2018-05-10 - Callings by Gregg Levoy
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Many-Hued Howls
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gopher://tilde.pink/I/~bencollver/log/
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This book was a loan from a friend. I would not describe the writing
as concise, but i found a few gems. Mainly, the idea is that
callings are liminal, requiring much patience and persistence to hunt
and drag out into the open. Below are quoted sections that caught my
eye.
Intro
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This book is about religion in the original sense of the
word--re-ligare, to re-connect--to remember what has been
dismembered: our own selves, the deep life within us that is a strong
"religious" impulse despite whatever outward waywardness our lives
may exhibit. It is the sense of 'religion' that psychologist William
James meant when he described religion as "the attempt to be in
harmony with an unseen order of things," to remember what we already
know.
Saying yes to the calls tends to place you on a path that half of
yourself thinks doesn't make a bit of sense, but the other half knows
your life won't make sense without. This latter part, continually
pushing out from within us with a centrifugal force, keeps driving us
toward authenticity, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and
occasionally reason, against terrible odds, and against the knocking
in our hearts that signals the hour.
The channels through which callings come--whether dreams and symptoms
or intuitions and accidents--are like oracles of any kind. They
aren't meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely
dispensing information. They are to be approached for dialog,
entered into spiritual correspondence - what the poet William Butler
Yeats called "radical innocence." Their answers are typically
metaphoric, paradoxical, poetic, and dreamlike, and they require
reflection and conversation.
It is precisely the quality of fragility, he [Ilya Prigogine] says,
the capacity for being "shaken up," that is paradoxically the key to
growth. Any structure--whether at the molecular, chemical,
physicalc, social, or psychological level--that is insulated from
disturbance is also protected from change. It is stagnant. Any
vision--or anything--that is true to life, to the imperatives of
creation and evolution, will not be unshakable.
Calls keep surfacing until we deal with them.
The difference that any of us will ultimately make in the world is
equivalent to our throwing a stone in the sea. Science tells us that
because the stone is lying on the bottom, the level of the water
_must_ have risen, but there is no way to measure it. We must take
it entirely on faith.
Chapter 1
=========
By turning on our devoted attention, by becoming students of our
lives, archivists of life's details, we may distinguish the calls
that are raining on us constantly, though they are obscured by our
inattention.
This is typical of the rational mind. It is the nature of the beast
whose habitat is an era and a culture that mistrust and denigrate the
impulses of the deeper brain--intuition, feeling, sensing, instinct,
dream. These functions of our guidance system are rejected by the
rational within us in part because they're primitive, in part because
we can't measure and control them, and in part because they smack of
the feminine. We disassociate with them because they scare us.
Unfortunately, for us, much power is embedded in the deep brain,
including survival skills and many of the underground flumes through
which callings well to the surface.
Self-awareness also requires that we have _curiosity_ about
ourselves, Tart says. We need to resurrect the sort of basic
inquisitiveness we had as children, that we usually directed
_outward_ ...
Through some trial and error, I have discovered that often the best
bait to use in luring a call is a little space. We need time when
we're not engaged in what the Taoists refer to as "the ten thousand
things." When we give off nothing but busy signals, calls simply
don't get through. There's no room for them.
[media fasting] not tuning into radio, TV, [Internet,] magazines, and
newspapers for a period of time. Start with an hour then build up.
[It helps you be better able to discern your own voices from those of
your culture.]
"You have to be willing to step into a mysterious unknown situation
and listen to the creative response within you, whether it be music,
a voice of wisdom, an inspirational idea, or a calling to just be
spontaneous."
"When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates
his mind wonderfully." Death is a strip search. It points the
barrel of mortality at your head and demands to see what you have
hidden under your garments. It also asks the question "What do you
love?"
Chapter 2
=========
The answer is in the outcome, she insists. "What is the _feedback_
your life gives you? Is your energy growing or shriveling? Moving
or getting jammed up? Is your life deepening? And don't jump to
conclusions about results. Maybe you have to wait for more evidence
before deciding what a thing means."
The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind--the
one that _knows_ things--so it's impossible to know for sure. But if
you're willing to sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and
contradictory meanings, then your unconscious will always be a step
ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. You'll
therefore do the right thing, although you won't know it at the time.
One thing I learned in the speaking classes was that when people
speak from their hearts, _everyone_ is interesting. I needed to
learn how to be really authentic in front of people, which by itself,
i think, is of tremendous value to people.
