You ever come at a child with a spoonful of bitter medicine? They yell, “No! … No! …” as they whip their head left and right to avoid the spoon. This is where you must pretend the spoon is a choo-choo train or an airplane coming in for a landing. Whatever game appeals to the child is the one that will get them to stop struggling, smile, and open wide for the medicine. Grabbing the attention, reigning in the focus of adults who resist Our Undoing’s type of understanding, is not much different than this.
When you run a website dedicated to undoing the self as thought construct, you have to come at it from different angles. This means communicating the same core Truth in as many fresh ways as possible so that one of them eventually breaks through the resistance of the audience. And it may never, because the audience is the resistance.
If the audience paid for the communication, then they want something in return. Sometimes that something is what they believe is on offer—enlightenment, in this case. Sometimes they want to turn the speaker’s sharing of understanding into an adversarial argument that they can sharpen their own arguments against. Sometimes they have no arguments or deep interest, they just want to hear themselves respond. Sometimes they want a psychological benefit and then move on. Sometimes they want to listen for the sake of listening because they interpret this to mean that doing so is the way to achieve a miraculous transformation.
Those are not instances of how only some audience members come here with motives, they are examples of how we all do. Every single one of us, or else we would not be here. The fact is not that some of us are beyond motives, but that one of us may hit the lottery and see through our motives. It’s hard because the motives are us.
Self-preservation is the root of it. Even if you have a nagging suspicion in the back of your mind telling you you’re the problem, you also want to be the solution because you want to exist. You want the transformation to be something through which you are fundamentally sustained. The alternative is scary. It’s death. It’s the unknown. And it’s what we’re all struggling to block out as the nagging voice of Truth grows louder.
The cleverest way to block that voice is to acknowledge it and tell yourself you’ve already heeded it. If there is still a you doing the heeding, you haven’t understood whose voice is speaking. That is why you find yourself here. Not because you get it, but because you don’t. The hardest people to reach are the ones who “know” they’ve already been reached. I speak from experience as I used to be exactly that person. And I reiterate: This dilemma is all of the audience. Not a few people. Not many or most. Every single person. One may have that inner eureka moment, win the lottery, and instantaneously die to clarity. Lucky me, I was such a one. Now I have a similar-though-different version of undoing to contend with. The audience must suspect I’m being honest about all of this or else why show up more than once? Again, nobody comes to listen because they’ve already successfully cashed in that winning ticket.
But what about children? Weren’t we all born with a golden ticket to the enlightenment show that we lost in the pockets of grownup pants? In a sad, ironic twist, aren’t our young selves already the transformation we seek as adults? Isn’t it the adult shell that must crack to reveal the innocence of the child’s heart already there, sooty-faced with the pollution of unhealthy authorities and decisions, yet beaming with love from ear to ear? Isn’t simplicity supposed to be… well… simple?
While one does need to be living in open heart for transformation to have a chance to speak, one must also abandon the rules of one’s open-heartedness, personal revelations, comforts, and even heart culture. Remember: even authentic shaman are outcasts of their people. Everything must go to be No-Thing. It’s an uncompromising fact. And since we are all born into this dilemma, babies and children cannot understand it. They may radiate great love and even selflessness. They often blurt out wisdom we say is beyond their years and ask deep questions that may only form in innocence. But the ultimate transformation requires a mature mind and body.
Part of the reason is that an aspect of mind is projected by the body, which must be grown through time and wind up healthy by the end of it. Still, that mature mind does stem from the innocence and openness of the child. Innocence is the soil of the mature mind. Although ours is a culture that pollutes the soil, one may, as an adult, add back those vital nutrients.
The mature mind transcends and includes the wise child, just as the immature mind expresses the unhealthy impulses of the stuck or wounded inner child. The clear, mature mind requires an adult body with an adult’s ability to comprehend and understand. Without comprehension and understanding there can be no meaning. Without seeing the need to put all of this to rest—the entirety of what’s written right here on the page and in each of our lives—there can be no wholeness. This is the singular free-will decision one can ever make and it’s not a decision for children, but for balanced adults who are children at heart.
Give up. But never give over or you’ll be playing someone else’s game, which is ultimately still your own game: the game of not giving up.
Give up. It’s the only medicine.
Give up. The medicine, the spoon, and the hand are also you.
Choo-choo.