questions on the road to your life’s work. You may answer them formally in this book, or you may grapple with them some other way, perhaps without even realizing that you are. The important thing is not the form but the quest, the journey, and your commitment to it.

No book can tell you how to find your way; it can at best catalyze and awaken the way within you. You can paint by numbers, but you’ll never produce a masterpiece like that. A masterpiece requires the soul and inspiration of an artist. To paint the masterpiece of your life, you need more than forms and systems. You need a heroic commitment to your best self. Born in your heart, tempered by your head, shaped with your hands, and walked with your own two feet, your life’s work is your special gift for mankind.

What follows is an attempt to point at some of the significant landmarks along the way to your life’s work. It is not the only way. It is not even a way, per se. It is simply a description of some of the important scenery along the way. You must find your own way, the road to your Self and its expression in the world. This process should be approached with a spirit of introspection, adventure, and fun. You must rely upon yourself over any form, system, or structure. Having said all this, here’s the plan in a nutshell:

Zen and the Art of Making a Living

Life’s Work Planning Program in a Nutshell

Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work: In this unit, you will consider your vision for the world. You’ll go on to identify your work purpose, your part in the grand play of life, your key talents, and the specific objectives you would like to accomplish in this life. This unit includes a special section on breaking through the fear barriers to unleashing your full potential. See chapter “The Quest for Your Best” for a more complete overview of the process work in “Act I.”

Act II: The Game of Life’s Work: You begin by mentally projecting yourself into the career roles that will best enable you to express your mission in life. Next, you are guided through the sometimes difficult process of conducting research on the careers you have envisioned. Finally, you have a chance to make a thorough and critical evaluation of the careers you have selected to help you determine what’s really right for you. See chapter “Playing the Game: Winners, Losers, and Choosers” for a more complete overview of the process work in “Act II.”

Act III: The Battle for Life’s Work: In this unit, you will develop your personal marketing strategy. Whether you decide to build your own organization or work for an existing one, this unit is packed with the kind of practical information you need to move ahead. With the information in this unit and the additional resources referred to, you will be able to assemble what you need to capture your market share or make the job interviewer sit up in his chair. See chapter “Winning in the Marketplace;” for a more complete overview of the process work in “Act III.”

Act IV: The School of Life’s Work: In this unit, you will develop a strategy for making the transition from what you are doing now into your new career. You’ll find sections devoted to increasing your ability, credibility, and marketability. You’ll learn how to improve your self-image, enlist the support of friends and loved ones, and how to love what you are doing ’til you are doing what you love. See chapter “Learning to Change: The Old Boy and the Student-Sage” for a more complete overview of the process work in “Act IV.”

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Plato

Working through the Time, Space, and Stuff

The biggest difficulty in any work is getting started. Consequently, we’d like to encourage you to begin as soon as possible. Make a conscious decision that you’re going to work through the program until you are satisfied you have gotten all you can from it. Consistent attention to the questions presented in this book will yield exciting, even life-transforming, results. The following are some tips that will help you to get the most of your life’s work planning efforts.

The Time

Schedule your life’s work planning sessions. Determine in advance how long each session will be and when they will be. We recommend an hour to an hour and a half once a week. Try to work at the same time each week if at all possible—for example, eight o’clock on Wednesday evenings. This will enlist the aid of your subconscious mind in working on the process in the interim. In other words, when your mind knows that at eight o’clock on Wednesdays you’ll be concentrating and writing about your life’s work, it will provide you with ideas throughout the week. You’ll wake up in the morning with ideas. In the shower or driving home from work or in the middle of a conversation, ideas will come to you. When you work on a regular basis, you can incorporate these moments of inspiration into your scheduled work.

It is helpful to review your work. If you’re working on a weekly basis, take the time at the end of each month to look over all you’ve written, your discoveries and decisions. Do this in a leisurely and relaxed fashion. You might take a Sunday afternoon and just look over everything you’ve written. Let it sort of synthesize and coalesce in your mind. Look at what your answers are telling you; let new ideas come to you.

The Space

If at all possible, establish a regular place where you can work in an uninterrupted fashion. If you don’t have an office or study in your home, we recommend that you set up a special table or desk in a designated area as free from distractions as possible. You’ll want to do a good deal of concentrated thinking and reflecting, and a quiet workspace helps a lot. Be sure that your family or the people you live with understand that you require their cooperation in giving you the space you need to work on the program. Let them know you’re not to be interrupted during this time. Arrange to have someone watching the children, and hold the telephone calls. Additionally, a designated work place will help you keep all of your work in one place. This becomes especially important as you get into the research phase of your process.

The Stuff

At times, you might be stuck, but if you persevere, you will get through the blocks. Awareness of your emotional responses throughout this process will help you to stay on course. You may experience feeling sad or depressed, angry or frustrated from time to time. The Chinese say even a hurricane doesn’t last a day. So don’t worry, it will pass. The parts of our subconscious minds that are hooked into negativity and limitation may begin to create certain problems or symptoms. These may include feeling sleepy or fatigued, even having a bit of an upset stomach or a headache. Of course, these symptoms have nothing to do with the program. They are a part of the emotional process of getting to clarity and commitment. We have to understand that this is a process. After all, if we were there now, we would be doing it, and we would have no need to do anything except to carry on in our life’s work.

Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit…each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.

Joseph Campbell

Understand that up to now we have kept ourselves from our work. Our subconscious beliefs have kept us from either the discovery of our life’s work or from taking the necessary action to make it manifest. What’s held us back is ourselves. If we are going to transcend our old limitations, we’re going to have to deal with things we have avoided in the past. For example, some people have difficulty answering probing questions that require self-examination. Others have difficulty doing the necessary research and goal-setting work. Persist through the difficulties, whatever they may be, and you will open doors to a deeper, richer experience of yourself and your work.

How to Start Your Own Life’s Work Support Group

In the first few years of my career consulting practice, I worked with clients exclusively on a one-to-one basis. When I began doing seminars, I was immediately struck by the power that group dynamics can add to this work. I soon discovered that by providing a minimum of structure, information, and motivation, a powerful wave of energy—one with a distinct life its own—could be tapped and made to serve the process of finding and creating a meaningful life’s work. A tremendous wellspring of suppressed energy would come bubbling to the surface as people began sharing their deepest desires with a group of like-minded and supportive individuals.

Many people feel isolated with respect to their career issues, having no place in their daily lives in which to explore their dreams. Seeing others from all walks of life and a diverse range of ages and socio-economic levels engaged in the same process is both reassuring and highly motivating to them. Listening to and sharing with others makes the whole process seem more real to many. Those who would tend to be more timid or self-doubting on their own gain confidence from the example provided by more confident and self-aware participants. In a variety of ways, people in this kind of supportive group setting feed off of one another’s energy, enthusiasm, knowledge, and insights.

The basic structure to all my career work involves asking the client questions (a number of which are contained in the exercises within in this book). The key is getting people to confront and answer these questions in a sincere and honest way—which is to say—from their hearts. The group dynamic adds momentum to the process, an intangible but palpable energy, which individuals can access to move more quickly through areas that might otherwise bog them down.

Because of my own experience in working with groups, I was delighted to learn that people were beginning to form support groups on their own. Providing this kind of context can be a valuable service to others that, at the same time, gives added support to one’s own quest. Toward that end, you may want to create a life’s work development group of your own. Below are some tips that have proved helpful to those who have set up successful groups in the past.

Membership

Your group should have a minimum of four, and no more than twenty, people. Optimal group size ranges between ten and fourteen members. It’s best to have an even number of participants so that each group member will have a partner to work with. Participants might include friends and acquaintances, coworkers, or members of organizations you belong to. Some people post flyers or run ads in their local newspapers to fill out their groups. Restrict membership to those who are seriously committed to the process of creating a new life’s work. Don’t allow hangers-on at your meetings—for example, group members’ spouses who are not themselves seeking a new experience of work. You’re much better off with a small group of sincere and dedicated seekers than a larger group with a lot of dead weight.

Discuss the issue of membership at your first meeting and establish clear policies about adding new members. Because this is a step-by-step process in which each new element depends upon what has come before, you will probably want to close the group to new members after the second or third meeting. Group members should be expected to attend all meetings, complete homework, and participate in group exercises and discussions. If it is impossible for a group member to attend a particular meeting, the meeting facilitator should be notified.

Leadership

Without clear direction and a well-focused agenda, your life’s work gatherings run the risk of degenerating into chat, gossip, or gripe sessions, where energy and time are spent but little is accomplished. For this reason, we strongly recommend that your group designate a facilitator or discussion leader for your meetings. It will become the facilitator’s responsibility to set the meeting’s agenda and to keep the group focused and moving forward. Facilitating a group of this kind can be a great way for those who feel they might want to someday work in the career field to get firsthand experience of some of the issues involved.

Your group may choose to elect a single leader or a leadership team that takes turns in facilitating the meetings. Group leadership might rotate from person to person, with each member taking a turn leading a meeting in his or her home. However your group chooses to resolve the leadership issue, make sure someone takes responsibility for each meeting. The facilitator should participate in all of the activities and not dominate the group. At the same time, he or she should make sure that the group stays focused on fulfilling its objectives for the week.

Structure

Of course, the structure of the meeting will vary from session to session, depending on the topic under discussion. Generally though, meetings should include focused discussion of reading material and the completion of exercises from the book. When moving through the exercises, instruct participants to write down their responses to all the questions in a given exercise (they will have a record of their responses which they can take home), then have them share their answers with a partner, a break-out group, or the group as a whole. One of the principal values that many receive from the group experience is that it supports them in doing the exercise work they might otherwise avoid. In addition, sharing their answers with a partner or in a small group context enables them to affirm their answers and receive feedback on them.

This process can bring up a host of related ideas and issues that participants may want to discuss. Nevertheless, it’s best to stick to the agenda. Don’t allow the group to get sidetracked with chit-chat or the personal concerns of a single individual. Leaders should encourage those who would like to talk about other issues to carry on their dialog outside designated meeting times—over coffee after the meetings or at other times throughout the week. Offering light refreshments after meetings can provide group members with opportunities to socialize and make arrangements to carry on their discussions. Often, individuals attempt to anticipate problems, mentally projecting ahead to areas of personal concern that have the effect of steering the group off course. The exercise work contained within this book is designed to take you step by step through the process of discovering and ultimately realizing your life’s work. Encourage participants to trust the process and remind them that their concerns will most likely be addressed at a later point in the work.

Guidelines

Establish and agree upon clear operating guidelines at the first meeting. Take notes and distribute copies to all the members. Basic guidelines might include: agreeing to create a supportive environment in which people feel free to share their dreams without fear of condemnation, giving full attention and respect to whomever is speaking, keeping sharings brief enough to allow all members a turn to speak, and staying within the time limits specified by the facilitator.

Time

At your first meeting, agree upon a regular and unchanging time for all future meetings. While flexibility is nice in theory, a regular meeting time greatly increases the likelihood of holding your group intact. Weekday evenings early in the week tend to work best for most people. Allow a minimum of two hours per meeting—more if you have a large group. Plan to meet once a week for eight to twelve weeks. At your final meeting, evaluate your group’s progress and determine where to go from there.

Place

You can hold meetings in your home, at a public venue, or in various group members’ homes on a rotating basis. In any case, make sure the room you use is clean, comfortable, and inviting. Anticipate potential interruptions and distractions, and do your best to eliminate them. Unplug telephones, mute pagers, and turn down the volume on answering machines. Make child-care arrangements for the little ones. Keep household pets outside or confined to areas away from the designated meeting area.

Materials

Each participant will need a copy of Zen and the Art of Making a Living, a notebook for exercises and group processes, and a writing implement. If the meetings are being held at your home, you may want to supply extra pens, pencils, and note pads for those who forget them.

Final Thoughts

Each group is an organic entity with a personality and intelligence all its own. The guidelines above are offered as a basic structure upon which you can build. Starting a life’s work development group can provide a fun way to begin the process of taking creative control of your work life, while at the same time assisting others to do the same. If this appeals you, by all means go for it!

How This Book Is Organized

The Essays: The essays that precede each unit (act) and many of the sections provide you with general understandings that can save you time, energy, and frustration in the long run. It is not necessary that you read these before you do the process work. Still, we think that you will find them helpful in bringing clarity to some of the complex issues of work. These include essays that make up the “Prologue” unit, as well as essays on the Quest, the Game, the Battle, and the School of life’s work, a series on discovering life’s work, and one on the new economics. Just so you’ll know how to find or skip over them, we’ll tell you that the essays are formatted with quotations and Zen art in the margins.

Specific How-to’s: Where you see a two-column format, you’ll know you are looking at specific how-to information. For the most part, this is information of a kind more typically found in career-planning books. Topics include: informational interviews, skill assessment, formulating a training strategy, enhancing self-esteem, building and utilizing contact networks, writing a résumé, landing an interview, interview techniques, job-hunting techniques, fundamentals to starting a business, basic steps to founding a nonprofit organization, enlisting support from friends and relatives, volunteering, long-term life’s work planning, and much more.

Process Work: This is the meat. It is the “work” of this workbook. You do not have to do all of the processes. Look over all of the material, and do the ones best suited to your purpose. To get an overview of the process work within each “Act,” see the “What’s Ahead” information. Worksheets are provided at the end of most of the sections.

Resources: While this is a comprehensive career-planning book, no single book can possibly contain all that each individual needs for success. Consequently, we have included over four hundred bibliographical entries on everything from global issues to writing a résumé, from starting a nonprofit organization to creating a success image, from education and training resources and financial aid to entrepreneurship and marketing. For your convenience, you will find the bulk of these resources listed within the text immediately following a discussion of the subject matter to which they apply. The remaining sources are in the bibliography at the end of the book.

Affirmations: At each step along the way, we have provided affirmative thoughts to complement the material. Repeated exposure to these affirmations will help keep you in the right frame of mind throughout the process of discovering and realizing your life’s work.

The Road to Your Life’s Work

The road to your life’s work is the ongoing process of taking the best of what’s in you and expressing it fully in the outer world. It’s a never-ending journey filled with challenges and obstacles. These obstacles we call “roadblocks,” or “detours.” The challenges and their potential detours represent the inner as well as the outer terrain you must traverse in pursuit of your work. Following the introduction to each “Act,” you will find a detour indicating a place where you might get off track. Awareness of the detours and the challenges they represent can help you stay the course.

Challenge I: Know who you are. The first challenge is to know who you are and why you are here on this earth. Unless you are up to this challenge, you have no chance of realizing your life’s work. You’ll be left taking a reactive rather than a creative approach to your work. The first roadblock is denial—an unwillingness to deeply examine your life and to discover your unique visions, talents, and gifts. Detour #1—The Denial Trap.

Challenge II: Be yourself in this world. The second challenge is to shape your life’s work, or vocation, into a viable career role or set of careers. Unless you are up to this challenge, you may allow your creative visions to languish in the realm of might-have-beens. It is important that you select a career role that gives you the freedom to be yourself at work. The second roadblock is that of approval—of compromising your visions or values for the sake of gaining approval. Detour #2—The Approval Trap.

Challenge III: Organize your efforts for maximum results. The third challenge is that of finding a vehicle (or vehicles) through which you can effectively advance your life’s work in the marketplace. Being up to this challenge means persisting until you can either find the right organization to work for, or you create your own. The third roadblock, or detour, is to settle for taking what is easily available rather than to persist until you get what you really want. Detour #3—The Availability Trap.

Challenge IV: Make the changes necessary to make it happen. The final challenge is to make the changes necessary to realize your life’s work. You’ll want to develop a plan for making the transition from what you are doing now to what you ultimately want to do. You’ll want to acquire the knowledge, skill, and experience you need to succeed. The final roadblock is lack of confidence in yourself, that is, in your ability to learn and remain patient through all of the tests. Detour #4—The Lack of Self-Confidence Trap.

Doing the Work You Love: A Social Movement for the Twenty-First Century

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

John Stuart Mill

A powerful new social movement is transforming the way people live and work. For years, virtually invisible to those not directly involved, this movement has been quietly building momentum. Today its impact is no longer in doubt. In recent years, it has become the subject of a spate of newspaper and magazine articles and has been featured in a variety of television and radio programs. Truly grass-roots, this is a social movement without political action committees, paid lobbyists, or effective national or international organization. It is a bottoms-up movement in which people are transforming society not by mass political action but by reorienting their own lives. It is a broad-based movement affecting men and women of all ages, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds in many nations.

At the heart of this emerging social movement is a fundamental redefinition of work and success. For a variety of reasons, people’s expectations of what their work life can and should be have been dramatically and irrevocably altered in recent years. While throughout most of the twentieth century, work was viewed principally as a means to an end—be it survival, security, status, or power—today it is increasingly being valued on its own terms. More and more people are coming to expect that their experience of work should include meaning, challenge, self-expression, and joy. More and more, people are looking for ways to integrate their values and talents into their everyday experience of work. And more and more, they are finding them—discovering that it really is possible to earn their way in the world without compromising, indeed by celebrating, the promptings of their hearts and souls. The cat is out of the bag and there is no putting it back. The “work-for-love” movement has caught on.

For all of its possibilities and promise, we should recognize that this is a social movement in its infancy. Moreover, it would be a mistake to minimize the significant ideological, psychological, and institutional barriers that impede its further development. Nevertheless, this is clearly an idea whose time has come. The encounter between this idea and the barriers blocking its further expansion will undoubtedly be one of the great dramas in the social history of the twenty-first century.

The impact of this social transformation on the daily lives of individuals and on society as a whole will be on a scale comparable to that wrought by the shift from family-arranged to love-based marriage. In the stories of Tristan and Iseult and Romeo and Juliet, we are reminded of the price paid by early trailblazers who broke the social convention of their day. These are romantic stories, to be sure. Yet we ought not dismiss the pain they portray as the mere hyperbole of fiction, nor forget that in real life, those who dared to defy tradition and follow their own hearts faced banishment, ostracism, even death. Nevertheless, despite tremendous ideological, psychological, and institutional resistance, in the relatively brief span of a few hundred years, the ideal of love-based marriage had become the prevailing social standard.

Though these things take time, there is every reason to believe the work-for-love ideal will take hold even more rapidly than the marriage-for-love ideal did centuries ago. Despite the difficulties, people are breaking through every day, finding their way to an integrated and meaningful experience of work. Each person doing work she truly loves serves as an example to the people closest to her as well as to those she encounters in the course of her work. She inspires the people in her life to take a fresh look at their own dreams and to question the assumption that they can’t make them real. Each and every time someone finds his or her way, he or she helps pave the way for others, giving this movement its self-renewing vitality and sustaining its momentum. Yet until this new ideal of work becomes the dominant one, it will continue to take uncommon courage, strength, and perseverance for individuals to realize it in their daily experience.

As important as an ideological shift is, it is only one aspect of genuine transformation. For instance, the fact that most people today expect to marry for love doesn’t guarantee that any given individual actually will. Even marrying the right person for the right reason is no guarantee that one will be able to create a happy and enduring relationship. This takes much more than the belief in “true love.” Again, the analogy holds for our experience of work. Many who believe that their work ought to be a fully integrated experience, reflecting their values, talents, and deepest desires are, for a variety of reasons, unable to realize this ideal in their own lives.

Making the translation from idea to reality can be a difficult process, often taking many years and consistent, determined effort. Let’s say that for a particular individual, doing the work she loves requires that she go into business for herself. She may lack the self-confidence to get started, the openness to learn and grow, or the discipline to see it through. Her progress may be impeded by the fact that she was inadequately prepared by the educational system to face the challenges of self-employment. It may be slowed by difficulties in gaining access to the capital she needs to launch or expand her business, or by the often excessive regulations and heavy taxes that governments impose on those who venture forth on their own.

Of all potential barriers, the psychological factor is undoubtedly the most significant. I agree with Lincoln that “your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing” and have seen it proved too many times to believe otherwise. The individual with sufficient desire, dedication, and perseverance will find a way to make it work. If she lacks knowledge and skills, she will acquire them. If she lacks capital, she will find a way to get it or begin on a shoestring budget; if she is met with excessive regulation and taxes, she will overcome these obstacles as well. Having said this, we ought not minimize the difficulties nor dismiss those who lack the inner strength or who, for a variety of reasons, may be unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices that are often necessary to realize an integrated experience of life.

Creative Empowerment: An Educational Agenda for the Twenty-First Century

While as individuals we have to work with things as they are, collectively we have the power to change them, to create in society more fertile ground for the germination of the creative seeds that lie dormant in all its members. Toward this end, we should realize that even the factor of psychological resistance is not without an institutional component, and to some degree, institutional remedies. For example, I have heard college and university career center staff recount time and again how difficult it is for them to get college students to take a serious interest in planning their careers, let alone discovering their unique purposes or missions in life. In the broader society, young people are often dismissed as cynical, apathetic, or lazy. Yet we can hardly blame them, when nothing in their formative education has encouraged them to assume responsibility for the direction of their own lives or given them the practical skills they need to follow their own paths.

I have seen firsthand how the attitudes and skills necessary to succeed can be readily acquired by even so-called “troubled” or “difficult” high school students. I have seen as well the transforming effect this kind of training can have on a student’s outlook on life and belief in his or her own possibilities. I have developed such programs myself and am aware of a number of excellent programs designed by others. It is a great failing of our current educational system that programs of this kind are exceptional and not an integral part of modern education. Many more could join the ranks of those doing what they love if our educational system were committed to preparing young people to do so.

Of course, it will always be up to the individual to realize his or her own destiny. As Walt Whitman said, “NOT I—NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you,/You must travel it for yourself.” Yet we can create a context in which young people are encouraged to take up the quest and are armed with the spiritual, mental, and emotional resources to conquer whatever inner demons or outer obstacles lie between them and their creative self-expression.

Today, we often hear political and educational leaders lament students’ low math and science scores, but we hear precious little about the need for programs that will help them develop their own creative capacities. Excelling in math and science are worthy goals and particularly so for those who are naturally suited to these kinds of pursuits. But what about schooling young people in the fundamentals of the creative process? What about preparing them to function independently in the market society in which they live? If we are honest, we have to admit that the implicit goal of virtually all public (and most private) education for many years now has been to equip students with skills and attitudes that will make them more valuable as workers for those whose agendas they will spend their lives serving. It has not been to help students discover their own purposes and construct and realize goals based on these.

A person who can survive or even thrive without a job, may choose to take one. On the other hand, what real choice has a person who needs a job to live? The best he can hope for is a “good job,” with “good” generally defined in economic terms alone. More and more people are seeing through the illusion that a “good job” as conventionally defined is synonymous with a fulfilling life. As one reader of this book wrote to me: “For too long, I have taken jobs or career paths that have carried prestige or security or remunerative rewards but have had little if any spirit in them. No one ever told me before that it is essential to my own well-being, as well as that of the world, for me to be doing work that I love and for which I am naturally gifted. Comments such as ‘It’s only your job, it’s not your life’ have been only too common. No one ever understood me when I have insisted that to me work is not just a job, that it must have a spiritual component.”

“No one ever told me before” is a comment I have heard time and again in consultations, classes, and seminars as well as in letters from men and women of all ages from all over the world. While it is gratifying to know that readers got that message from this book and that it played a part in helping them turn their lives around, it is also sad and unfortunate that many had to wait for mid-life to hear it and suffer years of needless pain as a result. Why, we might ask, are people not being told from the time of their earliest encounter with the educational system? Why must they wait to be told or to figure it out for themselves after years of trial and error? We could do much better by giving the creative empowerment of the individual the place it deserves among our educational priorities.

The innate creativity within all human beings can be fostered and developed. Risk-taking can be encouraged. Self-confidence can be enhanced by giving students the tools they need to recognize and overcome limiting beliefs, by instructing them in the elements of the creative process, by providing opportunities to create, and validating their efforts to do so. Students can be encouraged to identify and develop their unique talents and gifts. A sense of community responsibility and a spirit of service can be nurtured from an early age. It is my hope that in this new century, goals of this kind will become integrated into public education—that in practice, to educate will come to reflect the true meaning of the word’s origin “to draw out.” If we will commit ourselves to nurturing and drawing out the creative best within each and every individual, our society will reap benefits we can hardly imagine today.

While the educational issue and other areas of institutional resistance remain in critical need of attention, the work-for-love movement goes on gathering ever greater momentum. All over the world, people are responding to the call for a more conscious and joyous experience of work. While the primary impetus springs from universal promptings deep within the human soul, there are a number of reasons why these promptings are finding greater resonance today than twenty or thirty years ago. We will explore some of these reasons below.

Waking to the Call of Conscious Work

We have called this book Zen and the Art of Making a Living. If Zen means anything, it means to be awake, to bring full presence and consciousness to what we are and what we do. In fact, the word Buddha itself means “An Awakened One” or “One who is Awake.” To be awake with respect to work means to be conscious in the choices we make about the work we do and conscious in the way we actually do the work. If we want to think about the process of awakening, we can think about how people wake up each morning. Some people awaken naturally. It’s as if an internal alarm clock goes off, telling them that the time for sleep has come to an end. Others require an external alarm clock to wake them, and still others require an alarm clock with a delay or snooze-control function. Yet, in a certain sense, waking up is waking up—no matter how you get there.

Today, many people are waking up to the need for a new, more conscious approach to work and career. For some, this awakening is coming principally from their internal alarm, from a deep yearning to express their inborn talents, gifts, and abilities. Others are motivated primarily by an external alarm. They feel called to serve humanity, to make a meaningful difference by spreading joy and/or eliminating suffering in the world. For still others, the awakening is coming from the irritating buzz of the snooze alarm—the recognition that the workplace has fundamentally changed and that, as a result, they must assert greater control over their own destinies. We will explore each of these wake-up calls next. Of course in reality, it’s usually a combination of these factors rather than any single one that prompts an individual to begin the quest for a new, more conscious, experience of work.

The Internal Alarm: A Desire for Creative Self-Expression

Your internal alarm is going off if you feel stuck, stifled, or bored with your current work situation. If your primary experience of work is a “have to” and not a “want to,” your internal alarm is going off. If you feel as though you have to be someone else on the job, your internal alarm is ringing. If you feel like only part of you is showing up at work every day, your internal alarm is trying to rouse you from your slumber. If you feel that all the thrill, joy, or challenge has gone out of your experience of work—or that they were never there to begin with—your internal alarm is sounding loud and clear. Your internal alarm is going off if you know you have talents or abilities that are being ignored or could be more fully developed. Now if this alarm is sounding and we choose to ignore it, there can be considerable consequences to our self-esteem, our relationships with our mates and children, our physical health, and our spiritual and emotional well-being.

While there have always been consequences associated with an unfulfilling experience of work, today there is a growing awareness of them. Revelations from the health, personal growth, and psychotherapy fields have heightened public awareness of the costs of suppressing creative self-expression at work. Recent studies have found that unhappiness at work is the number one risk factor for heart disease—greater than smoking, high cholesterol, or hypertension. In psychotherapy, many have come to realize that the pain and frustration they felt about their work situation and their failure to confront it directly, was a factor leading to a divorce or to alcohol or drug abuse. Others have come to recognize the toll an unhappy experience of work took on their parents and how this came to affect their own lives. In short, more and more people are coming to recognize that while there may indeed be difficulties attending the process of creative self-expression, the costs of self-denial or self-suppression can be devastating to human happiness.

For many, the spiritual quest (and the awareness gained on it) becomes the impetus to seek an experience of work more in line with the deepest aspirations of their souls. In recent years, as a survey of the lists of best-selling books will confirm, there has been a growing interest in all things spiritual. Perhaps even more important is the mounting interest people are showing in practical strategies for integrating spiritual awareness into all aspects of daily life, including work. All of these factors are prompting people to pay greater attention to the internal alarm when they feel it rousing them from their slumber.

As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind wears itself out.

J. Krishnamurti

The External Alarm: A Call to Service

There is as well an external alarm trying to wake us up to a more meaningful experience of work. We hear this alarm in the situations in the world around us that cry out for our love and attention. You’re hearing the external alarm if you feel you could be making a more meaningful difference in the world. You’re hearing the external alarm if you feel that you were born for some high purpose or calling, even if you’re not sure what it is. You’re hearing this wake-up call if the sufferings of others are as real to you as your own. You’re hearing this alarm if you feel you have love to give and a desire to help others that is going unfulfilled. If you are more interested in confronting the problems of the world than in escaping from them, the external alarm is tolling for you.

There are costs to ignoring this alarm as well. For the individual, the cost is a kind of deadening of the soul. We cannot be fully awake, fully alive, fully human—and remain indifferent to the world in which we live. We all want to make the world a better place for having been here; to deny this desire is to deny our very selves. From the standpoint of society, we lose the gifts and contributions of those who hear the call and refuse to embrace it. It is certainly true that the problems of our communities and nations, let alone the world, often seem overwhelming. Yet if we know that we are doing our best in our own unique way to make the world a better place, we can feel at peace, no matter how minuscule our individual efforts may seem in the grand scheme of things.

Like the internal alarm, the external wake-up call is being heard with a new urgency today. Many of the world’s problems have reached a critical point of crisis. Issues such as the environment and global population cry out for immediate attention. Moreover, many today recognize the spiritual and cultural crisis that besets modern civilization. They see the need for an alternative vision of life to that given us by the dominant and increasingly global commercial culture that seems hell-bent on turning everything and everyone into a product for sale. The social and political movements of the sixties and seventies (the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements) instilled the baby boom generation with a belief that their lives ought to include a commitment to social responsibility. Many who had become distracted by or preoccupied with other concerns are returning to these roots. People of all ages yearn for a meaningful and rewarding experience of work. And yet, to paraphrase Albert Schweitzer, the only ones who will find real happiness are those who find a way to serve.

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people.

Leo Tolstoy

These two alarms, or wake up calls—the desire to express and the desire to serve—provide the essential keys to creating the work you love. Without self-expression, life lacks spontaneity and joy. Without service to others, it lacks meaning and purpose. I have spent fifteen years helping people to discover and pursue their true vocations or callings in life. In that time, I have read, thought, meditated, written, and lectured extensively on the subject. I know of no better nutshell statement of the path to finding one’s true calling in life than the simple formula given by Aristotle: “Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.” These two, talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake-up calls to your true vocation in life. To ignore either is, in some sense, to lose your soul.

The Snooze Alarm: Waking Up to a New Reality

Many hear these wake-up calls and start out on the quest for a new, more integrated and fulfilling life. Many more ignore them, hit the snooze button and to go back to sleep. They hear, however faintly, the alarms, but are not roused to wake or to act. Sometimes it just seems like too much trouble to wake up. Paralyzed by fear, unable to shake off the mesmerizing effects of routine and the inertia of the status quo, they roll over to catch a few more ZZZs. Fear whispers: “Go back to sleep, you won’t be able to make it work financially.” It tells you that you don’t have the heart, talent, discipline, or chutzpah to make it work, that doing work you love is reserved for rare individuals, people more gifted or advantaged than you. Fear says: “Forget these quixotic dreams; you’re lucky to have any job at all.” Yet just when you are ready to forget the whole thing, that darn snooze alarm starts ringing.

Even if we manage to mute the voice of our hearts, suppressing our desires to express ourselves and to make a more meaningful contribution, the work environment we find ourselves in today will not let us drift along in complacency. In the final two decades of the twentieth century, the entire landscape of work and career changed dramatically. As the president of a leading executive recruiting firm put it, “The way people approached their careers in the past is history. It will never, never, never return.” These historic changes in the job environment represent the snooze alarm, the final wakeup call to take responsibility and begin shaping your own career destiny. For today’s worker, this alarm is ignored at great peril. The chime of the snooze alarm is loud and clear, ringing out: THE WORKPLACE IS CHANGING…THE WORKPLACE IS CHANGING…THE WORKPLACE IS CHANGING. There are a number of factors driving these changes. We will explore some of the more important ones below.

Globalization: The global marketplace means different things to and for different people. What it means for American workers is that they are in direct competition with data processors in India and Ireland, with manufacturing labor in Mexico and Indonesia, and with technical experts in Korea and Taiwan. To date, those working in low-skilled manufacturing jobs and in related support industries have borne the brunt of the pain associated with the globalization of trade. Whole sectors of manufacturing have been eliminated in the U.S. and other technologically advanced countries. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Trade accounted for fully 83% of the total 2.7 million jobs lost in [U.S.] manufacturing employment between 1979 and 1994…Although the trade deficit eliminated more employment opportunities for the noncollege educated,…[there] was a net loss of 290,000 jobs for the college educated.” As the workforce in the developing world continues to become better educated and as technology continues to break down the barriers of distance, college-educated white collar workers can expect to experience in this new century the kinds of job losses that their less-educated blue collar counterparts did in the last two decades of the twentieth.

Merger Mania: Today, big business is more concentrated than ever. In the last twenty years, the banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, media, publishing, transportation, healthcare, utility, and retail industries—to name only a few of the more visible ones—have seen merger on top of merger. Many of these mergers have united companies across international boundaries. For workers, mergers and acquisitions are virtually synonymous with layoffs. Moreover, mergers spark more mergers, which in turn, bring even more layoffs. Even companies that manage to avoid being gobbled up by bigger ones feel increased pressure to slash labor costs in order to remain competitive. Merger mania has induced corporate management to look more and more to their short-term stock price and less to long-term profitability when making investment and cost-cutting decisions. Indeed, in the 1990s, for the first time, we began to see large-scale layoffs among companies that were simultaneously reporting strong, and in some cases, record profits. These layoffs were intended to boost the perceived value of company shares in the stock market. Merger mania shows no signs of abating. Barring an extremely unlikely reversal, consolidation will continue apace and will continue to exert pressure on corporate management to reduce labor costs. We can expect merger-related job layoffs to continue well into the twenty-first century.

The Electronic Revolution: The new electronic technologies are significantly less labor-intensive in manufacturing, management, data collection, and processing than were the old technologies of the industrial era. In some fields, one person with a computer can do the work formerly done by half a dozen. In other fields, new technologies are on their way to replacing some positions altogether. Bank tellers are being replaced with automated tellers; receptionists, with voice mail; gas station attendants, with self-serve and electronic pay-at-the-pump sites. Manufacturing companies that remain within the technologically advanced nations are increasingly turning to computers and robots in their efforts to cut labor costs. Yet the impact of the new technologies on the workplace has not been confined to low-skilled or blue collar jobs. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the electronic revolution is expected to make an even greater impact on middle-management white collar workers.

Out-sourcing: Another trend reshaping the workplace is the rise in temporary, part-time, and independent contractor work. By the early 1990s, Manpower Inc., a temporary services company, had become the nation’s largest employer, eclipsing long-time leader General Motors. Today, nearly 25 percent of the U.S. workforce, or one in four American workers, is a temporary, part-time, or contract worker. Many companies are hiring independent contractors for a variety of functions once done exclusively in-house. From accounting to janitorial services, from employee training to manufacturing itself, large companies are hiring out. For example, at this writing, Microsoft has not a single full-time employee engaged in manufacturing in the U.S. While it does have a relatively small number of full-time employees devoted to manufacturing in Ireland and Puerto Rico, the bulk of the work is contracted out.¹ Providing a variety of services to large organizations has been one of the major growth areas for new small business. At the same time, the out-sourcing phenomenon has displaced thousands from once secure jobs within large corporations and will likely continue to do so.

Mass Retail: In many small towns across America, factory outlets and discount superstores have all but eliminated local retailing. In urban centers and small towns throughout America and Europe, independent bookstores, hardware stores, office supply stores, grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants, and locally-owned department stores have been replaced by large superstores, factory outlets, or franchise chain stores. In many sectors, the small independent retailer is going the way of the small independent farmer. In the healthcare industry, the changed status of doctors from independent entrepreneurs to employees of large HMOs can be seen as another example of this trend. While mass retail has eliminated many small businesses, it has also been a major source of new jobs. Unfortunately, many of these are jobs are part-time, low-paying, and not particularly challenging or rewarding.

The New Work Environment: Dangers and Opportunities

Coming all at once, the trends discussed above have in a few short years radically and inexorably transformed the American workplace. Though most who have lost their jobs as a result of these changes have found new ones, the lion’s share have had to do so at a lower skill level and for less pay than they enjoyed in their previous positions.² In response to these and other changes, many are turning to a variety of self-employment options. In recent years, the number of people working freelance and/or in home-based businesses has risen sharply. Whether they choose to strike out on their own or work for others, people find themselves in a new work environment, one that requires them to take greater responsibility for shaping their career destinies. In this respect, the message of the snooze alarm is no different from that of the other two wake-up calls.

It’s obvious to most workers today that the old ways of doing things just don’t work any more. Workers know that qualities like company loyalty and a nose-to-the-grindstone attitude no longer pay off the way they once did. They understand that they can no longer rely on their employers to provide them with secure jobs. Whether workers respond creatively and decisively, or get tangled up in denial or distracted by outrage and anger, will spell the difference between taking advantage of the new situation and becoming a victim of it.

People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Emerson

The job environment of today is not only less secure than it was twenty years ago, it is also more demanding. It is more demanding in three key respects. First, full-time workers are working more hours per week than at any time since the second World War. Americans work more hours per year than the people of any major industrialized nation.³ Downsizing usually means that remaining workers carry a heavier workload. Employers are not only asking workers to work longer hours for less real pay—in many cases they are asking them to give up benefits as well, including overtime pay.

Second, more is being demanded from workers in terms of the responsibilities they are being asked to assume and in terms of the pace at which they are expected to learn new skills and incorporate new knowledge on the job. The era of mindless pencil pushing or monotonous factory work is over. Gone forever is a time when “just showing up” was enough. Today, even factory workers are expected to bring their brains to work. On the job, performance pressure in all fields is becoming increasingly intense. Productivity is being monitored as never before and is often measured in terms of team rather than individual performance. The pace of technological change demands that workers continually incorporate new knowledge and skills on the job. Fewer and fewer jobs today, especially better-paying ones, can be learned once or mastered for life. Workers must be prepared to keep learning for as long as they are on the job.

Finally, since it now takes the combined efforts of both adult members of a household to make the same amount of money (actually less in real dollars) than just one earned thirty years ago, people have less time to spend with their families or to do a variety of other things they enjoy.⁴ As noted economist Robert Heilbroner puts it, “Lack of time is the new poverty.” Many today feel that their lives have come to revolve around work. Now, if these people don’t value and enjoy what they are doing every day and if they feel as though they could lose their jobs at any time, they are likely to ask themselves, What’s the point?

In the face of the changes sweeping through the workplace in the developed world, it simply seems less risky and more inviting for people to take the leap into doing something they really love. In fact, many have told me that what motivated them to begin reexamining their lives and to choose career paths more suited to their values and talents were job layoffs (or the threat of them). The ringing of the snooze alarm forced them to finally pay attention to the other two wake-up calls, which had been ringing in the background all along. In time, they came to view the loss of a job as a blessing in disguise, providing the impetus to make a change that they might otherwise have put off indefinitely. The loss of a job or the threat of one provided the wake-up call they needed to create a more fulfilling experience of work. “After all,” they reasoned, “if I have to go through the effort of changing careers or perhaps become self-employed, why not make it about something I care about and enjoy?”

While echoes from the snooze alarm are sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the modern workplace, they are also providing the impetus for a variety of creative responses. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the individual with the dream of pursuing a more independent career path looked at the risks involved versus the security of his corporate job and decided that he was better off staying where he was. Today, many people are recognizing that it is at least as risky not to follow their dreams and begin charting their own destinies. The fact is that the current work environment provides greater reinforcement to follow your dreams and fewer enticements not to. Whether we choose to work for ourselves or for the small business organizations that are providing most of the new jobs, the qualities necessary for success are precisely those that the person doing the work he loves is likely to posses, namely: self-motivation, a high level of energy, a willingness to learn and grow, and perseverance.

Another trend affecting today’s workplace is what is often called the “down-shifting” or “voluntary simplicity” movement. Growing numbers of people are refusing to define themselves or the value of their lives by the financial criteria of the dominant commercial culture. They are seeking ways to reduce their living costs and are placing time above money in their priorities. The Trends Journal published by the Trends Research Institute estimates that by the year 2005, 15 percent of the population in the developed world will be in some way practicing voluntary simplicity.⁵ Running parallel to this trend has been the shift in population away from urban centers toward small town America, where living costs are cheaper and the pace of life is slower. People today are looking for ways out of the rat race. They are discovering that the less invested they are in the pursuit of material acquisition, the more latitude they have in the choices they make about their work and about what to do with the all the time of their lives.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.

Abraham Lincoln

The new electronic technologies that are costing many people their jobs are, at the same time, making it easier for people to create their own work. E-mail and the World Wide Web have made it possible for anyone with a phone line, a computer, and a modem to conduct business from anywhere in the world. By 1998, thirty million Americans were using e-mail, and Internet sales for the year 2000 were projected to reach twenty billion dollars.⁶ The Internet offers small start-up companies a way to successfully compete with much larger and well-established firms. Those offering specialized products and services are no longer limited to the demographics of their immediate area but can reach the entire world in an efficient and relatively inexpensive way. Moreover, informational resources that just a few years ago were hard to find in the best libraries in the world are today available to anyone anywhere with access to a computer and modem. Mission-oriented nonprofit organizations are also taking advantage of the Internet to promote and fund their causes. The Internet is not the pancea is it so often hyped up to be, but it does offer real opportunities for restructuring the way we work.

One of the exciting things about this movement is the way it brings together people with disparate social backgrounds, experience, and points of view. Many who have developed great discipline, strength, and ability on their way up the corporate ladder are coming to realize that work without heart is meaningless, dry, and empty. They are seeking a greater sense of meaning and purpose than can be realized through the pursuit of goals that revolve around money, status, or power alone. On the other hand, there are those who have developed a spiritual awareness but who have allowed themselves to be marginalized by their unwillingness to confront things as they are and develop the discipline and strength necessary to bring their inner realizations into manifestation in the outer world. They are coming to realize that a spiritual life includes a sense of social responsibility and that in order for them to make a difference in the direction of society, they must match sensitivity with the strength to persevere.

In the past, people with these differing perspectives on life seemed like polar opposites, who could never really understand or relate to one another. The more disciplined would tend to dismiss the more sensitive as impractical idealists, at best, or hopeless flakes at worst. On the other hand, those who had developed inner awareness and perhaps saw themselves as sojourners on the spiritual path would tend to dismiss successful corporate executives as selfish jerks. Today, a dialog has begun, and people in each camp are realizing that they have things to learn from those in the other. In truth, love and power, heart and discipline, compassion and strength are needed in equal measure. It is wisdom that unites the two. The dialog between those that hold these two perspectives and the synthesis it is spawning are vital components pushing the pace of social transformation.