A poetic basis of mind is, in a manner of speaking, the opposable
thumb of discernment, because with it we are able to grasp things we
simple couldn't before.
Still, a calling is ultimately mysterious, and the process of
discernment is always a bit of a guessing game.
Chapter 3
=========
Sometimes these contrary exertions inside us feel like gladiators
tied together for a fight to the finish, and sometimes like swimming
bodies of yin and yang swirling around in the same fishbowl. Either
way, the opposing forces occupy a space that is like an ecotone, a
transition zone between two ecological communities like forest and
grassland or river and desert. They compete, yes; the word ecotone
means a house divided, a system in tension. But they also exchange,
swapping juices, information, and resources. Ecotones have
tremendous biological diversity and resilience.
[research Fellowship of Reconciliation]
Chapter 4
=========
Whatever passions you can specify, know that there are also passions
within those passions that constitute their emotional cores, which is
what you're _really_ after, the _needs_ your passions satisfy, what
you want them to bring to you.
Chapter 5
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[This chapter is about dream interpretation.]
Chapter 6
=========
Like dreams, body symptoms present information of which we're
unconscious... They mean something. They have wisdom, metaphoric
power, method in their madness.
We are not so much responsible _for_ our illness, says author and
Buddhist teacher Steve Levine, as we are responsible _to_ our
illness. The question is not so much what to do _about_ our
suffering, but what to do _with_ it.
Change may or may not ameliorate the symptom, depending on how long
we've waited before making the change, but it can have a powerful
impact on the course of not only an illness but also a life. For
instance, among those who have experienced spontaneous
remissions--over 90%, Berrie Siegel says, first experienced major,
and favorable, change in their lives prior to the healing.... These
people, however, didn't make their changes in hopes of effecting such
an outcome, but "to do things more appropriate to living than dying,"
as one man put it. Healing was a _by-product_ of the change.
Chapter 7
=========
The things that happen to us are a kind of feedback, and interpreting
that feedback is critical to knowing how to proceed.
Any family reunion. However exalted we imagine ourselves to be in
spiritual and emotional matters, we have only to spend a few days
around our families to see how far we still have to go and what in
particular we need to work on.
We derive meaning from "just coincidence" when an external event
matches up with an event on the inside. A synchronicity is a
coincidence that has an analogue in the psyche. Depending on how we
understand meaningful coincidence, it can inform us primarily through
intuition, how near or far we are from what Carlos Castaneda calls
"the path with heart."
Synchronicities remind us that the world is shot through with mystery
and extravagant gesture, and we ought to be amazed that _any_ of it
happens.
In _The Global Brain_, Peter Russel asserts that meditation and
synchronicity are connected. The more you meditate, the more
synchronicities you will find.
Michael Talbot, author of _The Holographic Universe_ feels that
synchronicities not only point to transitions and emerge from them
but also tend to peak when the shift is just about to happen.
Chapter 8
=========
Art is something we express instinctively. We can use art to bring
us in line with our callings. Through art we can also reactivate the
mind of the child within us, which knows what it knows with great
simplicity and accuracy.
Soul is closer to movement than it is to fixity, said Socrates, and
loss of soul is the condition of being stuck--fixated on something,
as the psychologists would say--and overcome by the downward-pushing
forces that govern all moving bodies: gravity and inertia. The arts,
being about creativity and therefore about change, are ideal for
leading us toward movement...
If you made discerning your callings your priority, then the
"quality" of your creative efforts is determined by how _honest_ they
are, how true the expressions are to your inner experience.
The technique called _free association_ abets this process of self
discovery.
But given half a chance, the unconscious will definitely associate
with us, and it is a genius.
Chapter 9
=========
Questioning is at the heart of spirit. Journeying, or leaving home
for time to go on retreat, pilgrimage, or vision quest, of removing
ourselves from the duties and dramas, the relationships and roles
that bombard us with messages that may be distracting or irrelevant
or even destructive to our emerging sense of self, and that interfere
with our asking for responses to our burning questions.
"I went to strip away what I had been taught," Georgia O'Keef said,
describing her retreat to New Mexico from New York City in the
1920's, "to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best
times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was
doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or
another. I was alone and singularly free.
