Ah, my habitual need to be productive.
It’s an addiction, really. I was brought up and conditioned into this reality where everything I do is either validated or negated by the esteem of others. Behavior conditioning as a child is all about positive and negative reinforcement. And it is good an necessary, but it trains our minds almost immediately to look to others to confirm the relative goodness or rightness of even our most mundane decisions. Report cards follow, always with additional comments that evaluate the child’s social behavior. These are intended to encourage, no doubt, but we can not ignore the fact that they perpetuate the idea that an individual’s worth can be determined by another individual. And of course, this same pattern of arbitrary hierarchy continues well into adulthood with job interviews, progress reports and salaries…
Of course these things are necessary, but I’m pretty sure it’s got us all trained to seek answers from others in all cases, not just the specific cases in which others have legitimate expertise or authority.
In my personal life, I know that I behave differently than most would deem “normal.” How many times have I asked another person, “Is that weird?” The answer is always yes, and usually preceded with an awkward pause. But the greatest miracle in my life is that I have never been able to place the “appropriate” amount of value on the judgment of others. Hooray for me! Of course, most of the people who wanted my life to be easy would not agree it is cause for celebration. But I do celebrate it.
Now, as my adventuring endeavors turn inward, I am seeing another lingering side effect of this conditioning to seek external validation. I find that without any sign of it, I begin to crave it. I am seeing how much security is provided by knowing where I am in the grand scheme humanity. Where is my point on the bell curve? I am aware of my relative height, weight, age, intelligence, social status, economic status, employment, etc. But once inside the self, the soul, the spiritual realm, there is no bell curve for anything.
It seems a boundless abyss of experience. All are equally and singularly valid. This may sound like a comforting thought, but I am encountering the nasty craving of certainty. Ah, yes. That is clearly the appeal of a rigid morality and social structure. That would be the only appeal I think, of living under the constant scrutiny of others -or rather, of allowing their constant scrutiny to govern my decisions. There is only one authority in the inner realm, and it isn’t god. Or maybe it is, but the truth of this inner reality is totally and unrelentingly unaffected by any external concepts- including definitions of god. It merely is.
Terrifying, this is-ness is, when it defies the conditioning of our human interactions. I am an extremely ambitious person. My productivity level has been off the charts since I was a kid. Even though most of my endeavors (art, music, poetry) fell outside societal valued achievements, I still always have had a lot to show for my efforts. Paintings I could hang, books of writings that could be read, concerts, etc. Volumes of work produced.
But in recent years, the focus of my efforts has turned inward. My productivity is less and less evident in the external reality. I meditate and have achieved staggering heights and depths of perception, have understood how the moment of creation is echoed in every action, gesture and thought replaying itself over and over and over as I silently observe. I have developed certain empathic and psychic abilities which prove to be relatively “useless” in the external reality. Even the inner companion with whom I have been blessed is a person whose identity in the external reality is nothing more than a matrix of maddening riddles. I can’t seek certainty from them any more than I could an arbitrary person on the street. Inside, I breathe and move and experience with profound awareness of the perfect value and truth of my every living moment. And I have nothing to show for it. I can’t prove it to you. I can’t translate it into a painting, or sell it for money, or put it through a diagnostic test. It will never be rated by anyone for its relative merit, as this growing part my life has become a solitary endeavor, known only by me. The truth is, without having lived my particular life, I’m not sure anyone could really understand the true merit of my inward explosion anyway. That seems to be the way it is on the inside. But it doesn’t stop me from wanting a report card once in a while. A rail to hold onto. The loneliness of being my own guide through this inner transformation is too heavy to bear sometimes. But it is rooted in the addiction to validation. The actual truth is probably more like none of it matters since it is entirely subjective. But living my adult life as one long meditation without a destination occasionally strikes me as a torture chamber from which I will never escape.
The best survival tool I have for my spiritual adventuring is to recognize conditioning when I encounter it and eradicate it. I don’t actually need to know anything.