While we cannot predict with any certainty how the nature of work will change in the coming century, it seems at this point inevitable that the work-for-love movement will continue to grow. Certainly the three wake-up calls discussed above will go on sounding, and there is every reason to believe that people will go on listening to them. This is truly an exciting time to be alive and one pregnant with possibilities. By making the commitment to follow your heart and do the work you love, you are part of a truly historic social transformation, one that has the potential to make the world a more just, humane, and beautiful place. Best of luck on your quest!

PROLOGUE

The Art of Life’s Work

Wherein we consider the spirit at work and meet our hero

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

In “Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work,” we set the stage for the four-act play that follows. The theme of this unit is to consider how we can express our full creative potential and aliveness through work. In the introduction, we begin our discussion of the “Art of Life’s Work” by contrasting the prevailing myth of the “little king” with the philosophy of work as art. Chapter 1 explores approaching work as creative self-expression and contrasts this with the more traditional problem-solving approach to work. Chapter 2 draws on lessons from Zen and the creative arts in an attempt to discover how each of us can make our work poetry in motion—love in action. Chapter 3 considers how we can enhance our experience of work through a conscious and creative encounter with universal, mythic, or archetypal energies. Chapter 4 speaks to awakening the heroic consciousness in our lives and work and explores the potential for greatness and heroic action within us all.

INTRODUCTION

The Grail Quest or the Bourgeois Nest?

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

Joseph Campbell

Work is one of the great topics of humankind. We can know no people—their culture, history, art, or religion—without understanding their approach to work. In seeking to understand a historically distant culture, the anthropologist is interested, not only in the work these people did and how they did it, but why they did it. It is not enough for the anthropologist to know of a people’s artifacts and technologies; she must know something of their myths if she would understand them. In the same way, we cannot understand ourselves without a knowledge of the myths we live and work by. In this introduction, we will briefly explore a central myth that has shaped our attitudes toward work in the modern age. We will then suggest an alternative vision of work for the postmodern era.

Myths shape our attitudes and aspirations in ways we scarcely recognize, grabbing hold of our imaginations and channeling our energies into prescribed patterns of behavior. Today, our dominant myth about work is the myth of “a world of little kings.” This myth provides a social ideal, a measure for judging the relative worth of various activities and members of society. It is a view of life that many today are finding to be personally empty and socially ruinous. They, perhaps like you, are questing for another way.

Modern Times: Man in the Machine Age

It all began—not with the water wheel or the steam engine, the railroad or mass production—the modern world was born with the ticking of a clock. We don’t really know when the first clock appeared in Europe. We do know that by 1335, the people of Milan could hear their all-mechanical town clock strike out the hours. Later in the same century, domestic versions of the clock became available throughout Europe. By the sixteenth century, we had personal time in the form of the watch. These early “time machines” were harbingers of a profound shift in the world view—one that would touch virtually every aspect of human life—the dawn of the machine age.

The hours of folly are measured by the clock; but of wisdom, no clock can measure.

William Blake

We have been gearing up ever since. Time has become more precise and more “valuable” as the years have rolled by. Today time is money, as every child in day care knows. We save, borrow, and spend time until our bodily gears are exhausted. If we could travel back in time, we would, no doubt, have a difficult time explaining to a thirteenth-century peasant that today we “have no time,” that we feel under time “pressure,” that time is “getting away from us,” that we are in a “time crunch.”

Gears, clocks, and hourly wages just weren’t known in the Middle Ages. Man lived by the calendar, the sacred holidays and festivals marking the passage of cyclical time, recounting an endless drama of life, death, and regeneration. While calendarial time is based on nature’s seasons and the earth’s place in the universe, clock time is an abstraction of the mind. The shift from calendar to clock time took natural man into an abstract, linear world, sectioned off into minute particles. Life was no longer to be organized around the rhythms of nature but around a machine—the clock.

Today the clock has become an almost trite symbol of the Industrial Revolution, where the gears of industry turned on the labor of the punch-clock worker. In compensation for his labors, the worker became “geared” toward the pursuit of the “good life.” Why, it was only a matter of time before the marvels of science would allow the common man to enjoy the good life, once known only to the aristocracy.

The Little King’s Paradise: A Promise Unfulfilled

About the time the Industrial Revolution was really getting into gear, political revolutions were everywhere replacing kings with parliaments, presidents, and promises. The key promise was that the common man would one day soon be king. He would possess for his own the kingly prerogatives of power, leisure, and security—power over his station in life, the liberty of leisure, and the security of property.

Mass education would destroy class distinction and give every man the power over his station. Science would give him leisure: washing machines, refrigerators, plumbing, automobiles. Government would guarantee his security through old age benefits and either state assignment of housing or governmental support and incentives for home ownership.

Every man would be king, enjoying the goods of life made possible through machines and mass production. There would soon arise whole nations of little kings, each at home in his castle; if not a palace, then perhaps a country estate; if not a country estate, then a home in the suburbs; if not a home in the suburbs, then perhaps a condo, an apartment, a mobile home—any kingdom, no matter how small. This is what we worked for. We labored for a kingdom and the promise of the leisure to enjoy it.

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.

Will Rogers

We aspired to the kingly life of leisure, a life of ease, a life to do with whatever we pleased, to be as irresponsible as we imagined the aristocracy to be. Labor unions advocated less work for more benefits—never challenging the nature or objectives of the work, only demanding more leisure and security away from work. Golf and tennis, the games of the aristocrats, became the staples (with the stables) of the country club set, where the new upper middle class could play the part of landed gentry on a subscription basis.

Of Cabbage and Kings: Power, Leisure, and Security

Power through Technology: The Corporate Society. We put our faith in the power of technology and the technical sciences to solve all of our problems. As the production of atomic and chemical weapons demonstrates, technology has the potential for tremendous power, but it is not necessarily good. The danger is not with technology per se but in either elevating it to a religion—science as savior—or allowing it to be used solely as a tool for profit. The “free market” doctrine of the inherently benign nature of “competing technologies” fuels a global arms race which endangers us all. Just because we can do something (have the power) doesn’t mean we should do it. Power does not necessarily corrupt, but power for power’s sake is the road to disaster.

Individualism through Leisure: The Consumer Society. The advance of the philosophy of individualism has strangely failed to include individual expression in work. It has not meant better craftsmanship or fuller individual participation in the purpose and goals of work. It has rather come to mean “pleasure in leisure” or, in short, consumption. We claim to be an individualistic society, yet we reside in cracker-box houses and scurry about in cookie-cutter cars. We live in suburbs that look so much alike it requires a road map to tell them apart. We toil away at dull or meaningless jobs and suppress our individuality and creative zest in hopes of acquiring the status symbols which Madison Avenue tells us we need to be individuals. Today people in third-world countries want in on the act. Irreplaceable resources dwindle, but still we try to consume our way into heaven. Perhaps if we were happier, we wouldn’t need so much stuff.

Security through Secularism: The Bureaucratic State Society. Secularism has developed into reliance upon the state, the government. Big Brother will take care of us in old age, solve all of our social ills, and create the Great Society. The sum of our duty to our fellow man, to nature, and to the environment is to be a good “citizen” and vote for the best candidates. We have relied on political solutions rather than individual spiritual development and social cooperation. Bureaucracies abound, but they have not reduced anxiety, nor produced lasting security.

The more ambitious were not content with little kingdoms and playing weekend gentry. They would be empire builders. They would rule whole industries and employ thousands, have their own armies, and crush all opposition. While these industrial giants set out to conquer ever larger domains, the less ambitious or advantaged had to content themselves with whatever leisure and security they could manage.

Kingly life (at least that of the better kings) was, no doubt, more than power, leisure, and security, but these were what we coveted. Duty, responsibility, wisdom, honor, courage, magnanimity—these kingly virtues might be admired in passing, but they were not envied like the others. Like a young sibling, jealous of the privileges of an older brother, we viewed the king from afar and ogled the privileges we would one day have for ourselves. We would be kings and take for ourselves as much power, leisure, and security as we thought we deserved and could get away with.

The promise of a future kingdom kept the wage worker toiling away. If he wasn’t enjoying what he was doing, well, the age of leisure was just around the corner. It is amusing today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to read the predictions made as late as the mid-1970s about the life of leisure that was just around the corner for the common man. Today, children of the two-career family, who seldom see either parent, scoff at the notion that they will grow up to a life of leisure. Still, we rush to get our share of the goods of life, before our time runs out. We cling to the hope that, if not by the miracles of science, then perhaps by the miracle of the credit card, we can live the life of kings. (Increasingly, leisure has become associated, not with rest, refinement, or a contemplative life—but with consumption. Leisure, which we get from the Latin licere, “to be permitted,” has come to mean permission to consume as much as we want, without consideration for others or the environment.)¹

Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.

Rumi

By now, many realize that the promise was empty, indeed. We were promised that we would be little kings, and yet it seems we have so little control over the direction of our lives. The little king is a prisoner of his own “freedom”—from responsibility and conscience. His inner life is barren and hollow; his humanity, atrophied; his creativity, flat. Not surprisingly, some of the most telling criticism of modern society has come from some of our most insightful psychiatrists, people who see first-hand the psychological anguish of “the little king.” Erich Fromm described modern life as producing men “who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle of conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.”² To be obsessed with control, yet unable to direct his own life, to consume without satisfaction, to seek security in isolating conformity—such is the lot of the little king—such, his “freedom.”

Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, put it like this: “For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up; the dream that if we improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: Survival for what?”³ While the struggle for survival remains paramount for a large part of the human population, those of us who have the luxury of asking this question have a responsibility, not only to ourselves, but to those who don’t.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

Bertrand Russell

The dream from which we are now awakening is what we have called the myth of the little king. Now some would say that today we have no myth to live by, and in the strictest, or archaic, sense of the term, this is so. (We will discuss myth in this context in chapter 3.) Yet, as much as nature, the mind of man—his imagination—abhors a vacuum. If we have no genuine myth to show us the way of life, then a counter- or pseudo-myth arises to fill the void. Today we live by the pseudo-myth of the little king.

Of course, most of us don’t actually live like kings; yet most are still caught up in the myth. We wish it were so. So high school kids rent limousines on prom night; we dream of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” and hope to win the lottery. To wish for something is to believe in it (the lief in belief originally meant wish). If you believe in the myth, not intellectually, but deeply—subconsciously, you accept it as the standard by which you judge yourself and others.

The little-king myth is today at once a practical anachronism and a widely popular view that holds great currency in the imaginative life of the global culture. While most of us in the West still believe in the myth (and we are busy exporting it to the far reaches of the globe), many are coming to see it for the empty fiction that it is. Working for security, status, and consumer items is simply not enough for many today. We have a sense that work ought to nurture and uplift us spiritually and psychologically. The little-king myth and the values it promotes are increasingly seen as inadequate. Two major factors are peeling away the scales from our eyes.

• 1. The growing recognition of the importance of nonmaterial, psychological, and spiritual factors to happiness and fulfillment in life, generally, and at work in particular.
• 2. The achievement of the global village and the critical state of environmental, economic, and peace issues…Increasingly, we are coming to recognize that we are all together in this thing called life on earth.

These are really flip sides of the same coin. We cannot address the needs of the community, the nation, or the world apart from consideration of the psychological and spiritual needs of the individual, or vice versa. The great fallacy of the little king myth is its suggestion that the individual ego is a thing apart—apart from nature, from the spirit of life, from his fellows, and even from his own psyche. To conceive of ourselves as separate is to create an artificial boundary between “me” (the ego) and “them” (everything and everyone else). Our separate kingdoms become our prisons. We can’t lock “them” out without locking ourselves in. Individual alienation and social and environmental conflict must result from this separative consciousness.

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Emerson

In the remainder of this introduction, we will step back from our over-simple historical narrative and examine some of the deeper issues involved in transforming our relationship to work. We will see that the way we view work is fundamentally shaped by the way we view life and ourselves, that is, our image of man, and that we cannot transform our relationship to work without transforming our image of who we are.

For the Bold: Breaking with the Mold

The myth of the little king and the values that it inculcates—ambition (power), consumerism (leisure), and security in conformity—give us a prescription for how we are supposed to live our lives. To want something different from this is to enter the dark forest of uncharted experience. As Joseph Campbell put it, “You don’t have to go very far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed.”⁴ The hero, in living her own life, in being true to herself—radiates a light by which others may see their own way.

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Joseph Campbell

This is no easy task but one demanding the greatest integrity, courage, and skill. As Colin Wilson has written, “modern civilisation, with its mechanised rigidity is producing more outsiders than ever before—people who are too intelligent to do some repetitive job, but not intelligent enough to make their own terms with society.”⁵ Those “intelligent enough” to make their own terms with society are what we will later refer to as “artists of life.” The outsider views himself as a product of a culture he rejects—the artist views himself as a culture-builder. As would-be artists, we begin with the right attitudes or, as the Buddhists might say, “right views”—taking a mature approach beyond mere protest and complaint—accepting the responsibility to create the life we would live. Everything we will say in the remainder of this book is there to assist you in this creative process. Clearly, if we are to accomplish this, we will require a new image of what work is and what work is for.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin

A Question of Balance

On our way to developing a new image of work, we can take a lesson from Jungian psychology. According to Jung, the individual psyche (of both men and women) has feminine and masculine aspects or values. Roughly speaking, the feminine values are concerned with being; the masculine, with doing. In the Jungian conception, the masculine aspect of self is concerned with controlling the external world. Technology is the pre-eminent means of achieving control. In a society where masculine values dominate, technology is highly valued and advanced. The feminine aspect of self is concerned with enlarging the individual’s experience of the world as it is—that is, with being. In a society where masculine values dominate, people have little experience with being; they lose touch with what Joseph Campbell called “the rapture of being alive.” The key to psychological maturity, Jung would tell us, is balance.⁶

The balanced individual is free, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time [the world of doing] to that of the causal deep [the world of being] and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other.”⁷ Modern man is a prisoner of time—so involved in his doings that he has lost touch with his being. As individuals and as a society, we have lost our balance. We might ask with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “Why have we been seduced into abandoning this timeless inner strength of woman [the feminine values] for the temporal outer strength of man [the masculine values]?”⁸

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

T. S. Eliot

The effects of this cultural bias are not merely academic. They are everyday life, where good has become synonymous with expensive; practical, with commercial; science, with technology. The good doctor or lawyer is the one who costs the most money. Practical decisions are ones that make the largest short-term profit, regardless of long-term costs. Science is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, but the pursuit of technological “solutions.” The problem is we accept all of this as though it were the only way. The starving artist is cliché, but we seldom hear of the starving engineer.

Today, even art has become commercialized. It has become a tool for profit and, therefore, a means for better controlling the environment, rather than the revelation of deep inner experience. The same can be said of much of religion, which is often nothing more than a social club. Religion is used as a means of abating the loneliness and isolation of an existence lived without an experience of spirit. It has, to a large degree, lost its fire, its bliss. Philosophy has been left to the technical specialists, and wisdom, especially in high places, runs in short supply.

The feminine values are the fountain of bliss.

Certainly our common-man-as-king myth, with its exclusive emphasis on controlling the environment, produces a half-formed individual, alienated from the life-vivifying powers of nature and spirit—cut off from his own conscience. Without the balance of feminine values, the sanctioned drives for power, leisure, and security are more apt to produce little tyrants than philosopher-kings. The feminine values are the wellspring of life, the fountain of bliss, the ocean of life eternal. Without the regeneration of these living waters, life becomes the barren Waste Land of T. S. Eliot. We become slaves to time and technology. The more enslaved and stuck in time we feel, the more desperately we try to control our time and our lives. Yet the more we attempt to gain control through our mechanical creations (both mental machinations and material gadgetry), the more controlled by them we feel. Today the mechanical gear is being replaced by the electronic chip, and the pace of time becomes a frantic clip.

We miss the bliss, the touch of the eternal. We are stuck in time, stuck in trying to control, stuck with a sense of missing something. We miss the bliss, and so we try to drown time in a bottle of wine, a flood of sex, or a warm jacuzzi. Imitation bliss comes and goes, and too soon, time again comes marching in. Bliss is rest, but we are restless.

Know the masculine,

Keep to the feminine.

Lao Tzu

The women’s movement to date has provided little challenge to our overly masculine value structure. It has been more concerned with finding a place for women within the existing structure than with challenging the assumptions upon which it is based. (If the common man can be king, why not the common woman?) In its wake, we have not become a more feminine (that is, a more spiritual/artistic) society. The introduction of women en masse into the workplace means women, as well as men, feel the pressure to conform to the existing masculine-dominated value structure.

The Whole ’n’ Parting

In his effort to control his world, modern man rejected all he could not understand through reason or experiment. He accepted that “such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless.” He denied the great Mystery of life and put his faith in ratio-nality. A ratio is a portion, a part. In rationality, we divide life into parts, but in endless fragmentation, we miss the experience of the whole. Life is simultaneously the ratio (the part) and the whole—at once the same and different. A stream is the same stream, yet each moment the water is different. Starting from the ratio, life is an endless series of problems to be solved. Starting from the whole, life is a mystery to be revealed.

The rational scientific point of view tells us that life is a problem to be solved. Through analysis, problems can be solved, but always new problems take their place. This is the endless tail chase of Q and A—the Hydra who sprouts new heads every time you cut one off. The poet, the sage, the scriptures, the mythologies of the world suggest that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be revealed. But alas, toward these we turned a deaf ear.

We rejected the Mystery of the whole and came to rely on rational conscious attention as the sole means of experiencing the universe. This gave us a one-at-a-time (abstract, linear) sense of reality—a world of separate things. Our way of dealing with a world conceived of in separate parts was to attempt to exercise ever greater control over it. A world of separate parts (without a unitive whole) was perceived as a jumbled mess. It was up to us to impose law and order on this chaos. We put our faith in political laws to control the wills of others and natural laws to regulate nature. Politics and science became the religions of the modern era. Little king religion is concerned with controlling the parts, not with opening to the whole. The felt need for control and the emphasis on fragmentary, rational knowledge arise together—head and tail of the same dragon.

Nothing divides one so much as thought.

Reginald Blyth

Today, many of us see the “problem of life” as a matter of addition. Our whole effort is to gain and hold, acquire and defend. We fear to let go. The cry of the little king is, “More, more, more!” The answer to our social problems is ever greater economic growth (a good unto itself) and more and better technological solutions. On the personal level, the answer is more stuff of one kind or another: knowledge, money, fame, recognition, admiration, etc. Perhaps, we dream, if we get enough parts, they will add up to a whole. But alas, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put poor ole Humpty Dumpty back together again.

O, Heart, remember thee That Man is none, Save One.

Coventry Patmore

Society tells us the only thing that matters is matter—the only things that count are the things that can be counted. We start counting with toys, then grades, then friends, then bank accounts, then years to retirement. What is there to life that can’t be counted? That can’t be measured? That can’t be dissected or analyzed? What is this, that when you try to reduce it—it wiggles away? The moment you try to grab it—it escapes. No matter how we try to comprehend it, life itself remains an indefinable mystery.

Our science can record similarities or differences in nature, but it can’t touch the Mystery. Below, Isaac Newton states the difficulty of trying to understand any whole from a series of parts.

The orbit of any one planet depends on the combined motion of all the planets, not to mention the action of all these on each other. But to consider simultaneously all these causes of motion and to define these motions by exact laws allowing of convenient calculation exceeds, unless I am mistaken, the force of the entire human intellect.⁹

The difficulty he describes is not a matter of a backward seventeenth century technology but a fundamental limitation of analysis for ever comprehending the whole. There are mysteries that simply defy analysis. If we limit our knowledge to that which can be quantified, we miss, not only the wonder of the Mystery, but the possibility of its revelation.

It has been said that Mystery is revealed through purification. Zen tells us that we must purify even the idea of purification; we must enter into the Mystery direct. All can approach the Mystery in nature. The Taoist and transcendental English and American poets contemplated the Mystery this way—in landscape and rain, in birdsong and nightfall. Looking in nature, we catch glimpses of an order—patterns within a leaf, rings on a tree, cycles of seasons, migrations of birds. These glimpses hint at an incomprehensible, transcendent Mystery. The more of the Mystery we glimpse, the more we are struck by its incomprehensibility, and the more deeply we are moved to purify our sense of separation, our fixation on ourselves as little parts.

The Art of Life’s Work: The Mystery of Being in Action

The new image of work we will call “The Art of Life’s Work.” Life’s work is not machine work obsessed with control—negating the Mystery of Life. It is an integrated expression of Being and doing—what Zen calls the “infinite way of doing finite things.” It is a celebration of the Mystery of Life. We needn’t be desperate prisoners of the time machine, struggling to lord it over our separate little kingdoms. We can live in cognizance of the Eternal and in harmony with life, nature, and one another. We can dedicate ourselves to loving and serving our fellow man in the realization that he and we are a part of the great eternity of existence, the great Mystery of Life. This is what is meant by “follow your bliss”—do from being. Act in time from the ecstasy of the timeless.

A life’s work comes out of the Living Mystery. It moves into the limited world of time and forms; this is the work, hence, life’s work. Life and work are not things apart. Work is more than gaining privileges and possessions; it is ongoing, ecstatic, LIVING experience. When we tap into living experience, we no longer feel as though we must be king. We can just be ALIVE at work! When we live in the bliss, there is no difficulty that is insurmountable. If we miss the bliss, there is no compensation that is adequate.

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

Joseph Campbell

The highest order of duty to self is to follow your bliss. To thine own self be true. The highest order of duty to society is to make your fullest contribution to its well-being. These duties meet in life’s work. They may appear (especially in the short-term) to be in conflict, but in the long run of a life span, they can be seen to be threads interwoven so tightly as to be almost indistinguishable. It cannot be said where one begins and the other ends.

Freud said the basic requirements of human existence are love and work.¹⁰ A genuine life’s work breaks down any barriers we might impose to separate the two. Love is not a category, a compartment of life separate from work. It is pervasive. When we are in love, we feel boundless life. We touch the timeless. Work is simply the forms into which we pour this living substance of love. In life’s work, we honor both our timeless love and the time-bound world of form we live in. Freud was correct: Love (and through it, the timeless pulse of life) and work (and through it, the world of time and forms) are the basic stuff of human life. Work without love is dry and empty. Love without work is incomplete. Our task is to tap into the eternal ocean of bliss and somehow express that energy in the world of forms and time. This is the art of creative living. While engaged in life’s work, we can be said to be practicing artists—motivated, not by external rewards, but by the intrinsic joys of self-expression and service to humanity.

Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

Marsilio Ficino

A Postmodern Vision: Everyone an Artist

(The discussion that immediately follows draws on the work of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, an exceptionally gifted philosopher and art historian of the twentieth century. See especially Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art and The Transformation of Nature in Art, both published by Dover. This discussion is necessarily brief; I will explore these themes in greater depth in a future book, The Way of the Artist.)

Art is the proper task of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Some may find it hard to accept that Nietzsche’s statement (above) applies to them, yet we will insist throughout this book that every man or woman is, in potential, an artist and, when living authentically, one indeed. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote: “However broad or narrow, noble or ignoble, the subject of the art, however elegant or crude the language, art is always recognizable as art. All that we demand of an artist is that he should offer us living water: for this water has a miraculous quality, and even though it be offered in a thimble it will fill a bowl…” (Emphasis added.)¹¹

An experience I had many years ago shaped my own views of work as art. I had arrived in Europe for the first time, there to study the art and architecture of the Old World. After traveling all night, I arrived early in the morning and went straightway to a downtown hotel to check in. There was no one at the desk, but I heard the most incredible singing ringing through the building. A voice of such spirit, beauty, and joy as I had never heard. It was “not the tongue, but our very life singing.” Following the voice, I went upstairs. There, in the third-floor hallway was the origin of the voice—a young woman on her hands and knees pushing a bristle brush with both hands. In this woman, I had encountered a genuine artist of life. Her art echoed in me long after the noise of so many museum images had faded.

The Whole Business of Man Is The Arts, & All Things Common.

William Blake

This little story illustrates a couple of important points: that we not mistake art for artifact, or again, that we not mistake the art with the craft. As Coomaraswamy wrote, “the thing is a work of art, made by art, but it is not art itself; the art remains in the artist…”¹² If we can enter into what Coomaraswamy is suggesting here (and he is by no means alone in this view;.), we can understand that, not only can we all be artists, but indeed, it is our duty, for artists are what we naturally are. The art is in the man or woman—in their consciousness. The Zen saying, “How wondrous this, how mysterious! I carry fuel, I draw water,”¹³ gives this perfectly. Again emphasizing consciousness over craft, Blake said, “Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.”¹⁴ If you cannot find art in your consciousness, you will never find it at all.

The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it. It is for this reason that we are moved by the true Primitives and that the most accomplished art craftsmanship leaves us cold.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The artist’s craft may be a “fine” or “applied” art. We are not suggesting that all of us can or should be “fine” artists but that we err if we assume “that there is one kind of man that can imagine, and another that cannot; or to speak more honestly, another kind whom we cannot afford to imagine without doing hurt to business…”¹⁵ Of course, there are greater and lesser artists, whatever the craft. The test of greatness is the depth of the artist’s vision, and only secondarily, the skill of her technique. As Coomaraswamy would say, it is the artist’s vision (love) from which the “living waters” spring. “It is not by an intellectual or categorical activity that we can judge the intensity of an artist’s vision. We cannot judge except by our response and whether or not we can respond will depend on our own state of grace.”(Emphasis added.)¹⁶

The First Work of the Artist Is Herself

The purpose of the whole [work] is to remove those who are living in this life from a state of wretchedness and lead them to the state of blessedness.

Dante

The artist must be a developed individual—an authentic hero and never a mere product of society. The hero, as Dorthea Dooling so aptly expressed it, “may be you or me, but only at the highest reaches of our most impossible possibility.”¹⁷ Her role is to release the active powers of nature, soul, and spirit into the lives of men. The intensity of her vision is reflected in her capacity to fuse these three into a radiant, harmonious, whole. Nature provides the medium and energy of the work—the dancer’s body, the painter’s colors, the sculptor’s stone, the composer’s instruments, the poet’s paper and ink or computer chip—as well as the body’s transformation of these. The musician trains her ear; the painter, his eye and hand; the dancer, her body. The soul provides the symbols, the mythic forms, the archetypal energies through which a universally human art is made intelligible. The spirit arrests the mind—projecting the experiencer out of himself into the realm of the infinite, the transcendent Mystery.

Before she can express them in art, the artist must deeply encounter these energies in life. Modern life is so configured as to negate the powers of nature, soul, and spirit—to encourage you to put all of your eggs (faith and aspirations) into society’s basket. Society tries to make you think that it is your only source of nourishment and protection, power and refreshment. And who is this society? None other than our little king—the adolescent ego.

Traditional cultures understood that society is always essentially adolescent and sought to honor, celebrate, and make conscious the greater powers of nature, soul, and spirit through communally shared myths, rituals, and initiations, and in the higher religions, through individual transformation. Here we must distinguish between society and culture. A society can be interested in a man or woman only as a political or economic entity; a culture is interested in more. Culture means literally “to cultivate” or “to care for.”¹⁸ Cultures care for their peoples as natural, spiritual beings and not simply as workers or consumers. Cultures cultivate an awareness of the deep energies of life and of the particular gifts of the individual, and so naturally produce art. Modern society (the little king with his machines) has usurped the role of the greater powers in seeking to make itself the Alpha and Omega of human experience.

Industry without art is brutality.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The trick of society is to make you think it is the whole banana of life. For your physical food, you are to depend, not on the bounty of Mother Nature but on supermarket chains, chemical conglomerates, and giant agribusiness firms. Western man has become increasingly alienated from his body and nature. You are to depend on society for its evaluation of your sanity—measured, not in terms of the ancient wisdom or sacred psychologies but in terms of “normality”—the sharing of the society-dominant world view. Western man has become alienated from his conscience and the universally human. You are to depend upon social religion to tell you what God is or upon social science to tell you that God isn’t. Western man stands alienated from his divinity and from Ultimate Reality. (By Western man we mean, not simply those who live in the West but all who embrace its vision of life.) All of this puts extreme pressure on the social dimension to fulfill all of man’s needs and puts pressure on him to conform; for unlike in other cultures, he has no other concept of power, no other source of protection.

For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything beside the State must be taken from him.

Carl Jung

Again, our task is to re-energize the living powers of nature, spirit, and psyche into society. This is always the work of the artist—opening, as Blake said, “the immortal Eyes of man” to the reality beyond and beneath his mental abstractions. Having come to recognize and trust the energies which support it, we may come at last to develop a relationship of trust with society, not in unexamined innocence, but in the full acceptance of our responsibilities to it. We can only trust society when we are no longer exclusively dependent upon it—when we can live as natural, human beings in touch with the deeply spiritual within. The first work of the artist, then, is not the transformation of matter into some artifact, but the transformation of his own consciousness, or put another way, transforming his relationships to nature, spirit, psyche, and society.

The key to the transformations lies in developing relationships of trust with each of these aspects. Trust is not arrived at through an effort of will or conscious intention; it comes in the simple recognition that we are not separate from, but one with, nature, spirit, the universally human, and our unique historical and cultural context. All of these are forces greater than our little personality kingdoms. All may be trusted on their own terms, but these terms must be understood and not confused. We will encourage you to trust each of these powers by acknowledging or acting-in-the-knowledge-of them. Act-in-the-knowledge-of nature—its spontaneous growth and its inherent polarity. Act-in-the-knowledge-of spirit and its transcendent Mystery. Act-in-the-knowledge of the psyche and its archetypal energies. Act-in-the-knowledge-of society and serve it as a culture-builder, and not simply as a cultural product. Together these energies will guide you on your journey to life’s work.

When Nations grow Old, The Arts grow Cold And Commerce settles on every Tree.

William Blake

The Little-King Model

The Way of the Artist

Transforming Our Relationship to Nature

Transforming our relationship to nature begins with understanding how we approach it. Today, most of us have little experience of nature (or so we think), and so we are left with our ideas about nature. We will examine three big ones: (1) nature is inferior to the conscious mind, (2) nature is a machine to be controlled, and (3) nature is not good enough (here good is used in the sense of “being fair or ethical”).

Eradicate Inferior (or Sinful) Nature: Nature is not inferior to the conscious mind, but to the contrary, the source of its life. The conscious mind requires a brain to think with, which it gets courtesy of Mother Nature. Yet somehow (perhaps from our old-time religion?) we got the notion that nature has got it all wrong, and it is the job of man, with his superior conscious mind, to set things straight. This is the wild and woolly view of nature so prevalent in the nineteenth century, and carrying over into our own. Modern came to be associated with man-made, and all things natural came to be seen as dirty, messy, or heathen. Traditional peoples living “in nature” were inferior races; women, who are more closely associated with nature, became “the inferior sex;” natural bodily functions became unclean or unwholesome. The modern notion was to put nature out of sight and out of mind—to attack it. Of course, we couldn’t go around blindly bulldozing and cementing nature “out there” without losing touch with nature “in here.” And lose touch we did.

…technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

Alan Watts

Control the Machine, Nature: Where we could not eradicate nature, we attempted to control it as if it were a machine—a kind of giant clockwork. As much as possible, we attempted to make natural functions into social, mechanical ones. We start with childbirth, where life is not given by the mother as the embodiment of Mother Nature but by a socially licensed doctor and his marvelous machines. We are fed, not mother’s milk, but a product of a mechanized factory. We try to act as though we are the boss of nature—that through our marvelous science, we can piecemeal manipulate it—without bothering to respect, much less to understand it. Often our attempts at control only make a bigger mess of things. Nature can be improved upon, as in a Japanese tea garden or a beautiful city park. Yet this is best accomplished when we work with nature and by our own nature—so that the city park is as natural a human action as a beaver’s dam or an eagle’s nest.

Nature is not a dead machine but a living miracle. Your conscious mind is not required to digest your food or beat your heart. Nor can it direct the movements of the stars, the orbiting of planets, the migration of birds, the sprouting of seeds. If one stops to contemplate this, she recognizes that this great natural intelligence lives within. Right now, you are sitting in the midst of a miracle. Acknowledge it. Honor it. Nature is neither a wild creature to be tamed, nor a machine that can be adroitly controlled by pushing all the right levers. Nothing you can do from conscious intention can in any way rival the mystery of the life happening spontaneously within you—right now.

Thus, those who say they would have right without its correlate, wrong; or good government without its correlate, misrule, do not apprehend the great principles of the universe, nor the nature of all creation.

Chuang Tzu

Avoid the Polarity of Nature: Nature is not the one-sided affair that we seem to wish it were. Having attempted to eradicate and control nature, to discount its blessings, we are all the more shocked by its destruction. For most of us, nature is not the birth of a child, the bounty of food, a gentle summer day, or health—nature is a hurricane, an earthquake, a flood, or an illness. Traditional peoples living in nature, as a part of nature, are naturally attuned to its ways. They know the lesson of nature is polarity: life/death, black/white, gain/loss—that the way of nature is the way of sacrifice. Creation is suffering. The image is there in childbirth—for you to enter life, your mother must suffer. It is there every time you take a meal—some sentient being (plant or animal) has died to give you life.

A man is related to all nature.

Emerson

Traditional peoples love the animal while stalking, killing, and carving it. We buy our meat prepackaged in cellophane—we don’t want to be reminded of death or sacrifice. We want good without bad, happiness without suffering, beginnings without ends, life without death. We try to sugarcoat or avoid the pains of life. The sick, the old, and the dying are shunned. They remind us of our own mortality. Whether we like it or not, nature’s way is our way. We must come into accord with it, not as an intellectual understanding, but deeply felt in the depths of our being—opening our hearts to the sorrows as well as the joys of life. Nature’s way is only shocking for someone who lives in an artificial world of his own imagining, where everything is at right angles, and nothing is crooked.

Nature in Art: Ananda K. Coomaraswamy defined art as “the involuntary dramatisation of subjective experience.”¹⁹ Involuntary here means spontaneous; even as love cannot be coerced or willed, neither can creativity be forced. The art of creative living is not the execution of some intentional program for life, but a natural, evolving expression. In chapter 1, we will explore how we might learn to trust nature, growing spontaneously, as nature does, from the inside out.

Transforming Our Relationship to Spirit

At least since the Council of Constantinople in 869, the spirit has been denied as essential in man. Both our traditional religion and modern science dismiss the spirit as irrelevant to daily life. Religion does admit of the soul and the Holy Spirit (which comes to man from without but is not innate to him), yet the emphasis is on the ethical—good vs. bad, right vs. wrong. As Joseph Campbell said, contemporary “religious life is ethical; it is not mystical.”²⁰

For modern science, “mystical” is a kind of dirty word. The spirit is a childish superstition from a bygone era. The word science originally meant simply “knowledge,” and as the quote by Plotinus (below) indicates, it was considered that there could be knowledges of different kinds, including spiritual. (Plotinus is hardly original but following Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato in this matter.) Modern science is only interested in that knowledge perceivable through the senses, either directly or through augmenting instrumentation (empirical knowledge).

This bias rejects knowledge of the realm of ideas as well as the realm of spirit. That ideas cannot be sensibly perceived does not make them unreal (e.g., mathematics are proved by logic, not by measurement). Neither is the spiritual unreal because it cannot be measured by the senses or their instruments, nor proved by logic. (Immanuel Kant dealt definitively with this last point.)²¹ So much of our modern disdain for the spiritual or mystical results from a confused understanding of the word science. We retain its original meaning, knowledge, in other words, that which is intelligible; yet we graft on it a new meaning, one that limits all knowledge to the empirical.

Know Ye not…that the spirit of God dwelleth within you?

I Corinthians 3:16

Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

Plotinus

This fashion of the denial of spiritual knowledge runs contrary to the great mystical and philosophical teachings of the world. The term Philosophia Perennis or Perennial Philosophy was apparently first used by Leibnitz and developed in modern times by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy is what Huxley called “the Highest Common Good” in all traditions—cutting across religious traditions, historical epochs, ethnic inflectives—Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, Greek, Jewish, Christian, Islamic. It belongs to no religion but is the essence of them all. Huxley renders the crux of the Perennial Philosophy thus:

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individual consciousness…is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition…[uniting] the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.²²

The Man who never in his Mind and Thoughts travel’d to Heaven Is No Artist.

William Blake

Even if one has not fully identified with this spirit and, thereby, had direct experience, he can in some way intuit that the spirit within him is one with the Divine Ground out of which all things have arisen and into which they will again return. This cannot be proved by evidence of the senses nor understood by logic or deduction, and is therefore called Mystery. There is no genuine art that does not in some way acknowledge (act-in-the-knowledge-of) this Mystery. That the Perennial Philosophy is currently out of fashion or that it “makes no sense” (again, it is transcendent or trans-sense-able) in no way reflects on its efficacy or veracity. For in these matters, as Joseph Campbell said, the majority is always wrong. “The majority’s function in relation to spirit is to try to listen and open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.”²³ These “someones” are the genuine artists, mystics, sages. The consistency of their revelations across time and culture lead the open-minded individual to recognize in the Perennial Philosophy inherent truth about the Reality of who we are. (See The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley, Perennial Library, 1944, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, by Frithjof Schoun, Quest, 1984.)

If we are to learn to trust spirit, we in the West must venture beyond these primitive images of God as king, judge, or dead man. The Roman Catholic tradition epitomizes the king model. Early Roman Catholic churches were called “Basilicas,” or “royal houses.” The Pope wears a crown and carries a staff; you kneel to kiss his ring. I once saw the Pope entering Saint Peter’s at the Vatican. There he was with all of his attendants—being carried slowly down the aisle on a palanquin—the Swiss Guards standing sharply at attention. When at last he sat upon the throne, the entire congregation broke into applause. This is a king. The Pope is standing in for King God. The accent in this model is on authority and decrees issued from on high.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Alan Watts

From the Jewish tradition, we get the judge model. Read the Book of Judges: this is how the Hebrews organized society. Even when they took a king in Saul, this was recognized as adopting something foreign—the judge was the homegrown model. In this model, you get a heavy emphasis on judging by the letter of the law. The accent is on collective righteousness enforced, not by the king, but by the group—everyone is checking up on you to make sure you are doing it right. This is picked up again in the Protestant religions. The Protestant church typically resembles, not a throne room, but a courtroom. You have the minister in the black robe, who comes out to the pulpit like a kind of prosecuting attorney and throws the book at you—with the rest of the congregation playing the role of jury.

Of course, you have heard that God is dead. You probably have an image of an old guy with a grey beard who just died one day. The old codger got so tired of being the boss and the judge that he just up and croaked.

Thou shalt know God without image and without means.

Meister Eckhart

We might not want to admit it, but these are our images of God—way back there in our subconscious minds. They shape the way we approach the world. If you imagine God as the big king, then you want to be the little king—the boss of your little world. If you think God is the judge, then you think, I’ll be a good little judge and go around making sure they are doing things right. If you think God is dead, you feel yourself to be an orphan, forsaken and adrift in a sea of meaninglessness—a kind of Sartrian existentialist. Most likely you have a combination of the three. (God is there in the back of your mind bossing and judging you but dead when you need Him.) We have called the controlling pseudo-myth “the little-king model,” yet we can see elements of the Judge and the dead God within it. From the king, we get our ambition; from the judge, our hyper-conformity; and from the dead God, our insatiable consumerism and focus on entertainment. A genuine experience of spirit requires that we move beyond these primitive images of God. For this reason, we will, when we speak of spirit, do so in terms of Zen—though we could have just as easily used Plato or the Western mystics; for in matters of spirit, there are no contradictions.

Spirit in Art: In chapter 2, we will explore the Zen spirit at work. We will say nothing here of the role of spirit in art except to quote two great artists and two great philosophers:

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality—something approaching the work of God.

D. T. Suzuki

The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that art can go beyond the finest specimens of art that are now in the world is not knowing what art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the spirit.

William Blake

All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said has its origin in the Spirit.

Thomas Aquinas

One comes to be of just such stuff as that on which the mind is set.

Upanishads

Transforming Our Relationship to Psyche

We know ourselves as human beings through the psyche, the human imagination. The Chinese say that in man (the human soul), Heaven (spirit) and Earth (nature) unite. Through man, nature makes love to (becomes fully conscious of) spirit. The human psyche (literally, soul) is universal in its nature and individual in its expression.

To say that there is a universal human soul or imagination may be out of fashion, and yet how else can we account for the amazing correspondences in the art and mythologies of the world? How else can we account for human compassion, the readiness of one human being to suffer with another? For, as Arthur Schopenhauer suggested, when we act in compassion at the risk of our own lives, it is because we recognize the other to be, in fact, our very own self.²⁴ Careful examination will bear up what we intuitively know. After fifty years of studying diverse cultures, the great American anthropologist Franz Boas concluded that “in the main the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world.”²⁵

The psyche is the realm where the universal human imagination meets the individual conscience. A man or woman in touch with conscience (literally, “together with” (con) “knowledge”(science) or “the inner Knower”) and the potent properties of soul is an authentic human being and not easily controlled by the pressure to conform to social norms.²⁶ He knows where he is in the universe, in the stages of life, and in relation to the archetypal energies. Mythology speaks to the Knower within us all. It tells us what it is to be human and how to live in accord with the energies of life. Carl Jung wrote that man is “a being operated and manoevred by archetypal forces instead of his ‘free will,’ that is, his arbitrary egoism and his limited consciousness. He should learn that he is not the master in his own house and that he should carefully study the other side of his psychical world [the shadow], which seems to be the true ruler of his fate.”²⁷

Jung’s statement echoes the lessons of the world’s great mythologies: there are archetypal forces inherent in man, which he must recognize and come into accord with before he can be thought of as a mature individual. The role of mythology and genuine psychology is to guide the individual in this “inner work.” Today, our notion of psychology rejects the soul and its inner work, reducing “psychology” to a means of effecting, with the aid of academically trained specialists, social “adjustment” or behavior “modification.” The genuine psychology of the “inner work” is not the domain of the specialist but of every living human being.

Can it really be said that before the day of our pretentious science, humanity was composed solely of imbeciles and the superstitious?

R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz

We must get beyond the simple-minded notion that psychology is something “invented” in the nineteenth century by Doctor Freud or William James or Alexander Bain. Psychology, as the word itself indicates, is properly the study of the soul. Thousands of years of wisdom precede the good Viennese doctor. To toss this treasure overboard in favor of a narrow “scientific” psychology is a crime no less heinous than the burning of the library of Alexandria. (Jung, for example, recognized that one could not properly call himself a student of psychology and dismiss the wisdom of ancient China, India, Egypt, or Tibet, much less Greece and the folktales of Europe—and fortunately for us, he didn’t.)

Mythology is the womb of man’s initiation to life and death.

Joseph Campbell

In many fields today, overspecialization is a positively dangerous trend. Buckminster Fuller wrote: “The more specialized society becomes, the less attention does it pay to the discoveries of the mind, which are intuitively beamed to the brain, there to be received only if the switches are on. Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of all-powerful generalized principles.”²⁸ More than this, overspecialization tends to separate from us the pearls of wisdom already pulled from the depths of the human psyche.

