The Nature of Compromise

The issue of compromise is a touchy topic for some people. And it is on this topic that lines tend to get drawn between the older and younger generations, between conservative and liberal folk, between those who believe that the needs of others should be at the center of one's focus vs. those who believe that one’s own needs must take first and foremost priority. It is on the issue of compromise that we become polarized about the most fundamental values by which we live our lives.

There are some who believe that compromise is inevitable. That in reality, compromises must be made and that the fulfilment of your own desires and passions will always come at the cost of others. And vice versa, that being of service to others and fulfilling their desires implies that your own desires must be curtailed. This point of view has an underlying guilt mechanism built into it and its something you may witness operating in your own life and of those close to you. 

The opposite viewpoint is that compromise is a cop out. It’s a "settling for" or "giving up" on yourself and what truly moves you, inspires you and floats your boat. It’s the kind of thing people who have lost their sense of individuality and adventure do because they no know other way of living. From this viewpoint, compromise is seen as some sort of shackles, a limitation on your freedom to be who you want to be. In other words, to compromise is to give in to the pressures of society and expectations rather than staying true to your own identity.

Both these views, though in seemingly strong opposition to each other, are ironically similar when you begin to investigate a little deeper. To the first group, compromise is one of those unfortunate inevitabilities of life. It’s the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" mentality. And while they seem to have developed a tolerance for it, compromise is nevertheless seen as a negative attribute. It’s the woman who says, "I could have done great things in my life, but I sacrificed that in order to raise a wonderful family." It’s the man that says, "I always wanted to write a novel but I had to work two jobs to pay the mortgage." There is this distinct sense of a lack of fulfilment in this sort of perspective, even though these same people may rationalize that they were at least fulfilled in other ways.

The second group takes the attitude of denying the necessity of compromise and refusing to submit to it. "You can have your cake and eat it too and why the hell shouldn't you?" To this group as well, compromise is a negative trait. Only their reaction is to deny it or defeat it instead of surrendering to it. It’s the man who says, "I could never dream of getting married. I need the freedom to live my life the way I please." It’s the woman who says, "I could never imagine raising kids and having to give up a career that is everything to me." From this viewpoint, living for others is seen as something that curbs individual freedom and is thus limiting and undesirable.

Both these perspectives have certain things in common. Both see compromise as a negative attribute of life, both see it as a limitation on personal freedom, both see it as a hardship to endure and both regard it from a place of fear. The only difference is in the way each reacts to it.

And yet to perceive compromise in this way is to misunderstand it. Because the nature of compromise is something quite simple, necessary and even beautiful.

Here is one way to define what compromise is as we begin our investigation. Compromise is the weight of the distance felt between the reality we experience vs. the reality we envision. If the reality you are experiencing right now is one where you find yourself lacking and unfulfilled, and you desire a reality in which you might have greater freedom and abundance, then the compromise is the void between the two that you carry with you and experience continuously. If the reality you are experiencing is one in which you perceive yourself to be fulfilling or on the path to fulfilling your own needs without having to sacrifice them for another, and you fear a reality in which you are restricted by the needs of others, then the compromise is the void between the two that you carry with you and experience continuously. 

Notice, that whether or not you "feel you are compromising", the compromise is still felt from both perspectives. This is because the distance between the experienced and envisioned realities are what are at the basis of your experience. In the first case, you crave another reality and so through hankering and craving an abstract reality you believe you can never have drains you of the inspiration, creativity and vitality that are always available to you right now. In the second case, you are dismissing or denying circumstances in your life that require a shift in focus from your own needs to those of others. And so avoiding and keeping those opportunities at bay similarly drains you of the flexibility, openness and depth of experience that are available to you in this moment.

In both cases, what you really have compromised on is the potential of what this moment has to offer. You have compromised on yourself.

Compromise is built into the laws of nature. It is the point at which the two universal movements of expansion and contraction meet. Flowers compromise their nectar in order to reproduce, bears compromise their hunger in order to survive winter, rivers compromise their sediment in order to make the sea, and a car compromises its speed for greater control and safety. In fact, if you glance around you, pretty much everything that is happening in this moment moves in an eternal ballet of compromise, of expansion sacrificing itself for contraction, of contraction sacrificing itself for the sake of expansion. In martial arts, the art of "yielding" to your opponent’s energy, allowing it instead of opposing it directly, reveals a great wisdom. It is a philosophy of compromise that sees it not as a negative but a positive, not as a weakness but strength.