Simply taking up a bedroll and hitting the road won't generally
suffice to alert the forces of enlightenment, however... maintaining
a spirit of observance and self reflection is key. We must be intent
on spending time searching for soul, moving toward something that
represents to us an ideal... Without this intention, our pilgrimages
are only vacations, our vision quests are struck blind, our retreats
are not also advances. ... Perhaps we're even escapees, people in
flight rather than in quest.
Being _alone_ [in the wilderness] is the challenge of undertaking a
vision quest... A mouse scrabbling around in the underbrush becomes a
monster.
In any case, we need to know what we're looking for, and by having a
clear question, we are halfway to getting an intelligible answer.
Questioning is a prerequisite to change and innovation, and without
it there is no discovery.
A therapist of my acquaintance, Winifred Kessler, once conducted a
communication seminar for couples, during which, contrary to custom,
the women spent one whole day making declarative statements while the
men spent the day asking questions. The result: The women were
energized, the men were exhausted. One reason for this, Kessler
said, is that those in authority (usually men) make statements, and
those not in authority (usually women) ask questions, and it's more
energizing to be in authority, to be _an_ authority.
The best way to communicate your experience to others, says Foster,
is not to talk about it but to live it. "Vision, if it is anything,
is your life story in action."
Chapter 10
==========
Our past is intricately woven into our calls, and we can learn much
about those calls by casting the occasional glance backward.
[patterns, shadow side, etc.]
Chapter 11
==========
Remember though, that resistance is also a _good_ omen. It means
you're close to something important, something vital for your soul's
work here, something worthy of you.
I had the realization that i and my entire generation, my whole
civilization, in fact, are going to be one thin layer of sediment in
the side of a cliff some day. Yet precisely _because_ it makes a
flyspeck of a difference whether I write my essays or not, somehow
this frees me up to write, to follow the calling, to do whatever I
want, because there is no failure or rather, failure is already
assumed. I'm going to die and be a million years dead, and anyone
who might pass judgment on me for my pursuits and mistakes will be a
fossil right next to mine in that cliffside.
Under those circumstances [impoverished conditions] the notion of
following a call seems out of place, almost impudent, a thing of
privilege.
When it comes to the reasons for saying no to a calling, most of them
seem to pale when compared to the issue of basic self-esteem, that
core regard for ourselves, that part of us that knows exactly why we
should be here tomorrow... Elevating self-esteem though is among the
most difficult work there is.
Chapter 12
==========
[Wake-up calls] Crisis is Latin for "to decide," and when in a
crisis, you have to _decide_ to wake up.
If you desire consciously to succeed at a calling, there are also
unconscious parts of you, Wilbur says, that don't want to succeed.
If you succeed, for instance, that very success will probably demand
more and more of your time, time not spent with your family or
friends, and part of you knows you're going to hear about it. By not
following the call, you keep such a conflict at bay... What all this
tells us, Wilbur says, is that some part of us _wants_ every fear,
symptom, and neurosis we possess.
Some part of us has perfectly sound reasons to play a leading role in
creating and perpetuating them. Rather than fighting them--and
ourselves--Wilbur recommends that we use active imagination and
compassionate listening to reflect on those parts of us and seek to
understand them.
Chapter 14
==========
Faith contains a certain ferocity, an unspoken demand that to
maintain it we part ways with comfort and give up something we have
for something we want.
Sacrifice... is the price we _all_ pay for growth.
Calls are not immutable... Compromise, after all, means promising
_together_.
Whatever our choices, we have to be willing to renunciate "the
infiniteness of our aspirations," says Edward Whitmont in The
Symbolic Quest, for the sake of bringing those aspirations into being
at all. ... Any endeavor contains more desires and possibilities than
you can carry to fulfillment. Something's got to give.
Chapter 15
==========
Although our calls are our own, nowhere is it written that we must
pursue them alone.
Instead of just searching for advice on what to do to respond to you
callings, tell others what they can do for you. Guide the guides by
telling them _exactly_ what kind of help you need.
Chapter 16
==========
Having resolved some of the splits within ourselves, we also become
more adept at resolving splits between ourselves and others, and in
the world. With the ability to be in relationship to what moves
beneath the surface in our own lives... we ourselves may become
navigators for others, if only by example.
author: Levoy, Gregg, 1955-
detail: <
http://www.gregglevoy.com/callings/index.html>
LOC: BF637.S4 L487
tags: book,non-fiction,self-help
title: Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life
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non-fiction
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