In our overly specialized culture, we’ve lost the value of the universalist, the generalist. The universalist is a humanist in the best sense of the word. Her subject is man, not in any particular historical or cultural context, not in narrow specialization, but man whole, as he is. Especially in our time of great transition and upheaval, it is vital that we integrate the lessons of those who have made it their task to study what is constant in the human experience. In the century now ending, we have had great universalists, among them: Carl Jung in Psychology, Joseph Campbell in Mythology, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy in Art, Aldous Huxley and Frithjof Schuon in Religion, Buckminster Fuller in the study of the structure of the universe. All have had their difficulties with academic narrow-mindedness, and yet all have left legacies well worth mining. They themselves have made it their task to extract the diamonds from the coal of human knowledge.

I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine.

William Blake

In discovering the universally human, in other words, the human soul, you recognize your own soul and its unique life’s work. The only way one is capable of original work is to work in unoriginal themes—the universal human themes. Only in this is there the possibility of art. One’s true work is never merely “my work,” but humanity’s work. It’s not really self-expression, unless by “self” we mean it with a capital S, and that Self is the Self within all mankind.

Psyche in Art: In chapter 3, we will explore the role of the psyche in work. We will consider how we can come to trust our psyche by developing a constructive relationship with conscience, by learning to face our own shadow, or dark side, and by accessing mythic archetypes, the creative energies of the soul. Joseph Campbell said, “The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity…”²⁹

Transforming Our Relationship to Society

Society is a source of power and a protection for the individual. It teaches and protects us through our many years of dependence. As human beings, we are born into a long period of dependency and incompleteness. The moment the umbilical chord is cut, we are helpless. We are biologically incomplete and dependent upon others for our survival. This physiological fact has a profound effect on our psychology. We develop a psychology of approval-seeking as a reaction to our biological helplessness. This is an effective strategy. First, in seeking the approval of our parents, we win their affection and support: they take care of us. Second, seeking approval becomes the motivating force to learn and thereby to complete ourselves as full members of adult society. We learn to walk, talk, and all the rest we need to function as members of our society.

Even as approval motivates, disapproval has tremendous power to limit or correct our behavior. Because we associate winning approval with survival, signs of disapproval are experienced as threats to our survival and become effective tools for social conditioning. While efficacious in our youth, the psychology of approval is a positive drag on our development as mature adults. Traditional cultures helped individuals through this transition or transformation of consciousness with rites of initiation. In the modern world, we are left to ourselves to make this transformation—each one for herself.

Society and Art: In chapter 4, we will consider how we can develop toward society a relationship of trust—not as a conformist who takes its model hook, line, and sinker but in knowing that to be fully one’s self requires that one take responsibility for his fellow man. Increasingly, we recognize the need for this transformation.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a revolution in thinking turned the existing social order on its head. It was the realization of “the rights of man.” The next great revolution in thinking has already begun. It is the realization of “the responsibilities of man.” While continuing to protect and enlarge human rights, we must, if we are going to make a world worth living in, be equally concerned with human responsibilities. This includes the responsibility to make a meaningful contribution through our work. After all, most of us spend more of our waking adult lives working than doing anything else.

What we choose to do as individuals, taken together, becomes what we as a society choose to do. As responsible individuals, we cannot make our career choices as if oblivious to this fact. Even if we wanted to, we could not bury our heads in the sand. The evidences of our responsibility are all around us. It is fair to say that collectively we have, up to now, made some rather poor choices. For currently, as a global society, we are choosing to live under the threat of nuclear terror; we are choosing to live in a world of vast inequities in the distribution of wealth and resources; we are choosing to pollute and abuse our environment, fouling air and water, forcing the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals. We are choosing to crowd into urban centers that foster the breakup of the family, breed disease (in the undeveloped world) and drug use (in the developed), and destroy community and cultural values.

Of course, we are also collectively choosing to do many good and noble things. Still, the enormity of our difficulties requires that each of us consider our responsibilities to the world we live in when making our individual career choices. Most of our problems are man-made. They are a result of the way we think and the way we do, and we can change these—one individual at a time.

We begin from the recognition that all beings cherish happiness and do not want suffering. It then becomes both morally wrong and pragmatically unwise to pursue only one’s own happiness oblivious to the feelings and aspirations of all others who surround us as members of the same human family. The wiser course is to think of others when pursuing our own happiness.

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Today we stand at a crossroads in human history. We have the opportunity to create a new image of ourselves at work, one which will surely trigger a revolution as profound, as shocking, as transforming as the Industrial Revolution. Even as the Industrial Revolution could not occur until there was a massive shift in society’s view of work and wealth, so must an equally profound change in thinking regarding work and wealth occur before the next quantum leap in man’s social evolution can flourish. We can no more conceptualize the impact of such a change than a preindustrial miller in the hills of England or New Hampshire could have conceptualized the impact of the Industrial Revolution he was helping to foster. We are charting new ground. We must.

Humanity:

A Multidimensional Phenomenon

The “work-as-art” or “man-as-artist” paradigm we have outlined above provides a new tool for choosing and evaluating your work as an individual. (We will explore this at some length in “Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work.”) In the remainder of this discussion, we will briefly sketch some of the social and cultural ramifications of this view of work. Of course, a work-as-art view does imply an entirely different set of values around which to organize society. However, these values cannot take hold in society by imposing or proselytizing some abstract utopian theory but will “arise mutually” with individually transformed artists. In this, we can distinguish the work-as-art paradigm from prevailing theories of social transformation. Prevailing oppositions to the current structure of society focus on the need for change within the conventional view of man as a one-dimensional creature—that is, as an exclusively social (i.e., economic and political) being. They argue for economic and social justice within the confines of a view of man as a mechanistic, soulless, and unnatural creature.

The work-as-art conception is interested in man as a multidimensional being. It does not suggest that if “everything were equal” or that if “the playing field were level,” everyone would be happy. It does not put its faith in the free market, in democracy, in social welfare programs, in economic growth, in the redistribution of wealth, etc. (Neither, by the way, is it inherently opposed to any of these.) Owning the means of production without having some sense of what to do with them will hardly “save the masses.”

If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.

Reginald Blyth

The work-as-art conception views one-dimensionality itself as the source of the alienation of modern man. Again, this alienation is not an economic, political, or social problem, and therefore, its “solution” will always evade economic, political, and social theorists. Prevailing political theories (radical to conservative) accept the narrow (one-dimensional) little-king model of man. They differ in their analysis of the problem (e.g., “class conflict,” “patriarchal power,” or “lack of economic growth”) and, therefore, in their prescriptions (e.g., dictatorship of the proletariat, women in the board rooms, greater economic incentives for capital investment), but all accept a narrow view of humankind.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live—that is to say, [just] for the money—has turned himself into a slave.

Joseph Campbell

When the individual (consciously or tacitly) accepts the narrow, one-dimensional view of man in his approach to work, he degrades his humanity on two counts—regardless of the monetary compensation he receives. First, he degrades himself in his choice of work, choosing that which he considers the best trade for his labor; second, he surrenders all responsibility for his work (to his employer). In this, the corporate vice president may be as degraded as the factory worker. If each is doing soulless work, shaped by values not his own, then each is equally degraded. All little-king analysis, radical to conservative, views the corporate vice president as “advantaged” and the factory worker or secretary as relatively “disadvantaged.” This sets up a false conflict (rich against poor, men against women, labor against management) that denies the essential brotherhood, or humanhood, of all humanity.

A craft can only have meaning when it serves a spiritual way.

Titus Burkhardt

It assumes a “them,” that has what “we” (or “me”) need(s), that is, economic or political power, without ever pausing to consider whether the acquisition of this power would be, really, the panacea one hopes for. For the unionist, feminist, or Marxist who sincerely believes that the white, male corporate executive has “all the power” or a life to be envied, we recommend Quiet Desperation: The Truth about Successful Men, by Jan Halper.³⁰ To be sure, the executive possesses more creature comforts, but he is not necessarily a happier creature. (His unhappiness is often compounded because he feels guilty for feeling unhappy, while possessing what others so desperately seem to want, and has no idea of what else to do—beyond achieving still more power and possessions.) For the “less fortunate,” a one-dimensional perspective, not only produces envy and resentment, but more importantly, it distracts the individual from the pursuit of his or her own happiness through growth—that is, from contacting the deeper energies within and discovering his or her unique purpose in life.

Thoroughly to know oneself, is above all art, for it is the highest art.

Theologia Germanica

Honoring one’s own, and insisting on the humanity of all people, is the natural outcome of a work-as-art perspective. The little-king perspective sets up a master/slave or victim vs. oppressor dichotomy that fosters division, conflict, and hatred. We have been conditioned to see all human relationships from this narrow and destructive context. For those who insist on some type of dualistic means of comparison, “the degraded” vs. “the fully human” seems a more useful measuring stick. Degraded here does not indicate a failure to adhere to some set of moral rules but the diminution or confinement of consciousness (to the narrow realm of the political and economic). Fully human suggests acting in consciousness of the various levels of human awareness, especially those at the “higher” end of the spectrum. Where the little-king model views growth and wealth in terms of ever greater economic and political power, growth from the way of art is the expansion of consciousness into nature, spirit, and soul—the richness of life that results from a multidimensional consciousness.

While trapped in the box of one-dimensional consciousness, we feel constrained. We are like the man whose pants are too tight—he can “neither sit, nor stand, nor lie.” He is anxious and ill at ease. He knows or senses that something must change. This “something” is not a rearrangement of the furniture within the box but an expansion of consciousness into areas he has heretofore ignored. As Plato said, “philosophy [literally the love of wisdom] begins with wonder.” It is with wonder and humility that we approach the unknown. We expand into new ways of seeing, into new modes of being. We learn to approach nature, and through it, the mystery of that which is tzu-jan (of itself so) whose action is wu wei (non-striving). We learn to approach the mystery of spirit in its immanent and transcendent qualities. We learn to approach the mystery of the human soul with its individual destiny and universal harmony.

There are signs that many today are ready for this expansion in consciousness—ready to grow and expand, as all nature does, from the inside out. As E. F. Schumacher wrote, “Some people are no longer angry when told that restoration must come from within: the belief that everything is ‘politics’ and that radical rearrangements of the ‘system’ will suffice to save civilisation is no longer held with the same fanaticism [that it once was.]”³¹ In this there is great promise. If we can learn to redirect anger at “them” into the dynamic transformation of ourselves—we may yet discover the art of creative living.

“Art-quality” for All

Some may object that the image of man as artist is elitist—that the common man or woman cannot attain to art, either in consciousness or in the execution of their craft. It could be argued in reply that many so-called primitive cultures did, in fact, achieve a “society of artists.” Yet this is not a wholly adequate response, for they did so while operating within fixed traditional systems, having limited vocational choice and a shared mythic and symbolic vocabulary—neither of which apply to our situation today. Our task, then, is a new and more difficult one. There is no model we can imitate or “get back to.” Yet today we recognize that the underlying truths that the great art of the world sought to represent are universal and not limited to any particular ethnic inflection. They belong, finally, to all humanity.

The way of the artist is a universally human way, not dependent upon a shared religion, myth, geography, or even technology. It works as well in Bali as in New York City, in China as in the Middle East. Ultimately, quality is for everyone—both in terms of aspirations and end results. We all benefit from quality workmanship, from the products of men and women who know themselves as total beings and not simply as workers or “job-holders.” Were all to aspire to be artists, all would benefit from more beautiful meals, clothing, parks, homes, schools, etc. We would benefit further from living with people, not alienated from—but happy in—their work. Those capable of the greatest art would not waste their talents in a vain struggle to be king of the hill but would release the gifts they hold deep within their souls.

The little-king view of life is no less elitist in theory, yet far more destructive in its effect. Everyone cannot be king, and while this image dominates our imaginations, we view life in terms of separation and competition, and therefore, conflict. On the other hand, the way of the artist is inclusive—respecting and celebrating the wonders of nature, the dignity of humanity, and the radiance of the Transcendent Mystery. No genuine artist views himself as superior in essence to others.

Still, aren’t we just substituting one ideal or image for another, and doesn’t the truth stand behind any image? Of course, words or any symbolic images are always only maps of the territory of truth, never reality itself. No map, no matter how excellent, is ever to be confused with the territory that it indicates. Yet, since few know the territory directly, most are left dealing with maps—and, to be sure, there are better and worse maps. At the dawn of the third millennium C.E., the little-king map has us totally lost and utterly confused. The map we are here suggesting can help us find our way again. The way of the artist, as we have laid it out, offers us an image of man in harmony with nature, the deep rhythms of the human soul, and the Transcendent Mystery. In the end, it may produce, if not an enlightened society, at least a happier and more humane one.

The Art of Everyday Living

You can experience your everyday life as art by bringing to it the qualities of the artist—inspiration and absorption, creativity and resourcefulness, play and delight. But first, unwind. No one can live as an artist who feels anxious, knotted up in fear. Fortunately, there are only two great fears—the fear that life is going to end and the fear that it isn’t. It is easy to see that the fear of death arises from attachment to the temporal—from holding on to what must be let go of. But why should we fear living?

We fear living because we don’t believe we are adequate to life. Tangled in the mumbo-jumbo of conditioned beliefs, we get so hung up on limitation that we fail to recognize our basic adequacy as human beings. Denying limitation or obsessing on it keeps us knotted up in fear. Artists play with limitation. They neither deny it, nor are they overwhelmed by it. There are only so many words in any language, but that doesn’t keep the poet from writing. There is only a certain range of color the eye can see, but this doesn’t keep the painter from painting. There are a limited number of notes that we can hear, but that doesn’t keep the composer from composing. The artist accepts the limitations of form, not with fear and dread, but as the starting point of creation.

You can be the artist of your life by recognizing that, for all of your limitations, you are basically adequate to life. For all of its difficulties, life is basically adequate for you. Accept that, while it may not fit some imaginary conception of perfection, the world is basically adequate; and you are basically adequate to the world. Be here now with what is, and play with the stuff of your life. If you have twelve crayons in your box, use your creativity and resourcefulness to make the best picture you can with these. Don’t spend your time worrying that someone else has forty-eight or sixty-four crayons. As you are, you are basically adequate to life.

Your basic adequacy is not won or done. It is not because you own a home or because you have a good job, not because you have a big bank balance or because you have a certain relationship, not because you are American or politically correct. Your basic adequacy is in your breath, in your beating heart—in your life. You are adequate to life because you are life. You have all you need—a heart, a body, an imaginative mind, a basic connection with all of life. You have an earth to walk on. It has gravity to hold you. It has water and fire, plants and trees, mountains and valleys. It’s an adequate earth. The sky is adequate. It has sun and moon. It has stars—not too many, not too few. As you begin to attune to the adequacy of life all around and within you, you will see ever more opportunities for creative play. Even as the artist accepts the tools of his craft and creates with these, accept all the stuff of your life and creatively play with it.

Work as Art

This is a book about work. Work can be most simply and broadly defined as human action—our doing. In the West, we have separated our doing from our Being. This separation, or alienation, has profound consequences on the quality of our lives. It is for precisely this reason that we have, as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy said, “for the first time in history created an industry without art.”³² Everything that we will say in the remainder of “Prologue: The Art of Life’s Work”—the lessons we will draw from Taoism, from Zen, from art and myth, and from the great humanitarian activists—will be with a view toward discovering how we might unite our Being with our doing.

CHAPTER 1

The Tao of Work; or, Creative Self-Expression

Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.

Chuang Tzu

How can we make of work a genuine art—an expression of our deepest selves? We begin by asking, What are we working for? Is the purpose of work to solve problems or to creatively express oneself? The way each of us answers this question shapes our lives as individuals and our world. It affects our psychology as well as our activities—the way we feel about the world and the things we do in it. We can’t really get too far into this without at least a brief consideration of world view, of the way we approach the world. After a consideration of the metaphysics underlying conventional attitudes toward work, we will go on to explore how our approach to career design differs from more traditional career-planning models.

The Western view of life, inherited from Middle Eastern mythology, tends to view man as a stranger in a strange land. Thrust out of the Garden into a hostile world, he is condemned to toil and sweat, to eke out his existence in a perpetual struggle against nature and his fellow man. The ancient “man as stranger” element of the religious world view remained implicit in the “scientific” world view developed over the last few centuries. Briefly stated, the common sense of the scientific world view goes something like this: Quite by accident, man has arisen out of a dead and dumb universe. He has every reason to fear that he may fall back into it. Consequently, he makes it his business to distinguish himself from nature at every turn. This is his dirty little secret: He is a sort of bastard child of stones and slime, of animal violence and lust. Since he is embarrassed by his connection with the natural world, he insists upon his respectableness through a righteous quest to establish a rational order.

Nature is a mess he will put right. He will straighten it out, figure it out, reason this insane chaos into a predictable set of rules that he can deal with. His one great tool in this noble endeavor is his rational mind and the technologies he can construct with it. It will save him from the ravages of wild and cruel nature. Though it cannot beat his heart, digest his food, or maintain other vital functions, that part of his brain responsible for conscious attention, he considers the summum bonum of the human species. It’s as if one portion of his brain (that responsible for conscious attention) refuses to admit that it is connected to the rest of his brain, let alone the rest of his body or the rest of the natural world. It alone is “intelligent.”

The world view of traditional Taoist China (and many other traditional cultures) begins with a different set of assumptions.¹ Man was not thrust into a strange world; he came out of it as naturally as water comes out of a bubbling brook. He is not against nature; he cannot be separated from it—he is in nature, and nature in him. Nature is not dead and dumb; all of nature is alive and intelligent. It is not hostile and wild but friendly and ordered. Man’s purpose is not to conquer and lord it over nature but to come into accord with it. The Taoist understands that there is in nature a profound intelligence that the rational mind can never comprehend. Even as a horse cannot run beyond the borders of its corral, so the rational mind cannot venture beyond the limits of language and the categories of thought.

Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.

Carl Jung

While the Taoist view trusts nature, including what it calls Self Nature, our Western approach puts all its faith in the rational mind. As we discussed in the introduction, a solely rational orientation gives a problem-solving approach to life, one that denies the Mystery of life, the indefinable, unexplainable fount of creative living. A society at odds with nature will be at odds with the creative. For where are the mysterious creative powers more evident than in nature—from the miracle of the seed to the genesis of the galaxies?

Creativity is a function of the nature within us; call it intuition, native intelligence, or the subconscious mind. The rational conscious mind can intend, but it cannot, of itself, create. A conscious mind can intend a child, but it cannot create one. A conscious mind can intend a work of art, but cannot, of itself, create it. If we are to live a creative life, we must learn to trust nature within and without. The venerable Taoist Chuang Tzu told the following story: Once a one-legged dragon named Hui asked a centipede, “How do you manage all those legs? I can hardly manage one!” “As a matter of fact,” replied the centipede, “I do not manage them.” The centipede that doesn’t trust nature can hardly walk; the human being that doesn’t trust nature can hardly live his own life. Creativity bubbles up from within when we open to trust what the Taoist calls our “original nature.”

From the hostile-world, problem-solving approach, we seek to barricade ourselves into static, defensive positions. We don’t trust nature—in the environment, in others, or in ourselves; we don’t trust our innate creativity. From the natural-world approach, we open to life and its infinite creative possibilities. We can easily see how the differences in these world views affect our attitudes toward work. In the simplest terms, work can be defined as human activity. So we are back to the question we started with, namely: Is work, is human activity, principally for problem solving or self-expression?

The approach of traditional career models is to help people defend against problems. The implicit assumption is a notion of work as a means of defending against the problems of poverty, ridicule, boredom, and the like. A problem-solving approach to work puts us in a defensive posture, from which we hope for escape—ultimately, from work itself. (Defending, after all, is a rather tiresome business.) Since work is something we are forced to do to solve our problems, the implication is that no problems equals no work. So, many dream of winning the lottery and “solving all their problems” and not “having to” work.

Our approach is to assist people in creating their life’s work, their full self-expression. We view work, not as a means of achieving freedom from problems, but as the vehicle for expressing the freedom to create. Creating your life’s work is not solving the occupation problem. It is the art of creative living. From this perspective, you are not a problem but a creative, living being. Work is not a problem but a natural, ongoing, creative process. We are not interested in coming up with a good solution to the career problem but in the full creative expression of the individual.

Art always has something of the Unconscious about it.

D. T. Suzuki

The Tao is near and people seek it far away.

Menicus

Your life’s work does not exist “out there” in a world apart. You can’t order up the perfect career or set of careers the way you might order a lawn mower from the Sears catalogue. Being too concerned with what is “out there” before you know what you want “in here” puts you in a position of powerlessness. We encourage you to begin by identifying the results you want, and then to move confidently and deliberately in that direction, no matter how small your steps may seem. In this way, you move from strength and remain in creative control.

If it’s truly creative, the direction of your life’s work is “from the inside out.” We will provide tools you can use in this process—tools to help you tap the creative vision and power within—and tools to help you better understand what’s “out there” and how you can make it work for you. Traditional career models tend to view your creativity, energy, and zest for life as rough edges that must be shaved off to effectuate a better fit with what is “out there.” Exactly what doesn’t fit (the rough edges of the old model) is what will drive the process of creating a life’s work—your creativity, energy, and zest for life.

We have been told that we must face the facts of life; but we must also, if we are really going to live, face the spirit and the emotional power of life. To describe Michelangelo’s David as a marble statue of a Hebrew king in his youth gives you the facts but none of the spirit or emotional power of the work. To say that Don Quixote is the story of a madman wandering about in hallucination strips it of the power, spirit, and art of its message. It is no less ridiculous to reduce your life to a set of facts. You are not your place of birth, your height, weight, or degrees, your résumé, or credit history. You are a being of spirit, emotional power, and intelligence.

Traditional career models are only interested in the facts of your life, for example, your education, skills, training, and experience. We will consider the facts but also the all-important creative intangibles. From the perspective of life as art, the facts of your life are the media with which you will create. Color is not painting. Notes are not music. Words are not poetry. For color to become painting; notes, music; or words, poetry, there must be knowledge of technique, emotional power, and the radiance of spirit. To view your life as art is likewise to recognize that the facts only become significant, and really interesting, through the application of technique, emotional power, and the radiance of the spirit. We are not negating the importance of facts. You require technical skill and knowledge of the marketplace the way a painter requires color—these are essential. But remember, as the French painter Chardin said, “One uses color, but paints with feeling.” (Emphasis added.)

An exclusive emphasis on facts limits creativity. While a hardheaded, nothing-but-the-facts approach is often touted as an objective or scientific approach to reality, modern physics understands the limitations and fallacy of this view. As physicist Werner Hiesenberg put it, “the mere act of observing something changes the nature of the thing observed.”² This statement, called the uncertainty principle, means, in essence, that there is no objective reality we can discern with our senses. In our relationship to reality, a hard head is of less use than an open mind. The truly creative people, whether in science or art, would agree with Albert Einstein’s assertion that “imagination is more important than knowledge” or that “the only really valuable thing is intuition.” Intuitions, and not facts—imaginations, and not data banks, are the beginnings of creations.

It is the natural instinct of a child to work from within outwards; “First I think, and then I draw my think.” What wasted efforts we make to teach the child to stop thinking, and only to observe!

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The problem-solving approach to life generates feelings of fear and anxiety. But, as Rollo May put it, “what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction [as one might at solving a problem] but…joy.” He defines joy as “the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one’s own potentialities.”³ This gets to the crux of it—creating the joyous life or struggling from fear and powerlessness.

Since our problem-solving efforts are always tail-chasing and do not resolve, we soon tire of them and seek relief in escape. From a problem-solving approach, escape is what passes for joy. It is not the true joy of “heightened consciousness,” but the limited pleasure of diminished awareness. Many social critics have pointed out the escapism of modern life and its many manifestations. There are the individual manifestations seen in narcissism, alcohol and drug abuse, compulsive consumption, and addiction to television and entertainments. There are the collective manifestations of war, environmental destruction, national debt, and the like. As long as we seek to defend against problems, we try to escape from them. As long as we view work as a means of solving problems, we “live for the weekends.”

Facts, to become poetic, must be fused with being.

Gerald Sykes

Escapism generates still more problems, which in turn we seek to defend against and ultimately to escape from. This is the vicious cycle of modern life. Of course, the tendency to escape from life is hardly a modern invention. (The Buddha gave his Four Noble Truths over two thousand years ago as a strategy for creative living beyond escape.) Yet our modern world view encourages a problem-solving approach that leads inevitably to escapism.

Learning to approach life creatively is the challenge before us as individuals and as the human race. Man’s innate creativity holds a powerful key to the transformation of reality. Lewis Mumford wrote, “Every transformation of man…has rested on a new image of the cosmos and the nature of man.” Indeed, these images are how we mark history into eras: The Classical Era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Modern Age, etc. Our hostile-world, rational, problem-solving approach evolved over time into an image of the world, indeed of the universe, as a giant machine. The conception of the universe as a machine marks the Modern Age.

Ironically, science, the pride of the Modern Age, has been at the forefront in exposing the limitations of the machine model. Quantum physics and ecology, for example, have demonstrated that an image of a universe of separate, isolated parts is not a terribly useful way of conceiving of reality. While increasingly outdated, even from a scientific point of view, the legacy of the machine model affects the way we think in a range of subject areas, including our topic, work.

The mechanistic view of the world gave us a set of terms that still affect how we think about work. Work as a concept is “the treadmill” or “the old grind.” Work as action is “cranked out” and “geared up.” One’s relationship to work is a matter of “fitting in” or of “meshing with.” Economies are machines for making jobs. (Incidentally, our word job originates from the Middle English jobbe, meaning “mouthful,” and clearly comes from the notion of work as a solution to the feeding problem.)⁴ From this perspective, work is a very serious affair, a boring routine, a dull drill. Since this is what people think work is, it’s no wonder they want to escape from it.

To be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.

Meister Eckhart

From an organic view of the world, we get an image of work as living, growing, evolving, creative action. Work comes out of life the way grass grows, the way apple trees “apple.” Because human beings are active creatures, they naturally work. That is exactly the point—naturally work—not work like machines but work as integral parts of nature. Yet human beings are not plants or animals. Our creating is not simply a matter of reproduction. Human beings can ask: “Why to create?” “What to create?” “How to create?” That human beings ask these questions is no less natural than pear trees “pearing” or monkeys “monkeying around.” We are naturally creative, questioning creatures and must be unnaturally molded into mindless machine workers. Where spontaneity is the enemy of the machine society, it is the essence of natural action and, therefore, of work.

We view work first and foremost as a vehicle of self-expression. This expression naturally gives a life of integrity, service, enjoyment, and excellence. Your natural self-expression comes out of you and is therefore integral, an expression of “thine own self.” It is naturally your highest and best service, since the best thing you can do for others is to be yourself. Self-expression is naturally joyous and exciting and naturally prompts one to work with excellence. When you are doing something integral to yourself, something you love, you naturally want to make it the best you can—the way you want to give a friend a lovely present. Your self-expression is your gift to the world. Discovering your life’s work is not a mechanical process of assembling facts; it is more a matter of trusting yourself. Realizing it is a matter of trusting yourself and gaining specific knowledge, taking definite action, and persevering.

Going with the Flow and Creating What You Want

The great challenges of life are to BE and to EXPRESS. These are the lessons of “Zen” and of “the Art of…” Lose your spontaneity, your ability to sense and move with the flow of your deepest being, and you become stiff, numb, out of sync with life. Lack the ability to create structure, and you risk remaining socially marginal and/or psychologically alienated—unable to express yourself in a full and enlivening way. In either case, you risk an inauthentic life. Spontaneity and structure—these two have a creative tension, recalling the notion of life, the authentic life, as a razor’s edge.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Albert Camus

In certain circles, there is a long-standing argument about whether ’tis nobler to “go with the flow” or to “create what you want.” There is really no conflict between the two. In fact, “creating what you want” is a natural extension of “going with the flow.” This is so if by “going with the flow” you mean “following your bliss,” moving with the flow—the energy—of your deepest desires. Your deepest desires are at one with the universe, a natural expression of it. Your deepest desires (not commercially manufactured ones) are as organic as any towering tree, roaring stream, or flowering bush. To resist their flow is to block your own natural growth and, collectively, our natural evolution. Desire, deep desire, is the sap of the tree of life.

Going with the flow is, then, the first step to creating what you want. Yet in itself, it is not complete. To get into a truly positive, creative relationship with life, we must confront structure. Structure is necessary to every creative work. The composition of a musical score requires the creation of a structure; the writing of a book requires the creation of a structure; the scripting of a comedy act requires the creation of a structure. So, too, starting a business, a nonprofit foundation, or even creating the job you want—all require that you create a structure. The simple truth is this: Structure cannot be avoided. If you don’t create your own structure, you have to deal with someone else’s.

I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s.

William Blake

Creating a full-blown job search, the kind we will discuss in “Act III,” requires you to create a more structured job-hunting effort than merely answering want ads or firing out scores of résumés. Starting your own business, setting yourself up as a freelance, or founding a nonprofit foundation require the creation of still more structure, as well as the creation of additional structures for their maintenance and growth. The more involved you are in creating the structures of your life, the greater the sense of freedom and self-expression you will experience in your work. This is true, so long as the original impulse, the creative vision that generates these structures, comes out of your own being, out of your desire, and not from some abstract idea of what you “should do,” and so long as you continue to remain responsive to additional creative intuitions.

The most effective structures naturally present themselves when we move out of creative openness—out of spontaneity—going with the flow of our hearts. In this way, structure is intuitively perceived in principle before it is realized in practice, and it is continuously evolving. When creating structure, we don’t want to get locked into some dead end but remain open to spontaneous evolution. As artist Julia Jones puts it, “This is the way I approach the creation of art: I always have a plan [structure], but I allow things to happen.” In this way, structure serves our creative vision; we are not blindly serving structure.

The Tao’s principle is spontaniety.

Lao Tzu

Perhaps because we in modern life feel ourselves to be prisoners of structures we have not created—structures which, however inspired in origin, have hardened into lifeless, grinding machines—many of us resist structure altogether. In this, we miss the possibility of realizing our own fullest creative potential. We can create structure without getting stuck in it. Yet to do this, we must continue to “go with the flow,” never imagining that we have achieved the ultimate structure, or indeed that one even exists. Structures are built for the expression of creative desire and must not be taken as ends in themselves.

“Going with the flow” requires that you be here now, that you not allow yourself to drift automatically into a lackadaisical conformity to structure. It also requires respecting your humanity and holding it inviolate. Work doesn’t have to be a dehumanizing experience and should not be accepted as such. One of the main tenets of Mahatma Gandhi’s theory and practice of nonviolence is noncooperation with anything that diminishes human dignity. Of course, noncooperation means not engaging in anything that is blatantly oppressive or abusive to others. It also means avoiding that which is oppressive to one’s own soul—to one’s innate sense of humanity.

For example, when people are treated as machine-like workers and not taken seriously as human beings, tremendous emotional suffering results. Resentment and self-loathing are sure to build in those who remain in these situations. If we are to become a humane society, we must recognize that this emotional suffering is every bit as real as physical suffering—and put an end to it. This pain is mother to an army of social and psychological ills, which we desperately try to solve piecemeal, only to find new manifestations. Humane work has to take into account the fact that people are emotional and spiritual, as well as intellectual and physical, beings.

So often today, white-collar workers are hired for their brains alone; blue-collar and service workers, for their bodies only, as though these could be detached from the beings who possess them. As a consequence, there is so much emotional pain around work in our culture. This pain spills over into virtually every aspect of life. Families, relationships, and communities are deeply affected by it. We can’t really blame anyone for this, or at least, it does us no good to do so. Freedom can’t be demanded from others—it must be created for ourselves. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes: “But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men.” (Emphasis added.)⁵

Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?

Goethe

We must first become self-reliant; while we are still begging, pointing the finger serves no purpose. We can only learn to relax more deeply into the now eternal moment of our being and learn to create, like artists, structures that have definite use and meaning in our lives. We can learn to be truly self-reliant, trusting in our innate humanity and in our ability to create, maintain, and dissolve structures as appropriate.

The Natural Art of Human Living

The great German author Thomas Mann wrote, “Art is the spirit in matter, the natural instinct toward humanization, that is, toward the spiritualization of life…”⁶ Mann’s conception of art as the natural instinct toward humanization, or spiritualization, provides a bridge uniting the fine and the practical arts, the spiritual life with the art of creative living. The understanding is that the impulse to humanity, the movement “toward the spiritualization of life” is the origin of art, the progenitor of all that is noble in the creative arts, in science, in humanitarian service, indeed, in all fields of endeavor.

This conception unites the work of Gandhi with the Japanese tea ceremony, the mission work of Albert Schweitzer with Mozart’s Magic Flute, Navaho sand painting with the great cathedrals of Europe, the work of Mother Teresa with that of Goethe, the poetry of the Troubadours with the scriptures of India, the work of Albert Einstein with that of the anonymous but devoted local elementary school teacher. All of these are art because they spring from what Mann calls the natural instinct to humanization. Setting aside for the moment the issue of the relative merit of these or of any other works of art, we can recognize this natural impulse as their common origin.

Following your natural instinct to humanity is the road to your art, your life’s work. This is another way of saying, “Follow your bliss.” While we tend to think of art as something for a privileged few, Mann’s conception recognizes art as the natural expression of our humanity. As such, art is not exceptional, but ordinary. In many traditional cultures, it was expected that all people were, or ought to be, artists. (We can see remnants of such a culture today in Bali.) In regaining our naturalness, we regain our humanity and our art.

There are significant differences in the relative value of the arts and in the quality of their execution. (We err if we fail to take these into account.) Still, there is something to be gained in the recognition of the one impulse that gives rise to all the arts. Major or minor, epic or commonplace, the arts are the works of the spirit. They are acts of love that unite and “spiritualize” our lives. On the other hand, as Leonardo da Vinci said, “where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art,”⁷ no matter the virtuosity of the technique employed. All true art ought be celebrated for the sake of the impulse to humanity that gives it birth. This impulse is itself the art; it is what makes life worth living and, more than that, a thing of wonder, glory, and splendor.

The fine arts, especially, evoke our humanity in their contemplation. If we study these arts with a view toward the underlying patterns, the ever-recurring Universal archetypes, we cannot help but recognize, we cannot help but convince our minds, that the ground from which these images emanate is the universal ground of Being in which man, the earth, the universe, and all things reside. The Ever-Becoming of this Being, the grand play of creation in which we are privileged to participate, is itself the Great Art to which all of the lesser arts point. As the sunlight reflects and recalls the Sun, so the radiance of the arts reflects and recalls the Great Art of Infinite Being, Ever-Becoming. Naturally.

Gandhi also emphasized the importance of self-reliance. Self-reliance is critical to creating structures we can live with and for remaining free of confining structures imposed by others (or even those of our own making). Self-reliance is a matter of spiritual and emotional maturity. It doesn’t mean everyone out for him- or herself. Many of the most important things to be done in this world require that we work together. The critical points are that those working in a structure have some part in creating it—that it be useful and meaningful in their lives—and that structure never become “just the way it is.” Structures, even at their best, are never “the way it is” but only limited vehicles for the expression of use and meaning. When they outlive either their use or their meaning, structures ought to be dissolved. The sad truth is that today, far too many have little, if any, input on the structures they work with; they experience their work as neither useful nor meaningful but “just the way it is.”

When we lack self-reliance, when we depend upon someone else’s structure for direction and support, we never know when it is going to shrink, collapse, or simply replace the part that we play in it. The corporation, the federal, state, or local government, can suddenly and unilaterally decide that what you are doing, and may have been doing for many years, is no longer necessary. This is often experienced as painful and disheartening. Perhaps it is all the more painful because we, at least obliquely, realize that all along our work was not principally a means of self-expression but of problem-solving, and damn it anyway, now we are right back to the problem—and know nothing more of our self-expression in the bargain.

Being is thoughtless—beyond and beneath all categories of thought. Expression is the realization of creative thought. Being is still; expression, moving.

The freedom to create, then, means that we can, to whatever degree, BE in touch with the essential core of Self and Life, and that we can EXPRESS through structures that we have some part in creating. We can say that the maximum experience of freedom in work requires the ability to freely and deliberately create structure, the ability to maintain structure through adaptation, the ability to freely let go of structure, and the ability to know when each is appropriate.

But then if I do not strive, who will?

Chuang Tzu

For one who has conquered the mind,

The mind is the best of friends,

But for one who has failed to do so,

His very mind will be the greatest enemy.

Bhagavad-Gita⁸

Many Westerners think of Eastern religion as seeking to induce a mindless, negative, trance-like consciousness, which they call Nirvana. As the quote above clearly indicates, the enlightened man is not a tranced-out dope. His mind is his friend. He uses it creatively to express. He can think—and think clearly. And he can simply Be. He can rest, and he can move to express. His thinking is not the random chatter of self-consciousness that most of us call thinking. It is deliberate—holding and developing the thought of some creative vision or idea for the accomplishment of some human purpose.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

Joseph Campbell

To express is to take an idea, not of what one is, but of what one can make or express, and to make or express it. In this sense, creative expression always has an impersonal quality to it. For example, we have a sense of the world’s great art as belonging to humanity and not to the individuals who created it. Unique self-expression turns out to resonate with all of humanity, while conformist work seems strangely alienated and isolating. The deeper we go within ourselves, the closer we are to everyone. In regard to work, the question, What do you want to be? throws us off track. Better questions are: What do you want to make? What do you want to express? What do you want to create?

Many today are seeking a wholistic approach to life and work, one that integrates the spiritual and material. Too often these seem separated by a wide chasm bounded by steep cliffs. Our lives take on a schizophrenic quality—spiritual here, practical there. We require a bridge or bridges—effective ways of uniting the spiritual and material, the sacred and the ordinary. We offer here, not a bridge, but some principles of creative design and some materials with which you can build your bridge. To bridge the sacred and the ordinary, we must tap the spirit and emotional power of creative living and gain knowledge of how things are and how they work. In this way, we can create the life of our inborn nature.

Don’t listen to friends when the Friend inside you says “Do this.”

Gandhi

I.S.E.E. My Life’s Work

While we cannot tell you what your life’s work is in any detail, we can suggest a few terms to serve as a frame of reference while you are making your search. In your life’s work, you will find a mix of integrity, service, enjoyment, and excellence.

Integrity: Your life’s work is something you deeply care about. In line with your values and ideals, it’s something you can be proud to work for. Of course, it is important that your work not conflict with your values and ideals. More than this, a life’s work is born out of your visions, values, and ideals. It’s giving life to your ideals, anchoring them in the everyday world of action. Key Words: Purposeful, meaningful, responsible, honest, truthful. Essential Question: Who Am I?

Service: Your life’s work is your way of making this world a better place. It’s something you can make an important contribution to. We all want to give, to know that what we do is benefitting others. Your life’s work is an opportunity to put your love in action. It’s your way of taking a stand to help your fellow man. Key Words: Helping, caring, loving, giving, contributing. Essential Question: How can I make this world a better place?

Enjoyment: Your life’s work is something you love to do, something your talents can find full expression through. If we enjoy our work, we are sure to bring our creativity and enthusiasm to it. If we do not, we are sure to get burnt out, frustrated, resentful, or indifferent. No matter how noble the ideal or seemingly valuable your service, you must bring joy to it if you are to be truly successful. Work without joy is a chore or a bore. Channel your creative powers into meaningful contributions. Key Words: Talents, creating, feedback, joy, gratitude. Essential Question: What do I love to do?

Excellence: Your life’s work is something you can give your all to. Something you can dedicate yourself to. The dancer has his body pain, the writer struggles and racks his brain, the craftsman sweats every detail, the musician has his endless scales. Always quality has its price. It takes extra effort to make it nice. Key Words: Dedication, persistence, determination, quality. Essential Question: What can I dedicate to enough to persist to excellence?

CHAPTER 2

Zen at Work; or, Poetry in Motion

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s hum drum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.

D. T. Suzuki

We have called this book Zen and the Art of Making a Living, and you may well ask, What is Zen? A Sufi was once asked, “What is a Sufi?” He replied, “A Sufi is a Sufi.” What is Zen? Zen is Zen.¹ Big help, you may say. Ask a Zen master, and he might choke you, or hit you with a stick, or laugh, or insult you, or spit in your face.

If you’re still asking, What is Zen?, look at the question—it’s all words. Words are symbols. Symbols are not what they stand for. Water is not these five letters w-a-t-e-r. Only an idiot would confuse the fluid reality with the letter symbols. You can’t drink letters on a hot day. The reality behind all symbols has been called the Mystery, the Unnameable, the Unexplainable, the Tao, God, many names. Whatever you name it, you can’t name it; whatever symbol you invent, it cannot hold the reality it represents. Since it can’t be named, Zen is as good a name as any. But Zen is not about knowing about this reality. Zen is drinking it in everyday life.

I was first introduced to Zen through my interest in poetry. Poetry is our best (though entirely inadequate) attempt to reveal and express the Great Mystery of life in mere words. Zen poets seem to have an uncanny knack for providing awakening glimpses of the Mystery in the ordinary. Their poems are slices of ordinary life, lived with extraordinary vigor, insight, grace, and humor. The attentive reader can’t help but feel refreshed and amused, ready to meet the situations of his own life with new energy and detachment.

…Zen makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.

D. T. Suzuki

Of course, Zen poems are not alone in this. East or West, inspired poetry has been called scripture, or sacred verse. Writing about the Old Testament prophets, David Ben-Gurion notes that “it is a strange but significant fact that all the prophets were poets, so much so that any prose passages in the prophetic writings must be suspected of being later additions.”² In Mahayana Buddhism, author Paul Williams instructs that “the Mahayana sutras were not the words of the Buddha but rather the works of poets.”³ We will not belabor the point beyond restating Aldous Huxley’s general assertion that “the original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic.” (Emphasis added.)⁴

Poetry is not to be thought of as mere words upon a printed page. A poem is an interactive relationship of word and consciousness. It is the act of hearing that makes the poem come alive. Indeed, sruti, the Sanskrit word for the scriptures, means “hearing.”⁵ Scriptures are not scriptures, poems are not poems, until they are heard. Rightly heard, poetry can be a gateway to Mystery.

Likewise, poetry can serve as a metaphor for a vision of work as art. From the Western vantage point, the notion of equating poetry with work may seem peculiar. We are used to thinking of work as a necessary drudgery or a moral responsibility, as a means to economic gain or ego gratification, but hardly as poetry. Work is what you have to do when you grow up, or it’s a way of paying the bills, relieving boredom, achieving status, exercising power, or getting rich. This is life and work as “prose”—driven by the fears and ambitions of the mind, haunted by the necessities of the body—functional but soulless.

“Poetic” work comes from the heart. Where “prosaic” work struggles to satisfy the material demands of the body and the ego demands of the mind, poetic work delights in the spirit of living. Spirit led and fed, there isn’t a trace of other-worldliness, moral superiority, or retreat about it. Not a matter of engaging in superior occupations, poetic work intensifies and exalts human experience in whatever it finds itself engaged. While it goes without saying that it does not become involved in that which would violate its source (the heart), poetic work differs from the prosaic, not so much in content as in its approach.