Everything expands and everything contracts. Each opportunity to grow in one direction limits the ability to grow in another. To see expansion as positive and contraction as negative is to live a one-sided life in which suffering is inevitable. Rather a more balanced perspective is to see that both are necessary and in fact entwined. The more you expand the more opportunities there will be for contraction. The more you contract the more reasons there will be to expand. Expansion and Contraction are like the in-breath and the out breath. Exhale unconditionally and you will suffocate. Inhale unconditionally and your lungs will explode.  The art of Compromise is the art of breathing, it is the art of knowing when to expand and when to contract, when to give and when to take, when to follow your needs and when to be aware of the needs of others.

To truly live a life of freedom of "No Compromise” is to be able compromise effortlessly. It is an experience in which the weight of the distance felt between the reality desired and the one envisioned is minimal. This does not mean that you no longer have any desires. Desires are the catalysts that inspire us to expand and to express our own unique individuality. When you are grounded in the reality of this moment, you no longer experience these desires as a fear, an addiction, as guilt, a craving or an escape. The distance is not experienced as negative but rather a space of infinite potential and possibility. It does not burden you but rather it makes you more buoyant.

To compromise effortlessly is to flow and to adapt. Regardless, of what life has to offer. Regardless of what your present version of reality is. When you are able to tune into the current of Life, you no longer have the need to hold onto your perspectives and mental positions. You grow, evolve and compromise even these as the realities around you shift. You recognize that your own nature and the Nature of reality are one. The problem of compromise itself becomes moot.


   

The Totality of Your Being

Experience is all there is. There is no version of your Self that is separate from experience. In fact, experience is the only means you have of being aware that you even exist. You are revealed to yourself, from moment to moment in relationship with the present in all the forms in which it appears. And the relationship you have with this present moment is what is defined as experience.

Each experience reveals to you another facet of yourself. And in that sense every experience is of equally significant value. Whether what you are experiencing right now is joy, anger, boredom, restlessness, anxiety, humor, hardship, creativity, heartbreak, victory - each of these moments reveals a different version of you. And each of these versions of you has a different lesson to learn, a different journey to take, a different depth to plumb. We tend to think of ourselves as one static entity moving in a dynamic universe, when what we really are is a universe of dynamic entities transforming into one another from one moment to the next. Who you are when you are angry is very different from the person you are when you are ecstatic. The way you see the world, your demeanour towards others, your willingness to be of service, your compassion towards yourself and everything else is completely different based on the experience of the moment.

You, and your experience, are not two separate things. They are inextricably linked. And each is responsible for creating the other. Consider this analogy: imagine that you are standing in front of your bathroom mirror, up very, very close so that your nose is almost touching the surface of the mirror. Your field of vision is limited so that at any given point of time you are only able to see one small cross section of your face. You can move your head around to different angles but for now you are unable to step back from the mirror. This mirror is the present moment; the portion of the image you are witnessing is your particular experience in this moment. As you move your head about, you will find there are certain angles of your face which please you and there are certain angles that don’t. Maybe you have a great profile, but when you tilt your head this way the light makes your nose look hideous. Maybe you have stunning eyes but a slight movement reveals a less than desirable chin. Every angle pleasant or unpleasant is an image of the same face, your face, seen from a different perspective. They are all you, and yet they are each unique and different.

When you deny one experience in favor of another, what you are doing is laying restrictions on the ways in which you can orient your head as you gaze into the mirror. Your fear or dislike of certain experiences and strong preference for others translates into movements that minimize or try to altogether suppress the harsh angles and maximize the beautiful ones. The result is a very rigid, unnatural and jerking experience of Life and ultimately one which creates an internal division and conflict in your being. You embrace and esteem only those aspects of yourself that you deem worthy, noble and beautiful and deny, despise and neglect those aspects of yourself that you deem worthless, base and ugly. But they are all the same face, seen form a different perspective.

When you are willing to see that each experience of your life is only a reflection of some aspect of yourself and is not something separate from you, you are making the choice to see yourself in totality. This is your decision to take a step back from the mirror to see the larger image - the one experience that contains all experiences, the one image that contains all the angles. This is what it means to be present - to be in tune with the totality of your being.

