Monday, May 7, 2012

The One Percent

"Life is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I remember hearing this over and over again while growing up. My parents said it, my relatives said it, my teachers said it - its what the world around me reiterated. And it was a particularly hard pill to swallow, you see, because I was a dreamer. I lived in a world of vision and fantasy. I was an inspiration junkie. I could be incredibly passionate about an idea or a cause as long as I felt inspired to be. But as soon as the inspiration waned, so would the passion. I became a master of starting projects and leaving them unfinished. It became my trademark. Everyone knew that about me. This became particularly problematic as I grew older and some of life's "important" choices had to be made: what program to major in in university, what career to pursue etc. I chugged along my life's path, starting and stopping, sputtering and wheezing like an old jalopy. And each way I turned I searched desperately for a glimpse of inspiration, a few desperate drops of it would suffice. And when I couldn't find it, I would try and contrive it.

But I always failed and as a result ended up feeling miserable and utterly uninspired. And so I would try and convince myself that there was something wrong with me. That it was unrealistic to want to be inspired ALL the time. That hard work and effort was what was really required. That Life is by nature difficult, challenging and hostile. And that to be truly successful one had to "rise above one's own self and circumstances" and "take Life by the horns" and beat it into submission. And the more I tried to convince myself of this and conform myself to this reality the more miserable I became and the more helpless I felt. Because even in the thickest fog of depression the voice of intuition still continued to whisper to me that I was missing the mark. That I was compromising what I knew to be true. That inspiration is the key...

It wasn't until I began to really delve into the question: "What is inspiration?" that I began to see how I'd been missing the mark.

What is inspiration and where does it come from? We tend to use the words "inspiration" and "motivation" interchangeably believing that they mean almost the same thing whereas in reality they are entirely different. We are all motivated by a number of different factors on a daily basis. By our environment, by stimuli, by our own desires, ideas and opinions, by our social and cultural conditioning, by our genetics, by each other. From the moment we arise to the moment we sleep we are constantly reacting to agendas: personal and impersonal. When we eat we are motivated by hunger on a basic level but also by more complex psychological processes like addiction, body image, self esteem, health and fitness beliefs, medical factors, guilt, fear, lack, compulsion. A simple act such as eating a bowl of cereal can be motivated by a confluence of any permutation or combination of these factors just to name a few. A bowl of cereal can be reflective of our entire belief system and psychological makeup.

Motivations exist in our psyches in various forms and in complex relationship. Motivations also cause significant inner conflict in most of us. Inner conflict is essentially the experience of being motivated to think, act or feel in contradictory directions. An addict in recovery is a great example of this kind of conflict made manifest for all to see. Yet, we are all addicted to our own minds and even though we may not exhibit it as obviously, we are in a perpetual cycle of recovery and relapse.

But most essentially, every motivation can be traced back through its roots to two primary and fundamental motivations: power and fear. Power is the impulse to grow, to evolve, to dominate, to triumph, to prevail, to become more, to become whole. Fear is the sense of the opposite: of decay, of regression,  of submission, of surrender, of dissolution, diminishment and fragmentation. Power seems to enhance our sense of self and self esteem, whereas fear diminishes it. We seek power in different forms everyday and turn away in fear from the all the things that deny us. Returning to the analogy of the bowl of cereal, that simple act is a complex interaction of power and fear stimuli operating within us through our thoughts, sensations and emotions. Observe it in yourself - the next time you go to the gym, the next time you send in a report to your manager, the next time you're sitting in traffic - observe how every single move you make is in some form a sum result of all these motivations operating within you.

Its possible to take this one step further. Where does this desire for Power come from? Where does this impulse to be and want more come from? It comes from a feeling of lack, of insufficiency, of an inherent dissatisfaction with the present reality. There can only be a desire to be more if there is a sense of not enough. There can only be a desire to be whole if there is a sense of being fragmented. There can only be a desire to triumph if there is a sense of being oppressed. And this sense of insufficiency, fragmentation and oppression is fear. Essentially power and fear are two faces of the same coin. One feeds the other and neither can survive without the other. In order to understand what power and fear essentially are and how they exist in relationship, lets consider Nature and her laws.

Creation and destruction, expansion and contraction, birth and death, evolution and dissolution - these are the tides of reality. What goes up must come down. Once you inhale you must exhale. One cannot inhale indefinitely. Every expansion must be followed by contraction. Every creation must be annihilated. There is no good or bad, right or wrong in any of this. This is the way reality works. One is an outward motion, the other is a return motion. The Universe expands and the Universe contracts.

Power is the desire for constant expansion accompanied by a corresponding fear of contraction. This is evident in our lives and societies. Its an unrealistic paradigm we have all adopted for ourselves. Corporations are built on a model of constant growth and profit. Economies are setup to constantly expand. Our population is growing at an exponential rate and this is viewed as a favorable outcome.  We are as a culture obsessed with youth and vitality. We admire people who retain their youthful features, who live energetically and vibrantly even at an older age. We believe that it is better to have more than to have less. We are fearful of disease and old age. We view death as an enemy rather than a natural eventuality and we are, as a species, obsessed with avoiding it. You see, we want to prevail, we want to grow, we want to expand and we want to triumph. No matter the price. And the price we have paid for this misconception is becoming glaringly evident.