Perhaps the best way to give a sense of the difference between these two approaches is to look at two phrases: “have to” and “want to.” “Have to’s” have a bit of grudge to them, a holding back, an inner struggle. “Want to’s” move ahead directly. I have to work. I have to pay the bills. I have to impress people. I have to get rich. I have to beat the competition. I have to save the world. I want to work. I want to buy things. I want to be myself. I want to make money. I want to win. I want to share love. Feel the difference?

The things you have done because you truly wanted to—you experienced. The things you have done because you thought you had to—you missed. Zen says, This is it! Don’t miss it with a lot of “have to” concepts. Dig on life! Zen embraces life; necessities, it calls desires. Since it lives, it “wants to” live. Since it works, it “wants to” work. Zen is not fighting with itself.

Desires that are just are termed Truth. Without desires, Truth cannot be understood.

Hung Tzu Ch’eng

(Discourse on Vegetable Roots)

How can we bring to work the spirit of Zen—of poetry in motion? We can start by listening to the “want to’s” of our hearts, of our original nature. Poetry, after all, is all in the hearing. As a poem depends upon the “hearer” to make it Poetry, a life depends on the “liver” to make it Living. Inspired poetic works can be analyzed, but that is so much nonsense if they are not heard. Lives can be planned, controlled, and organized, but that is so much nonsense if they are not lived. Zen says LIVE! Be what you are!

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

Sigmund Freud.

Dare to Be the Poet of Your Life’s Song

A poet is one who hears and one who makes. In fact, our word poet comes from the Greek poietes—one who makes.⁶ To make is to bring into form. The poet brings into form what she hears in the depth of her heart—the echo of her life’s destiny. Oh, maybe she can only make out a couple of notes. They roam around in the back of her mind and won’t let go. Maybe she hears only a refrain or a simple tune. Perhaps she hears a glorious symphony in full orchestration. Whatever music she hears, she plays it with intense energy. She makes the song of her heart sing through her life.

A poem is the realization of love…

Rene Char

Again, poetic work is not limited to stanzas on a printed page. Mother Teresa was a poet, as was Einstein. St. Francis was a poet and Martin Luther King. Michelangelo was a poet, and so was Mozart. All who hear a voice calling them to a mighty purpose and labor to give it expression are poets. Still, all poems are not epics. There are farmer poets and cleaning poets, healing poets and sewing poets, cooking poets and building poets. Some hear better than others, and some are better at making, but all can be the poets of their own lives by joining the hearing and making—the inspiration and the action.

We can carry our metaphor of work as poetry (hearing and making) a step further by introducing two terms, one from the Western tradition, one from the Eastern. The Western term is vocation; the Eastern, D. The word vocation means “calling.” Your vocation is the work you are called to perform. From the Japanese, we take the word D. D has been translated “way” or “art of,” as in the art of flower arrangement or the art of archery. D is a mindful attitude and manner of performance. It has been called “the infinite way of doing finite things.”

In the Supreme Presence of Mind there is total absence of “mine.”

Your life’s work is a matter of the use that you are called to make of your life (vocation) and the way (D) in which you execute it. The use is the function served; the way, the manner in which it is served. The use of a meal is to eat. The way that the food is selected, prepared, served, and eaten will spell the difference between enjoyment and a lot of gas. The right vocation and the right way of executing it—this is life’s work.

Vocation: Hearing the Call

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

Rumi

We have said that vocation means calling. To get the call, you have to be listening. It’s hard to listen when you have a lot of preconceived notions about what you should do, or fears of inadequacy, or prejudices about how one kind of work is better or more worthy than another, or vested interests (like having trained and worked so long at something that isn’t really you). If you want to find your true calling, you have to forget all of that and follow your Bliss.

Dive deeply into being, beyond identity and form. Encompass all around you. Penetrate into absorption—absorb into bliss—sail on bliss—into complete quietness. Enter into emptiness—where “self” is no more. Silence the noise of fear and craving, the static of social obligation. Have no fear; in silence the image or form of your life’s natural expression will become clear. It is in your heart; it has been there all along. As the great poet Rumi has written, “Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”⁷

Can you hear it? Can you silence the confusion of the mind and its conflicts and listen for your Bliss—the voice of your heart? Listen now for the voice out of the Silence. Listen for what moves or draws you the most. Listen for what you can dedicate yourself to. Listen to what you love. If many things attract your attention, you’re still on the surface. Go deeper. A relative few will speak powerfully to you. When you hear this call, what will it say? Make this—bring this into being. A poet is one who hears and one who makes.

If you ask him: “What is silence?” he will answer, “It is the Great Mystery! The holy silence is His voice!” If you ask: “What are the fruits of silence?” he will say: “They are self-control, true courage or endurance, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of character.”

Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman)

Look with thine ears.

Shakespeare

We All Have It: The Desire to Be Useful

Have you ever noticed what energetic creatures we humans are? Most of us appear happier when we are busy than when we are not. We seem to feel the need to do something. Many of the other animals seem to have this as well. But we humans have this other thing—this notion of being useful. We don’t want to do just anything. We want to do something meaningful, something useful. George Bernard Shaw put it like this: “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”⁸

The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Now some may protest that none of us are terribly useful, but that doesn’t keep us from trying. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu (or the poets writing in his name) wrote that those who know do not speak, and those who speak do not know.⁹ One wonders why he bothers to break his own silence to tell us this. Perhaps there is something in our nature that is bound and determined to be useful—even if it knows better.

The modern Indian philosopher and teacher J. Krishnamurti would often say: “Do not accept it [what he was saying] because the speaker is telling you. The speaker is not important.” Still he went on speaking right to the end. Even after there were dozens of books, tapes, and films, he kept talking on into his nineties. If the speaker was altogether unimportant, and everyone knew what he had to say, why keep saying it? Maybe next time someone would hear! Maybe he just loved to talk. Or maybe he just couldn’t help making himself useful.

Your calling is your natural way of being useful, the way it was natural for Lao Tzu to be useful in speaking to remind us that those who speak do not know. Apparently, he just couldn’t help himself from sharing—naturally. Just as naturally, you have a calling, a unique way of being useful. Struggling and straining to find your calling is a good way to miss it. It’s natural, after all.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

Lao Tzu

You have heard that life is a dance. And if you have seen cells dividing, or the sun on the water, or birds before the mate, you can see that it is a dance. If you think too much when you’re dancing, you trip over your feet. In the same way, if you miss the rhythm of your life (with too much self-conscious “have to” thinking), you’ll stumble through it a bit awkward and out of place. The graceful dancer listens for the music and trusts her feet to respond.

Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large.

Mahatma Gandhi

Follow Your Native Compassion and Bliss

In listening for the song of your life’s work, the notes to follow are your native compassion and bliss, or karuna and ananda.¹⁰ We will call compassion the desire to act for the benefit of others—to eliminate their suffering or increase their happiness. Bliss we can call the Transcendent Joy of Consciousness, Life Ecstatic.

The Buddha, like all the great sages, tells us that it is the craving desire to act for self-interest that binds us to suffering. Jesus said, to save yourself, lose yourself—lose these self-interested cravings. Yet how can we eliminate desire? Desire is the very stuff of life—to kill it would be to destroy life itself. We cannot destroy desire, but we can begin to recognize that beyond the transient desires of ego there lie deeper desires for love and service to all mankind. We can “lose ourselves” in our desire to give of our love and talent. This, we have been told by all the great teachers, is the road to happiness.

Why, then, is this road so little traveled? Most of us are too busy running down approval alley. Our years of dependency, from infancy through adolescence, condition us to try to please others in order to get from them what we need (or think we need) to survive. The conditioned drive to please, to get approval, is a learned mental process based on the memory of past experience and the hope or threat of future consequences. It moves us out of the now-present-moment of spontaneous giving into concern for gaining approval or avoiding disapproval in the future. Where pleasing is a calculated mental process, compassion comes straight from the heart. Out of a here-and-now feeling of identity arises a spontaneous urge to act for the benefit of others.

The art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

Henry David Thoreau

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lieh Tzu

Many of us find the please-for-approval habit a hard one to break. Doing so means accepting full responsibility for our own lives—breaking our chains of emotional dependence, letting go of our unending approval demands. Only then can we hear the compassion note echoing from within. Only then can we move in the direction it wants to take us. As we accept responsibility for our own lives, our desire to serve others increases. It seems we have more energy to give. Energy once tied up in the infantile desire to please can now find release in the compassion of universal love.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

Norman O. Brown

Zen finds in trshna, selfish ego-centered love, the seed of karuna, universal compassion. Melting ice changes in form, not in essence. All the while, the ice of selfish love contains the water of universal compassion. Rearranging the letters in the word please, we get the word ASLEEP. The “please” mode is simply sleeping compassion. Awakening genuine compassion leads you to the best use of your life—“a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”

The Buddha has further told us that our fundamental nature is constant Ecstatic Bliss. Yet, paradoxically, we miss the Bliss in our desperate attempts to find happiness. When we stake our happiness on other people, places, things, or circumstances, we are sure to come up wanting. This brings to life the sense of a roller coaster ride of elation and depression, an endless cycle of ups and downs.

Of course, gains and losses, advances and reversals are inevitable in life, but they neither cause us to be happy nor to be unhappy. In our attachment to and investment in these turns of events, we miss the ecstatic pulse of life, its radiant Bliss. Bliss is not pleasure without pain. Genuine Bliss holds infinite sorrow as space holds the earth, without effort or weariness. Our adolescent and unrealistic craving for pleasure without pain is simply “sleeping Bliss” (pleasure = ASLEEP-U-R). Even as we miss Compassion in trying to please, so we miss Bliss in trying to find happiness.

The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose; Do not like, do not dislike: all will then be clear.

Seng-ts’an

The Buddha enjoins us to hold to the middle—recognize that pleasure and pain (like and dislike) are but two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it comes up heads; sometimes, tails. Aware of pleasure and pain, but neither attached to the one nor repulsed by the other, the Buddha resides in the center of Bliss.

Zen masters laugh at our vain attempts to find happiness in outer circumstances. In this, we are like a man standing in a clear stream while dying of thirst, or as the Polynesians say, we are “standing on a whale fishing, for minnows.” Bliss, the sages tell us, is not a thing to be acquired, conquered, or possessed by outer means; rather, it is an ongoing experience to relax into. Ever-abiding and without cause—Bliss simply Is. To recognize this, to know it in the gut, is to awaken the sleeper. The Zen masters call this the recognition of one’s own “original [blissful] nature.”

Now, getting back to work, whatever gets you really turned on, enough to work for with dedication, sacrifice, and excellence, has the quality of this blissful, original nature in it and is moving you toward your life’s work. If you both find great joy in your work and are ready to sacrifice for it, you are on the right track. You are following your bliss—beyond the pairs of opposites.

To be willing to suffer in order to create is one thing; to realize that one’s creation necessitates one’s suffering, that suffering is one of the greatest of God’s gifts, is almost to reach a mystical solution to the problem of evil.

J. W. Sullivan

The compassion and bliss notes are usually drowned out by all the “have to” static over the security, approval (status), and power needs that occupy so much of society’s time and interest. Money is usually mixed up with all three. Joseph Campbell said that “social pressure is the enemy!”¹¹ Society gives us preconceived, abstract notions of how our lives are supposed to be and puts on tremendous pressure to see that we conform.

Then, of course, there is our own weakness and rigidity. We fear change. We try to create a predictable life that is as unthreatening as possible. Yet it’s not knowing what’s coming around the corner that makes life interesting. Look at nature; it’s full of surprises. It curves, zigzags, wiggles, and bends. Its forms grow, expand, decay, and die. Change is everywhere, ongoing. Yet for all its changes, nature has an order, an intelligence.

As the innocent infant relies upon the mother for sustenance, so the innocent wanderer, following his native compassion and bliss, relies upon the natural intelligence of life to sustain him.

So it is with compassion and bliss. Follow them; they know where to take you. Don’t interfere with growth; yield to it. There is an intelligence in this. Often it can only be understood in retrospect. Though we may not have understood at the time, something was guiding us all the while. When we yield to our compassionate, blissful nature, its intelligence takes the lead. We are moved by something at once intrinsically a part of ourselves, and yet, infinitely larger.

Allow your natural compassion and bliss to ripen, and you are sure to find your vocation sooner or later. It may not come out like you thought, but that’s part of the adventure of life—and the fun! Pay attention to where compassion and bliss take you, and watch the thing unfold. Even if you miss the heart promptings of compassion and bliss, you can still mentally recognize your desire to be useful. (Watch how children naturally want to help.) Since we can’t help trying to be useful, we may as well decide to be useful at things that foster harmony, increase beauty, and generally make life more palatable. Certainly we can decide not to be useful at things that are destructive, dull, or drab.

If the notion of following your compassion and bliss to your vocation seems too vague or nebulous, don’t worry. Later on, we will put it to you in more concrete terms. For now, simply recognize your desire to be useful, and see where it wants to take you.

Take thy Bliss O Man!

William Blake

D: Making the Art of Zen

So far, much of what we have said may sound a bit mystical. Were Zen to stop here, it would be all but useless in daily life. But Zen is as much at home with the practical business of everyday living as with the transcendent realization of Bliss. It is every bit as much concerned with “form” as with “emptiness.” Indeed, the Zen insight is that form is emptiness, emptiness form. Zen doesn’t ask us to be something that we are not but to be more fully what we are. At work Zen discovers “the infinite way of doing finite things.” Its actions, however ordinary, are exaltations. Performed without hesitation or doubt, they reveal the ordinary greatness of man.

Whatever your calling, your vocation, your way of being useful, how you go about it is as much “your work” as what you do. If use is purpose, D, or way, is purposefulness, acting without waste or haste, in a spirit of play. Zen influence on Japanese culture gave rise to many D’s, or ways. Anyone who has ever experienced a Japanese tea ceremony has some idea what purposeful action is. Here, in the simple act of serving and taking tea, life is artistry. Human dignity, strength, and grace are honored in purposeful, present action.

There are various Ways. There is the Way of salvation by the law of Buddha, the Way of Confucius governing the Way of learning, the Way of healing as a doctor, as a poet teaching the Way of Waka, tea, archery, and many arts and skills. Each man practices as he feels inclined.

Miyamoto Musashi

Every man or woman is a potential poet or artist. Everyone has the capacity to bring to their work the dignity, purposefulness, and presence of the artist. Like art, work holds up a mirror to life. The work reflects the creator, his strengths and flaws, his skill and resolve. An individual encounters human society, physical nature, and the particular medium, tools, or objects of his work, and shapes these in the image of his consciousness. The melding of creator and creation is the artistry of work.

The dictionary defines art as “the disposition or modification of things by human skill, to answer the purpose intended.” Our word art comes from the Greek artunein—to arrange.¹² We arrange by sight. We see how to arrange things to answer the purpose intended. Where vocation is a matter of hearing what to do, making is a matter of seeing how to do it. We will use the metaphor of art and sight in discussing D—the making of a life’s work. It is important to remember that while we will frame this discussion of making in terms of the formal arts, everything that will be said applies as well to the art of living, generally. Whether our making is in humanitarian service, the production and distribution of beneficial products or services, the transmission of some special knowledge or wisdom or whatever else—art has lessons for all of us.

You wish to see; Listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

St. Bernard

In giving form to her vision, the creative artist measures her efforts against the inner vision she holds. The final product is always inadequate. Yet, as Michelangelo said, it’s in striving for perfection that the artist touches the divine. This striving for perfection, for the fullest realization of the thing imagined, elevates ordinary life to the level of sublime, transcendent experience. Striving for perfection is the passion of art—the ready sacrifice of the artist. The word sacrifice literally means “to make sacred,”¹³ and, as we shall see, the sense of the sacred is of utmost importance to the artist.

The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have the craft.

Jean Erdman

While it is this striving for perfection that gives art its passion, imagination gives it its play. Both in the sense of enjoyment and in the sense of the dramatic, art is play. The revelations of imagination, the satori of every genuine artistic inspiration are sublime delight. Art is magical or, in Zen terms, marvelous, when vision, content, design, and technique form an inseparable unity. Today we rely heavily upon technique, but as D. T. Suzuki put it, “technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes the artless art…”

“Artless art” has the quality of revelation. One feels that in beholding it, he has received a precious gift; a conscious spirit has moved over this form, in turn evoking the spirit of the beholder. This sense of the gift is equally present in the practical and the contemplative arts—as much in entering a well-made home or sitting down to a well-prepared meal as in enjoying a fine piece of music or poetry. It is the essence of the experience of any work as art. The all-embracing humanity of Zen tells us that there is no sphere of human life exempt from the display of this gift-giving spirit.

Although profoundly “inconsequential,” the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.

Alan Watts

It is easier and more useful to talk about what art does than what it is. Art communicates awareness—consciousness. All art reflects some theory (in the original sense of the word, i.e., “a way of seeing”).¹⁴ This is true whether or not the theory is ever understood or articulated by the artist. A way of seeing, or theory, of art is expressed through a work’s content and design language. Of course, the language of art is not limited to words. Movement, sound, light, shape, color—all design elements are a kind of artistic language. Additionally, every art has a technique, a way of “modifying things by human skill.” We will discuss the theory, content, design, and technique of art below. As we will see, we can draw on these elements in shaping any life’s work.

Vision or Theory of Art: To quote art critic and historian Herbert Read: “Any general theory of art must begin with the supposition that man responds to the shape and surface and mass of things present to his senses, and that certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape and surface and mass of things result in pleasurable sensations whilst the lack of such arrangement leads to indifference or even positive discomfort and revulsion.”¹⁵

Read’s essential point, what he calls the starting place for any theory of art, is that “certain arrangements” evoke pleasurable responses, while other arrangements provoke less favorable responses. The origin of the word art, as we have already discussed, is “to arrange.” So we can say that the true artist is a master arranger or master of arrangements. He may “arrange” in any field of action—in any of the making or doing arts. Whatever his field, he knows how to evoke “pleasurable sensations.”

Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit.

George Fox

Now what are these pleasurable sensations? It is important that we not be confused in this matter. To bring this out, we will draw on James Joyce’s theory of art as expressed in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.¹⁶ Joyce distinguishes between what he terms “proper” and “improper” art. The pleasure of proper art, he calls “aesthetic arrest.” (We will get to this.) The “pleasures” of improper art are not the genuine pleasures appropriate to art but rather impostors. These impostors, Joyce calls the “pornographic” and the “didactic.” The “pleasure” of pornographic art is the excitement of the desire to possess the object represented. Pornographic art is seen in the advertising barrage to which most of us are daily subjected. “Make the thing look sexy, alluring, sensually enticing, so they will want to possess it.”

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

Goethe

The “pleasure,” if you could call it that, of didactic art is the excitement of a sense of fear and loathing in relation to the object represented (not unlike the “pleasure” many seem to get from watching horror films). We see this represented in art used as a tool for social criticism or as propaganda for some political or cultural agenda. “Political” and “confessional” art and much of “women’s art” or “gay art” is didactic. Of course, this is not to say there are not great artists who are women or gay, only that genuine art transcends these labels. Georgia O’Keefe put it emphatically: “There is no man’s art or woman’s art; there is just Art.”

This capital A Art that Georgia O’Keefe is referring to above is what Joyce calls “proper art.” Joyce tells us that while improper art has a kinetic, or moving, quality, proper art has a static, or still, quality. Improper art excites the mind to move toward or away from its object. Proper art brings the mind to rest. In the symbolic language of Western poetry and art, the changeable moon often represents the moving or kinetic aspect of consciousness, while the sun represents the changeless or static dimension. In Zen, the kinetic (moving or moon dimension) is sometimes called “mind”—and the static (still or sun dimension), “No-Mind.”¹⁷ So we can say, proper art radiates the still sun of eternal No-Mind, or that in proper art, the motions of the mind are arrested in the rest of No-Mind.

The motions of the mind excited by improper art (its “pleasures”) are, as we already discussed, desire and loathing. Joyce says that the pleasure of proper art is “aesthetic arrest,” stopping or arresting the motions of the mind. In contemplation of the work of art, “the mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”¹⁸ This is exactly the goal of meditation—to arrest the mind—transcending attachment (desire) and repulsion (loathing). And so now we can see that art, proper art, in both its contemplation and in its practice, is indeed meditation—mind arresting. And this is Zen. The word Zen itself is Japanese for the Indian dhyana, usually translated “meditation.”¹⁹

In Zen the important thing is to stop the course of the mind.

Saying of “an Ancient” quoted by Takashina Rosen

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

Plato

The motive of proper art is neither “for” or “against,” but to bring out what Joyce calls “the radiance.” The radiance of a work of art shows in its ability to arrest the mind in joyous contemplation. We want to linger and enjoy the beauty of the work. The Buddha said that the contemplation of beauty eliminates selfish desire. For Rodin, “art is contemplation. It is the joy of the intelligence.” Blissful serenity, intense stillness, this is radiance. While Joyce’s theory of art was intended for the contemplation of the fine arts, we can see in it keys to D, or working in the way of art, in any field of human endeavor. In action, in the doing arts, radiance comes through in what Zen would call wu wei, or effortless action. Acting from the center, moving from the stillness, action is radiant.

We have then come, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the essential point: The pleasure in art, both in its practice and in its contemplation is meditation, that is, the arresting of the mind. We lose ourselves in art. As Arthur Schopenhauer noted, the contemplation of great art switches off the sense of “other.” As we merge our consciousness with the art object, we lose the sense of ourselves as a thing apart.²⁰ This “loss of self” is extremely pleasurable—echoing the transcendent bliss of the mystics. Likewise, in the practice of art, the sense of self is lost in ecstatic absorbtion. One loses oneself and gains eternity. Moving safely between the twin whirlwinds of desire and repulsion, the artist enters into paradise. While here on earth, attending to the most practical of affairs (his daily work), the artist, as Blake would say, “travels in his mind to Heaven.” This is Zen at work, the essence of work as art—self-liberation.

If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.

Joseph Campbell

D is active contemplation or meditation—moving or doing in aesthetic arrest. Or we could say moving without moving—moving without the motions of the mind. Lao Tzu wrote, “The secret of the magic of life is in using action to attain non-action.”²¹ For St. Augustine, “our whole business in this life is to restore the health of the eye of the heart whereby God (the Infinite) may be seen.”²² Our business (work life) ought not and need not keep us from “our business in this life.” Indeed, working in the way of the artist does not impede but enhances and expresses spiritual life. The practice of art, or D, purifies “the personal system so that it moves over into the universal.”²³ In the making of the art, we are remaking ourselves; we are developing confidence in what Zen calls our “original nature.”

Having now perhaps some inkling of how we might approach work as D or “way” or “the art of,” we will briefly examine how we can recognize a work of art, be it our own life’s work or the art of another. Of course, there is no simple formula—of artists it may properly be said that it takes one to know one. Still, we give four essential characteristics to look for—comprising a kind of practical theory of art. Note that the elements of this theory apply equally to the “fine” or “common” arts.

The heart has its reasons that the mind knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal

• 1. The work of art is inspired. It is conceived of the spirit, born of the Buddha nature, whispered by the muse—however you want to say it—the work of art in some way echoes the transcendent Mystery. It suggests something more than itself. What Joseph Campbell said of myth—that it is a “metaphor transparent to transcendence”—applies to the work of art. Both in the making arts and in the doing arts, the radiance of spirit shines through. We recognize a Beauty that transcends the beautiful and the ugly. This is the integrity of the work of art—that it arises from the essential self of the artist. The secret of art lies in the artist himself. (Kuo Jo Hsu)²⁴
• 2. The work of art is useful. The artist has a sense of his responsibility to the community of mankind, and therefore, he makes that which can be put to good use. The use intended may be for the practical life of the body, the refreshment of the mind, or the awakening of the soul. In every case, the artist has in mind the use of his work. It comes out of compassion for humanity. “The secret of art,” as the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle put it, “is love.”²⁵ This is the quality of service in the work of art—that the artist makes the work, not simply for himself, but for all mankind. The general end of art is the good of man. (Aristotle)²⁶
• 3. The work of art is natural. The artist is naturally suited to his work. Be he a carpenter, an orator, a doctor, or a poet, his work is what he naturally does, that is, loves. This is what gives work the quality of play. While working at what is naturally his to do, the artist enters into the work so completely—he loses himself in it. This is the enjoyment of the work of art—the natural, spontaneous, self-abandonment of the artist in what he loves. It is certain that the secret of all art…lies in self-oblivion. (Riciotto Canudo)²⁷
• 4. The work of art is beautiful. Beauty is not an end in itself, but the by-product of making or doing things well. Beauty results from the aspiration to perfection. Yet it accepts and allows that natural imperfection which is human. Beauty is not found in mechanical correctness but in human aspiration—in making and doing with love. If in-spiration is the call of Heaven, aspiration is the desire to realize Heaven on Earth. The artist knows that, as Michelangelo said, “trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle.” This is what gives the work of art the quality of excellence—the artist’s striving for perfection in making the work beautifully. O Excellence! how narrow are thy paths, how arduous thy ways! Happy the man who can climb thy paths and tread thy ways! (Gottfried von Strassburg)²⁸

• The “Vision Questing” and “Clarifying Values” sections of “Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work” are designed to help you explore and develop a theory for the art of your life.

Content: The content of “proper art” may be the “super-ordinary sacred” or the “ordinary sacred.” The sacred art of India or medieval Europe reflects the sacred in the super-ordinary aspect. The subject is theistic—God in splendor, majesty, and miraculous exploits. Zen art more typically represents the sacred in the ordinary aspect: the rock gardens, the calligraphy, the tea ceremony, the martial arts. Ordinary things like rocks and trees, ordinary activities like writing, taking tea, and fighting are approached with a presence and a sense of wonder that can only be called sacred.

What is particularly intriguing, in fact, is that whereas many peoples tend to locate this experience [of the sacred] in certain unusual, if not ‘supernatural’ moments and circumstances…the Oriental focus is upon mystery in the most obvious, ordinary, mundane—the most natural—situations of life.

Conrad Hyers

In the West, this sacred-in-the-ordinary aspect can be seen in works such as Cezanne’s still lifes or his paintings of Mont Saint Victoire, in van Gogh’s Boots with Laces or Starry Night, or even in T. S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Of course, the two (super-ordinary and ordinary) are not mutually exclusive. Blake, Rembrandt, Mozart, and many others have revealed the sacred in both super-ordinary and ordinary content.

• The “Pointing to Purpose,” “Targeting Talents,” and “Marking Mission Objectives” sections of “Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work” are designed to help you discover the content of your life’s work.

The work will teach you how to do it.

Estonian Proverb

Design: We have seen that “proper art” is a kind of meditation and that its content may be any work approached in a sacred manner. Approached in this way, the work becomes a vehicle for an epiphany—a revelation of the infinite in the finite. Now, we will briefly consider design. Our word design originates in the Latin designare, “to mark out.”²⁹ Through her design, the artist marks out the time and space boundaries or forms through which she will reveal the infinite. In approaching your work as art, your first design choice is your choice of career. Every career has its own unique boundaries, limitations, and patterns, and as Joseph Campbell put it, “When you choose a vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while.”³⁰

William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”³¹ Design is in time, both in the sense that a poem, a painting, a song, a humanitarian service live in the finite world of form and in the sense that every design reflects the historical and cultural context in which it is produced. The Infinite in Shakespeare speaks through the design forms of Elizabethan sonnets, comedies, histories, and tragedies. The Infinite in Michelangelo shines forth through the forms of “High Renaissance” sculpture, painting, and architecture. The Infinite in Bach echoes through Baroque musical forms—e.g., fugues, masses, and concertos. The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho revealed the Infinite in the seventeen syllable haiku form. One feels that these great souls would have somehow expressed the Infinite, no matter the time, place, or form of their work.

Love is love’s reward.

John Dryden

The design forms these artists selected reflect the historical and cultural contexts in which they lived, as well as their own unique style. Similarly, your life’s work will be shaped by the time you live in, yet your own unique expression. The design of your work, the career you choose, ought to be a natural vehicle for your unique talents and temperament so that you will be able to say with Henri Matisse, “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.” This is the essence of vocation.

• You will have the opportunity to shape the design (i.e., select your career role) of your life’s work in “Act II: The Game of Life’s Work.”

Technique: The true artist is always a master of technique. His compassion and bliss drive him to excel in his art. The artist is so stimulated by these “that he naturally possesses a sustained interest strong enough to impel and guide him through a lifetime of searching for an adequate…vocabulary, with which to objectify his subjective impulses in translatable traditional symbols.”³² Strive to be the best you can at what you do, to expand your vocabulary in the language of your art.

The essence of technique is discipline. Even as Zen embraces the necessities of physical survival, so it embraces the necessities of the D (the discipline of the work). Without regret, second thought, or self-pity, it plunges in. What must be done to perfect oneself in one’s craft is done, without pausing to consider, Do I like to do it? In this way, the artist becomes first master of himself and then of his art.

Again, the execution of art is meditation—self-collected, mindful, deliberate action. Its deliberateness is not that of imposing an abstract form but of unself-conscious, spontaneous action. Zen trusts “the original nature” to act of its own accord. In one deliberate Zen brush stroke, a world of images is born. Again, D. T. Suzuki: “Zen wants to act, and the most effective act is, once the mind is made up, to go on without looking backward.”³³

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Work on New York’s Saint John the Divine cathedral has been going on for over a hundred years. The people who are working on it now will most likely be dead when it is finished. Yet the work calls for the finest craftsmanship. How does one stay motivated working at building something he will never see finished? Zen responds: by concentrating on the process—working for the sake of the work, losing yourself in the now moment of action. Work without attachment.

• You will have the opportunity to consider how you can improve your capacity to excel in your career field by improving your technique in “Act IV: The School of Life’s Work.”

The Poetic Work Is Hearing and Making

The Life of Beauty

Modern life has altogether too much ugliness. This is doubly so since most of it is so unnecessary. The ugliness of poverty may be excused, but the ugliness of the mediocre, the bland, and the lifeless is an appalling waste. Beauty sensitizes the soul—evoking the finer, subtler feelings and inspiring noble thoughts. Ugliness depresses and diminishes life—sapping the creative spirit of the individual and weakening the character of society.

We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

There is unnecessary ugliness, not only in the things we make, but in the way we make them. Mass production ensures that quantity dominates quality, and profit rules beauty. White collar or blue, the worker is taken to be a machine. Engaged, not as a whole person, but as a tool of production, he becomes alienated from his work and himself. No wonder the worker is more interested in sports or gossip than in his or her work. No wonder, in the words of popular bumper talk, he “would rather be fishing” or she “would rather be shopping.” Work devoid of meaning and spirit, work without the discipline and satisfaction of a job well done, is work without joy. So work has gotten a bad name, and we live for the weekends. Art curator and philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy put it like this: “It is taken for granted that while at work we are doing what we like least, and at play what we should wish to be doing all the time.”³⁴

Zen and art can teach us how to work beautifully. From Zen, we can learn to embrace work, to accept responsibility for ourselves and our world, without seeking to escape. From art we can draw lessons—the lessons of the spirit at work (the inspiration of the artist) and the lessons of dedication to and sacrifice for the vision one sees. Zen says: No sense waiting for Heaven. This very life on earth is the Buddha Realm. Therefore, let it be a beautiful life. The Buddha nature is within all things; therefore, treat them with love and kindness, care and understanding.

…a first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.

Abraham Maslow

Conceiving of ourselves as artists in whatever work we do gives us a metaphor for a life of integrity, service, enjoyment, and excellence. We can draw strength from the lives of the great artists and cultivate an appreciation of their works. Really, there is no significant transformation of our increasingly global culture without changing our ideas about what work is and what work is for. Conceiving of ourselves as artists and injecting the spirit of beauty into our work from beginning to end can play an important role in this transformation. Cultivating an appreciation of art and the artistic life fosters a desire to serve humanity in a spirit of beauty—no matter one’s calling.

Learning to appreciate the art of others is as much a part of building a beautiful world as developing the artist within ourselves. Real art appreciation will produce, not only more and better contemplative or “fine” artists, it can also produce better carpenters, managers, and tailors, and most importantly, better human beings. Art is for the sake of the living everywhere. Its lessons, traditions, and revelations belong to us all.

Many today would have us believe that art is for the cultured few—the museum hounds and the wine and cheese set. The implication is that art is too good to be contaminated with the vulgar business of living. While art is safely locked away from the soiling hands of the common man, the greatest vulgarity of all is perpetuated. Art is reduced to an investment commodity. In the name of protection (from the masses), art has become a favorite form of capital speculation.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Walt Whitman

It is clear that even without cultivating a deep appreciation or understanding, art speaks to us all. One doesn’t have to understand a cathedral to appreciate its beauty or comprehend a musical composition to be moved by it. You certainly don’t have to be a poet, playwright, director, or scholar to appreciate a Shakespearean play. Something within us recognizes art. Perhaps it is because we ourselves are artists at heart. Even as we all share in a spiritual life, whether we are “enlightened” or not, so we are all artists—whether masters, journeymen, apprentices, or hacks. Cultivating an awareness of the art we are called to perform and of the manner in which we perform it can only improve our craft.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats

In saying that everyone can be an artist, we in no way mean to denigrate the arts—to cheapen or to lessen the standards of excellence in any of the arts. It is not that we all take dance classes and are suddenly “dancers” or that we take creative writing classes and are now “poets.” It is rather that in whatever our craft, we lift ourselves to the highest standards of excellence in that field. This doesn’t mean that we cannot as amateurs enjoy dancing or writing or singing; indeed, these brighten our lives (and what we practice as amateurs may enrich our art). It is simply to recognize the difference between being an amateur and being an artist in any field.

Of course, all arts or artists are not equal. It is absurd to compare a well-cooked meal with Mozart’s Requiem or the local home architect with Michelangelo; it is even more absurd to eat tasteless meals or live in cracker-box houses because their makers aren’t Mozarts or Michelangelos. If we are called to be cooks, or architects, or whatever, we can be the finest we can be at our professions. Beautiful clothing, lovely meals, well-designed homes, parks, and cities uplift the spirit of man. They reveal a vision of beauty, of the mystery of life, and in this they are art.

In Japan, the place where “the art” is practiced is called the “D-Jo,” or “house of enlightenment.” There is a popular saying: “The D-Jo is everywhere.” Wherever work is done in a present, conscious way, there is the house of enlightenment. Transformation is the action of both spiritual liberation and art. Zen sees, in the stuff of suffering, the tools for liberation. For the artist, the physical world provides the raw materials for revealing a higher consciousness of Beauty.

The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.

Rumi

It is, of course, in the imagination that all art begins. In the words of Jacob Bronowski: “The characteristic gift that makes us human is…the gift of imagination. The power that man has over nature and himself lies in his command of imaginary experience.”³⁵ The art of life is facing that awful power and then leading it in the way of Beauty, until it learns to find its way naturally. Dostoyevsky said, “Beauty will save the world.” Beauty rightly understood and widely practiced will save the world. It is not too farfetched to imagine a civilization of artists working in love and joy to reveal a world of Beauty. Though it may take a thousand years, we can begin at once.

To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.

Mahatma Gandhi

For man is by nature an artist.

Tagore

Modern Artists on Spirit

Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.

Paul Klee

Whoever does not detach himself from the ego never attains the Absolute and never deciphers life.

Constantin Brancusi

If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty. The more this union with the universal is felt, the more individual subjectivity declines.

Piet Mondrian

Construction on a purely spiritual basis is a slow business…The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul…

Wassily Kandinsky

Something sacred, that’s it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is “touched by God.”

Pablo Picasso

Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.

Vincent van Gogh

(Describing Starry Night)

CHAPTER 3

Myth at Work; or, Crafting the Story of Your Life

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Joseph Campbell

The word myth means story. But a genuine myth is not just any story. It is a story of an encounter with universal human energies and experience. It is, as Joseph Campbell said in his final and most refined definition, “a metaphor transparent to transcendence.”¹ If we approach myth as fact, it is clearly ridiculous. We don’t really think that a god named Zeus had a splitting headache from which (with the help of an ax) Athena sprang or that a guy named Ulysses went around in a boat encountering sirens and cyclopes. It is not as fact but as metaphor that the mythic stories speak to us. To approach myth as fact is to miss the point. Similarly, to view your life as “nothing but the facts” is to miss an opportunity for a marvelous adventure, a conscious encounter with the universal energies and dilemmas of the human drama. In this encounter, we take the hero’s journey; we experience life as art; we put “soul” into our work.

Think of a work of art, a fine piece of literature, for example. A great work of art is a great work of art because it reveals the universal in the particular—so that across time, place, and culture we experience the works of Homer or Virgil, Dante or Shakespeare speaking directly to us. To view your life as a mythic story, to approach it as a work of art, is to recognize the play of the universal in the particulars of your life. In this chapter, we will identify some of these “universal energies” and how you might consciously, constructively, and artistically engage them on the way to creating your life’s work.

The myths hold keys to a timeless psychology of creativity. Clearly, if we are to be artists of life, it is useful for us to have some understanding of the psychology of the creative process. But what does myth have to do with psychology? To begin with, in its life-instructing function—in what it can tell us about how to live—myth is psychology, in the literal meaning of the word psycho (soul) and logos (description). As the word itself implies, the work of any genuine psychology is to describe the landscape of the soul. This landscape comes to life in vivid, rich, and haunting detail in the world’s great mythology.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Joseph Campbell

The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.

Emerson

Where the Zen poetry of work is in the now, immediate experience of being, the psychology or mythology of work considers the process of becoming. It describes the soul’s journey, the pilgrim’s progress, if you will, and the inner territory one encounters on this journey of becoming. Through the ages and across cultures, there have been many psychologies (soul descriptions). They were traditionally expressed in the intuitive language of myth and symbol, a language we have largely forgotten. As a result, much of the wisdom of these ancient psychologies remains a mystery to us. Recently, Jungian psychology (the only widely popular modern psychology that, in fact, is one, i.e., the only one concerned with describing the landscape of the soul) has begun to provide a framework through which we can begin to approach some of these soul mysteries. We will briefly consider the relation of three basic elements of this framework: myth, archetype, and symbol, then go on to consider four universal or archetypal energies that we can play with in creating life’s work.

Myth and Archetype: For Joseph Campbell, “myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”² These “inexhaustible energies” of the cosmos are what Carl Jung referred to as archetypes. Archetypes, as Jung defined them, are the primordial energies that underlie human consciousness. How these energies got there is not entirely clear. Yet whether they are a sort of a human microcosm of the great macrocosmic energies of the universe, an intrinsic part of human biology, or dispositions acquired through common human experience is not the central point for Jung. The point is that they exist as a fundamental part of human experience and that we are better off for learning to recognize and come to terms with them.

The archetypes provide the cosmic or psychic raw material of myth. Across cultures and time, we see this same basic psychic stuff or raw material worked and reworked in great variety. The mythic stories, their heroes, friends, and foes, their deeds and adventures are particular representations of these archetypal energies. No matter how the stories of world mythology differ in detail, one can always recognize common themes. These common themes arise from the universality of the archetypes.

Symbol: If the archetypes are the raw material of myth, then symbols are its vocabulary. Symbols are the language of the imagination—the active ingredients of mythology and psychology. As Carl Jung said, “The psychological mechanism that transforms energy is the symbol.”³ He elsewhere tells us what this “transformation” is all about: “The symbols act as transformers, their function is to convert libido from a ‘lower’ into a ‘higher’ form.”⁴

…the degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

Thomas Merton

Symbols transform the energy of the individual and collective psyche. The power of symbol lies in its capacity to transcend the limits of reason—to penetrate the conscious mind and communicate directly with the subconscious. While this power is enormous, it is not always well used. Allowing, as Jung suggests, that the true function of symbol is to “convert” “lower” libido energies into a “higher” form, we mustn’t get the idea that the power of symbol (or sign) can’t be used for more malevolent aims. The mass hysteria of the Nazis, for example, relied upon a peculiar brand of mythic interpretation and the very deliberate, effective, and perverse use of symbol and ritual.

The secret of art is love.

Antoine Bourdelle

The power of symbol should hardly surprise us. We need not be students of mythology or history to understand its effect. Advertisers use symbols every day to try to transform our energy—prompting action to buy their products. The logical connections between cowboys and cigarettes, half-naked women and beer, babies and tires may be dubious, but the power of these images is not in dispute. Today, the power of symbol is wielded with greatest effect, not by its traditional keepers in religion and art, but by Madison Avenue and political image-makers, Hollywood and commercial television, MTV and the recording “industry.” We are everywhere surrounded by what Joyce called pornographic art, the use of symbols as tools of manipulation. (See chapter 2.)

While dictators and advertisers certainly know and use the power of symbols as psychological tools of transformation, the scientific view of life and “scientific psychology” in particular tend to downplay their power in the inner life of the individual. This has important consequences. As Jung says: “Modern man does not understand how much his ‘rationalism’ (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic underworld. He has freed himself from ‘superstition’ (or so he believes), but in the process, he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree.”⁵

Through the centuries, religion and art used the power of symbol as an end in itself for the transformation of consciousness, to uplift and awaken. Today their influence is minimal. Instead, politicians use this power as a means to gain and maintain control; commercialists use it to sell products. If we are to take control of our own destinies, we must reclaim this power for ourselves as individuals. We must consciously develop our own relationships to myth, archetype, and symbol.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

Alfred North Whitehead

That’s what this chapter is all about—encouraging you: first, to experience your life as myth, as a story of the individual encounter with the universal; second, and as a part of the first, to learn to recognize the universal or archetypal energies; third, to develop your own creative relationship to these archetypes through symbol. In this way, the “inexhaustible energies” of the cosmos can pour into your life and, in so doing, transform you and the world around you.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

Allen Ginsberg

We will present four archetypes that we hope you will recognize and work with on your journey to life’s work. These are the Hero, the Magician, the Warrior, and the Scholar (or Student-Sage). Developing your own symbolic relationship with these archetypes can transform your experience of work (and life). These four archetypes can help us to begin to approach a psychology of work—work as a means of soul development, as well as providing deep insight into the creative process. These archetypes show up all over the place in mythic stories and adventures. Are they the only ones? Of course not. I have found these particular archetypes to be especially useful in creating and executing a life’s work. While we might note that they do in some way parallel the four wisdoms of Zen Buddhism (The Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom, The Marvelous Observing Wisdom, The Perfecting-of-Action Wisdom, and The Universal Nature Wisdom),⁶ they do not belong to any one tradition but arise, as it were, from life itself. Names for these universal energies vary and are less important than the energies themselves.