The Willingness to Experience

Whatever the experience of this moment, allow it to exist. If your experience is one of ease, joy and comfort this may not seem like a challenging proposition. If your experience right now is one of stress, struggle, disappointment, anxiety or heartbreak, this may be easier said than done. But regardless of what you are experiencing, your willingness to allow it to exist and to experience it in a pure, unaltered and unadulterated state is the first step towards developing an understanding of the nature of experience.

This "willingness to experience" is a powerful choice because it implies a number of things. The first is that you are not afraid. This implies courage. No matter how painful or how unpleasant the experience, your willingness to allow it to be there, without avoiding it, turning away from it, denying it or rationalizing it away, is a courageous choice. This does not in any way imply that as a result of your allowing the experience it will suddenly be any less painful. But this is exactly why it is such a courageous choice, because you know that the next time around it will be just as painful and still you do not shy away.

The willingness to experience implies Self Awareness. When you choose to align with the experience of this moment, you are no longer a victim of that experience or circumstance. You have made a subtle shift in perception from the "one stuff is happening to" to the "one who is aware of the stuff that is happening". It may not seem like much of a difference at first glance, but reflect on it, because the difference though subtle is monumental. With this slight shift in perception, your eyes become open to a whole different dimension of Life that you previously may not have been privy to. Prior to this you were nothing more than one person on a planet of 7 billion, struggling to stake your claim on one small finite portion of experience that you could call "your life". Now, you are able to recognize that even that "person that I am" is just one experience within your awareness. Sometimes you are aware of yourself and sometimes not. The world, other people, activities, circumstances, even you drift in and out of the focus of your awareness several times during the day. It is only the mind that somehow strings these disconnected and largely incongruent moments together into some seemingly continuous reality. Even though, the content of awareness is in constant flux, the one constant through all this is the awareness itself. As you begin to allow this moment and the experience of it to exist without attempting to manipulate it in anyway, your own sense of self identity naturally shifts from the notion of the person that you think you are to the Awareness which is prior to that notion.

The willingness to experience implies Openness. What we find most appealing about children and childhood in general, is the simple and natural openness with which all of Life's experiences are approached. This is an ability that we lose as we grow older simply because we are taught to rely excessively on our own mental processes (most of which are flawed and incomplete) to filter our experience. This compulsive filtering happens so unconconsciously that after a while we become unaware that it could be any other way. When you allow the experience of this moment in its totality, you open to Life in a way that is spontaneous and innocent. It is spontaneous because you cannot plan to be open, you can only do it now. It is innocent because this allowing does not presume to know or to judge the experience. The moment is experienced for no other reason but simply because that is what is happening in this instant. There is no why, how come, should or shouldn't about it. That is how the mind would approach it - with evaluations, agendas, analysis and rationalizations - dissecting it and trying to absorb the good parts and discard the bad. With openness the mind fades into the background.   

The willingness to experience implies simplicity. Even the most dramatic circumstances and seemingly complex scenarios in Life when witnessed and accepted without resistance or wanting to modify them in any way, are not experienced as being problematic. They become relatively simple in comparison to the way the mind approaches them, which is with the baggage of a past history and future expectation. Then the challenge you are facing is ALL you are facing. The history of the thousands of times you faced it in the past and the thousands more you may face in the future have no bearing on you. Nor do all your ideas of failure, ineptitude, unworthiness or woe. The challenge is reduced to its lowest common denominator. You have made a molehill out of a mountain.    

       

Understanding Your Ego

Your ego is your sense of self identity. It is your unique identifier. It is the mechanism using which you are able to differentiate and navigate your environment. Your ego is your gamertag - your online persona, as you enter this reality matrix that you call 'the world'.

The ego receives a bad rap, as something undesirable, something that needs to be subdued, subjugated and altogether done away with. But what many don't realize is that it is a vital mecahnism without which you would have no means of functioning within this particular reality. According to the specific design parameters of this Universe's reality, each human being MUST have an ego - it is a requirement. Without the ability to perceive yourself as a separate organism independent in your environement you would have no means of recognizing the need to create, survive and evolve as an individual organism. The ego is that very impulse to create and preserve the individual's reality. 

All this is just a technicality. What most people actually find objectionable is not the ego per se, but rather the ego's tendency to enhance pain and suffering. And this is where a deeper understanding of the dynamics at play is necessary.