Power and fear are two sides of the same one coin that is Control. They are the drive to control Life and the events and the circumstances that surround it.  Power and fear promote the illusion of separation. We have come to believe that we are separate and disconnected entities that have control over how we can interact with each other and our environments. We see the world and the Universe as a "dead space", an inanimate landscape in which we are beings of intelligence with the power to control  and shape the events in our Universe. But this sort of thinking lacks any substance. From the most subatomic level, to the cellular level to the Universal level: Life is a constantly moving and transforming flux of energies of which we as a species are only an infinitisemal part. Human life on planet earth represents such a tiny and almost insignificant energy force when compared to the whole that for us to think we are somehow in control is laughable. It would be like saying a single drop of water can act independantly of the Ocean, or that a single cell in the human body can act independantly of the body.

One might argue that it is possible for a cell to turn against the body and become cancerous, for example, acting seemingly "of its own will" rather than that of the body. Yet, cancers are also a part of the natural order and serve Nature's agenda like any other cell. In fact, the analogy of a cancer has been used many times to represent humanity's relationship with its host oraganism - the Earth. Ours has been a parasitic relationship in which we have turned hostile towards the larger organism of which we are only a functional aspect. One might consider our illusions of control and the behaviours resulting as 'cancerous'. And yet from Nature's perspective its all part of the big picture.

Control is an illusion. One that we buy into hook, line and sinker. When things go our way, we feel in control. When they don't, we feel like we've lost control. We're under the impression that we're making it happen. And when it doesn't work, we've failed to make it happen. We struggle to find moments in which we feel empowered, happy, fulfilled and in control. We dread moments in which we feel helpless, miserable, unfulfilled and lacking control. The pusuit of happiness is high on our agendas. We all believe that there exists such a static state of unconditional growth, fulfilment and expansion. We just have to find the secret...

Its all an illusion. When Life goes our way it just so happens that Life is in an outward movement, an expansion. Its the High tide and it makes us so happy because we believe that we have reaped the rewards of our labor. And when Life doesn't go our way, it just so happens that it is in an inward movement, a contraction. Its the Low tide and it makes us miserable and we feel that we have been unfairly and unjustly treated. But its all in our heads and its all our imagination. Life just moves naturally. High tide - Low tide, expand - contract, inhale - exhale, wellness - illness, fortune - misfortune, growth - retreat, victory - surrender, creation - destruction, birth - death. Its just the Tides of the Ocean of Life, of which you are a single wave with no will that is separate from the will of the Whole, no volition that is different from that of Nature and absolutely no shred of control other than the fantasy that exists in your mind.

So if control is an illusion, motivated by Power and Fear: What is inspiration?

Inspiration comes to us from a very different place and is a wholly different experience for what I have described thus far. Inspiration can best be described as a moment of spontaneous clarity. Inspiration rarely comes when we want it to and takes on many forms and seldom the same one. Inspiration and insight go hand in hand. The former is experienced more as a feeling whereas the other is experienced more as a thought. Yet they both result from that single moment of spontaneous clarity.

Most essentially however, inspiration is an experience of momentary trasendence. When we are inspired, we are, for that one moment, completely surrendered to the experience of the moment in whatever form it appears. There appears to be no boundary between ourselves and what we are experiencing, rather it is all experienced as one seamless reality. This feeling of felt Oneness is very different from how we are accustomed to viewing Life. In this one moment, "we" as we know ourselves, cease to exist and there is only "this", the experience.

If we think of all the moments we usually refer to as inspirational ones, we can see that this is true. Watching the sunrise from the summit of a peak, watching an infant in the arms of a mother, watching an old couple walking hand in hand, watching a cherry blossom in bloom, listening to a rousing symphony or the crashing or waves upon the shore - the images are infinite. And yet no matter how we interpret these images and no matter what stories we create in our minds to make them fit within our own paradigms - that first moment when the inspiration hits us, spontaneously, arbitrarily, unexpectedly - it is a moment in which we are transported out of ourselves and we see with the Eyes of the Universe, from the perspective of the One reality. And we are left feeling small, fragile, insignificant and humbled. To be truly inspired is to be in awe, to be humbled, to realize our utter utter insignificance. The only true response to a moment of inspiration is that of reverance - a deep reverance and devotion to the beauty, the magnificence and the wisdom of Life.

Inspiration is an opportunity to see that all is beautiful and all is necessary. The expansion and the contraction are equally vital. Triumph and surrender are equally rewarding. Wellness and disease are equally harmonious. Birth and death are equally natural. And we as essential aspects of the same Reality will experience all of it. There is no constant state of health, peace and happiness except in our imaginations. We will grow, we will decay, we will rejoice and we will suffer. Each and everyone of us will experience this no matter how we convince ourselves otherwise. There is no need to strive for one and reject the other. It all happens in spite of what we want or don't.

Inspiration sees that there is no such thing as control. That we are not separate entitities suffering our own existences. Instead we are indistinguishable aspects of the whole, much like individual waves are to an Ocean. And yet, Inspiration also reveals that just like every wave is already in harmony with the oacean, we are already in harmony with Life. In fact, disharmony is the illusion. One can only be disharmonious if one is separate. The illusion that I am somehow separate from the Whole gives rise to the illusion that I am not in harmony with the Whole which then gives rise to the illusion that I can do something about it (control).

To be inspired is to live in alignment with Life and with every moment as it unfolds. To live in spontaneous relationship with Reality. To be free of the need for control and so to be free of power and fear. To live with humility, reverance and simplicity. To know nothing more about Life than how it appears at the moment. To live gracefully and die gracefully. To eat cereal simply because you are hungry.

A famous zen story goes: A student once asked a Zen Master, "What is Enlightenment?" The Master responded: "When I'm hungry I eat, when I'm tired I sleep."

If I could travel back in time and talk to that young boy who tried to believe, against all intuition, that Life is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" I would say only one thing to him:

"Life is 100% inspiration."