Around the world, teachings relating to the four directions or four wisdoms abound. We might mention the four directions of the Native American medicine wheel, the four rivers of the Garden of Eden, the four gardens of the Islamic Paradise, the four sons of Horus in Egyptian mythology, and the four Holy Living Creatures of Ezekiel’s vision (eagle, lion, man, bull), often portrayed as the four authors of the gospels in Christian sacred art. Of course, this list is hardly complete; our purpose here is a practical, not a scholarly one. Still, we would be remiss if we did not point out that our presentation only hints at the profound wisdom of the worldwide teachings of the sacred four. Our aim here is to show how we might engage these universal energies in the specific and ongoing process of creating and maintaining a life’s work.

The Universal is always the same, the specifics are always different.

Robert Aitken

Symbols of the Archetypes

Perhaps the best or easiest way to understand the action or function of the archetypes we are referring to is to consider the symbols with which they are often associated.

The Hero

The Seeker of the Grail—The Decider of Roads: Two of the strongest symbols of the Hero are the cup, or Grail, and the road, or path of adventure. The Grail represents the Quest, the Hero as Seeker. It signifies the fullest potential of life, the yearning for one’s true life. The road represents choice, the crossroads of decision, the Hero as Decider. What will you give your life for? Whom does the Grail serve? The key for the Hero is consecration to service to humanity. The test is the choice between creative problems and neurotic problems.

The Magician

The Showman—The Shaman: Two of the strongest symbols of the Magician are the mask and the wand. The mask represents the play in illusion, the Showman Magician donning costume and role. The wand represents the mastery of the forces of nature, the Shaman or Master Magician consciously invoking the cosmic powers of Light. The key for the Magician is developing detachment and clear perception. The test is: Are you psyched up or psyched out for the game of life?

The Warrior

The Horseman—The Swordsman: Prime symbols of the Warrior are the horse and the sword. Riding the horse signifies the mastery of the animal nature, or aggressive energy. The Warrior can mount the magic horse of creative aggression and ride like the wind. The Warrior’s sword, spear, lance, or arrow is that which penetrates. Penetration is achieved through concentration. The Warrior has developed the power of single-minded concentration. The key for the Warrior is endurance. The test is: Will you persist or give up?

The Scholar (Student-Sage)

The Child—The Old Wise Ones: Two of the strongest symbols for this aspect are the child and the old wise ones or grandparents. The Nativity is a kind of veneration of the child. All hope, potential, growth and learning capacity are there in the child. All the suffering of humanity, and the compassion we feel for all mankind are there in the child. (One who can’t feel compassion for children can’t feel at all.) The veneration of the old wise ones or grandparents signifies respect for the wisdom tradition. Myths and stories represent the wisdom and knowledge of the old, the continuity of human experience. The key for the Scholar is the heart of intuition. The test is: Are you a steward or owner of knowledge?

Before we look at each of the archetypes in greater detail, we want to emphasize that archetypal energies are simply that—energies. Like the four elements to which they, in some essential way, correspond, these energies may take positive or negative expression. We can experience water as refreshing spring or raging flood, fire, as light and heat or as hellish holocaust. Air can kiss with a cool, gentle breeze or ravage with a mighty cyclone; earth can give the joy of beauty, the bounty of food, or quake with terror and spit molten rock. The value of working deliberately with the archetypes is to move into a conscious and constructive experience of the vital energies they represent. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all dealing with archetypal energies. In Jungian terms, negative manifestations of archetypal energies result from their denial or suppression and are called shadow aspects. (We will briefly consider the shadow aspects of the four archetypes below under the headings “Shadow Play.”) To help you better understand how these energies are universally active, whether for good or for ill, and to put all of this in a practical context specifically related to your work life, we will briefly (and somewhat oversimply) describe these energies below.

Hero—The Creative Power of Decision: Decision-making is an essential part of human life; no matter what you do, you will always make decisions. The power to decide what to focus on, in other words, the power to decide what is important and the power to decide what you want to create, are basic to the creative life. The decisions you make about your work life are especially important, since most people spend more of their waking lives working than doing anything else. Your choices will affect, not only yourself and those closest to you, but in some way the whole world. The Hero energy is about claiming the decision-making power, being conscious of the decisions you make, and accepting responsibility for them.

Magician—The Creative Power of Imagination: Imagination is an essential part of human life; no matter what you do, your imagination is operative. If imagination is not set to the task of building a creative life, it busies itself with weaving a web of inner fears and doubts, blame, and excuse. How well you use your imagination can be the difference between succeeding and failing in your work. The power to effectively and deliberately activate imagination and the power to receive and interpret the spontaneous promptings of imagination are basic to the creative life. The Magician energy is about embracing imaginative power, being conscious of what your imagination is doing in shaping and responding to the events of your life, and accepting responsibility for how you use this power.

Warrior—The Creative Power of Aggressive Action: Aggressive energy is an essential part of human life; no matter what you do, you will always have aggressive energy. You can use it for good or for ill or deny it altogether in a self-destructive self-abdication—nevertheless, aggressive energy will always be a part of your life. The power to tap the vital pool of aggressive energy and the power to direct this energy towards the accomplishment of constructive purposes is basic to the creative life. It will take the disciplined and concentrated use of aggressive energy to accomplish your life’s work. Wimping out or getting bitter or hostile will limit your creative capacity. The Warrior energy is about fully embracing the aggressive power, being conscious of how you are channeling your aggressive energy, and accepting responsibility for how you use this power.

Scholar—The Creative Power of Learning and Teaching: Learning and teaching are essential to human life; no matter what you do, you will always be learning and teaching something. You can learn about sports or celebrity gossip, about what time various television shows come on, or you can learn about that which, in some way, makes your world a better place. You can, by your example, teach about greed and indifference, derision and confusion, or you can, by example, teach how we can all live together in healthy and beautiful ways. To succeed in the emerging new economy, you will need to become a lifelong learner, and we trust you will want to exemplify whatever is, to you, constructive and uplifting. The Scholar energy is about claiming the learning/teaching power, being fully conscious of what you are learning and teaching, and fully accepting responsibility for how you use this power.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Marcus Aurelius

We can think of the artist of life as the Self, wielding the awesome creative powers of decision-making and imagination, of aggressive action, and the learning/teaching dimension—building a life of beauty on these four pillars. The key is consciousness. As Jung put it, “In the history of the collective, as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.”⁷ We encourage you to become conscious of these inner powers and engage them creatively in your own life.

The Hero (The Quest for Life’s Work)

Imagine, for example, that in approaching the Quest for life’s work, you view, consider, and experience yourself as a hero or heroine tracking a great treasure which, having won, you will bring back for all to see and enjoy. This is an altogether, qualitatively different experience from “looking for a good job” or “finding a niche” or “discovering how to have it all.” You are a Parzival or Dante, a Psyche or Penelope. However you frame it or name it, you are a hero—moving into the field of questing—following your bliss. You frame your experience, in this case your searching and questioning, not as that of a confused and pathetic groper who doesn’t know what to do but as a Hero on a Quest.

The Seeker of the Grail

You can tell when people are just going through the motions in their work and when they are putting their whole selves into it. The people who can put their whole selves into their work are the ones who have put their whole selves into the Quest to find it—and who keep questing the whole of their lives. It’s an unfolding process, a marvelous, never-ending path of discovery. One reason people remain in untenable work situations (or any untenable situation, for that matter) is because they put a negative frame around the process of questioning, of seeking, of looking for a better way. They view self-questioning as a sign of weakness, rather than as an essential element of the creative life.

The Hero is comfortable with not knowing, and yet he is not willing to tolerate confusion. His comfort with not knowing gets him going on the Quest; his unwillingness to tolerate confusion keeps him going until he has answers that ring true for him. In every invention, every creative work of art, every advancement in scientific understanding, there is experienced, at some point, the tension between not knowing and not accepting confusion. This creative discontent is beautifully expressed in the following quote from Einstein: “The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him who has himself experienced them.” This is hero stuff—seeking and searching for a better way.

Think of how embarrassed the average person, especially male, is with not knowing what he is going to do next. While the artist of life is comfortable with “I don’t know yet; I am still seeking, probing, searching,” the average Joe thinks he must have all the answers right away, even before he has seriously asked the questions. He dreads the uncomfortable space of not knowing and seeking and so clings to something pat—in other words, to something he has been told and has accepted without examination.

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves.

Rainer Maria Rlke

Of course, in addition to the “know-it-alls” with the quick answers, there are those who have simply given up on seeking, and accept confusion or muddling as a sort of “natural order of things.” They have resigned themselves to not knowing and have given up the Quest. Their “not knowing” isn’t a matter of having yet to find an answer. Indeed, they shape no question. Confusion hangs over them, an amorphous and ubiquitous black cloud of doubt and despair. The “know-it-all” tends toward defensiveness; the resigned, toward depression. The true Hero (or Heroine, if you prefer) has the gonads to ask the really big questions, questions like: Who am I? and What in the world am I doing here?—and to stay with them.

The Hero as seeker decides what to focus on, in other words, what is important. He is the philosopher or contemplative, exercising judgment in making value choices. George Bernard Shaw said of the creative process, “You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.” Desire begins the creative process, setting imagination and will to work. The Hero’s seeking informs desire—before he wants, he asks what to want. He recognizes that we tend to desire what we focus our attention on, and that what we focus on is often more someone else’s doing than our own. Parents, teachers, television programmers, movie producers, newspaper editors, etc., select what we focus on, and in so doing, shape our desires. The Hero decides for himself what to focus his attention on (what is important), and in so doing, what the story of his life will be about.

Man’s activity consists in either a making or doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction upon the contemplative life [that is, the Hero].

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Many of us first contact this seeking aspect of the Hero in our youth. Sometime in our late high school or early college years, a lot of us begin to reflect on the values and philosophies that our society represents and the directions we would like to take in our own lives. We are young and idealistic and not yet heavily invested in the status quo. Exposure to history, anthropology, sociology, art, mythology, literature, and philosophy, etc., teaches us that ours is not the only way to organize this thing called human society. We begin to see more clearly the nature of our particular culture from the reference point of others.

The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.

Ortega y Gassett

The realization of choice and the potential for change hit us like a bolt of lightning—the way we do it in this society is not the only way. There are many ways. There is nothing sacrosanct about the choices we have made—as individuals or collectively. We understand that many options are open to us now, and they always will be. We are exposed to so many ideas, values, choices. We become more sophisticated. We may even come to realize that “social reality” exists only because people agree to it and only for as long as they agree to it. Likewise, we may realize our individual “reality” is plastic stuff, shaped by the questions we make important. We realize we have choice.

About the time we are really getting into all this, we are faced with the fact that our college days will soon be history. Now it’s time to go out into the “real world.” “Real” here, of course, means sanctioned, socially approved of, conventional, having no more or less reality than any other social order—past, present, or possible. The “real” world of today’s Western society may not adequately represent values you identified with in your youthful philosophical search or may emphasize others that you would not choose. But now, all of a sudden: Nobody’s asking what you think, Buster.

It’s time to get a job. Time to forget all that stuff about choices. Don’t think about visions or values. Don’t concern yourself with whys. Just be responsible (sic) and concentrate on how you can get the “best” job. Suppress your awareness of yourself as an observer and creator of social reality and plunge into playing the game as it is already defined, with your eyes closed. We have seen other ways. We are aware of choice, and yet if we are to be “respectable” citizens, we must try to forget. Be a good kid now and get yourself heavily involved in the game of winning social approval—anything else and you risk the label “irresponsible.” That’s enough to keep most of us in line for a long time. We still think about these things—now and then. We may talk about it late at night, some weekend over a few beers. We may bore our children with repeated tellings of stories about the good old days of our freedom (of choice). What was questing, searching, evaluating now gets stuffed, shelved, and compartmentalized—but make no mistake; it is not dead. It is only sleeping.

Once we see the light of choice, we must put on blinders in order to go back to sleep. The trouble is, we put these blinders on by choice and in awareness of the choice. We will go along, though we know the emperor has no clothes. This makes it difficult to fall into a really deep sleep. It is more of a waking trance. We may struggle to keep our eyes closed, but from time to time, the light gets in anyhow. Its perception reminds us of how alienated we feel, mostly from ourselves. Whatever happened to all those choices, all those possibilities? Now everything seems set in stone, and we are quickly turning into stone. Of course, whether you’ve gotten off the trail a bit or are just taking it up for the first time, it’s never too late for questing.

I was so full of sleep at the time that I left the true way.

Dante

Awaken the Hero. Don’t be afraid to seek, to ask questions, or to stay with it until you have answers that really work for you. In Norse mythology, the first human was named Ask. Asking questions is the first distinction between humans and the rest of life. Humans ask. Most only ask what they are told to ask. The Hero asks his or her own questions. We will invite you to embody the Hero as Quester as you move through the self-examining questions in “Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work.”

The Decider or Chooser of Roads

As well as the quester or questioner, the Hero is the inner King or Queen, the chooser, the decider, the one who gives directions, who sets the life course. This is the aspect of Hero as the conscience, deciding the right things to do; in the Buddhist tradition, it is called buddhi, or discriminative will. The Hero bravely ventures into the dark forest of the unknown, and once, through great effort, he comes to see the light, he is determined to live by the light he sees. Because his vision, or clarity, is hard won, he is not easily dissuaded from his insights. Homer describes the Hero when he says, “What he greatly thought he nobly dared.”

Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.

Helen Keller

The Hero is the chooser at the crossroads of life. He admits that he and we together always have a choice and that he and we are always responsible for what is chosen. The first choice of the Hero is the choice to be one, to live a life dedicated to full consciousness and responsibility. The Hero exercises the judgment that selects out what is worthy of his or her time, attention, and energy, that is, worthy of his or her life. To choose a life direction is the Hero’s greatest choice. Even those who claim not to be making decisions but living according to the intuitions of poetic or Divine grace made a choice at some point to seek the intuitive life and must continually decide to act upon or ignore the promptings of intuition. In any case, the Hero’s life course is never merely random or automatic. He chooses to be conscious of the choices he makes and accepts full responsibility for the same. He knows that the greater his awareness, the better the choices he will make.

Questions are the creative acts of intelligence.

Frank Kingdon

While our culture honors the executive function (Warrior), we hardly recognize, let alone honor, the Hero as seeker and decider of roads. We have so many rushing about—busy doing this and that, but few who have deeply considered the direction they want to move in, either as individuals or as humankind. Together we crash about like a giant headless horseman, hardly aware of where we are going or the effect we are having on the world around us. The Hero is the one who sets the direction for the Warrior (and the rest). The warrior energy of the unprincipled and undirected nowhere man is ripe for the plucking and can be, and so often is, manipulated for all kinds of foolishness. In this, we can wonder with Shakespeare at “what men do daily not knowing what they do.” We have been told over and again that it takes courage to be a warrior, and surely it is so, but it takes even more courage to be a Hero—to, as Thales said, “Know thyself.”

The Hero’s motivation is love, compassion—something bigger than him- or herself. Inspired and nourished by the great mythic themes, his life is transformed so fundamentally, so radically, that without anything changing—everything seems to have changed. The suffering he experiences is no longer personal suffering but human suffering. The work that he does is no longer personal work but humanity’s work. The energies that he employs are no longer mere personality traits but aspects of great mythological archetypes.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

Joseph Campbell

The Hero as chooser is the one who decides what to create, to build, to make. The Hero is the inner king or queen setting the agenda for the other creative powers, commanding them to work his visions into reality. In relation to the other archetypes, the Hero is first among equals. We cannot be artists of life without the courage to seek and the courage to stand by our insights. Likewise, the Magician, the Warrior, and the Scholar all serve the life directions set forth by the Hero. For this reason, we will discuss the Hero at length in the next chapter.

All truth is an achievement. If you would have truth at its value, go win it.

T. T. Munger

Shadow Play: The shadow hero is the nowhere man, without conscience, direction, or personal integrity, “the little king.” The Hero is decided, and the first decision, as we will discuss, is to live, to say yes to life. The nowhere man is indecisive. He doesn’t know who he is, what he wants, or where he is going. The nowhere man thinks: It’s a beautiful day, someone paid me a compliment, it’s payday, I like to live. Life is good. But the next day, it’s raining, he feels his aches and pains a little more acutely, the dog does doo on his morning newspaper, and the boss is upset. So he thinks: I hate life; it’s a terrible thing that I’m being forced to endure. His days go on like this, a virtual rollercoaster of elation and depression. That is why he’s called the nowhere man.

The Magician (The Game of Life’s Work)

Once the Hero has, through searching and self-examination, determined a direction or outcome he would like to pursue, he hands the project over to the Magician. The inner Hero says, Imagine this! and the inner Magician goes to work making a mental mock-up of the result. The Magician is the ruler of the i•Magi•Nation. The true Magi, or Magicians, are those who have mastered the creative powers of the imagination. Of course, the inner Magician, or imagination, is active, whether it is under the directorship of the conscious Hero or in the muddled command of the nowhere man. Depending on who is in charge, the magician is a powerful, creative ally, a pesky nuisance, or a positively dangerous foe.

The true Magician makes her magic in accord with the Hero’s directions and as a reflection of the poetic view of life. She plays out the ritual game of career, puts on costume and mask, and wields the secret knowledge of her craft. She knows there is magic in making, in creating. In ancient times, gods or magical rites were associated with all the crafts: cooking, weaving, metallurgy, healing, writing, dance, theater, leadership, farming, architecture, carpentry, music, oratory, history, etc. In ancient Hawaii, the craft masters were called Kahunas and were honored as spirit masters of their arts.

Artist! You are a magician: Art is the great miracle.

Péladan

Cosmic Theater: The Great Magic Show

Theater and stagecraft have a kind of magic in their capacity to create and pull us into a world of illusion. East Indian cosmology views the world, indeed the entire material creation, as a kind of giant cosmic theater—the lila, or play, of creation in the realm of maya or illusion.⁸ Shakespeare gives us a similar notion in his “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Our word illusion originates from the Latin illudere, literally “to play on.”⁹ Illusion is what we play on and in.

If you go to a Hollywood set and see the illusion of a town created by a series of storefronts, you know it is not a “real” town, yet the storefronts are made of “real” stuff—boards and nails. The appearance of a town is an illusion, but that with which the illusion is built is real. Likewise, Hindu cosmology tells us that the appearance of the world around us is an illusion, a stage set, but that this set is made of real stuff. We individually and collectively shape the real stuff of the universe into its many appearances through the power of imagination. The inner life of the imagination holds a power we must face and learn to use constructively or risk individual and collective destruction.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.

Buddha

The Showman and His Box of Magic Props

The Magician is always dealing with illusion and perception. The showman Magician knows how the illusion of magic is created. If you do a sleight of hand trick with me and I say, “Wow, that’s magic!” you don’t think to yourself, I really made the ball or quarter disappear. You know how the trick is done. For one not to be fooled by illusion, he must first be disillusioned; that is, he must see how the trick is done. This is when, as Alan Watts said, the life of Zen begins.¹⁰ If you need to be somebody special or always on top, if it matters too much to you what people think or you’re ashamed of this or that, then you’re ready to be tricked. Before you can be a real Magician, you must first become disillusioned with all of that. (See “Playing the Game: Winners, Losers, and Choosers,”) When we understand that we are not these egos or persona masks that we pretend to be, we are freer to play with the illusion stuff of ego and personality—freer to play the Magician.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer himself to be tricked.

Machiavelli

Where we encounter ceremony, rituals, secrets, the psychic—be it the psyche-up or the psyche-out—this is the realm of the Magician. We may think of magic as a bygone relic from an ancient time, dominated by superstition and the fear of ghosts. Still, we can recognize magical elements in a host of rituals that populate modern life. For example, why does the judge still wear the black robe? (Or in England or South Africa, the robe and the wig?) What practical purpose do these serve? Perhaps the donning of the ceremonial costume is meant to impress upon the minds of the participants that this is no mere mortal but one possessed of some supernatural wisdom, one sanctioned with the power to determine the fates of other’s lives. Why do we still wear the cap and gown at graduation, white at weddings, or black at funerals? We have some sense of these events as magic rituals.

The Magician uses tools such as ritual, costume, space, language, number, symbol, suggestion, and visualization to make his art. Below we will consider how a few of these elements of magic affect our lives today. Space requires that we be brief. The purpose of this discussion is simply to stimulate an awareness of the magic all around us, and how we might perhaps better use this magic for the good of all.

The Magic of Ritual: In business, the “power lunch” is a ritual. The handshake is said to have developed as a means of showing no weapon; the wine-tasting ritual, as a means of discovering whether or not the vino was poisoned. Why do we still carry our important papers about in animal skins or wear hides on our feet and around our waists? Surely there is some old animal magic in this. The animal trophies that hang in the men’s club, the bar, or the executive’s office or “den” are supposed to confer some magic power to their owners.

The Magic of Costume: Today men wear the suit and tie uniform. Prior to the French Revolution, men’s dress was more varied and, certainly amongst the well-to-do, much more colorful, ornate, and elegant. The infatuation with Roman law, custom, and culture that attended the French Revolution produced the stoic military-like costume of the suit and tie. Putting on the suit and tie is a ritual that affects body carriage, speech, and ways of relating. When a group of men in this attire change to, say, tennis clothes at a resort or country club, different manners of speech, movement, and interaction are immediately apparent. To appreciate the real power of this magic, imagine men the world over forsaking the suit for more comfortable or colorful clothing. This alone would change the world.

The Magic of Space: Territorial boundaries—the corner office, the physical and people barriers that separate the “big man” from the rest—these are the magic of space. In the fifties, the key to the executive washroom was a status symbol. For the lower echelons, a reserved parking space indicates that they have “arrived.” The perquisites of limousine rides, private yachts, and Lear jets all reflect a kind of magic in one’s ability to use and control space. Certainly one hundred years ago, flying across oceans would have been considered magic. Any physical space that impresses people to the point where they forget themselves is magical use of space. Bankers, for example, use this magic when they give their buildings the appearance of imposing temples. The Chinese practiced an ancient art known as Feng Shui. Its purpose was to use and arrange space so as to effect a harmonious environment. They knew that use of space could create good or bad magic.

The Magic of Language: Most professions have their own secret language. Why do doctors still write prescriptions in Latin? Why are legal terms loaded with French and Latin? Why are fraternities “Greek”? Some special terms are necessary to distinguish fine points of difference; most are simply code words designed to make the initiated unintelligible to the masses. The plaques, diplomas, or certifications on the wall usually indicate initiation into some secret society and its language.

The Magic of Number: The magic squares and formulas of the alchemist may seem foolish to some today, and yet how are skyscrapers, nuclear bombs, or ocean tankers designed? With magical lines and numbers, geometry and mathematics, the great buildings, machines, and implements of war and peace take shape in this world.

The Magic of Symbol: Corporations spend millions in designing and projecting a corporate logo because they understand the power of symbol. Reebok’s use of the Union Jack, Chrysler’s use of the five-pointed star, or Safeway’s use of the Tai Chi (Supreme Ultimate) are hardly accidental. The Great Seal of the United States of America is a kind of super symbol loaded with ancient symbols. The swastika, ancient symbol of life, has come to be so closely associated with the Nazis that today many cannot look at it without feeling fear, horror, and dread.

The Magic of Suggestion: Advertising uses the magic of suggestion in the barrage of commercials that we are all subjected to. Those who fear the influence on society of violent television and movies fear their suggestive power. The news media are using a kind of suggestive power in what they select out as the important issues of life. Peer pressure and association have suggestive power. It is well known that people tend to become like the people they associate with. Parents who tell their children that they are stupid or will never amount to anything, or the individual who tells himself, “I will succeed”—each is using the power of suggestion.

The Magic of Visualization: In recent years, the dramatic results achieved by top flight athletes and by health practitioners have convinced all but the most closed-minded skeptics of the power of visualization to effect results. A growing list of books, such as Mental Training for Peak Performance by Steven Ungerleider,¹¹ detail the improvements in performance achieved by Olympic athletes and others who practice visualization. Dr. Bernie Siegel and others in the medical field have reported on scores of seemingly miraculous recoveries effected by those who use visualization as a major component of their healing process.¹² If the power of visualization can actually increase the weight Olympic weight-lifters can lift or reduce the size of cancerous tumors, it can certainly be a powerful tool in creating the results you want to effect in your life.

So many elements of the magic show are designed to psyche people out. The business man wooing a major client takes him out on his private yacht, into his field of magic power. He romances the client with the banquet, the music, the lights on the water, the powerful or beautiful people he surrounds himself with. He impresses him with the power expressed in his wealth and retinue. The client negotiates away the store and the next day wonders what happened. If you can be impressed, you can be psyched out. Weakness in your magic shows in the ways you can be impressed. When you are impressed, you lose your center, your self. You move into someone else’s field—they have and take the power. This is why the Zen bushido master says, “Don’t show weakness,” or the Jedi Warrior Obi-Wan Kenobi says, “Hide your feelings, Luke.”¹³ Don’t let them see you sweat—or too impressed.

Whatever you do to psyche yourself up for the game of life is also a part of your magic. The essence of the psyche-up is to project personal power, magnetic, dynamic energy—in other words, confidence. This confidence, or self-esteem, is conveyed through energy level, strength and tone of voice, posture, and body language.

You can’t depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

The Genius, The Shaman, and the Creative Womb of Emptiness

The Chinese sage Lao Tzu tells us that the usefulness of things is in their emptiness. The useful part of the wheel is the hub; the useful part of a pot is the empty space within.¹⁴ Consider the mystery of the seed; throw it in the seemingly empty earth and watch life spring forth from the emptiness. There is mystery, magic, and creative power in the emptiness. Think of the creative artist. She knows that for all her searching, concentrating, and disciplined effort, the really exciting breakthroughs will come as inspirations from the emptiness.

The goal, the Hero’s direction, is a seed, a potential; throw it on the emptiness of the imagination. Let imagination show you the way. Learn to trust in its magic subconscious power. Walk in expectancy, looking for signs of its revelations along the way. If we only move into what we are sure we know how to do and are not willing to let imagination show the way, we block our creative potential. The creative life, like the growing of a plant, is a mystery, a surprising unfoldment.

From What-is all the world of things was born But What-is sprang in turn from What-is-not.

Lao Tzu

In the Indian Vedas, the creative principle of life is imaged as a golden embryo.¹⁵ It is said that the entire manifest universe arises out of the living emptiness of this cosmic womb energy. Every kid in science class is told that nature abhors a vacuum. The Magi creates a magic empty space by drawing a magic circle. Within this vacuum, or empty space, he creates his magic. You can think of your goals as providing the boundaries of a magic circle. Within the empty space of this circle, your imagination or inner magician works to create the outcomes you desire.

The two-headed Janus was the Roman god of doors and gates.¹⁶ Like Janus, the Magician is a two-headed gatekeeper. She looks within and without, guarding the gate between the conscious and subconscious mind. In traditional cultures, a shaman was one who had learned to deliberately and intentionally pass through the gate into the awesome realm of the subconscious and come back again.

A shaman, as defined by Michael Harner in The Way of the Shaman, is one who can “contact and utilize an ordinarily hidden reality in order to acquire knowledge, power, and to help other persons.”¹⁷ While perhaps not to the same degree or in the same way as the shaman, we can all develop the capacity to contact an “ordinarily hidden reality” and draw from it what will be useful to our daily lives. We’re not talking about performing any kind of strange rites, but simply developing the capacity to see that there may be more or less to things than immediately meets the eye. We can learn to, as Plotinus said, “close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing.”¹⁸

The faculty of imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of the senses.

Leonardo da Vinci

For example, many Jungians make use of “dream therapy.” Through this practice, one learns to read the signs and symbols of the hidden world of dreams with the aim of discovering what the individual subconscious, or even the collective unconscious, might be “saying” at a particular time. Dreams can be a rich source of creative and life-instructing information, insight, and inspiration. To gain real value from our dreams, we must develop the capacity to clearly see and recall our dreams and to consciously interpret their importance.

All poetic inspiration is but dream interpretation.

Hans Sachs

In the Biblical stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel and of Joseph and the Pharaoh, we see the importance of the interpretative function of dreams. In each case, the King or ruler recalled a dream in precise and graphic detail; yet until he found someone with the insight to interpret the dream for him, the information transmitted through it remained a mystery. This process applies to all information arising from the emptiness of the subconscious mind. Inspiration and insights must be interpreted by the conscious mind to gain full value. This brings us back to the image of Janus looking within the subconscious mind and looking without, interpreting with the conscious mind.

The power to receive and interpret knowledge from the emptiness also recalls the image of the great oracles of Delphi. Like the tribal chiefs and their shamans, the great kings of old relied on Magi, oracles, and astrologers to give them knowledge from the hidden reality. Throughout the stories of world mythology, we see the archetypal Hero receiving aid from the archetypal Magician.

The final aspect of magic that we will consider is the one we are engaged in here, that is, the conscious invocation of the archetypal energies. Every traditional culture uses masks and ritual drama for this purpose. One puts on the masks and becomes the archetypal Warrior or Magician; one moves as the archetypal energy, transcendent to egoic limitation. The great Magicians of old did not view themselves as making magic but rather as evoking natural and metaphysical laws.

Shadow Play: A Magician can be a Magus, a sorcerer, a charlatan, or shyster, depending on the depth of his knowledge and the purity of his motive. The shadow magician is the manipulator, the liar, the conman, the devious scoundrel. If you don’t have the Quest, that is, a purpose larger than yourself, you are left with using your magic, your imagination, for less than constructive purposes.

The Warrior (The Battle for Life’s Work)

The Hero makes the decision; the Magician develops a plan; the Warrior’s job is to carry it out. King Arthur makes a decision, gains magical help from Merlin, and sends his knights out to do his bidding. Without his knights, without his warriors, the King’s decisions are meaningless. A king or a queen without warriors to enforce his or her decisions is useless indeed, as King Lear so poignantly learned in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The Warrior is the one who gets things done.

As a Warrior, you have a sense of yourself as a champion of your vision, the larger-than-self purpose to which your inner Hero has committed. This becomes your banner, and with it held high, you ride out to slay the dragons of doubt and fear, to defeat the view of life that holds nothing dear. The Warrior starts down this road, inspired and full of optimism—and runs smack into obstacles, blocks, and opposition. These test his character and resolve. They tempt him to forsake his duty (to himself and others) and abandon the vision of his Quest. He battles his own inner doubts as well as the external resistance to making things happen in the real world. Some obstacles threaten, intimidate, or coerce; others seduce, entice, and charm him from his duty. In any case, they prey upon his weakness and tempt him to relent, to give in to the belief that life doesn’t make a difference and that choice is not. The Warrior battles the whole of his life, within and without, against the notion that life doesn’t make a difference.

Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted, or a woman either?

George Bernard Shaw

The Warrior perseveres in the face of difficulties and doubts. Study the myths of the world, and you will see these things portrayed symbolically. As soon as the Hero gets the call, the obstacles arise, and there’s something difficult to do. There are dragons to slay, raging seas to cross, wicked stepmothers to outwit. In other words, there is uncomfortable stuff to do. The minute you answer the Hero’s call, the Warrior’s tests begin. How you handle these tests will determine whether you will live as a free man, a free woman—or cower in slavish bondage to circumstance.

Riding the Windhorse of Creative Aggression

Now all the Hero wants to do is fulfill his duty; all the Poet wants to do is express her vision of beauty in the world—which are nice things to do. The problem is, if he’s too much of a nice guy or she too much of a nice gal, they’ll never do them. They start with grand intentions and run smack into obstacles to penetrate, hurdles to jump over, hoops to jump through. He starts to think, Do I really want to do this? She thinks, Is this really important? Good intentions are not enough; commitment and sacrifice are necessary.

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangersbut to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my painbut for the heart to conquer it.

Tagore

Warriors actually enjoy discipline, not as something imposed from without, but as an opportunity to live life to the fullest. While the nice guy (wimp) hopes that if he kisses enough rear, somebody will do it for him, the Warrior knows he must rely on himself. Warriors succeed because they have to—because they put themselves in situations that demand their all. True Warriors have the dignity that comes from self-reliance and from having been tested and proven under the fire. Much of the world’s great literature and drama have as their action the transformation of the youth (or, if older, the wimp or thug) into the Warrior. A heroic motive, a purpose larger than self, gives the individual the impetus to rely on himself as never before. It is for others that he becomes a stronger, more self-reliant individual and acquires the dignity that all people crave. He rides what the Tibetans call the windhorse of dignity, self-respect, and power. He no longer doubts his basic goodness as a human being.

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few more upon it.

Albert Schweitzer

We can think of Warrior energy as penetrating and protecting, piercing barriers and defending boundaries. The Warrior protects life and pierces the boundaries of limitation and stagnation. Both require creative aggression. The Warrior is master of aggressive energy. People with a lot of aggressive energy determine the sociocultural landscape: Those who work for the good make this power serve the heart; those who work for ill, whether consciously or unconsciously, use this power to serve their lower instincts. One way or another, aggression is a part of the human experience.

For many, aggression is a bad word. They associate it with violence, cruelty, tyranny, and oppression. Yet aggression—the assertion of power—is required for every creative as well as every destructive act. Concentration is the assertion of a single idea, image, or train of thought to the exclusion of all else. That exclusion is aggressive. Great artists through history have been known for aggressive concentration on their work. One had better not interrupt Beethoven while he is composing or Michelangelo while he is carving. In Tibetan Buddhism, they call this creative tenacity all-accomplishing wisdom.

Life is a fight. You must remain concentrated and not reveal your defects; through continuous training and self-control, gradually you discard them.

Taisen Deshimaru

Zen masters have been known to be extremely aggressive in their teaching techniques—hitting, kicking, spitting, throwing things—shocking the student out of his slumber. Jesus was aggressive while confronting the money changers in the temple. Elsewhere he called men vipers, hypocrites, and serpents—aggressive terms, to be sure. Mahatma Gandhi’s use of fasting was an aggressive act. He held his own body hostage and threatened to destroy it unless the changes he wanted were adopted. Mother Teresa was aggressive in the demands she made upon the sisters in her order and in fighting for those in her care. If her followers could not accept the strict discipline she imposed—and cheerfully—they were dropped. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington was an aggressive act. The point of these examples is simply to demonstrate that Warrior aggression is necessary for positive, creative action and that aggression is not necessarily violent.

The Sword of Present Concentration

From Japanese bushido, or “way of the warrior,” we can learn three keys for making aggressive energy serve our creative visions: be present, be concentrated, and be strong.

Be Present: The Warrior is totally alive. He accepts his life and his death. Most people accept neither. They live in terror of death and muddle through life half asleep, scarcely aware of the dangers and opportunities that lie all around them. Native American warriors cried on their way to battle, “Today is a good day to die!” Mohammed said, “Die before ye die.”¹⁹ Japanese bushido teaches the warrior to be internally dead, meaning still. Being dead within, the samurai is completely free to respond—immediately and in all directions—without. The aliveness of the Warrior, his conscious, alert presence, arises from his inner deadness. In Japanese bushido, this consciousness is called the shin, or “spirit” aspect.

Be Concentrated: Then there is the aspect of technique or wasa. The essence of technique is concentration. One way of considering the Japanese D’s, e.g., Aikido, Judo, Kendo (sword), Kyudo (archery), Chado (Tea), is as a means of concentrating on a single act. If you can do a single act with total presence, be it wielding a sword, arranging flowers, or serving tea, then this concentrated presence will carry over to other aspects of your life. The person who does things in a sloppy fashion never develops concentration, that is, his or her expression of the Warrior.

Technique is never merely mental. It must become instinctive, immediate, total. The warrior who has to think about what he is doing in combat will soon be dead. If one thinks of his motions in calligraphy, it will come out stiff. If one thinks before he releases the bow, the arrow will miss. Training and technique must become total, must involve the body as well as the mind.

Be Strong: The final aspect is that of strength of body. The Warrior must have a strong body, because he will ask it to do what is contrary, that is, uncomfortable stuff. If your body is weak, it becomes boss. When your body is strong, it obeys the commands of mind and spirit.

It is said, Good technique defeats body strength. Good shin, or consciousness, defeats good technique. This is why the old d-jo master in his eighties will whip the strong, young buck every time. The old master has the patience to look for weakness—in Japanese, suki, or opportunity. When he sees it, he strikes. The young buck, too eager to attack or too self-conscious, leaves himself open.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Ambrose Redmoon

From the European tradition of the knight, we can learn something about the Warrior’s relation to the Poet. Many of the great knights of old practiced what has come to be called “The Art of Courtly Love.” Poetry and song were the means through which the knight expressed his love for and dedication to his Lady. Recently, scholars (for example, Frances Gies, The Knight in History,)²⁰ have provided rather convincing evidence that the etiquette of Courtly Love was, in fact, an elaborate ritual filled with spiritual significance—a vehicle for honoring the spirit in the ordinary. In this ritual, both the knight and the lady were playing prescribed, symbolic roles.

Those who reach greatness on earth reach it through concentration.

Upanishads

The Lady (standing for the knight’s True Self) says, “Kill me some dragons.” The knight goes out and slays the dragons or defeats the opponents. He comes back all full of himself and thinks, “Ah, what a fine thing I have done.” And the Lady says, “Is that all? That’s not much. The heroes of old who really loved their Lady did truly great and heroic deeds. Go out and do something really great, and then I’ll consider if you’re really serious.” Even as the knight’s Lady taunted her suitor to ever greater heroism, so today we can be inspired by the literature of spirit (mythic and poetic)—spurred and egged on to the Avalon of our Quest. True Warriors endure for Love.

Shadow Play: The shadow warrior is a mercenary. He might be a hired gun, selling his aggressive energy for the highest ransom or an accommodating lackey, harboring aggression in hopes of ingratiating himself with the powers-that-be. Both the bully and wimp have sold out. The discipline of the Warrior comes in learning to use aggressive energy to serve the inner Hero—that is, a consciously and freely chosen, larger-than-self purpose.

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.

Han Suyin

The Scholar (The School of Life’s Work)

What we mean by Scholar is not necessarily a bookish fellow with a grey beard. The archetypal Scholars might appear in various cultures as the grandfathers or the grandmothers, the keepers of the knowledge and the wisdom of the people.

I once saw a film about an African family in an arid climate. The grandfather knew the old ways of his people, which had been passed on for thousands of years. His son had a few years of elementary school and began to lose the old ways. The old man’s grandson, in turn, went off to the university and knew virtually nothing of the traditional teachings. One day, the grandson arrived at the village with a strange and noisy machine. He was very excited—telling everyone that with this contraption he could find water. There he was bumbling about with this noisy machine, looking quite ridiculous and having little luck besides, when the old grandfather happened onto the scene. “What are you doing?” asked the old man. “Looking for water,” came the reply. The old man laughed. He walked out into the desert, and where he saw certain plants, he began to dig. Sure enough, he found water. Now if finding water is important, the old man, who never had a day of schooling in his life, is a better scholar than the university-trained grandson.²¹

This story gives a sense of what we mean by the archetypal Scholar. The Scholars are the knowledge and wisdom keepers of a people, a culture, and of humanity as a whole. Scholar is not really a satisfactory word to describe this aspect. In “Act IV,” we coin the term Student-Sage, which gets closer to the meaning but is a bit clumsy to use. We will use the terms Scholar and Student-Sage interchangeably throughout.

The Hero sets the direction, determining what to create; the Magician develops the plan; the Warrior executes it; the Scholar is the course-correcter. In the learning and teaching or exemplifying capacities, the Scholar keeps one on track. The Scholar learns that which is necessary to advance and keeps an awareness of where one is in the process of creation. The Scholar looks at the situations of life as opportunities to learn and as opportunities to exemplify what she believes in. Recognizing the Scholar in your life comes in the realization that you are learning and teaching twenty-four hours a day.

Of course, true learning is more than collecting and storing data; it is an organic process of self-expansion and discovery. While learning, we grow naturally, as trees expand—in circles of knowledge, wisdom, and ability. To live is to learn. With apologies to Bob Dylan, we can say, “He not busy learning that which betters himself and his world is busy dying.”

Likewise, teaching isn’t simply passing on a certain body of knowledge—a formal operation we do apart from the rest of our lives. First and foremost, we teach by example. In the way we live our lives, we are teaching about what we think is important and valuable. Whether we choose to exemplify the selfish, the mediocre, or the indifferent or to take a creative approach to life, we are constantly teaching. The Scholar recognizes that just as she is teaching others, others are teaching her. As a wise friend of mine often says, “Some people are teaching you where it’s at; some are teaching you where it’s not at.”

The Scholar includes both what Blake called “The Wisdom of Innocence” and “The Wisdom of Experience.” In myth, this archetype presents itself in images such as the Divine Child, or Innocent, and as the Old Wise Man, the Crone, or the Wise Old Grandmothers. (The two in one nature of this archetype is expressed in mythic figures such as Pluto, who is represented as a bearded, wise old man or as a playful youth.) The special relationship of children and grandparents represents the two aspects of this learning-teaching archetype we call the Student-Sage. The child represents the learning or growth potential within us, the grandparent, the tested wisdom of experience. In traditional cultures, the older people pass their knowledge to the younger through a kind of hands-on apprenticeship and through storytelling. We will first consider apprenticeship and then the storytelling aspect.

Your motive in working should be to set others, by your example, on the path of duty.

Bhagavad-Gita

The Student: Child Apprentice, Beginner’s Mind

Apprenticeship is the way of learning with love. Think of times when you learned something one-on-one: your mother taught you how to cook, or your father taught you how to play baseball or to do some kind of handiwork, or maybe a friend taught you how to play jacks or do a new dance step. Recall the sweetness of this. Learning in the physical presence of the one who teaches you to do the thing—this is a tender and beautiful experience. You always feel sort of like a child when you are learning from someone who loves you. Now imagine if someone taught you to do your work in this way, not hovering over you constantly, but from time to time being there, physically present, showing you. The important thing is that learning come with love, in a spirit of goodwill and rapport.

If you go to work for a corporation and they give you a “video orientation,” then perhaps someone to watch over you, you don’t experience this sense of the apprenticeship. You’re probably a bit suspicious of the watcher’s motives. You may think of them (and perhaps with good reason) not as a friendly and supportive mentor but as a sort of monitor, sent to keep you in line or to catch you screwing up. The difference between a monitor and a mentor is the human element, caring for the person as a person and not simply as a “worker.” Corporations, bureaucracies of every kind, encourage people to act as monitors, not mentors. Of course, there are outstanding exceptions, but mentoring is not standard practice.

Beyond encouraging people to act like machines, bureaucratic systems tend to reduce knowledge to bits of information with all the humanity blanched out. This reductionism has gone hand in hand with the move in recent years toward automated instruction. We will miss something profound if we attempt to teach people solely from computers, video screens, or audio tapes. Something about the human presence itself is vital to passing on the wisdom-knowledge of humankind. People taught only by machines will become machines. People taught by loving humans will become loving humans.

…Without love the acquisition of knowledge only increases confusion and leads to self-destruction.

J. Krishnamurti

In addition to the move from mentoring to monitoring and automated instruction, there is pervasive emphasis in our society on the cramming-to-learn method of instruction. Of course, this is hardly new. Followers of Confucius stressed the importance of an exacting study of the Confucian and earlier Chinese classics. Systems of examination were eventually established to recognize those who excelled in such study. Since the successful completion of the examinations was necessary to virtually every position of responsibility or standing, students became more concerned with passing tests than with penetrating to the essence of the knowledge. Systems of examination, originally designed to foster understanding, became perverted from a means to an end. Finding people more concerned with passing tests than with penetrating to understanding should not surprise us today. It has been around for at least a thousand years.²²

Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student’s behoof?

Emerson

The reductionist approach and emphasis on testing tends further to select out those knowledges that admit to objective examination and to ignore more subjective subjects—the kind that involve value choices, for example. Wisdom cannot be reduced to informational bits and bytes that can be programmed into people or scored according to nationally standardized measures. In the time-honored tradition of the crafts, even the most practical knowledges of weaving or stone masonry, candle making or cloth spinning were taught in a spirit of love and wisdom. When teaching is happening with love, more than knowledge is being shared. Something indescribable, yet immensely important, transfers from the one to the other. If we are to be good Student-Sages, then this is our way through life: receiving this “human substance,” along with knowledge, as students and giving it, along with knowledge, as teachers or sages.

The Sage: Grandmother and Grandfather Story

In addition to, and often as a part of, apprenticeship, traditional cultures transmitted wisdom-knowledge through storytelling, song, dance, theater, visual art, etc.—but principally, storytelling. Dance, art, and music, as much as the spoken word, were means of telling a story, the story of a particular people, the story of their god, the story of their origin, the way they came to be the way they are. The Sage knows stories: her own story, the story of her people, the story of humanity, perhaps even the story of life itself. She has a sense of being a trustee, a steward, and a record keeper, part of an unbroken line extending back and forward, honoring those who have gone before and feeling profound responsibility for those yet to come.

The world is our school for spiritual discovery.

Paul Brunton

Today we are story starved, hungry for stories that will feed our souls. Oh, we have plenty of stories. We consume more stories than any people in human history. Television sitcoms, cops and robbers “dramas,” formula movies full of violence, and escapist fantasies, romance, and spy novels are cranked out by their respective “industries” like so many widgets at the factory. But it’s a hollow diet. Most of these stories lack spiritual nutrition—confidence, direction, insight, and inspiration. It isn’t just pop culture—the stories of many of our “serious writers” are equally devoid of soul food. As with junk foods, we can consume these stories in great quantities and remain malnourished. The Scholar respects the art of story telling. She knows that stories, from children’s nursery rhymes to the most serious novels and everything in between, make a profound difference in the lives of individuals and in the character of a society. Whether we want to admit it or not, stories, all stories, teach values in a uniquely powerful way—by giving them life in our imaginations.

Myth, legend, drama, ritual, dance, art, in addition to whatever else they may be, are vehicles for carrying profound knowledge about the human experience. They can teach us about what it means to be human and about the wide range of creative living strategies humankind has developed over many thousands of years. The Chinese poet Lu Chi, in his classic Wen Fu (The Art of Writing), instructs on the importance of honoring the old wise ones. “Learn to recite the classics, sing in the clear virtue of ancient masters,” and “There are no new ideas, only those which rhyme with certain classics.”²³ In the West we have, “There is nothing new under the sun.” The new that doesn’t rhyme with the best of the old cannot be said to be wise. As Aquinas said, “All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said, has its origin in the Spirit.”²⁴

We began this chapter with a discussion of a mythic approach to life—viewing your life as a story of an encounter of the universal in the everyday. The Sage aspect of the Scholar is that which has a sense of where you are in the story of your life. Her insight gives continuity and meaning to the events of your life. Her long-term perspective and detachment encourage the Scholar as student to learn that which will enrich and better her own life and that of all mankind. In this we have a kind of closure, the completing of a cycle begun by the Hero as seeker or Quester. The Hero is shaking things up, questing, seeking, moving into the unknown, until direction is found. The Sage aspect of the Scholar brings the opportunity to examine whether or not one is, in fact, exemplifying what she determined to do as the Hero. She considers the lessons learned and yet to be learned on the journey through life.

Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.

William Butler Yeats

Shadow Play: The shadow scholar uses knowledge for his own ego and sense gratification. He is an opportunist who, without conscience or compassion, sells his knowledge to the highest bidder. He reasons that the labors of his studies have earned him an expertise that he now “owns” as a kind of personal commodity to trade as he wills. The ramifications that this “trading” has on the world at large don’t concern him. Further, he lacks a sense of story in his life—and the wisdom and the patience that this engenders.

Working with the Archetypes

Jung repeatedly emphasized that for the individual to gain real value in working with the archetypes—emotional involvement is critical. Archetypes are not merely dead images. “They are living pieces of life itself—images that are integrally connected to the individual by the bridge of the emotions.” He stresses that it is “by being charged with emotion [that] the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy)…”²⁵ Active engagement with the archetypes intensifies our experience of life—moving us out of the mundane, drab, half-asleep life, into the wide awake intensity of life lived full on. Nothing is as intense as play. Constructively engaging the archetypes in a spirit of play energizes and intensifies life to a surprising degree. It’s as though you plugged yourself into a great psychic energy amplifier.

It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.

Irwin Edman

You might, in reading myth or in seeing plays or films that draw on mythic images, experience yourself embodying these energies. Recently a friend remarked, “I studied psychology for years, but I get more uplift and inspiration from a movie like Star Wars—more applied, effective psychology than I ever got at school.” While her study of psychology dealt in dry theories and “controlled experiments,” the images from the film touched her emotions. The imaginative power of her subconscious mind was effectively and powerfully engaged. Joseph Campbell said of myth, “Once this subject catches you, there is such a feeling…of information of a deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you don’t want to give it up.”²⁶ [Emphasis added.] As my friend sourced on these images (for example, the archetypal warrior battling the dehumanizing forces of darkness), she began to feel herself embodying that archetypal energy. She was, in effect, playing, moving, experiencing in a different world, a world of her own creation. It was no longer life as television, something to passively observe and critique, but an interactive experience of the inner world of the imagination and the outer world of events.

I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

In the experience of life as television, one is a passive tabula rasa on which things happen. He is not living in a world of his own creation but a world made and controlled by ambivalent or even hostile forces beyond his reach. He feels alienated from and overwhelmed by this world. The artist of life is imaginatively engaged in the world around him. He accepts it as the setting, the backdrop on which the story of his life is being played out. He is creatively engaged in his life—using imagination to shape events and imaginatively responding to events. The victories and the obstacles, the angels and devils of his inner and outer life—all are elements of the story of his life—a story he is simultaneously writing and acting in.

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Around the Wheel

The Poet doesn’t tell his story. He tells The Story. The Story is the encounter of the individual with the universal. Great literature, whether intended or not, has a mythic or poetic dimension. We understand that it is not a story about an individual, that is, a history; it is a story of an encounter of the individual with the universal, that is, a poetry. If the spiritual or poetic life is the capstone of human experience, then the foundation on which this capstone rests is the four wisdoms. Similarly, if the poetic center is the source of all great inspiration, then these four aspects are the vehicles through which the inspiration becomes manifest.

Around the world, all who teach the sacred four indicate that we must pass through all four directions—that we must develop ourselves in all four aspects if we are to be complete and balanced human beings. Ask yourself: What kind of Hero am I? What kind of Magician? What kind of a Warrior am I? What kind of Scholar? By the strength of your Hero, your Magician, your Warrior, and your Scholar, you are able to do or not.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

Buddha

Even if we cannot yet hear the voice of the heart, the direct intuition of the Poet, we can, in the meantime, be developing as Heroes, Magicians, Warriors, and Scholars. We can, as Heroes, learn to respect the dictates of our conscience and develop our volitional will, the capacity to decide without vacillation. We can, as Magicians, creatively direct imaginative power and develop the ability to see the soul or inner meaning of things. We can, as Warriors, develop the alertness, concentration, and strength of endurance we will require, should we ever be fortunate enough to hear the voice of the Muse. We can, as Scholars, grow in learning and teaching that which is life-preserving and affirming. By consciously making all we make—we make ourselves ready to hear the voice of the heart.

Light on the Shadows

It is clear to many of us that the world is in critical need of change if we are even to survive on this planet. But how to change? Jung points out that our typical idea of change is to blame others or the “system.” He goes on, “It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation.”²⁷ In other words, learning to recognize our own shadow inoculates us from the destructive elements of the collective unconscious and mass culture. It is an individual process, indeed an individuating process: it takes the courage to face one’s dark side.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

Emerson

As I become more aware of these archetypal energies, I must be willing to admit that I am largely an effect of life-controlling decisions which I have made and for which I am responsible but of which I am now hardly aware. I must be willing to recognize that much of my imagined freedom is not conscious choice but slavish obedience to the compulsions and constraints of repressed memory, collective and individual. I must be willing to recognize where I am using the creative powers of my imagination, not as an artist creating a life of beauty, but as a kind of black magician—conjuring demons and monsters in thoughts of fear and guilt, jealousy and revenge, destruction and injury. I must be willing to recognize within myself the dark warrior whose undisciplined and unfocused aggression wreaks havoc and destruction, turning green fields to barren wastelands. I must be willing to face that I may be using the knowledge of my craft, or any knowledge for that matter, for destructive or indifferent aims.

Only if I am willing to conceive of myself as a slave to conditioned habit, to infantile and unexamined choice, will the possibility of acting as a true Hero, a conscious quester and chooser, become a viable option. Only as I am willing to conceive of myself as having an imagination populated, and even dominated, by forces from the psychic underworld does the possibility of being a true Magician arise. Only if I am willing to conceive of myself as a destructive warrior, abusing the aggressive energy of life or bottling it up in self-destructive and world-polluting stagnation, can I possibly become a true Warrior—a brave and gentle knight. Only if I am willing to conceive of myself as playing the whore with the knowledge I possess, selling it for destructive or indifferent aims, can I become a true Scholar.

• Right now, are my choices conscious or automatic? Do I accept my responsibility for life, that is, my choices, or do I seek to escape?
• Right now, in this instant, is my imagination creating beauty or destruction?
• Right now, in this moment, is my aggressive energy serving a higher purpose, or is it stagnating or openly destructive?
• Right now, in this instant, is my knowledge serving the greater good, or is it unused or abused?

In earlier times, working with these energies was something that was done in community. Today we are left to work these things out on our own. As we said earlier, part of your magic lies in your capacity to consciously invoke these energies into your life. In the process, you might create your own dramas, rituals, and creative relationships to symbol. If you enjoy writing, you might write your autobiography—your life journey or story—from the standpoint of your relationships with these energies. This can be an illuminating process and is only one example of the many ways you can begin to creatively engage these energies.

“What is the path?” the Zen Master Nan-sen was asked. “Everyday life is the path,” he answered.

We have organized the remainder of this book around the themes of the Quest, the Game, the Battle, and the School of Life’s Work. The four archetypes (Hero, Magician, Warrior, Scholar) correspond to these four “Acts” of Life’s Work. Of course, these energies do not fit into neat little compartments or categories; they show up all over the place. The point of suggesting correspondences is simply to show which energies predominate at each point. We promised a book on life’s work, and we can easily see that these are energies that we will, in one way or another, work with for the rest of our lives. In the next chapter, we will look more closely at the Hero. Remember, the Hero is first among equals, the inner director, or chooser of roads.

It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It takes a long time.

Margery Williams

Zen, Myth, and Symbol

The Zen insight was historically and is today—directness. The Indian pantheon of innumerable Gods, demons, demigods, titans, and celestial beings was rejected by Buddhism generally, and especially Zen, in favor of direct pointing. Zen Buddhism is extremely sparse in its use of images and icons. Zen is always reminding us that the finger is not the moon; the symbol is not the reality it points at.

While perhaps not as elaborately as the Indian, the Western tradition also relies heavily upon symbolic representations. A Western artist might use the sun to represent immortality, divine light, the logos, etc. A tree might represent fulfillment, the fruits of labor, the paradisiacal realm, the fall, etc. For Zen, sun is sun, tree is tree, rain is rain, flower is flower. The emphasis is not on the thing as a stand-for-symbol but on its “suchness.”

Koans are the folk stories of Zen Buddhism,
metaphorical narratives that particularize essential nature.

Robert Aitken

Yet even anti-symbolic, anti-mythological Zen is stuck with symbols and a mythological tradition. The Zen tradition is communicated through the sutras and through stories about Zen masters and their encounters with students, ordinary people, and everyday life. The primary symbol employed is the word: the sutras, the stories, the koans, the mondo (questions and answers). There are stories of Zen masters tearing up the scriptures, but to be sure, they missed a few, for many have survived. Zen texts and stories often remind one to regard the ancients and the sutras. Apparently it’s best not to tear up the sutras until you see the moon.

When Buddha was enlightened, the first thing that he reportedly said was, “This cannot be taught.” In other words, “This cannot be communicated through symbol.” Yet pointing at the moon is not altogether a futile activity. For without this pointing, we might never know that there is something to experience. The scriptures and the sages in their communications, the artists in their representations, are all saying: There is something to EXPERIENCE! Anyone interested in the welfare of humanity must be interested in symbols and myths, for it is by these that we communicate and by these that the world and its social reality are shaped.

CHAPTER 4

The World Calls for the Postmodern (Blissful) Hero

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

If ever there was a time that called for heroic action, it is the one we live in today. Never in our history have we possessed the awesome capacities for self-destruction that we now hold. From the immediate destructive power of nuclear holocaust to the slow death of environmental decay, we live in dangerous times. We simply cannot go on with business as usual. Perilous times call for heroic action. It is time that we suspend our preoccupation with economic life to the exclusion of all other values and put love into action in every sphere of life.

Today heroic action is not a matter of conquering new lands, slaying dragons, or crossing uncharted seas. The heroic life awaits all who are ready to take up the challenge of making this world the best it can be. Even as the hero of old had to confront the unknown, today we must confront the known. We must confront the world we find ourselves in while keeping before us the image of the world that could be. We must face our conditions and “breathe into them the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life” (Walt Whitman).

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world depends.

Wallace Stevens

Perhaps inspired by Hamlet, Albert Camus said that the fundamental choice is suicide or life.¹ The intellectually honest person must square up to the choice: To be or to not be. Among the living, there are but two kinds of people, those who have said YES to life and those who have ducked the question. Those who have honestly decided that life is not worth living are no longer with us.

That which says YES to life, we call the heroic view of life. That which ducks the question, we call the anti-heroic view of life. The heroic YES must be total, unequivocal—the affirmation of a love that completely embraces human life exactly as it is. Anti-heroic avoidance is born of fear. It gives rise to a deep guilt, a gnawing self-contempt. It endeavors to build an abstract ideational world that emphasizes either the “good” or the “bad,” but as we shall see, neither Pollyanna positivism nor cynical resignation are intellectually honest.

The Heroic View of Life: Love for Existence

The intellectually honest person must face the fact that his own existence is dependent upon the destruction of other sentient beings. Whether it is plants or animals that I kill to sustain my life in this world, I’m a murderer. I can try to rationalize, prepackage, or otherwise avoid it, but I live on destruction. This alone is enough to make a person feel guilt and repulsion. After all, how can I justify my existence when it depends upon the destruction of others? I cannot. I can only accept that it’s the way of life, that death, decay, and destruction are as much a part of life as birth, growth, and regeneration. Life is full of pairs of opposites. Night and day, winter and summer, man and woman, on and on. Heroic love transcends the opposites in its embrace of them.

I believe in life after birth!

Maxie Dunham

I exist as I am, that is enough.

Walt Whitman

In life’s work, bliss and sacrifice are two sides of the same coin, complementary opposites. It takes disciplined effort to produce beauty in art, music, fashion, or even the presentation of an evening meal. What is most pleasing to our senses often comes, not from sensual pursuit, but from meticulous effort. George Bernard Shaw said, “This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one…”² The joy is the bliss, the being used, the sacrifice. Shaw is saying that if we want to know the greatest joy in life, we ought to dedicate ourselves to a purpose which we conceive of as a mighty-heroic-valuable-meaningful one and give our very all to it.

We in the West, with our tradition of glorifying the rights of the individual, find it repugnant to speak in terms of sacrifice or “being used.” We are told we must assert ourselves and “look out for number one.” To “be used” is to lose, and we who idolize material success are loathe to lose, to sacrifice. And so we miss the bliss. We may be materially comfortable, but we miss bliss. We tranquilize, aerobicize, fantasize, and gluttonize in the hope of awakening our zest for life or of deadening the pain that we feel from its loss.

Today we seek quick happiness, not lasting bliss. We want to have it all. Though we have been told of agony and ecstasy, of losing oneself to save oneself, we run from the pain of the world. We build isolating idealistic bubbles around ourselves, thick shells designed to keep out the pain of the world. In our effort to block out the pain, we miss the bliss.

Back to Bliss: Unzipping the Ego

How then do we get back to bliss? The better question might be, “How did we lose it?” Every child knows the joy of living. His bliss is innocent. He has not yet felt the weight his culture will soon hoist upon him, the weight of thought, of conflicting roles and obligations, of social manners, habits, and customs, of being right and proving himself make him a socialized individual capable of functioning in his society. However useful all this may be in “socializing” him, it robs him of his bliss.

You can and you must expect suffering.

Mother Teresa

He is wrapped in mental cellophane and shipped off to become a useful member of society. What is the wrapping about? Mental cellophane is protection from the direct experience of life. It’s an idealistic insulation from pain. It’s endless categories and types; it’s prejudices, should-be’s, and hypes. Every society has its own distinctive wrap. Oh, the shape and the hues are individual, but just the same, you can spot Russian cellophane or French or American.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

Joseph Campbell

The older we get, the more difficult it is to keep out the pain of the world, so we add layer after layer of cellophane. By middle age, a lot of us can hardly breathe. Wrapped up in mental cellophane, we are awkward and stiff, slowly suffocating talking heads, devoid of direct experience.

Reclaim the bliss! Split the seam of your cellophane wrap! Step out of thought and convention. Leave your mind behind. Feel the breeze, dance naked in the moonlight, move freely, spontaneously, blissfully. It feels good out here. Don’t worry, you will be able to handle pain when it comes. You are strong now.

How do we split the seam once and for all? How can we live naked and unwrapped? By learning to live with pain. Not in spite of it, not in hope of its end, not crushed by it, but with it. As a tree must anchor its roots deep in the earth in order to stretch forth to the skies, so must we who would reach the greatest heights of human experience be ready to meet the pain of this world square on. The innocent child in his bliss will one day, like Buddha, discover that this world is full of pain and that if he is to live, fully live, he must live with it.

Heroic love is not something that can be hyped, pep-talked, or adroitly argued into someone. It must be felt by each alone. It is not a matter of majority vote or popular consensus. Each must conquer for him- or herself the desire to run away from life. There’s no escaping from life, really. You are here. There is no denying it. Maybe you don’t know why or how, but you are here. You may as well decide to love it like you find it. Life, after all, is for living.

Is not life a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Either you think that life should not exist, that it’s all a big mistake—or you affirm its basic goodness. You say yes to life, with all of its pain and beauty, horror and majesty, sorrow and bliss. It is good that life exists. It’s as simple as that. Oh yes, do all you canto make the world a better place, but remember—that comes out of acceptance, not out of rejection. Love in its truest form is without condition. It accepts life exactly as it is. Yet paradoxically, love is also the strongest force of change.

Zen wants us to be the Mother of All Things, to embrace everything exactly as it is—to see all that is as “my will being done on earth.” Total acceptance. Zen also asks us to be the Father of Creative Movement—to exert the will to transform, to change, to improve, to evolve. So, in this understanding, we can say with Lao Tzu, “Know the masculine, but keep to the feminine”—act for change from the embrace of things as they are. This is the only action or creative movement. All else is reaction.

Humanity: One of a Kind

All people share in a state and relationship we call the human condition. In this we are one; we are of a kind. You are human; I am human; they are human—we are all human. Since we’re all of a kind, we might as well act that way. Really, aren’t we all doing everything we do to gain happiness or avoid suffering? Of course, many of our efforts are misguided in that they do not bring the results we seek. Still, we are all, in our own ways, trying to be happy.

Today…we know that all living beings who strive to maintain life and who long to be spared pain—all living beings on earth are our neighbors.

Albert Schweitzer

Through the ages, various religions and philosophies have offered formulas for happiness. Perhaps the simplest is: Be kind—treat all people as being of your kind. We can say that to see kind is to be kind—for who would want to injure oneself or those of one’s kind? Beyond sex, race, religion, nationality, talent, social or economic status, or political power, we share our humanity. Differences, of course, exist, and it is well to recognize and honor these but never at the expense of forgetting our essential “kindness” as humans—not, at least, if we would be happy. Of course, kindness doesn’t have to look any particular way. It is a recognition, not a set of prescribed actions. In this recognition, you can trust—remember your “kindness” and act.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts

Anti-Heroic View of Life: Self-Contempt

The anti-heroic life is based, not on love, but on self-contempt, or shame. Where love comes out of an identification of kind, contempt sets up a need for separation. The need to be separate comes out of the belief that mankind is a low level of life. You must separate yourself from that lot. What makes you different is what makes you good. Your difference might be that you are an American, or Jewish, or Christian, or rich, or intellectual, or conservative, or liberal, or whatever.

No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Alan Watts

Although few “respectable” people would dare to say it so bluntly, the internal rationalization goes something like this: “The normal run of people are a sort of contemptuous mob. I would be in that mob were it not for my trendiness, causiness, wealthiness, holiness (whatever it is that separates me from the masses).” We hate ourselves as we are, because we don’t believe we are what “we should be,” because we are constantly making demands.

We make demands upon life, demands upon ourselves, demands upon others. We will love it when our demands are met and not a minute before. If life were more to my liking, I would love it; if I were more to my liking, I would love me; if others were more to my liking, I would love them. In the meantime, I will hold back, and I will hold on to what I think distinguishes me from the rest of the rabble.

It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.

P. D. Ouspensky

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Sören Kierkegaard

When one tries to prove his identity through distinctive possession, he is on insecure ground. It matters not whether the possession be a title, a position, a social status, a marriage partner, an accumulation of wealth, or a cause—it is sure to bring him anxiety. The owner becomes anxious about losing his possession, for its loss translates in his mind as a loss of separate identity. Once more he is confronted with the spectre of finding himself indistinguishable from the mob he so deplores.

“Doing good” can become a distinctive possession that separates you from the masses. That is why the motive of the hero must be love, first, foremost, and always, love. Love for existence—your own and that of others. If you secretly hate yourself but you’re “trying to do good,” your hatred will color the water. You can only give to others what you experience yourself.

The hero must first be a lover. Then he may attempt to heal others: their minds with high ideals, their emotions with loving feelings, their bodies with nourishment and touch. But these things are secondary. It is the existence that he loves, and it is the love that makes the difference.

Mother Teresa’s work with the poor and the dying was certainly a heroic work. She emphasized to those in her order the importance of doing their work with a spirit of joy and a feeling of love. She said, “If you can’t do it with love and cheerfulness, don’t do it at all, go home.”³ She understood that you can’t hate the existence and heal the particular need.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

Mother Teresa

Understanding contempt for life helps us to understand how so many wars have been fought in the name of religion, how so many good ideals have been used in destructive ways. The fault is not with the religion or the ideal but with the practitioner’s hatred of himself and of life. In the Crusades, the Christians marched into battle crying, “God is mighty!” The Muslims cried, “God is all!” But because they each “possessed” God, they couldn’t comprehend their own slogans.

Cynics are fond of pointing out these atrocities as an excuse to discount any basis for a moral or ethical life. Surely hypocrisy does exist, but that is no justification for excusing ourselves from a moral responsibility to our fellow man. It is contempt for humanity that must be overcome, not our desire to serve. If we are to survive and flourish as a race, we must remake, not only our society, but ourselves as individuals. Ironically, we cannot succeed in remaking ourselves until we accept ourselves as we are. We must say yes to life. Yes to life with all of its beauty and terror. Yes to life with all of its brilliance and depravity. Yes to life with all of its sorrow and bliss.

One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a [hu] man.

Goethe

Love Makes a World of Difference

My life is an indivisible whole, and all my activities run into one another; and they have their rise in my insatiable love of mankind.

Mahatma Gandhi

It’s easy to imagine that making the world a better place is simply a matter of throwing money at its problems. Of course, money helps make things happen, but it is secondary to love and character. As Albert Einstein put it, “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness, and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with…money bags…?”⁴

The fear of pain and death makes most of us but shadows of what we might be. Yet even suffering, mixed with love, with purpose, with joy, becomes heroic—an exaltation of the human spirit. And what of death? Listen to the speech Dr. Martin Luther King made days before he was shot. You can tell, somehow, he knew it was coming. Still, he went ahead undaunted, unbowed. Like a thousand heroes before him, he held on to a vision of man mightier than fear. Heroic action cuts the bounds of fear and triumphantly asserts that there is a spirit in us that is noble and mighty. This loving spirit exists within all life, including yours. The heroic life lives in dormancy in all and in active expression in the great men and women.

The heroic life is a beautiful life. You cannot hear Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and miss hearing the beauty. You cannot see Mother Teresa and miss seeing the beauty. You cannot study Gandhi’s life and miss sensing the beauty. You just can’t. I think everyone sees it. But what does it take to transfer that beauty into an active force in our own lives?

Identification. We must be able to identify with the hero as being fundamentally like ourselves. Otherwise, heroic action is dismissed as the peculiar behavior of some peculiarly great individual. This behavior is worthy of admiration, to be sure, but not capable of imitation by the ordinary man and woman. Heroes, whether living or dead legends, are seen as fundamentally different from the rest of us. Of course, we are not all equally gifted or talented, but we are all capable of heroic action.

Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts: then it is real and pure.

Mother Teresa

How then do we create identification with heroic models?

• 1. By realizing that the greats of history were human beings, cut from the same cloth as we. They put their pants on one leg at a time. They had to deal with the same emotions and inner doubts, the same outside pressures and concerns.
• 2. By seeing that they are all around us. Thousands of so-called ordinary people are every day involved in heroic service to their fellow man. Most of this service goes unrecognized and unnoticed by the wider public because it does not fit with the conventional view of what is valuable and important.

Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle…[or] Einstein’s Theory of Relativity…[or] the Second Theory of Thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The point of telling the hero’s story is that our identification with the hero allows us, at least for a time, to move beyond the fear and defensive hesitation that hold us back from full participation in life. We experience what the Greeks call catharsis.⁵ Catharsis doesn’t mean rant and rave and scream and yell and then there is catharsis. The cathartic experience is the release experienced in the cessation of the emotions that ordinarily dominate life, namely fear and guilt. Catharsis happens when we identify with the character and move along his emotional track until he and we are free of guilt and fear.

That’s why the stories from ages old have been told—so that you might feel, if only for an instant, what it is to be so bold. So ALIVE. In that, you find life. You find bliss. You find courage. You can feel it. Where did it come from? It was there all along, beneath the clouds of shame and fear. Cathartic identification has temporarily blown the clouds away. Now you feel the pure brilliance of your being. Courage isn’t something you’ve put on. Fear is something you’ve taken off. You feel the power and grace of your naked Self.

The Way is not far from man; if we take the Way as something superhuman, beyond man, this is not the real Way.

Confucius

We all have the capacity to inspire and uplift one another. When you see someone heroically facing a tragedy of some kind or heroically working to express his vision of love in action—it’s an inspiration. That person could be black, white, yellow, red, rich, or poor, Protestant, Catholic, or Jew; it doesn’t matter. It’s the spirit that you identify with. It lifts your spirit to see someone exalting his. Each of us can approach our daily lives in a way that exalts the human spirit. We can be living examples of human dignity, love, and brotherhood. We can create a society based on love for one another and respect for the mystery of life.

I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.

Mahatma Gandhi

You have seen the earth from space. Maybe it was only a photograph, but you have seen it. All over the world, people have seen themselves from another reference point. Having seen ourselves from somewhere else, we can no longer be so much in the dark about where we are. We are on earth, together with the great oceans and land masses, together with six billion of our fellow humans, we are on earth. For the first time, we have a perspective of ourselves as one world. For the first time, that image is a part of our psyche, and for the first time, we have a global culture. We can decry this culture and its banality. We can try to stop the push toward universality by emphasizing ethnic or cultural differences, but inevitably we are moving to one world. Our efforts are better spent in attempting to elevate this culture than in reverting to separation.

How can we elevate this culture we live in? How can we make it more human, more sane? What kind of values do we want represented in the images that bounce around the world in an instant? What will we televise? What will we glorify? What will we fax? What will we compute? Will it be about love or loot? We are deciding.

I cry: Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!

William Blake⁶

Living on the Edge

Look at Bodhidharma’s fierce scowl. Strong as an ox, he won’t take any bull. He’s a radical, a rebel, a revolutionary. He knows that it’s society’s job to tame the individual and the individual’s job to get free.

Society’s propaganda will tell you that you are inadequate, that it’s your fate to live in fear and beg for the approval of others, that things are just the way they are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You must resign yourself to a gray existence; you must go along to get along.

But there is Bodhidharma, fiery eyes, teeth showing, intent and determined, a free spirit who will not buy the propaganda of mediocrity. He challenges you to be free enough of society to actually help transform it for the better.

That’s what this book is about. It’s about being personally free and socially active. It is not for wimps. It takes the courage to say no to every attempt to fit you into a category and make you a carbon copy of your next door neighbor. It takes the courage to say no to every attempt to turn you into a beggar, pleading for the approval of others. It takes courage to say no to the needless suffering of your fellow man. No to becoming hypnotized and tranquilized. No to becoming greedy and indifferent. No to becoming clay in somebody else’s hand.

Things were no different in Bodhidharma’s day. Society has always been the free man’s greatest enemy. And the free man has always been society’s greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus or Socrates, Galileo or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left mankind.

Bodhidharma, if we could get him to talk, would tell us that it’s our wanting to be somebody special that turns us into slaves of approval. He is a nobody who works for everybody, who kow-tows to none, condemns none, loves all in his rascal way. I’m not your leader, he might say. Don’t follow me. Be your own leader. Watch your parking meter.

This book says: What is in you, let it out. What you really want to do, do it. Don’t yield to doubt. Love is the greatest religion, the greatest philosophy, the guiding light of the free man. Love is what it’s all about.

ACT I

The Quest for Life’s Work

Wherein our hero asks:
What in the world am I doing here?

NOT I—NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.

Walt Whitman

A lifelong adventure awaits those who are ready to take up the quest for their life’s work. The first step on this journey is to determine the direction you want your life to take. In “Act I: The Quest for Life’s Work,” we invite you to examine several key landmarks to help you get your bearings. These include: your vision for the kind of world you want to live in, your values, your purpose in life, your talents, and specific objectives you would like to accomplish while on this earth. With your commitment and these landmarks, you will be able to determine, at least in a general sense, what your life’s work is.

The Quest for Your Best

“Each entered the forest at a point he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path.”

These lines come from an ancient story we have come to call The Quest of the Holy Grail.¹ It is a story rich in inner meaning and significance. When the knights of King Arthur’s court had seen an apparition of the Grail through a veil, they determined to go on a quest to find it. And they thought, “We should go out together to find the Grail.” But then they realized that this would be “a disgrace.” No, each must go alone into the forest and enter at the point he himself would choose, “where it was darkest and there was no path.”

Entering the forest alone at the darkest spot, this is the road less traveled. To walk this pathless path is to take the hero’s journey. This book is for those who, like the mythic heroes of old, are ready to make of their lives a quest for the shining apparition of their own best self—ready to take the hero’s journey. The word hero is etymologically related to heresy and heretic. All three are derived from the Greek hairétikos, meaning “able to choose.”² A hero is a chooser. A hero chooses the questions of his or her life and thereby, his quest.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

Henry David Thoreau

For all of us, the question is the quest-I-on. In other words, the questions we ask or fail to ask shape the journeys of our lives. What distinguishes the hero from the rest is that he or she chooses the questions and earnestly seeks them; the rest blindly, and often half-heartedly, follow the conventional questions of their society. As Joseph Campbell puts it, “The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored.”³ Will you live your life spontaneously from the heart and its pathless call or conventionally from prescribed role? Will you take the path less traveled or the well-trodden road? This is the dilemma that Zen and the Grail myth put to us, each in its own inimitable way.

The Grail myths of the West and the Zen insights of the East inform and instruct one another. Both say loud and clear: Be yourself—be done with fear. Both say: Trust your original nature. Both say: Beware the conventional and its deadening influence. Both instruct us to walk the pathless path, and both remind us that only in trusting our original, spontaneous, loving nature are we authentic—or even safe.

If you observe well your own heart will answer.

R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz

For both, the Question is imperative. In Zen, the koan, or question, is the vehicle for kensho—seeing into one’s own real nature. Zen has long used the koan, or impossible question, as a means of awakening one to what Sören Kierkegaard calls “the supreme paradox.” “The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.” Likewise, the Question is central to the Grail stories. As Grail scholar John Matthews writes: “Many, if not all, of the Grail mysteries are about self-discovery, hence, the emphasis on questions. The Quest is a journey inward as well as through the lands of the Grail.”⁴

Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli

Wisdom asks the right questions. Many of the world’s myths, legends, even children’s fairy stories revolve around questions—How was the world created? When and how did man first appear? What should one ask for when given three wishes? Likewise, many of the world’s scriptures revolve around questions. In the stories of the Zen masters and in much of the Buddhist writings, in the Sufi stories and in much of the Upanishads, we find a question/answer format. The whole of the Bhagavad-Gita is in this style. Jesus questions his disciples and answers their questions. The Book of Job is an extended “What if?” question. Plato’s Dialogues are full of questions, and philosophy (literally, the love of wisdom) generally is concerned with questions. Scientific discoveries are driven by questions. These are just a few examples.

Where wisdom asks the right questions, Enlightenment is getting back behind the questioner, the hungry, restless mind. Zen calls this “seeing into your own self-nature,” into the loving, blissful consciousness that is before question, attention, or mind and out of which these seem to arise. As the Sixth Cha’n patriarch Hui Neng puts it, “From the first not a thing is.” Where nothing is, there is nothing to get or to ask. This is called the Zen doctrine of No Mind.

What is this place where thought is useless? Knowledge and emotion can not fathom it!

Yumen’s reply to the question of a certain monk

Questions are also central to creative work. In his wonderful book, The Craft of Novel Writing, author Colin Wilson writes: “Go to the heart of most novels and you will find a question mark. This applies also, of course, to stories, which are simply novels on a smaller scale.”⁵ Literature is not alone. In every creative medium, we find creative work formed, fired, and glazed by questions. For example, da Vinci’s Last Supper was shaped by the question: How to render this scene so that “the movements of the figures represent the passions of their souls”?⁶

In considering the relative merit of several centuries of novels, Wilson suggests as a criteria for judgment the expanse of their world view. At the bottom are the novels that reflect what he calls a “Communal [Conventional] Life World.” Toward the middle are those with an “Individual Life World.” At the top are those that approach the universal realm, which he calls “Purely Objective Vision.”⁷ These three exactly correspond to one’s psychological development on the path of awakening or enlightenment—moving out of the conformity of convention into the individuation of self and then transcending the individual self in universalization— what in the East is referred to as mukta or “liberation.” The Self that is not self. The hero, literary or actual, must individuate from the mass of automatic conformity—become himself—and then begin to discover the relationship of this self to all of life.

Wilson suggests that “the novel is a form of thought experiment…The aim of all these thought experiments is the exploration of human freedom.”⁸ Again the parallels are exact. The spiritual path through “universalization” and the artistic path through “Purely Objective Vision” are probing the outer boundaries of human freedom. The Zen koan is a thought experiment—penetrating through thought, finally, into no thought. The story of the Holy Grail is a thought experiment, taking us through the psychological terrain of the hero’s journey. (We will explore it later.)

We can make our own lives creative thought experiments. Ask more expansive questions than convention dictates, and you widen your consciousness. Stay with these questions, and you deepen it. In exploring the range of human freedom, we can benefit from those who have gone before. We can learn from those who have, through spiritual and/or artistic “thought experiments,” explored the boundaries of human limitation and gone beyond. George Bernard Shaw said, “You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”⁹ Scriptures and mythology likewise have this soul-reflective quality. Midas asks for gold; Solomon, for wisdom; Arjuna, for understanding—What are you asking for?

Ask and it shall be given unto you.
Seek and ye shall find.

Luke 11:9

The only journey is the one within.

Rainer Maria Rilke

We have already suggested viewing your life as a story—call it a poem, a novel, a play. Colin Wilson observes that “you can’t write a really effective play—or a novel—about someone who doesn’t know what he wants.”¹⁰ So it is with the story of your life; it doesn’t get really interesting until you know what you want. The first step to knowing what you want is to choose the questions you want to explore and to determine, like a good novelist, to work them through. (The process work in “Act I” can help with this.)

Wilson notes that among novel writers, there are high fliers and low fliers. We can think of these as degrees of difficulty. In gymnastics, one may execute a simple exercise perfectly or a very difficult one imperfectly. A novelist can write a nice little story about achieving “Communal Life World” objectives, or she can attempt to take on bigger questions. Obviously, the more difficult the questions, the bigger the challenges and the greater the possibility of failure. As with novelists and their stories, so with all of us and our lives. We can take our questions from the “Communal Life World” (What do they want me to do?) or from the “Individual Life World” (What do I want to do?), or we can ask, “What does humanity, the human soul, want me to do?” We can be high fliers or low fliers. Heroes are high fliers. Sometimes they crash and sometimes they succeed brilliantly—but they are always after the big questions.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Benjamin Disraeli

The mind runs on questions. Questions ignite the mind the way spark plugs ignite your automobile engine. All imaginative journeys are prompted by questions, be they the mundane questions of moving the body about (Is it time to rise? What shall I wear? What shall I have for breakfast? What is my schedule for today?) or the psychological need questions (Will she make me happy? Will he be faithful? Will my children fail or succeed? What will people think?) or the deeper attitudinal questions (How can I defend myself? How can I get by? How can I be approved of by others? How can I avoid losing? How can I get ahead of people or back at them?). Most of this questioning is so automatic that we hardly notice it. Conventionally, we call it subconscious and either dismiss it altogether or try to psychoanalyze it into “normality,” whatever that is.

Your conscious or subconscious imaginative life, then, is just a matter of questions, or rather, of chasing after answers to questions. Everything you’ve thought, everything you’ve imagined, came from a question that your imagination followed. When you find your mind drifting in fantasy, some question sent it on that journey. When you imagine a better world, some question sent you on that journey. Becoming mindful is becoming aware of the questions you are asking. Moving toward your life’s work is coming to ask the questions appropriate to it and persisting with them.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

William James

Your Book of Questions

What are the dominant questions of your life? Your dominant questions determine its direction and shape. They form a kind of skeletal structure in relation to which the action and circumstances of your life are but the material coverings. No matter what materials you use to cover the skeletal structure of a geodesic dome, you can’t, by the covering alone, change it into the form of a forty story skyscraper, the Statue of Liberty, or a canoe. So it is in our lives; we can put a fresh coat of paint on things, new sidings or roofings, but these will not change their fundamental shape. New questions deeply asked will shape a new life. Further, in the process of tearing down one structure and building another, we may happen upon the mystery behind all structures and see the true nature of the raw materials used to build them.

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and you can’t follow the bliss of your life’s work by asking the conventional questions of the day. As Emerson said, “Whoso would be a man [or woman] must be a nonconformist.”¹¹ Think of the automatic conventional questions, questions like: How can I get by? How can I be approved of by others? How can I avoid losing? How can I be the big cheese? How can I defend myself? Then consider questions like: Who am I? What in the world am I doing here? How can I serve? and even, What is the meaning of life? Clearly these two sets of questions lead to fundamentally different lives.

Live the questions now.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The latter set of questions held with sincerity and tenacity are as much koans as the well-known, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” If you think that the question: “Who am I?” is any less a koan or any less difficult to answer, then you haven’t ever really asked it, not deeply, as a koan is to be examined. To take these questions as koans is to awaken to an experience which those who pass by these questions, because they are simple or obvious on the one hand or obtuse or unanswerable on the other, will never know. What will be the koans of your life and work? Whatever they be, your questions will shape your journey.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

Vincent van Gogh

The road to individuation, the way to live as king of your own life, is the way of asking questions. This is the Zen way of the koan. Zen historian Heinrich Dumoulin notes that, while today the Zen master usually chooses the student’s koan, “in former times, the disciple chose the koan himself.”¹² Choose your questions, your koans—make your start. If and when you are ready for a teacher, this will occur of its own. Find a way to quiet your mind—as the Zen master said, “Solving koans in action is a billion times harder than solving them in zazen (sitting meditation).” One needn’t do zazen, but it helps if, in whatever way works for you, you get still.

It is said that there are three essentials to the Zen practice of the koan (quoted by Zen master Hakuin): the great root of faith, the great ball of doubt, and tenacity of purpose.¹³ The faith is in one’s original nature, in the ultimate reality of the Buddha (literally, Awakened) experience. The great ball of doubt means applying “concentrated doubt” to the koans. Tenacity of purpose is the intensity of commitment, the firm resolve that ultimately “shatters” doubt. These (faith, doubt, and tenacity of purpose) are just the same qualities of all the great mythic heroes. Certainly they are the qualities of Parzival, the hero of the Grail myth, whom we will consider below.

They are also essential qualities for those who would seek the call of their life’s work. The great root of faith shows in your confidence in your vision for a better world and in your own part in it. The great ball of doubt represents the inner fears, doubts, vagaries, and the outer obstacles and adversities en route. The tenacity of purpose is the dogged determination to see it through. Take a koan for your life’s work: What am I doing here? What is my destiny? How can I serve? What is my real life? Whatever your question, however you phrase it, enter into it with an intensive imaginative exploration.

Underlying great doubt there is great satori, where there is thorough questioning there will be thoroughgoing experience of awakening.

Zen Saying Quoted by Hakuin

And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.

Shelley

Lacking this imaginative questing, life becomes the mechanical, dry, empty wasteland. To reawaken it, we “must become as little children.” We must allow our imaginations the freedom to explore in humility and openness. We must have what Zen calls a beginner’s mind. All the great explorers have this childlike humility and openness. Isaac Newton wrote, “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Einstein said, “The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.” In every field, the “big” people have little pretension.

Now let’s return to the Grail myth. Who is the hero of the Grail myth? Called variously Parzival, Perceval, Gallahad, or Bors in different versions of the story, he is the one adequate to “Grail Quest.” His adequacy is not a matter of big muscles or intellectual refinement but of a simple, childlike heart. Parzival (from here on, we discuss the Grail story in terms of the Wolfram von Eschenbach version)¹⁴ often seems something of a fool. The line between the hero and the fool is always thin indeed.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Parzival is raised by his mother. His father was a knight and came to his end in the way knights often do. Mother would that the same not happen to her fair-haired boy. She secludes him from knightly things and stories as insurance, but of course this fails, for no one can be kept from his destiny. One day, three knights show up in bright and shining armor, and the boy is enchanted. Mother then hopes to have him ridiculed out of his quest, for as she observes, people are usually ready to “turn away from mockery.”

She wants him to give up this foolish business of grand and heroic intentions. (Many young men do give up their dreams to please mother, or the “mother” projected onto their wives.) So she gives him a pitiful old nag of a horse and a ridiculous costume, one that Wolfram tells us makes him look exactly like a fool.¹⁵ The lesson is clear: Every Quester must be prepared to face ridicule. One who accepts the prescribed role seems sure of himself. He knows what to do even if he is just doing what he is told. The one who breaks out of the conventional mold must figure out for himself what he is about. It is not only his desire for “something different” but his searching after he-knows-not-what that makes him seem a fool.

This is precisely where one requires what Zen calls “the root of faith.” It has been said that the meanest form of atheism is to not believe in oneself. This kind of atheist, if he takes up the quest at all, is soon ridiculed out of it. The following quote from Dag Hammarskjöld gives the sense of the kind of faith required of the heroic Quester.

Within our impure mind the pure one is to be found.

Hui Neng

He broke fresh ground—because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation—a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind was loving.¹⁶

The crux of the story of Parzival and his quest for the Grail is suggested in his first encounter in the Grail castle. After various adventures, Parzival has sort of stumbled into the Grail castle. This is the wisdom of innocence. The purity of the simple fellow gets him into the Grail castle. In the castle lives a king who is sorely wounded. The king’s illness has brought devastation to the kingdom—it has become the Wasteland.

The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as ‘the wasteland.’ The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer…It’s the world of people living inauthentic lives—doing what they are supposed to do.

Joseph Campbell

Parzival can redeem the king and kingdom by asking a simple question. The wounded king is brought before him, and Parzival wants to ask, “What ails thee, brother?” But he has been told good knights don’t ask a lot of questions. The decisive moment for him is the choice between acting spontaneously from his heart or conventionally from his role as a knight. He fails; innocence is not enough, for he has already been socially indoctrinated. It has caused him to doubt the promptings of his heart, and as Wolfram says in the very first line of his Parzival, “If vacillation dwell with the heart the soul will rue it.”¹⁷

Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others?

Martin Luther King, Jr.

He chose to act conventionally, the way he thought he was supposed to. He muffed his opportunity for the Grail because he was trying so hard to be a good boy. He goes to bed that night, and when he gets up in the morning, the castle is empty. As he leaves the castle, he hears a voice shouting, “You silly goose. Why didn’t you open your gob and ask the lord the Question?”¹⁸ Though a little dense, he soon enough comes to realize that he has missed his chance. He is sorely bummed out. As Wolfram says, “It was a cause of great remorse to the warrior that he had been so slow to ask the Question as he sat beside the sorrowing king.”¹⁹ Now for five long years he tries desperately to find his way back to the castle. He is booed and jeered. Everyone knows he has failed, and everywhere is the desolation of the Wasteland.

He is gaining now the wisdom of experience, of commitment, loyalty, and dedication. He must face the great ball of doubt. His journey now weaves through a maze-like set of experiences through which he comes to redeem and understand his past. Holding to his quest, his question, his koan, provides him with the ball of string which he can, like Theseus in his encounter with the Minotaur, unwind and thus find his way out of this labyrinth of a wasteland and back to the Grail castle. Of course, he eventually triumphs and, in fact, becomes the Grail King. Through his tenacity of purpose, his loyalty to the Quest, he is told he has changed God’s law. “A greater marvel never occurred…. you have wrung the concession from God.”²⁰ Just so, all who take up the great Quest-I-ons of life and hold tenaciously to them will enter into a marvelous life, the life of their destiny.

For Parzival, the basic issue is compassion. In other words, “What ails thee, brother?” In the Buddhist Bodhisattva tradition, this compassion is called “joyful participation in the sorrows of others”—the consecration of action in service to humanity. Without compassion, without the heart of spontaneous action, all one has is conventionality in one form or another. Of course, we can be conventionally spiritual, intellectual, yuppie, hippie, “revolutionary,” or whatever. It’s still the wasteland. You can recognize it right away. It lacks spontaneity, freshness, energy—life. Zen.

The way out is through the heart. The heart is the heart of things, the center of life. If the heart is not the center of your life, you are not really living; you are inauthentic—this is what the Grail myth is telling us. You’re stuck with the wasteland of the conventional. Again, as Wolfram says, “If vacillation dwell with the heart the soul will rue it.” The victory of the Grail Quest is the assertion of the spontaneous impulse of the heart over the automated, conventional monotony of uninspired, unimaginative life.

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.

Mother Teresa

In another and older version of the Grail story, the one told by Chrétien de Troyes, the critical Question on which the story turns is: “Whom does the Grail serve?”²¹ While the phrasing of the Question is different, the issue remains essentially the same. Is life for the endless desires, fears, and hostilities of the ego or for something larger than this? Not only the Grail story but many of the great souls from various ages and places have told us reality and authentic living transcend the barren life of narcissistic ego entrapment.

The spontaneous, loving heart is the reality of human life. The mechanical, fortressed, inauthentic life of the ego is a transitory, dreamlike phase we seem to pass through on an apparent journey from innocence to experience and beyond. The desire to be what you are, to know the reality of love beyond self and other, begins to awaken the sleeper from his slumber.

You may have experienced that when before you awaken from a dream, you sometimes incorporate events of the “real world” into your dream, for example, the sound of an alarm clock or a dog barking. When this happens, you are still in the dreaming state, but the “real world” is moving into your awareness, and if its sound is loud enough or persistent enough, it will soon wake you up. In the same way, the “desire to serve” bridges the dream world of the inauthentic life with the real life. While we think, “I have a desire to serve,” we are still dreaming but hearing a sound from the real world. When we awaken, we know that we do not possess love as a thing apart but that we are that love; we do not have a desire to serve—we are service and cannot be otherwise.

Focusing on your desire to serve is asking to be roused into your real life. Mahatma Gandhi said: “Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and make, not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large.”²² We can think, “I have this mind, and I’ll put it in the service of humanity. I have emotions, and I want to put those in service to humanity. I have these abilities; I want to put them to service to humanity.” And out of this will come the particular manifestations of our work—the entree is the desire to serve. Hear the call from the real world waking you to the way of happiness. Scattered through these pages in various quotations are many voices calling us to heed the desire to serve. Below are just a few:

A person starts to live when he can live outside of himself.

Albert Einstein

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

Get beyond love and grief; exist for the good of man.

Ha Gakure

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Tolstoy

Mankind’s role is to fulfill his heaven-sent purpose through a sincere heart that is in harmony with all creation and loves all things.

Morihei Ueshiba (Founder of Aikido)

Of course, it only makes sense that, as all of these (and so many more wise ones) have said, your mission in life is to serve humanity. You can’t get to your life’s work from a point of view of: What’s going to make me hot, rich, or let me get off easy? These questions won’t give you your life’s work, because they are not asking for it. If you want the seed thought that’s going to give you your life’s work, this is it: How is humanity to be served by this existence? or, expressed another way: What is my real life? The specific forms of your life’s work arise out of this deep desire to serve humanity—to know your real life. Compassion moves us to serve, to ask, “What ails thee, brother?” Wisdom wants us to ask, Whom does the Grail serve?—in other words, What is my real life? or Who am I? Following these questions is living the Quest.

Innate Ideas are in Every Man, Born with him; they are truly Himself. The Man who says that we have No Innate Ideas must be a Fool & Knave, Having No Conscience or Innate Science.

William Blake

Right now, in this moment, you contain everything you need. Zen says, let go of the conception of yourself as a lack walking around waiting for fulfillment. The seed is within. It is not something that needs to be added or invented. All you can do is create the right circumstances for its germination. The questions that we will present you with in the pages that follow are not there so that you can come up with brilliant answers (though you may), but rather that through the process of questioning (questing) you might put a new light on the seed or add just a tad more water and suddenly—germination.

The concept of an individual with a conscience is one whose highest allegiance is to his fellow man.

Ralph Nader

What Gets You Going and Keeps You Going on the Quest?

What gets the hero going on the quest? What sustains her in her seeking? The beautiful and the sublime. Art and life, through the Beautiful and the Sublime, call us to the Quest and nourish us along the way. To the sensitive heart, Beauty, the radiance of the veiled Grail, calls one out of the world of convention. Stop and think of it. What are the world’s great scriptures, poetry, mythology, music, paintings, etc.? Beauty! Beauty is, as Plato said, “the splendor of truth”—not truth itself—only its reflection. Beauty is the transcendent made transparent in the world of form and time. The perception of beauty in nature and art stimulates the sensitive beholder to seek its source. It starts the hero on the Grail Quest, and if he achieves it, then he too will make things of Beauty which will call the next generation of heroes to the questing life.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

There is another way, the way of the terrible or as it is sometimes called, “the sublime.” Edmund Burke describes the sublime thus: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime…”²³ Confrontation with death and death at its most terrible, war, can open one up to a new experience of life.

War is an extreme example, but we confront the sublime at every turn. We face the sublime in encountering the sheer horror of life—destruction, suffering, pain, war, and tragedy of every kind. Religious experience and ritual attempt in some way to come to terms with the sublime. In the Christian communion, we drink the blood of Christ; in Tibetan Buddhism, instruments of sacred music are crafted from human skulls and thighbones; in the Hindu religion, the goddess Kali stands with a garland of skulls drinking the blood of her victims. In primitive or traditional cultures, ritual animal and even human sacrifice and painful initiatory rites are an attempt to reconcile the human psyche with the sublime.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.
William James

Much of the art and literature of the modern era deals especially with the sublime. The awakening of Pierre, one of the main characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, involves his encounter with the sublime. Like Parzival, he too is troubled by questions. Pierre is a thoughtful fellow earnestly seeking meaning. He travels up on this philosophy and down on that disillusionment, until finally the shock, the overwhelming horror of war, gives him release from his quest for meaning. “What had worried him in the old days, what he had always been seeking to solve, the question of the object of life, did not exist for him now. That seeking for an object in life was over for him now; and it was not fortuitously or temporarily that it was over…And it was just the absence of an object that gave him that complete and joyful sense of freedom that at this time made his happiness.”²⁴ He had, as Zen would say, awakened his mind without fixing it anywhere.

Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy…If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once.

Dostoyevsky ( The Possessed)

This release gave him a kind of, from the conventional perspective, madness. “Pierre’s madness showed itself in his not waiting, as in the old days, for those personal grounds, which he called good qualities in people, in order to love them; but as love was brimming over in his heart he loved men without cause…”²⁵

Of course, this experience sounds good, like something many of us would like to know for ourselves. The difficulty is—we must cross the wasteland to get there—the barren, empty, dry, and desolate places of our inner lives—the great ball of doubt. We can not pretend to have put an end to the questions until they are, in fact and forever, silenced by the quest itself. We can only be where we are now, while keeping in view the reality of our destiny (and awakening). The heroic spirit carries on in the quest for real life and work, in spite of inner doubts and outer obstacles.

Driven on by creative discontent, refusing to settle for less, he stays the course, she keeps on keeping on. This is the theme of Goethe’s masterpiece, Faust. If Faust becomes satisfied, Mephistopheles gets him. The “devil” and his hellish wasteland gets the man or woman who becomes self-satisfied. With reference to work, Peter Drucker has put it like this: “No matter what job it is, it ain’t final. The first few years are trials. The probability that the first choice you make is right for you is roughly one in a million.

You ask me for a motto. Here it is: SERVICE.

Albert Schweitzer

If you decide your first choice is the right one, chances are you are just plain lazy…”²⁶

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Mark Twain

And what becomes of those who hear the call and refuse? Joseph Campbell writes: “Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative…the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless…All he can do is create new problems for himself [and others] and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.”²⁷ All we can do is encourage you to go on the quest—invite you to consecrate yourself to your best for the sake of all mankind.

The Koan of Creativity

In his early essays, Zen writer D. T. Suzuki discussed the process through which the student of Zen moves in consideration of the koan to the satori of enlightenment. He said that the process was marked by stages of accumulation, saturation, and explosion.²⁸ These three exactly parallel the creative process known to creative artists and scientists. We will briefly consider this process first with reference to the koan and then in terms of creative work.

In consideration of the koan the first stage begins with the accumulation of energy and focus, developing mental concentration, moving confidently into the koan. One tries to answer from memory or intellect and is foiled. Initial confidence is followed by doubt, the stage of saturation. We have already quoted Zen Master Hakuin’s assertion that the greater the doubt, the greater the eventual satori. We can also say, the greater the doubt, the greater the saturation.

All the fish needs Is to get lost in the water All man needs is to get lost In Tao.

Chuang Tzu

Achieving total saturation may take more or less time—time is not as important as intensity. Imagine that you are trying to melt a certain metal with a melting temperature of two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You could keep this metal in a low temperature fire for a very long time without getting anywhere. To get the transformation, you have to reach the critical point of intensity—in this case, two thousand degrees. It doesn’t matter whether it takes a day or a week, one year or twenty; you have to reach the critical point of intensity before you have the melt, the transformation. So it is with the koan; extreme intensity of doubt, total saturation, brings the explosion of awakening. Now let’s consider the role of accumulation, saturation, and explosion in the creative process.

Accumulation: This is the initial phase of the creative process. We might call it “great beginnings.” This is the stage when the idea first occurs and generates the initial action. For this stage to come to its fullest development, one must do everything she can to accumulate that which supports the initial revelation. She might accumulate knowledge or materials, the support of other people, or her own energy through the scheduling of time. Her love for the vision she has seen sets her in motion, collecting the technical, material, intellectual, and human resources she requires to manifest it. She moves with confidence, trusting that, as George Herbert said, “Love makes one fit for any work.”²⁹

Saturation: This is the second phase of the creative process. We might call this stage “great absorption” or “magnificent obsession.” It’s the one that separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. At this point, we find out that there is a world of difference between being interested by something and being interested in something. You might be interested by an attractive person walking down the street, but to create a relationship with someone, you have to be consistently interested in them—warts and all. The original creative idea might have seemed interesting to you, but are you ready to stay with it—to keep creating interest in it, even when you’re not sure of what you’re doing? This is the test of saturation.

In the first stage, the creative idea comes to you; in the last stage, it takes on its own life; in the middle, the saturation stage, it takes your life. It temporarily embodies in you. Because of your love for this vision, you freely give yourself over to it. Think of a creative idea as a living entity that exists on another plane of existence. This entity wants to live on the physical plane. The problem is, it doesn’t have a physical body; so it will borrow yours while you make one for it. The entity will tell you how to construct its new body and will work through you to do it. Time and again, creative artists report on this process.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate.

John Keats

Often labor pains are associated with the body-building process. This is why the lives of creative artists sometimes take on a tragic quality. Until they have set the idea free, they hang suspended, as it were, between two worlds (the idea realm of the creative vision and the physical world of manifestation). Saturation in the creative vision may cause them to neglect other areas of their lives. The artist lives for the work even more than for himself. One biographer of Mozart has written of the great composer: “Artistically he succeeded, though he died penniless. Throughout [he was]…a creative artist with a goal that had to be achieved. No matter what, he adhered to his vision.”³⁰ This is creative saturation—that no matter what, you adhere to your vision.

Intensity is the essence of saturation. Sometimes the work comes out all at once. Mozart was said to have written many of his compositions as if taking dictation. On the other hand, many reworkings are often necessary to realize the original vision. Beethoven reworked the theme of the adagio movement of his Fifth Symphony at least a dozen times; James Joyce spent nineteen years on Finnegan’s Wake; Cezanne, at least eight years on his great Women Bathers.³¹ Often the artist is forced by the demands of the vision to grow—to develop in ways that make him better able to express the creative image. After many years of work, part one of Goethe’s Faust was published in 1808. Twenty-four years later, part two was published. Goethe was still at work on his masterpiece in the last months of his life. One can say without question that the man who wrote part one was not the same man who wrote part two. He grew with the work. He remained intensely saturated in it throughout.³²

Explosion: This is the final stage of the creative process. We might call it “happy endings.” In this stage, the work becomes a thing in itself, whole and complete. A tremendous explosive relief often accompanies the completion of a creative work. The thing has its own life now and is done with you (though something of you is in it). There may be a sense of loss. If we hold too tightly to that which now has its own life, if after the high voltage of saturation we find our energy dropping to a more mundane level, if we no longer feel useful, or if we are struck at how far the creation seems to stand from the original vision, we may feel a sense of loss or let down.

On the other hand, we might experience great joy on completion. One may feel as though a great burden has been lifted from his shoulders. He may feel free to pursue other creative endeavors that were not possible while he was saturated in the previous creative work. Even as a pregnant woman cannot conceive, we are not free to begin great new projects while in the midst of building the body for a great idea. The joy of the completion is in the total release of saturated energy. As we can see, each stage of the creative process has its own joy. There is the enthusiastic joy of the new idea, the concentrated joy of absorption or saturation, and the explosive joy of completion.

What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore

What’s Ahead in Act I

There are a number of ways to slice a cake. There are, likewise, a number of ways to find your life’s work. No matter how you slice it, cake is cake. No matter how you find it, your life’s work is your life’s work. In “The Quest for Life’s Work,” we present several methods, or approaches, to help you tap into your life’s work. Each approach stands on its own as a means of discovery. Yet combining all of these methods will help you to see your work with a clarity and breadth not possible through any single method. Each method can be thought of as tapping into a different level of awareness. Some of these approaches may resonate with you more than others. Whatever method you use, the key ingredient in finding your life’s work is your desire. With enough desire and commitment, any of these methods or others will work for you. Lacking sufficient desire, all methods are inadequate.

“Scene I: Vision Questing” invites you to consider your world view (the way you see the world) and the effect that it has in shaping the world. Further, it asks you to consider what world, national, or community problems you might like to work toward solving. Finally, it asks you to use your imagination in seeing the world as it could be and to recognize and honor the inspirations that have already come to you.

“Scene II: Clarifying Values” asks you to answer questions like: What values are most important to me? What is my basic philosophy of life? What are the most important lessons I have learned in life? What seemed most important to me as a child?

“Scene III: Pointing to Purpose” invites you to answer questions like: What am I doing here? What is my part in this grand play of life? How can I make a difference? What do I want to do?

“Scene IV: Targeting Talents” asks you to answer questions like: What do I love to do? What am I naturally good at? What are my natural strengths and abilities? Further, it asks you to consider how you can best put your talents to work in service to your vision, values, and purpose.

“Scene V: Marking Mission Objectives” This section invites you to answer questions like: What specific outcomes do I want to effect? What can I realistically achieve in the span of my life? What must I do?

It is the first of all problems for a man [or woman] to find out what kind of work he [or she] is to do in this universe.

Thomas Carlyle

Detour #1: The Denial Trap

Man is a social animal. This statement is a truism, one we all accept and pass by without contemplating the meaning. If man is a social animal, then his existence and action cannot but affect his fellows. Man, fully conscious of himself as a social being (regardless of whatever else he may be), recognizes that he affects and creates social reality in his individual choices and actions. If he is a social animal, he cannot do otherwise. Therefore, to say that he has a responsibility to the social order he is creating and perpetuating is almost too clumsy an expression, for that responsibility is no different from the responsibility to himself. It is simply a matter of being what he is.

The denial of the social aspect of man is a denial of self. It is a denial of one’s own nature. This denial takes two forms: “Don’t Care” and “Don’t Know.” “Don’t care about others” equals “Don’t care about self.” “Don’t know what I can contribute to others” means “I don’t know myself.” It is in hiding behind “Don’t Care” and “Don’t Know” that we perpetuate folly. For to act without self-knowledge (self-awareness) is to make action itself a denial of self. By self-knowledge here, we do not mean some mystical apparition; we mean the simple realization of the basic truism we began with, i.e., man is a social animal.

One can now begin to understand how we have come to make such a mess of our world. We have been acting without basic self-awareness. We have been acting as if we were not social. Precisely because this denial has been so strong, we are now beginning to break free of it. Our denial has produced weapons of destruction and environmental consequences that put in jeopardy the entire human species.

The individual’s denial of social nature has come at last to put the individual at risk. We are being forced to face the fact that we are all in this together, that indeed man is a social animal.

Don’t Care: “Social responsibility” is not an afterthought of an “enlightened person”; it is a fundamental part of being true to what one is. The pursuit of so-called “self-interest” apart from the realization of the social nature of self is immature because it is unaware. The mature individual cares, not out of largess, but because he cares about himself.

Don’t Know: “Don’t know what to do” is the last hiding place from awareness. (We discuss this) Here we will simply say: Do something that needs to be done. Don’t do things that are better left undone. Support those who are doing things that need to be done. Find what needs to be done that goes undone and do it.

Crafting the Story of Your Life

Throughout this book, we will be asking you to think of your life as a story. When most novelists sit down to write, they don’t know everything that is going to happen in their story. They start with an idea, a compelling central question that they work out through the plot and characters. We invite you to approach the story of your life in this way—to start with the life questions you want most to explore, and shape these into a rough outline. Don’t worry about the details or about how you will accomplish your objectives. We will get to that later. Start by letting your imagination follow the track of the questions or issues that grab you.

Of course, you are the main character of your life’s story as well as the author. In a good novel, the main character grows and develops, so too in a good life. A good novel has an interesting plot, so does a good life. An author must be able to step back and see her story from a distance—to objectively consider whether or not it achieves her purpose. Ask yourself, “If I could look at it objectively, would I want to read the story of my life? Does it grab and hold my attention? Does it have the elements of a good story: challenges to overcome, growth, direction, confidence, a larger-than-self purpose?” If the answer is no, then perhaps the main character needs development; the plot needs to be clarified, expanded, sharpened; or excitement needs to be generated by increasing the tension between what could be and what is. If the answer is yes, then—where is the next chapter going?

Your Story’s Elements

You can conceive of the action of life’s work planning in terms of the elements that go into crafting a story.

The Quest for Life’s Work Affirmations

• 1. I am now willing to see the vision of my life’s work.
• 2. Whatever fears or blocks may have kept me from seeing my work in the past are now dissolved by my desire to know and be my very best.
• 3. I am open to receiving the vision of my life’s work easily and with joy. I now receive it.
• 4. I am willing to accept this vision and promise to be responsible to and for it.
• 5. Having seen the vision of my life’s work, I trust that it will continue to reveal itself more fully to me as time goes by.
• 6. I am confident of my ability to manifest the vision I see.
• 7. I boldly take each and every step necessary to make this vision manifest.
• 8. My strongest talents and abilities are now made clear to me. I accept and embrace them with gratitude.
• 9. I am happy that I am a unique individual, endowed with unique talents and abilities. I never spend my precious time and energy comparing my talents with those of others.
• 10. I like me, and I like being who I am. I am glad I have the talents that I have, and I use them wisely in service to others.
• 11. Each and every day, it becomes more clear to me how I can best apply my talents to my life’s work.
• 12. The more I focus on my desire to achieve the vision of my life’s work, the more my talents become clear to me and the more effectively I use them.

SCENE 1

Vision Questing

If we want to make something really superb of this planet, there is nothing whatever that can stop us.

Shepherd Mead

Identifying your visions of and for the world starts you on the quest for your best. You project your vision beyond the myopic, self-centered concerns that often block the perception of a life’s work. As you deeply consider what you would like to see for mankind and the world, your own part in that process will begin to come into view. In this section, you will have the opportunity to consider your world view (the way you see the world), the clarity of your perception, and the depth of your imagination. You will be challenged to love the world as it is, while holding an image of the world that could be.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the era of global consciousness is upon us. We have come to recognize that we are drifting through space on a circular life raft. Our vision of the world and of our place on it have changed dramatically in the last several decades. This change in vision portends a similarly dramatic change in the reality of life on this planet, provided, of course, that we can integrate it in time. A vision that recognizes our place within the universe and the interdependence of all life on earth is coming to supplant the independent “man against nature” view, which has dominated Western thinking for at least the last three hundred years, and by now, has been exported to every corner of the globe.

In the discussion that follows, we consider: vision as world view, that is, as a way of seeing; vision as a process of perception; and vision as an imaginative, or creative, process. Your vision for the future is expressed in the way you see the world today. This applies to both your world view and your ability to accurately perceive what is going on in it. Vision as an imaginative process means simply this: everything that has ever been created began as an idea—we create what we imagine.

Vision in Three Aspects

• 1. World View: Vision As a Way of Seeing
• 2. Perception: The Vision to See What Is Going On
• 3. Imagination: The Vision to See What Could Be

World View: Vision As a Way of Seeing

Without vision the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18

The way you look at the world—the Germans call it Weltanshauung or world view. A world view is a “general perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.”¹ Put another way, your world view is your metaphysical window to the world. Metaphysic means, simply: beyond (meta) the physical (physic). A metaphysic is a view that cannot be accounted for on the basis of empirical evidence; it can neither be proved nor disproved by fact or argument. It’s an overarching way of seeing that colors all our so-called objective observations and “logical” interpretations. The old metaphysical debate in the West was: Does God exist or not? Today the question is: Is life sacred or not?

In the most general terms, there are but two world views. One can take the view that life is sacred or the view that life is a commodity. A sacred view of life gives birth to feelings of duty, protection, and love. It emphasizes values of joy, beauty, happiness, and caring and sets up an internal constraint against the exploitation of other individuals, groups, or species. Our word sacred comes from the Latin sacer “from the root seen also in sanus, sane.”² A sacred view of life, then, is a sane view of life. A commodity view is interested in profit, domination, and control. It seeks to “gain the world” and subjugate it to the will of man (and only “the fittest” men at that). At the core of the commodity view of life are two seeds: individual self-interest economics and man-against-nature technology. Planet earth is choking on these seeds.

An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods…

E. F. Schumacher

You needn’t be religious in the conventional sense to hold a sacred view of life. There are those who claim no personal God, yet have a sense of the sacredness of life. On the other hand, there are those who profess belief in God and yet seem to view life as a commodity. Christian or Jew, Moslem or Buddhist, Hindu or humanist, atheist or agnostic, pantheist or shamanist, if life is sacred to you, you may have more in common than you think. While there are endless differences in the interpretation and emphasis made by those who hold a sacred, or sane, view of life, a few essentials are commonly accepted. These include wholeness, harmony, and radiance. (These terms are from Joyce’s theory of art. Notice the parallels with the Eastern sat, cit, ananda—or being, consciousness, and bliss; the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; or the Greek three graces—Thalia, Euphrosyne, and Agalia; etc.)

The Wholeness of Life:There is an intelligent life order that is beyond human understanding. This life order may be called divine or natural intelligence, cosmic or scientific law, or a host of other names, but anyhow, it exists. This life order is an integrated whole. It is more than a sum of its parts. In fact, the idea of considering static “parts” as having existence beyond language is anachronistic to modern physics. In the words of Fritjof Capra, “…the constituents of matter and the basic phenomena involving them are all interconnected; they cannot be understood as isolated entities but only as integral parts of a unified whole.”³

The universe is made of one kind of whatever-it-is, which cannot be defined.
Thaddeus Golas

The Harmony of Life:Call it the web of life, ecological interdependence, gaia, or the noosphere, we are all in relationship with one another. The universe is better understood as a living organism than as a machine. Events in one part of the organism affect the whole of the organism. Since every change affects the entire system, we ought to seek harmony in the system rather than the advantage of any individual, group, or species over others. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

Emerson

The Radiance of Life:Life itself has value. Beyond any purpose we can imagine, life itself is valuable and ought to be celebrated, preserved, and protected. Save the whales or rain forests, whether profitable or not; avoid war; uphold human dignity, because life is valuable. Life is a Mystery. In the words of Albert Schweitzer: “We can no longer say that there is a senseless existence with which we can do as we please. We recognize that all existence is a mystery like our own existence.”⁴

Again, these terms of the sacred do not belong to any particular religion or even to religion per se. The following from Albert Einstein has all the elements of a sacred view of life: “[The scientist’s] religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement [radiance] at the harmony [harmony] of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority [wholeness] that, compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant.”⁵

For the purposes of this discussion, we will assume that you hold a sacred view of life. While the facts and logic that support a sacred view are, to those who hold it, overwhelmingly persuasive; for those who don’t, they’re not. We will not try to convince those who are not already so inclined or make a lengthy restatement of the argument for those who are. For those who need convincing, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher and The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra state the case well, not to mention the Bible, the Talmud, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.

Out of the sacred view, ethics flow naturally. From a commodity point of view, efforts at moral or ethical restraints must rely on reward and punishment. Holding to a sacred view, we can let ethics take care of themselves. Losing a sacred view, ethics are always artificial, inadequate, and bound to create resistance and opposition.

Again, sacred or not, a world view is a metaphysic, and metaphysics are indeed meta (beyond) the physical. They are essentially choices. While a metaphysic can never be proved or disproved by facts, a metaphysic does select out the facts that support it and ignore those that do not. For example, happiness is not a matter of fact but of attitude. If one is unhappy, he finds the facts to substantiate his unhappiness; if happy, he finds the facts to support his happiness. Happiness, while independent of facts as a cause, can itself become a fact. We all can recognize the fact of a happy man or woman. Occasionally such a recognition of fact can even trigger a spontaneous change of attitude. This is the effect that an example can have on us. He has not proved the efficacy of his view by logic; rather, by example, he has demonstrated it.

Nothing is so contagious as an example. We never do great good or great evil without bringing about more of the same on the part of others.

François de La Rochefoucauld

If we’re going to change the quality of life in any appreciable way, we must begin, not with facts, but with attitudes. Outer changes always begin with an inner change of attitude. Albert Einstein called this change of attitude “a new level of thinking.” He said, “The world we have made as a result of a level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them.”⁶ Acting from the attitude of a sacred view of life creates a new set of facts, as well as a different perception of the existing facts. It represents a “new level of thinking.”

Many do not know that we are here in this world to live in harmony.

Dhammapada

It is less important that we change the minds of others than that we have the courage to put our sacred vision into practice. Those who are caught up in the commodity world view will probably remain unconvinced, at least in the near term. They may try to involve you in “proving” the viability of your vision or discount it as unrealistic or even simple-minded. Remember, from a commodity world view, economic profit is what is real and valuable. All other values are secondary, even superfluous: “It’s nice to do good, but what REALLY matters is the bottom line.” The commodity world view is not fundamentally interested in what is right or necessary, valuable or serving, beautiful or wise but in what will sell. Its important facts are dollar signs and profit potentials and often only short-term ones at that. Other facts may not register through the filter of the commodity metaphysic.

Continue to soil your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

Chief Seattle 1844

Apart from business, economic profitability has become the sole, or at least dominant, criteria by which projects in science, art, and the humanities are judged. In considering whether a project is “worthy of support,” its purpose or quality is less important than its bottom-line potential. The term viable, which originally meant “able to live,” has come to mean “economically profitable.” This redefinition has meant the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals, not to mention the elimination of many human pursuits that are seen as superfluous to profit. All this, it is argued, is a necessary part of the high standard of living we enjoy. But, as E. F. Schumacher has noted, high standards of living do not necessarily mean high standards of life.⁷

Those with a commodity view may have difficulty seeing, let alone supporting, what you are trying to do. (Unless, of course, you frame it in commodity terms, for example, “green profits.”) “Good works” are agreeable from the commodity standpoint, so long as their advocacy does not challenge the legitimacy of the commodity view itself. For example, it is worthwhile to educate and train the inner city poor because we have a labor shortage and need more skilled workers to “stay competitive.” This is an acceptable commodity argument. On the other hand, asserting the dignity and value of all human life as sacred and worthy of a decent and even a beautiful life may not be heard by those with a commodity perspective.

Make a profit coming and going; this is progress from a commodity approach. The commodity metaphysic, which has been the ruin of the environment, is now ready to turn “saving” the environment into a commodity. Today the business magazines are trumpeting the big profits waiting to be made on the environment. Water polluted and loaded down with chemicals from industrial waste and agricultural run-off? Don’t ask fundamental questions about the ethics of the commodity world view; delight in the fact that bottled water is now the fastest growing part of the “beverage industry.” The commodity world view that gave us preserved, processed, and “enriched” foods will now give us the original “all natural” foods as high-priced specialty items.

The commodity world view holds that the creation of life itself is a commodity to be owned and sold for profit. For years we have had patents on “grain food commodities.” (Meanwhile the genetic diversity of the planet’s food grains has dwindled.) Now, genetic strains of animals have been patented. What’s next? While all of the above are taken as signs of progress from the commodity view, they are clearly dangerous from any sane perspective interested in the long-term quality of life on this planet.

Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.

John Stuart Mill

The purpose of this discussion is not to condemn or complain but simply to demonstrate that so much of the insanity of this world makes perfect sense (is understandable) from the commodity metaphysic. If we are going to change the world in any fundamental way, we must collectively change the way we see the world and ourselves in it. This, of course, can only happen one individual at a time. The writer who gives up his art to strike it rich in advertising or the manager who takes less pay and more hours to work for a nonprofit foundation engaged in a service he believes in—each is deciding in his own way the future of the world. The victories and defeats are one at a time—not a matter of “them” but of you and me. Gandhi put it eloquently: “I believe that if one man gains spiritually, the whole world gains with him, and if one man falls, the whole world falls to that extent.”⁸

The more I study physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.

Albert Einstein

Of course, the sacred view of life is still the minority view in the developed world. From the standpoint of the commodity metaphysic, it is a dangerous heresy. If you put your sacred world view into practice, you may be ridiculed or scorned, not because your view is unsubstantiated by the facts, but because it is not yet the prevailing one. (All minority views are considered stupid until they gain acceptance.) You may be told to “grow up” or to “get with it.” Certainly we can all grow more mature. Yet it is lunacy to imagine that the rejection of the sacredness of life is a necessary element of the maturation process. If it is, we will shortly mature our species out of existence. “Get with it” may mean: “Get into step. March your way into consumer heaven. Never mind the larger social perspective or the deeper spiritual one—just get what you can while you can.”

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you are out of step because you are taking the time to reflect upon your direction or because you are already acting out of a sacred view, be undaunted in the face of the pressure to conform. You cannot prove the validity of a sacred view of life, but you can over time create and leave behind something that others can recognize. See life as sacred, and work to make it so. From the context of a sacred view of life, we create from perceiving a need or directly from inspiration. Later we will consider creating from inspiration. For now, let’s consider how we create from perception.

Perception: The Vision to See What Is Going On

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Marcus Aurelius

The second aspect of vision is perception. Even as we create the world by our attitudes toward it, so do we create the world by our perceptions of it. It is one of the great marvels of consciousness that whatever situation we clearly perceive, we improve. To see is to see a better way; to perceive any problem clearly is to begin to create its solution. All we need is the wisdom and patience to keep looking and the love to hold what we see up to the light of understanding. Only when we doubt our capacity to create (love) do we begin to block and distort our perceptions of the world. Only then do we fear to look at it square on. From the love and confidence of clear perception, the world must become a better place. It is a necessity.

Again, whatever we give our loving attention to naturally improves. We all know, for example, that plants respond to loving kindness and attention. The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, gives incredible testimony to the power of loving attention to affect plant growth and well-being.⁹ What is true for plants is certainly true for the “higher” forms of life. We all have had practical experience with this; areas of our lives that we avoid and neglect become problem areas. Once we begin to give these areas loving attention, they start to improve.

We usually move from avoidance and confusion to attention and clarity only when we perceive that it is necessary. It was Plato who gave us that wonderful saying: Necessity is the mother of invention. Necessity is simply the perception that something must be improved (i.e., given more attention) and that the perceiver is the one to do something about it. Once we deem it necessary, we begin to look over what we had previously overlooked, until we see a better way. Necessity often forces us out of the prejudices and conceptual limitations that have heretofore blocked our perception. Necessity has an intensity, an urgency to it. Without this intensity, there is no drive to keep looking for a better way.

For example, well over 50 percent of all employed Americans consistently report that they are dissatisfied in their work.¹⁰ Most, however, never allow their dissatisfaction to reach the point where action becomes a necessity. They never know the kind of necessity that would compel them to thoroughly examine themselves and their environments until they perceive a truer vision of their life’s work.

Of course, necessity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. No matter how deplorable a situation may seem to an outsider, the individual involved finds no reason to look for a better way until, for him, it becomes a necessity. When discontent reaches the point of necessity, we demand of ourselves and our world that a better way be shown. Until then we put up with less. Because we fear and hate the problems that seem to trap us, we find no way out. It is often necessary that we find more confidence and love before things can start to improve.

I clearly see how the Eternal Light

Shines in your mind,

So that upon its mere sight, love is enkindled.

Dante

Joyously participate in the sorrows of others.

This applies to the bigger picture of planetary and community problems as well as to our individual concerns. We are stuck in these problems until we have the confidence and strength to look at them with love. The gift of the innovator is his ability to keep his attention on what most of us avoid. He makes it a necessity to find a better way. She keeps looking until she does. We can say that it was a necessity for Jonas Salk to discover the cure for polio, for Maria Montessori to design a better way of educating children, or for Gandhi to devise an effective means of nonviolent social change. Creative discontent was driving them all.

The soul…Never thinks without a picture.

Aristotle

Where is creative discontent taking you? What is the better way you see for the world as a whole or in some particular arena? Perhaps it’s the cure for some contagious disease or a means of more efficient energy use. Perhaps it’s a way of improving communication within families. Maybe it’s a necessity for you to create a better way of dealing with drug addiction or a better way of coordinating nonprofit resources and activities. Maybe it’s a necessity to create a better way of utilizing the knowledge, skill, and energy of the elderly. Perhaps it’s a necessity for you to bring about an advance in whatever field you work in or want to work in. What are your necessary discoveries? If you don’t know yet, keep looking. Sharpen your observation skills.

There is nothing so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking.

Terence

Leonardo da Vinci kept extensive notebooks. Hundreds of detailed drawings of everything from the flight of cannonballs to the structure of plants, from human anatomy to fish eggs, honed his observation skills. What he learned from these detailed observations was of great benefit to him in his later inventions and artistic creations.¹¹

Buckminster Fuller kept detailed diaries in what he called his “Chronofile.” Fuller viewed himself as a guinea pig and the world as his laboratory. Careful observation of both led him to an important discovery. In his words: “Chronofile observation showed that the larger the number for whom I worked, the more positively effective I became. Thus it became obvious that if I worked always and only for humanity, I would be optimally effective.” It was on the basis of these observations that he determined to commit all of his “…productivity potentials to dealing with our whole planet Earth…”¹² His discovery of optimal effectiveness in world service was probably his single most important discovery, since all later discoveries depended upon his fixing his attention on global problems.

A man of science doesn’t discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

Alfred North Whitehead

Careful observation helps to keep the mind in shape. In the words of da Vinci, “Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.”¹³ All the great minds seem to be saying: “Don’t be afraid of problems. Take a creative look at them.” Creative solutions arise spontaneously upon the clear perception of particular personal, community, or planetary problems. Whatever level you are working on, get clear on exactly what the problems are. Penetrate to the essence. According to Einstein, “The formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution.”

Seeing with the Eyes of Patience: Unmasking the Ignorance Blinder

Often our ignorance blocks us from creative solutions. We cannot see a solution until we have sufficient data. We must have the patience to persist until we see a problem clearly enough for a solution to occur. Many times the solutions are right in front of our noses, but we don’t see them. For example, Buckminster Fuller was able to demonstrate that we have all the energy we need on the planet to exist in a high standard of living, without having to destroy nonreplenishable resources.

Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.

Chinese Proverb

Most of us accept the conventional assumptions of lack because we are ignorant of the facts and lack the patience to investigate. But Fuller and the “World Game” he founded “…demonstrated beyond any argument that humanity can carry on handsomely and adequately when advantaged only by its daily energy income from the Sun-gravity system.” As with energy supply, so too, food, “…we can take ample care of all human food needs.”¹⁴ (Those interested in more on this are directed to Critical Path [St. Martin’s Press, 1982] by R. Buckminster Fuller.)

For ignorance is in reality the Buddha nature.
Cheng-Dao Ke

Time and again, we accept limitations simply because we don’t know any better. We must exert the confidence and maintain the patience to investigate until we see a better way. Two hundred years ago, Alexander Hamilton described this kind of confident patience when he said: “Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded by it. Then the effort I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.”

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Remember, people were once told that bleeding was the best cure for disease and that slavery was an economic necessity. We have been told we must sell out to get along and that many of the world’s problems are insurmountable. Always we can yield to the blinder of ignorance or make resolute our determination to look until we see a better way. It has been wisely said that there is nothing that will not reveal its secrets to you if you love it enough. All things improve with loving attention.

Buddha’s Enlightenment Begins by Seeing Suffering

While most of us in this culture are seeking the lifestyles of the rich and famous, Gautama Buddha, who grew up in a life of tremendous luxury, sought the imperishable. Gautama Buddha was born Prince Siddhartha. It had been prophesied that he might one day become a great renunciate. His father, the king, wanted very much to avoid this. He tried to keep the prince from ever seeing any suffering, lest it prompt him to renounce the princely life. He kept young Siddhartha safely closeted in beautiful palaces. Around him were only beautiful people, beautiful things, and beautiful goings-on. He never saw old age or sickness, ugliness or death. He lived a comfortable life with his wife Yasodhara and son Rahula.

By the time he was twenty-nine, the prince was getting bored with hanging around the palace all day. He asked his father if he could go out and look around and see how the other folks lived. His father said yes, but in advance of the prince’s visit, sent out his men to clear the streets of anyone who was poor, old, sick, or suffering in any way. Everything was given a fresh coat of paint and spruced up nicely.

In full regalia, the young Siddhartha sallied forth to see the world for himself. Alas, all of his father’s efforts were in vain. The prince encountered an old senile man, a man wracked by disease, and a corpse on its way to the funeral pyre, with grieving friends and relatives in tow. He also saw an ascetic who had renounced the world.

After seeing all this suffering, Siddhartha thought his life of material comfort had been a waste. He became an ascetic, seeking to discover what there is that is beyond sickness, old age, and death…So it was that seeing the sufferings of the world was the beginning of the Buddha’s quest for enlightenment.¹⁵

For the contemplative is the path of knowledge; For the active is the path of selfless action.

Bhagavad-Gita

Seeing with the Eyes of Strength:

Unmasking the Fear Blinder

It is not ignorance alone that keeps us from perceiving our personal, community, and planetary problems or from acting to abate them. For example, we daily see scenes of war, injustice, indignity, and violence flashed before us on our television screens. Yet many of us have insulated and isolated ourselves from the suffering of the world. The need seems so great, the hunger so vast as to be almost overwhelming. In fear of being overwhelmed, we dull our senses.

All the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.

Helen Keller

It is a hungry world we live in. This world is hungry, not just in material terms, not just because over 20 percent of its population faces chronic malnourishment or starvation. It’s hungry in so many ways—hungry for knowledge, hungry for wisdom, hungry for caring, hungry for justice, hungry for beauty, hungry for peace, hungry for joy, hungry for love, your love. Rather than to fear the enormity of world problems, we can act with courage, responding to the particular hungers we are called to feed. Mother Teresa put it like this: “What we do is nothing but a drop in the ocean, but if we didn’t do it, the ocean would be one drop less.” Mahatma Gandhi said, “Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

Alas! the fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

Thomas Carlyle

The hunger of the world cries out for the food of your loving attention. Listen and discover what kind of food you have; then distribute it where it is most needed and wanted. Do you have spiritual food or the food of laughter? Do you have wisdom food or affection food? Do you have beauty food or confidence food? Whatever food you have, share it. We can all feed each other our best food, and in so doing, nourish all life. Remember, there are so many ways to serve. It needn’t look any particular way. It is up to you to see clearly—to find your way.

Of course, to see suffering is to feel suffering. Many fear that they won’t be able to handle the suffering of the world and its people. Many of us have dedicated our lives to feeling good, to avoiding suffering at all costs. We want day without night, beauty without ugliness, comedy without tragedy. Sooner or later, we must find a love big enough and strong enough to love life exactly as it is.

Man was made for Joy and Woe;

And when this we rightly know,

Thro’ the World we safely go,

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

William Blake¹⁶

If it hurts to see the suffering of the world, it also hurts to avoid it. Avoidance has its pain, no matter how we try to deaden it. In America, 120 million prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are written each year. Thirty million people take sedatives on a regular basis. Fifteen percent of the American population are alcoholics. Each year, we spend approximately fifty billion dollars on illicit drugs. Suicide rates among our young have skyrocketed in the last two decades. These are problems that know no ethnic, racial, or class boundaries.

Clearly we cannot run from the pain of the world. Rather, we can learn to look with eyes of strength into the darkest abyss and not flinch. We can gain confidence in the knowledge that only that which we avoid as individuals and as a species will, in the long run, hurt us. What we refuse to be aware of does not go away. If anything, it only becomes more pronounced. Below are a few facts that we must not be afraid to be aware of. Information about the state of the world is available, but you may have to dig a little to find it. (See list of sources)

No one must shut his eyes and regard as nonexistent the sufferings of which he spares himself the sight. Let no one regard as light the burden of his responsibility.

Albert Schweitzer

• • In the world economy, weapons and drugs are the number one and two industries, respectively.
• • The largest killer of children worldwide is diarrhea (for which there is an inexpensive and easily administered cure).
• • The average American consumes fifteen times as much of the world’s resources as the average Indian.
• • More grain goes to feeding American cows than to feeding all the people of India and China (approximately two billion people).
• • The difference in income between the rich and poor is greater in America than in any of the other top twenty industrialized nations.
• • Sixty-six percent of the world’s population take in roughly 10 percent of the world’s income.
• • One percent of the U.S. population owns as much wealth as the lower 80 percent.
• • According to a recent study reported by the Food Research and Action Center, 5.5 million children in America are hungry. One in eight American children under the age of twelve go to bed hungry.

Can I see another’s woe

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another’s grief

And not seek for kind relief?

William Blake¹⁷

Seeing with the Eyes of Beauty:

Unmasking the Hatred Blinder

There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distill it out.

Shakespeare

Bless relaxes, damn braces.

William Blake

It is easy to hate and often difficult to love. With clear perception, we see the weakness of man, his greed, folly, and capacity for cruelty. It seems that everywhere we look, we see man’s inhumanity to man. We are tempted to hate—to be angry and bitter at “them”—for making such a mess of the world. Or we hate the people we have known whom we perceive as hurting or blocking us as individuals. It seems we have a thousand reasons to hate.

Yet to do so is to violate the basic necessity of our being—love. Without love, we cannot be what we are. We may think we have every right to hate or that we are hating for the right reasons, but all the while, hatred is shaping us in the image of the thing we detest. In our efforts to rid the world of evil, we can ourselves become caught up in the evil of hatred. Once tricked into returning hate for hate, we become locked in a vicious circle. Hatred disables our creative capacities and sucks all the beauty out of life. This brings us no advantage but only increases the chance that we will suffer more injury—so then, more hate. On and on it can go…Surely we can accomplish no great good nor have lasting happiness with hatred in our hearts.

I hold myself to be incapable of hating any being on earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over forty years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility.

Mahatma Gandhi

When we see people acting in ways that seem to injure us or others, we feel an impulse to condemn the insanity of their actions and to hate them as people. Of course, with a bit of detachment, we see that the problem is simply ignorance and weakness. To hate people for their ignorance or weakness is to become a part of the problem. The solution can only come with the understanding of wisdom and the strength of love. The Buddha said: Never has hatred ended by hatred. Only by love does hatred cease.¹⁸

From a sacred point of view, life is not merely random combinations of inert matter; life is conscious, and consciousness is life! The more conscious we are, the more alive we are, the less conscious, the less alive. “Aliveness” gives us the energy to experience and handle the situations of life. The more we are willing to be aware of, the more energy we have to create with. Love is the energy of accepting awareness (life). Hatred is the energy of resisting (or avoiding) awareness. When we resist awareness of something (hate it), we put a damper on our consciousness. We tie up, in denial and defensive reactions, energy that we need to enjoy and handle the situations of life. The greater our avoidance and denial, the less energy we have to create with and the more we will tend to feel like victims—at effect of life.

We all seek safety. We could say that everything we do is an attempt to make safe. This is true no matter how dangerous the action appears. It applies to the heroic risk-takers attempting to make their group or humanity as a whole safer (e.g., Gandhi, King) or to make safe the integrity of their own souls (e.g., Socrates, Sir Thomas More). It also applies to the miser, addict, and criminal attempting to make safe their bodies or egos. While the hero acts out of love and furthers life, the others act from hate and diminish it. All are attempting to make safe; the difference is that, while love creates a better way, hatred can only destroy.

Our wisdom (or its lack) is reflected in what we believe will gain us the safety we seek. Hatred is only a misguided attempt at creating safety. The miser, addict, and criminal are all trying to be safe (right) while feeling desperately unsafe (wrong). They are attempting to make safe within a context of avoidance. While in avoidance, the greater the effort to make safe, the greater actual danger we place ourselves in. Love is the only safe way. This is so since only in love do we enjoy full consciousness—the full aliveness to enjoy and handle life.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Chinese Proverb

Of course, the examples above are extreme, but the principle applies to all of us: while we hate, we block our capacity to create. While in the spell of hatred, the world seems dark and gloomy, bleak and hopeless. Love restores the eyes of beauty, the eyes of the artist. Only with the eyes of beauty can we see the way to a better world. To have a sense of the right without being self-righteous, to have the strength to see the evil of the world and yet to give back love and understanding—is to retain the ability to create a better life for yourself and others.

There is a comfort in the strength of love;

’Twill make a thing endurable, which else

Would overset the brain, or break the heart.

William Wordsworth

Imagination: The Vision to See What Could Be

The third aspect of vision is imagination. Even as we can open our physical eyes to the problems and opportunities of the world as it is, so we can open our mind’s eye to the possibilities of as yet unseen realities. To open our physical eyes fully, we must learn to trust that whatever we see, we can look at with eyes of love. To open our mind’s eye, we must learn to trust that in some way we will make manifest what we see in our imaginations in the world of form.

Though it is crude to do so, we can say that the vision of perception is the vision of the scientist, and the vision of imagination is the vision of the artist. Perception, of course, involves seeing clearly what exists in the outer world; imagination means “the act or power of forming mental images of what is not actually present.”¹⁹ Of course, these classifications are meant to describe differences in methodologies, not to classify individuals. (Many of the truly great geniuses in both art and science have been well developed in both imagination and keen observation.) Both types of vision are creative. In the former, we give our attention to some situation until we see a better way; in the latter, the creative image seems to come from nowhere. It comes all at once as a bug in the ear, the whispering of the muse.

…when your thinking rises above concern for your own welfare, wisdom which is independent of thought appears.

Ha Gakure (Hidden Leaves )

In a seventeenth century samurai text called Ha Gakure (Hidden Leaves), we find this distinction in vision described thus: “Some men are prone to having sudden inspirations. Some…arrive at the answer after slow consideration.”²⁰ Usually, we are best at one type of vision or the other. Of course, we all use both, and we all can learn to use each better. However we arrive at our creative visions, it is most important that we claim them and commit ourselves to their realization. As each of us acts on our visions for the world, we better ourselves, almost without trying. Confucius said, “He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.”²¹

The vision of imagination, since it is a pictorial, right brain process, doesn’t lend itself well to systematic, left brain discussion. Let’s just say that if necessity is the mother of invention, then playfulness is the father. Playfulness is the dew-fresh, childlike spirit of wonder. A roving, wandering, wondering, “what if” kind of a rascal. Unconventional, lightning flash, sailing through the cracks, images come, free and unattached.

The right brain process we are hinting at here is not logical and measured. It is intuitive and spontaneous. If it sounds a little silly, it is important to recognize that it works. Michael Faraday imagined living the life of an atom. He went on to discover the electromagnetic theory. Albert Einstein imagined himself flying through space at light speed. Such play as this was significant in the development of the general theory of relativity. It is said that in the beginning, the telescope was just a toy for Galileo.

Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.

C. G. Jung

Go on a vision quest. Consecrate yourself to a high purpose—then let go—when inspirations come—make them manifest in a form that can be enjoyed by others. Remember that the process of imaginative vision has more to do with receptivity than concentrated effort. Struggling and straining don’t help; they actually impede the process. Start by relaxing, playing, keeping an open mind. After all, ideas are all around us. Like radio waves, they fill the air. We have simply to open to receive them.

Awaken the mind without fixing it anywhere.

Kungo Kyo

You enhance your receptivity as you relax into stillness and play. Meditation eliminates the mental clutter and clatter that block inspirations. Play gives your mind the freedom to wander where it will. Alfred Benit said, “I find that images appear only if we give our minds uncontrolled freedom…” Just let yourself be in a state of reverie. Inspirations come to a mind that is relaxed and alert. The Zen saying is: “Awaken the mind without fixing it anywhere.”

When open, our minds have tremendous power to receive ideas. Yet much of the time, we jam our creative imaginations with the static of negativity and limiting beliefs. We are so sure of how things are that we lose all perspective on how things could be. We have lost the wonder of the childlike mind. We tend to think alike. This conformity of thought maintains society’s traditions on the one hand and perpetuates its misconceptions on the other.

An original concept…prefers the mind imbued with the love of Nature, untainted with hidden plans for Her exploitation.

R. G. H. Sui, (Tao of Science)

Artistic revelation for the artist and artistic perception for the beholder come as “Aha!!!” The artist is as surprised (or more) at his discovery as anyone. From the reference of his conscious mind, it is coming from somewhere else. Call it “the muse,” “the mind that is no mind,” or “Dionysian ecstasy,” a power greater than himself is working itself through him. Intense love has shattered the conscious control barrier, revealing something of the greater-than-self mind and its awful majesty. Less mystically, we can say that love relaxes the stranglehold of the conscious over the subconscious and allows the artist to tap a far deeper and richer well of inspiration.

What is now proved was once only imagin’d.

William Blake

Where do creative visions come from? When it comes to ideas, there is nothing new under the sun. In a sense, all ideas already exist. Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity illustrates the point; if the law of gravity is operative, then it was always so, even before the fateful day that the apple came his way (or so they say). He didn’t invent or make up gravity; he simply discovered an already existing idea. Before man began to use fire to warm himself and cook his food, the capacity of fire to do these things existed. In a sense, these uses were latent within the idea of fire. The property and action of the law of displacement was operative long before Archimedes took his famous bath.

I invent nothing; I rediscover.

Rodin

All creative ideas are discovered. The new world called America existed before Columbus or Leif Erickson (or whoever else had dibs on it) bumped their boats on its shores. They did not create America from nothing. They simply made it known to people (including themselves) who were previously ignorant of its existence. So it is with all discoveries. Every discovery, whether through observation or direct inspiration, opens a new world to the discoverer. Further, if the discoverer can somehow communicate her discovery, it becomes a boon she bestows on her society.

To help us understand how all ideas exist now, imagine a universe of ideas, a vast, timeless realm that contains all ideas. Now imagine within this broad universe a smaller subset of all known ideas. These are the ideas that have been discovered. Their time has come. Voltaire said, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”²² How it is that an idea’s time comes, we cannot say. But when it does, it transforms the world.

There is often a significant lag between the discovery of an idea and its manifestation. Leonardo Da Vinci envisioned the modern submarine and helicopter four hundred years before their actual manifestation. In 1690, Denis Papin, inventor of the pressure cooker, first proposed the idea of a piston-driven automobile. Yet it was not until 1896 that the first auto was built. This lag principle applies to social and spiritual ideas as well as to physical inventions. Some have suggested the notion of a critical mass or a “hundredth monkey theory” to explain the lag. These theories suggest that when a certain portion (by no means a majority) of the population adopt a new idea, it becomes a part of the conventional, socially agreed upon reality. (See The Hundredth Monkey by Ken Keyes.)²³

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

If all ideas already exist, what is the role of the genius? Geniuses are those whose receptivity or keen observation allows them to discover previously unexplored or long forgotten sectors of the universe of ideas. A great genius explores sectors that lie beyond the reach of ordinary awareness and brings the ideas she finds there “down to earth” by expressing them in a way that the rest of us can comprehend. Much like Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” she climbs the ladder of consciousness and returns with the gold-laying goose of newly discovered or rediscovered ideas, often with the giant of entrenched mediocrity hot on her trail.

I call intuition cosmic fishing. You feel the nibble, and then you have to hook the fish.

Buckminster Fuller

The genius serves as a conduit for ideas, expanding the subset of all known ideas to include a greater portion of the universe of all ideas. Einstein’s genius lies, not in the difficulty of his ideas (his theory of relativity is taught to many high school students), but in their potential to enlarge our understanding of the universe we live in. You too have the potential for genius, the potential to expand your known universe.

Image creates desire. You will want what you imagine.

J. G. Gallimore

We are familiar with the great discoveries of history. Those of Copernicus, Gutenberg, Newton, Edison, and Einstein are just a few examples. Yet equally important is the process through which each one of us comes to discover for ourselves the answers to the age-old questions: Who am I? and What am I doing here?

Thoreau said, “Man’s capacities have never been measured, nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedent, so little has been tried.”²⁴ Imagine what wonderful new worlds of ideas are yet to be discovered. They exist now and await discovery, even as the light bulb waited for Edison; relativity, for Einstein; The Magic Flute, for Mozart. Like all ideas, your creative visions already exist, whether you have discovered them or not. You may be the next Einstein; yet even if you are not, the way in which you live your life is of great importance to yourself, your loved ones, and in some significant way, to the world as a whole. At this point, you may be asking yourself, But how do I go about discovering the important visions of my life?

When an inspiration hits you, pay attention. This is how you develop confidence in your imagination—one step at a time, by acting on your inspirations. As you continue in this, you may gain the confidence to tap into ever higher realms of thought and take responsibility for ever greater visions. Often we ignore our inspirations and then wonder why our lives seem to lack the marvelous or magical quality we felt as children. Children trust their imaginations and are not afraid of seeming ridiculous. We really needn’t fear; we all are a little ridiculous.

A genuine vision is a pregnant idea, teeming with life and possibilities. Visionary ideas give birth to other ideas, as well as to the actions that materialize them. Even with ideas that come directly from inspiration, we often have to keep looking for ways to apply them or for other ideas that support them. When asked how he got his ideas, Einstein replied that he only had one. According to Einstein, the rest of his work was merely the development of a single visionary idea. Imagine that.

Francis Bacon said: “A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return.” That’s good advice even today. Keep a notebook or journal with you and near your bed. Catch the ideas as they come pouring in. Your dreams can be an important source of creative visions. Your mind is a maker of models. Seeing the image of your vision builds the first model. Getting it down on paper builds the second and so on. Don’t expect complete perfection on the first attempt to make this vision manifest. Just begin your sketch, no matter how blind or foolish you may feel. Remember: A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, no matter how awkward or tenuous that step may be.

Everything around you—this book, the room you are in, the clothes you are wearing, the political and economic systems you live in—began as an idea in someone’s head. Come to think of it, every created thing began as an idea in some fertile mind. In the words of Robert Collier, “The source and center of all man’s creative power…is his power of making images, or the power of imagination.”

Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.

Albert Einstein

You have probably had inspirations that you have discounted. Perhaps you have a vision of a better way in art, in science, in education, in child care, in health care, in nutrition, in farming, in social philosophy, in politics. Whatever your vision, recognize it and work to give it expression. Recollecting your creative inspirations will reconnect you with a potent energy source in your life which you may have been neglecting. Tune in again, and watch the very thought of the vision charge you with positive feelings and set you in motion.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

The visionary artist sees and gives expression to the deeper inner reality that we all experience. Through his art, we are able to experience more deeply our humanity, the mysteries of existence, and the god-like beauty of the human spirit. The poet gives voice to what we all know but cannot express. The artist shapes, forms, and colors the sublime radiance of life. Let them speak:

I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the Soul.

The pleasures of Heaven are with me and the pains of Hell are with me.

The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

Walt Whitman²⁵

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

Michelangelo

But I am no artist, you may protest. Yet is your life any less a canvas because you do not paint? Is your voice any less potent because you do not give it pen? Is your soul barren of song because you compose no notes? No, a thousand times! Life well lived is the greatest art of all. The art of your life is not a matter of talent. It is a matter of MOUNTING THE COURAGE TO LIVE.

It’s mounting the courage to SEE what you really are, to be dazzled by the Radiance that is You. Mounting the courage to imagine what this world could be. Mounting the courage to die a thousand deaths to LIVE one life to the fullest. Translate the pains of hell into a new song. Lovely apparitions of possibilities as yet undreamed await those whose hands are strong and steady enough to hew away the rough walls and make their creative vision a manifest reality.

No one knows what he can do until he tries.

Publilius Syrus

Making visible the glorious inner life in the everyday world of form is the creative process. Neurosis is but expression denied. We can’t hide and express at the same time any more than we can move forward and backward at once. We hide because we do not accept ourselves as we are. We will not admit the pains of hell, fearing we have not the courage to translate them into a new song. We hide in shame outside the Gates of Eden, invisible to ourselves, blind to others.

Fear not: Your hands are worthy to chisel out the divine image. Live in openness to the possibilities. The muse will visit without call, but she abides only with those who make works of her inspirations. None but yourself can tell you that you are worthy to be her scribe, her errand boy, or handmaiden. Seek her out. Serve well the images she inspires. O noble son, O noble daughter, you are worthy of her divine touch. Consecrate yourself to the sacred vision you see.

Fear not: You can bear the pains of hell and translate them into a new song. As all heroes before you, you must conquer the pains of hell. Open eyes will shed tears, for this world is full of sorrow. The flames of hell reflected in wet pools of tender eyes blaze brilliant the light of love. The sorrow of the world humbles and purifies all idle vanities. Look upon the world, stripped bare, not in a blank stare, but gently with eyes that care. Mother Teresa, who had reason to know, has said, “Sorrow shared becomes joy.” What sorrows in this world do we not share, you and I, my brother, my sister?

A man’s value to the community primarily depends on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.

Albert Einstein²⁶

Creating from Vision

All that is is a result of what we have thought.

Suttapitaka

Man is what he believes.

Anton Chekhov

Imagination rules the world.

Napoleon I

The idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Elbert Hubbard

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

Albert Einstein

A man’s dreams are an index to his greatness.

Zadok Rabinowitz

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Marcus Aurelius

There will be a decrease in the desire for individual advancement, and an increase in the desire for the advancement of the race as a whole.

Eugene E. Thomas

What in the World Could Be?

In the space below, write your vision of the world you would like to live in. Do not concern yourself with how realistic your vision is, how it would be implemented, or what your part in creating it might be. Simply write your vision as though you could wave a magic wand and have it manifest in one fell swoop. This is your opportunity to create your utopia. Use additional sheets of paper if necessary.

Now do the same for your nation.

Now do likewise for your community.

Attitudes are more important than facts.

Carl Menninger

Your World Needs Your Love

This process provides you with the opportunity to assess the needs of your world, nation, and community. We have found that one of the key components to a satisfying and fulfilling life’s work is the sense that you are making a contribution to the world you live in. This exercise is a problem-solving approach to your world that will help you determine what you can do to make it better.

In your estimation, what are the most critical needs on the planet that are going unmet, or what are the greatest sources of pain and suffering in the world?

In your nation?

In your community?

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

Charles Dickens

Perceiving the Need

What situation or need in your community, nation, or world moves you most to want to act? “More than anything I really want to do something about…”

What situation in the world, your nation, or your community do you complain about the most? “Somebody really ought to do something about…”

How could you ultimately be most effective in working on these problems? “If I were to take responsibility to do something about this, I would…”

What is the most cynical reason you can come up with for not acting?

Are you going to let that stop you from doing your part?

In nothing do men approach so nearly to the gods as in doing good to men.

Marcus Cicero

Why Not?

Like George Bernard Shaw, ask yourself, Why not? Here are a few of my “why nots.” Now write yours.

• 1. Why not love each other?
• 2. Why not live in peace?
• 3. Why not value happiness more and consume less?
• 4. Why not feed the world’s hungry?
• 5. Why not develop safe, efficient, nonpolluting, replenishable energy systems?
• 6. Why not develop and implement educational models that encourage the development of both creative and critical thinking as well as a sense of personal and global responsibility?
• 7. Why not encourage individuals to become aware of their gifts and how they can use them to better the world?

Why not:

Why not:

Why not:

Why not:

Why not:

Why not:

Why not:

You see things and say, “why?” but I dream things that never were and say, “why not?”

George Bernard Shaw

“Your World Needs Your Love” Sources

For those interested in a more systematic study of global problems and opportunities, we suggest reading from the following:

Artful Work: Awakening Joy, Meaning, and Commitment in the Workplace. Richards, Dick. New York: Berkeley Books, 1997.

Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Daly, Herman E. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare. Henderson, Hazel. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1996.

The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization. Karliner, Joshua. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997.

For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb Jr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

* Gaia Atlas of Green Economics. Ekins, Paul et al. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

* Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management. Myers, Norman, and Nancy J. Myers. New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1993.

Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World. Weisman, Alan. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishers, 1998.

The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty-First Century, Vol. I. Council on Environmental Quality Staff. New York: Penguin USA, 1982.

Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations in the New World Order. Barnet, Richard J. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

* Hammond Atlas of the World. Hammond Incorporated. New York: Random House. Updated Reglarly.

The Illustrated Book of World Rankings. Kurian, George T. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1996.

In Earth’s Company: Business, Environment, and the Challenge of Sustainability (Conscientious Commerce). Frankel, Carl. New Haven, Conn.: New Society Publishers, 1998.

* The New Book of World Rankings. Kurian, George T. New York: Facts on File. Published annually in September.

Newsletters in Print. Detroit: Gale Research Co. Published annually.

One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. Greider, William. New York: Touchstone Books, 1998.

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Testemale, Phil. New Haven, Conn.: New Society Publishers, 1995.

Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism. Eppsteiner, Fred. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1988.

The Peace Corps and More: 175 Ways to Work, Study and Travel at Home and Abroad. Benjamin, Medea, and Miya Rodolfo-Sioson. Santa Ana, Calif.: Seven Locks Press, 1997.

Planethood: The Key to Your Future. Ferencz, Benjamin B., Ken Keyes Jr., and Robert Muller. Coos Bay, Ore.: Love Line Books, 1991.

The Public Issues Handbook: A Guide for the Concerned Citizen. Rosenbaum, Robert A. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1983.

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher, E. F. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

* The State of the World Atlas: A Unique Visual Survey of Global Political, Economic and Social Trends. Kidron, Michael, Ronald Segal, and Angela Wilson. New York: Penguin USA, 1995.

State of the World: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. Brown, Lester R. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Published annually in January.

Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. Block, Peter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1996.

Vital Signs: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future. Brown, Lester R., Michael Renner, Christopher Flavin, and Linda Starke. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997.

Waging Peace II: Vision and Hope for the 21st Century. Krieger, David, and Frank Kelly, eds. San Bernardino, Calif.: Noble Press, 1988.

What You Need to Know about Business, Money, and Power. Kidron, Michael, and Ronald Segal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

When Corporations Rule the World. Korten, David C. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers/Kumarian Press, 1996.

* World Development Report. The World Bank. New York: Oxford University Press. Published annually.

Asterisks (*) indicate sources that provide broad surveys or information at a glance.

To work for the common good is the greatest creed.

Albert Schweitzer

SCENE I

Clarifying Values

Why not spend some time determining what is right for us, and then go after that?

William Ross

Thomas Jefferson gave us a worthy maxim for sorting out the importances of life. He said: “In matters of principle, stand like a rock. In matters of taste, swim with the current.”¹ What principles do you want to stand for? What values are central to your life? The choices you make will determine your future and with the choices of others, the future of life on our planet. The objective of this section is to assist you in identifying and clarifying your values.

“Know thyself,” said Thales. Knowing oneself is no less important today than it was in the sixth century B.C. Yet modern life runs at such a pace that we seldom take the time to examine our lives. We become strangers to ourselves—so caught up in seeking the approval of others or in oiling the great machinery of society that we take little time to pause and reflect upon the deeper issues of our existence.

For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

Dostoyevsky

Know Thyself.

Thales

Our educational system is of little help. We aren’t trained to be critical thinkers, to perceive the fundamental principles or values behind a given political, economic, social, or interpersonal agenda. The mass media tell us their version of current events with little debate about the fundamental value choices involved in major policy decisions. It is up to each of us to discern the cornerstone principles upon which our society stands and determine for ourselves their merit or fallacy. It’s up to each of us to determine the kind of future society we will create by deciding on the kind of values we will emphasize today.

For good or for ill, ideas and the values they reflect have tremendous power to shape our world. The great debate of ideas must not be left to a few academics in ivory towers or “experts” on talk shows. It must become an integral part of everyday life if we are to create a sane and healthy society. We owe it to ourselves and our society to consciously examine and make explicit our values.

The individual who takes the time and makes the effort to discover for him- or herself what is valuable and what is peripheral in life has internal guideposts to live by. Of course, in practice, making value choices is not as easy as it sounds. At times, values conflict. One esteemed value or principle seems to run against another. Much of the great literature of the world—from Abraham and Isaac to Arjuna and Krishna, from the plays of Sophocles to the death of Socrates, from Hamlet to Huck Finn—turns on how individuals resolve their moral dilemmas.

Moral dilemmas are only possible for those with strongly held principles. The pressure of value conflict provides the strongest test of character. Often today we take the convenience store approach to values; whatever one we need, we will just run in and get it. We take whatever value seems expedient in the moment to justify our actions. We then sanctimoniously elevate moral neglect into high duty by invoking the doctrine that all value assertions are unscientific and relative. In our efforts to rid ourselves of the responsibilities (and anguish) of moral dilemmas, we have thrown out our best chance to develop character. However trying moral dilemmas may be, they are more healthy for the individual and the society than eliminating all value conflict by eliminating all conviction.

The Ch’an masters who carried Zen to Japan brought with them Confucian ethics. They advocated the adoption of Confucian values as a means of promoting the welfare of the society and providing a cultural environment favorable to Zen realization.² In discussing the role of fundamental values in guiding individual behavior, Confucius said, “If a man will carefully cultivate these in his conduct, he may still err a little, but he won’t be far from the standard of truth.”³ We seldom err when we make explicit our core convictions and endeavor to align our behavior with them.

Below, we invite you to consider three categories of values in human life: universal (or archetypal) values, cultural (or ethnic) values, and individual (or personal) values.

Universal Values

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgement, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.

Goethe

Be still, and know that I am God.
Psalms 46:10

Who am I? What is there of me that is not simply the forces of socialization and heredity? What is the essential? Who am I, stripped of the particular social and cultural milieu into which I was born? Is there anything of me that cannot be explained away by genes or social means?

Universal values reveal and inform the essence of the human condition. Through the universal values, we link our individual experience with the rest of humanity and the cosmos. In the universal values, the barriers of time and place, language and culture crumble before the eternal dance of life. Universal values are experienced, not comprehended. Can you comprehend a sunrise? Fathom a flower? Translate a smile?

That the Upanishads, the Bible, or the plays of Sophocles can speak with relevance to our lives today tells us that there are, at the core, certain timeless constants to the human condition. That we feel wonder at the Sphinx, awe at the cathedrals of Notre Dame or Chartres, or serenity at the Taj Mahal tells us that these values can not be contained by words. That we can be moved by Beethoven, soothed by Mozart, identified with Hamlet or Faust speaks tomes on the mystery of universal values and the laugh they have on time, place, and death.

Universal values are not the exclusive domain of the poet, artist, mystic, or monk. No fair-minded reader of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, or Erich Neumann can dispute the presence of universal values in the myths and legends by which all peoples have sought meaning and direction. Today, we are so occupied in material and economic pursuits that universal values receive little attention. Still, when we deny them in our waking lives, they haunt us in our dreams, as Jung has shown. Universal values move us out of our separate roles and identities into the vast expanse of timeless reality.

Universal values can be experienced as: life, joy, brotherhood, love, peace, unity, sacrifice, service, God, eternity, bliss, etc.

Cultural Values

Society is a necessary condition of life in this world and a necessary medium of personal self-realization through community; that is why we hold it to be a part of the order of creation.

Will Herberg

Cultural values are the generally agreed-upon social values of the day. They serve to establish and maintain social order. They are peculiar to time and place and can be extremely volatile. Cultural values are concerned with ethics, with right and wrong, good and bad, with manners and customs. We see cultural values reflected in the ideas and behaviors a society rewards as well as those it punishes. Cultural values are a mixed bag for the individual. Especially in a highly complex society like the late twentieth century Western culture, there is likely to be much with which the individual resonates and much with which he does not.

Man has speculated for centuries on the best ways to organize human society: from Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia, from Bacon’s New Atlantis to Wells’ Anticipations. The society in which we live is itself a speculation. It is man’s attempt, with his limited knowledge and psychological and spiritual development, to construct the best world he can imagine.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance–your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of course, there is nothing wrong with speculating, but it is dangerous to forget that we are. When speculation becomes “truth,” opinion “fact,” and prejudice a “holy cause,” demagoguery is not far behind. When we mistake cultural values for universal ones and proclaim them as doctrine, we risk intolerance, chauvinism, oppression, and every form of brutality and stupidity. While cultural values may be (as Claude Levi Strauss and others have suggested) functional, they are, nevertheless, essentially arbitrary. There is no contradiction here. A shovel serves the function of turning over earth, but so can a grader, a bulldozer, a plough, a shoe horn, a coin, or a bare hand. The fact that a cultural value or custom serves a given function does not necessarily imply that it is the only, or even the best, way of doing so. In certain primitive cultures, human sacrifice no doubt served a function, but in other cultures, that same function was served by animal sacrifice and, in still others, without any loss of life.

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is screwy.

Joseph Campbell

That we in this culture have chosen the automobile as the dominant mode of transportation has ramifications on virtually every aspect of social life. The suburb, the supermarket, the freeway rush, the shopping mall, the parking lots, the drive-in banks and restaurants owe their lives to the auto. Yet if one were asked to specify exactly what caused, and continues to cause, reliance on the automobile, one would be hard put to come up with a definitive, rational explanation.

The engineer has his explanation; the sociologist, hers; the management professor, his; the historian, hers; the cultural anthropologist, his; the economist, hers. Each considers important those factors peculiar to their specialization. Some pontificate, but all speculate. Rational attempts to comprehend causes for the peculiarities in various social orders are always approximations.

While attempts to trace the origins and development of cultural patterns rely upon speculation, they can, nevertheless, help us better understand ourselves and our world. Speculation will always be incomplete. In this sense, history is bunk. Still, speculating on the history of ideas, the origins and propagation of cultural values, is more than entertainment. With careful execution, it becomes a source of insight into our psyche, time, and society. It provides an opportunity to step out of our cultural skins and observe our common prejudices, taboos, and superstitions, as well as our cultural strengths.

The good man is the friend of all living things.

Mahatma Gandhi

In a sense, every culture is a person. As with people, when cultures meet, there is the potential for conflict and for creative interaction. We are too familiar with cultural conflicts and the destruction these have wrought. Yet, it is well to remember that the meetings of cultures have also triggered tremendous creative explosions. Zen was born in a meeting of Chinese and Indian cultures. The Renaissance sprang from a meeting of the ancient Greek and medieval European cultures. A number of scholars have recognized a Buddhist influence in Neoplatonic thought. Jazz is African meets European music. Some have said that the great medieval romance poetry (including the Grail and Tristan traditions) evolved out of a meeting of the Islamic (Sufi) and European cultures.⁴ American Transcendentalists studied the Indian Vedas and Upanishads. Many of the German philosophers of the nineteenth century (e.g., Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) were influenced by the philosophy of China and India.

Modern writers including: Hermann Hesse, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the Beat poets, to name only a few, were heavily influenced by the East. Van Gogh shows Japanese influence. Gandhi drew heavily from Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King, in turn, from Gandhi. Modern dance began by cross-pollinating ballet with aboriginal dance. These are only a few illustrations; much of what we find exciting and interesting has come from a meeting of cultures.

If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.

S. I. Hayakawa

If all one knows is one’s own culture, one has only met one person. Those who know no culture but their own tend to be narcissistic, simply because they’ve never known anyone else to have a relationship with. Much of what we understand as unique personality is simply the mask (persona) of culture. The field of psychology since Freud has placed great importance on childhood experience and particularly the role that parents play in shaping personality. Of course, parents do not fall from the skies and are themselves the products of culture.

The study of other cultures helps you to see yourself as both a spectator and a participant in your personal life drama. It gives you a frame of reference. Of course, moving to Japan to live in a high-rise, commute by subway, and work for a large corporation is not necessarily meeting another culture. (One tea ceremony will teach you more about Japanese culture than weeks in Tokyo nightclubs.) Oswald Spengler suggested that the key to understanding any culture is the study of its sacred (poetic, mythic, religious) tradition, which he calls “culture forming.”⁵ A century before, William Blake put it like this:

It is not Arts that follow & attend upon Empire, but Empire that attends upon & follows the Arts.

William Blake⁶

We see our silly cultural ethnocentricity in books and indeed entire academic departments that purport to be world history, when they are in fact European or, at best, Western history. We are told that the history of Western art is “THE HISTORY OF ART,” that Western philosophy is “PHILOSOPHY.” We teach world literature without the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. Of late, there has been a trend to incorporate snippets from other cultures into “world courses,” but these are, for the most part, merely token. Of course, we are not alone in this. The Chinese thought Westerners barbarians and made no attempt to learn from them, until it was too late. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he reportedly said that he thought it would be a good idea.

Cultural Values are seen reflected in: language, ethics, status systems, aesthetics, education, government, law, economics, philosophy, social conventions (of every kind), social institutions (of every kind), etc.

Scatter Joy.

Emerson

Individual Values

Individual values are our private meanings. These result from individual temperament and experience. Individual meanings can be a source of individual strength (as in a marriage vow or the consecration of a knight) or weakness (as in idiosyncratic fears). Personal role models, parents, teachers, and childhood chums shape individual values. Biology and physical environment also play a role.

Two men respond to war wounds in different ways. One remains cheerful, buoyant, and productive; the other becomes bitter, morose, and difficult. No doubt the injury means something different to each. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back does so because of the weight of individual meaning given to it.

Moral courage and character go hand in hand…a man of real character is consistently courageous, being imbued with a basic integrity and a firm sense of principle.

Martha Boaz

The concept of a life script has been suggested to account for the individual differences in attributing meaning to experience. We tend to project early personal relationships onto the present and replay the issues of these relationships over and over again. We distort perception and impute personal meanings resurrected from images of the past. A client’s decision not to buy one’s product is taken as a personal rejection, unconsciously recalling a negative and critical father who withheld the support one craved. A friend’s pain or bad mood becomes a personal affront, unconsciously recalling a cold and emotionally distant mother.

An earlier experience of pain can lead us to hold associated stimuli with disdain. Embarrassment or ridicule at school can, by association, lead one to reject learning in toto. Others may have difficulty understanding how strongly these private meanings affect us.

Any object, event, or idea can take on individual meaning. What others find the odd piece is, to the sentimental owner, a cherished treasure. Personal “power spots,” a special piece of ribbon, a baseball player’s favorite number, these have personal meaning. Even objects that hold cultural significance may represent, to the individual, values and feelings beyond those culturally assigned to them. For example, a marriage ring may represent more than a social contract of fidelity. For one person, it may symbolize inspiration, joy, and the strength to do one’s best. For another, it might represent bondage to an unhappy existence. The difference in meaning is individual.

Individual Values are reflected in: individual goals, humor, vows, relationships, commitments, personal objects (of every kind), personal preferences (of every kind), etc.

In addition to determining which universal, cultural, and individual values are most meaningful for you, consider the relative priority of each of the categories of values. For me, the universal values are at the top of the list. Each of the categories of meaning has its place, but it is through the universal values that we experience a sense of oneness with the entire human race and, indeed, the cosmos. Encountering universal values gives an experience so rich and profound as to make the others seem shallow by comparison.

Today, in the midst of writing this, I took a stroll past the county courthouse. There, a photographer, quite intently engaged in his craft, asked me for the time. Nothing peculiar in this, except that he was standing beneath an enormous clock on the side of the building. I thought of how often we are like this photographer, so focused on a narrow part of the landscape that we miss the wider view. Our personal and cultural biases limit and distort our perception of the universal wonder that is life.

Even as the hands of a clock are powered from the center, which remains ever still, so the universal values remain ever at the center of human life, no matter where the hands of time are pointing—past, present, or future.

That civilization perishes in which the individual thwarts the revelation of the universal.

Tagore

Of course, all three categories of meaning overlap. An artist may use his personal experience to express universals in a culturally relevant motif. On a universal level, the image of Jesus on the cross may symbolize the conquering of the lower selfish aspect of man in his sacrifice for others, dying to the old self to be born to the new, or the love of the creator for creation. Culturally, the image may represent the Christian church and its impact on the Western psyche and society or a popular subject of Western art. Personally, it may represent the abhorrence one has for those aspects of the Christian legacy one rejects, or it might represent a personal relationship with a living God-Man. Of course, on every level, the possibilities are rich. As Goethe said, “Everything transitory is but a reference.”⁷

Values

Cowardice asks the question, Is it safe? Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? Vanity asks the question, Is it popular? But conscience asks the question, Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right…

Martin Luther

Thus to be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great…

G. W. F. Hegel

Think nothing profitable to you which compels you to break a promise, to lose your self-respect, to hate any person, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything that needs walls and curtains about it.

Marcus Aurelius

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Herman Melville

The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.

Carl Jung

Know Thy Values

After you have read the preceding discussion, answer the questions below. (Refer to the examples given in the discussion if you are unclear as to the nature of each kind of value.)

What universal values speak most powerfully to you? Why?

What cultural values speak most powerfully to you? Why?

What individual values speak most powerfully to you? Why?

Overall, what values are most important to you? (Name at least five.)

Now prioritize your top five values and list them below:

• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.

What You Value Most

Alternative exercise: Take fifteen three-by-five cards or tear off fifteen card-sized sheets of paper. Next, label each of the cards with one of the values listed in the preceding discussion or other values that are of primary importance to you. When you have labeled all fifteen cards, go through and rank them from the most important to the least. Next, eliminate five of the least important values, so you’re now down to ten cards. This will be difficult but important. Next, drop one more card. You may find that you will rearrange your original order. In any case, drop another card until you have eight, then seven, then six, and finally (and this will be especially hard), drop one more. Now you are left with your top five values. Check them against the ones you have omitted and against any other values that may have occurred to you in this process, until you are satisfied that you are holding in your hands the cards that represent your top five values.

Whether you used the “Know Thy Values” process from the previous page or the alternative exercise above to select your top five values, we invite you to further differentiate these and briefly explain why each is of such importance to you.

My number-one priority value: _________________________

Why?

My number-two priority value:___________________________

Why?

My number-three priority value: __________________________

Why?

My number-four priority value: ____________________________

Why?

My number-five priority value:____________________________

Why?

Back of every noble life there are principles that have fashioned it.

George Horace Lorimer

Instant Recall

Reviewing highlights from your past may reveal clues to your life’s work. Additionally, the questions may help you get a feeling for what it would be like to actually be engaged in your life’s work. When giving your answers to the questions below, do not limit yourself to previous work experience. Draw upon your entire life experience.

Recall times when you have been most creative. These are times when you created something (an event, a thing, a product, a system).

Recall times when you have been most committed. These are times when you were deeply involved, emotionally committed, and determined to persist in spite of all obstacles.

Recall times when you were most decisive. These are times when you knew exactly what to do. You knew you were right, and you acted deliberately and confidently, perhaps even in spite of the doubt and objections of others.

Recall a time when everyone said you couldn’t do it, but you knew you could, and you did it anyway. What was it? How did it feel?

Recall times when you have been so absorbed in what you were doing that you hardly noticed the time. What were you doing?

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.

Henry Drummond

Highlights from the Past

What do you consider to be the greatest accomplishment of your life? Why?

What is the most exciting thing you have done in your life? Why?

When have you taken the strongest stand in your life? What were you standing for?

Review your answers to the questions above with a view toward what they might suggest to you about your life’s work. Look for patterns, redundancies, events that you repeatedly recalled. What insights do your answers suggest? Write these in the space below.

Work to become, not to acquire.

Elbert Hubbard

You Have Always Known

The premise behind this set of questions is that somewhere in the back of your mind, you have always known what you are here to do. Recalling your childhood may help you unlock this knowing. Children are more readily aware of “knowing” because they have yet to inculcate either the limiting beliefs or the sense of defeat that often cloud the issue for adults.

What did you most want to give to the world when you were a child?

As a child, what situation in the world hurt you the most, and how did you respond to that? (Recognize that the pain as well as the joy of life may be a clue to your life’s work.)

What insights do the answers to these questions give you?

Until Death Do You Play Your Part

Imagine that you have just passed on. You have devoted yourself to your life’s work and have been successful in its execution. What is the legacy that you have left behind? What contribution did you make to a better world? What is your epitaph? When all is said and done, what statement did your life make? What will you be remembered for? Write it below.

Here lies

______________________________

Born _______ Died ________

That action is best which provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Francis Hutcheson

Your Philosophy of Life

If you could share one bit of wisdom with the whole world, what would it be?

Is there anything you’d be willing to put it all on the line for? If so, what?

What has been the most important lesson you have learned in your life? Why?

Briefly, what is the basic philosophy of your life?

Few men ever drop dead from overwork, but many quietly curl up and die because of undersatisfaction.