The ego itself is nothing more than an identifier. It is not an entity with any intelligence or personal will of its own. It is more a 'something' than a 'someone'. So to feel angry or negatively towards an ego is much like being pissed off at a chair. It’s a dead piece of furniture at best.

Think of an ego as a large balloon with your name on it. You can think of it as a complex balloon with a number of chambers inside, each of which can be inflated independently of each other.

Each chamber in this balloon that is the ego is a particular aspect of the ego-self. One aspect may be your family ego (the person you tend to be around family members), another may be your work-ego (who you are at work), your social ego (who you are in society and among friends), your private ego (who you are when no one is around), your sexual ego, your spiritual ego, your national ego, your religious ego, your political ego, your child ego, your parent ego and the list goes on and on. There are an infinite number of subtle variations that would each constitute an aspect of your ego - the balloon has many chambers.

The balloon itself is flaccid by nature and has no real will or volition of its own. But when air is pumped into one or more of its chambers, it begins to inflate and move. As the chambers inflate more and more, the little 'you' that is holding the balloon by its string begins to have a harder and harder time controlling it. Before you know it the balloon starts to slowly lift you off the ground and off you go sailing in every which direction according to its whims and fancies, according to whichever way the wind decides to blow. Flying out of control, you crash into trees, into buildings, into other people flying out of control with their balloons - and this is when you begin to suffer.

But how are these chambers inflating in the first place and why? Thought is the valve that releases the gas, emotion is the gas that fills and expands the chamber. Each time you have a thought, that thought has the potential to create an emotional response within your system. If the thought is something completely arbitrary such as "i need to pick up a dozen eggs today", this is not something that is a self-reflecting thought and so does not generate much of an emotional response. However, if the thought is something like "I’m getting fat" then the emotional response is a significant one because this is a self-reflecting thought. Or if it’s a thought about another person such as "that pregnant woman is smoking" it is still a self-reflecting thought because what you are potentially saying is "that woman is doing something I believe is harmful" if that is in fact what you believe.

Every thought you have whether it is an arbitrary one or a personal one loosens the valve on the gas tank, it’s just a question of degrees. A thought such as "this chair is comfortable" is likely to budge the valve only by a hair whereas the thought "my parents never loved me" is likely to send the whole damn thing spinning.

The clue to understanding the ego is not to try and control it, to fight it, to subdue it or ignore it. Because everything you "do" only turns the valve on and inflates it. The clue is in seeing that you actually have the choice and the ability to disconnect that balloon from the gas tank from time to time, whenever you please.

The next time you have a self-referential thought especially if it a negative one, notice the immediate emotional response that rises within your system. You can observe the physiological symptoms that arise - the increased heart rate, the rise in body temperature, the clenching sensation in your gut and others. And watch how this emotional response causes your awareness to immediately contract. Your mind suddenly hyper focuses on the thought and develops something like a tunnel consciousness (like tunnel vision).

This hyper focus then attracts the next thought that magnifies the emotional response and heightens the physiological symptoms which attract even more thoughts and soon it begins to spiral. This is like a hand spinning and opening the valve faster and faster and faster. As the gas releases it inflates the chambers in the balloon and off you go to the races. 

At the moment the thought arises see if you can be watchful and alert. Allow the thought and the emotional response that come up with it almost as an outside observer or witness. At this point this is not "your thought" or "your emotion". You have yet to lay any claims of ownership. The moment you think of it as "yours", you have made the connection. The ego-balloon is now firmly fixed to the gas tank and the inflation has begun.

But instead of labeling the thought/emotion, just allow it to be there - as this alien entity that is separate from you. And experience it. Let the emotion, with its entire energy and essence, surge through your system. Then watch it dissipate and disappear. With nowhere to go it has no choice but to dissipate. Just as gas released from a gas tank dissipates if left open to the air.

What you have essentially done is make the choice not to feed the ego. You have demonstrated to yourself that you have the freedom in every moment to regulate your own self-identity and suffering. And most fundamentally you have demonstrated that your true identity is not derived from the ego, your emotions, your thoughts, your name, the roles you play in this world or any ideas you may have about yourself. Your true identity is always prior to and more fresh and spontaneous than all of that. It only exists in the present moment.

With practice the more you see that the mechanisms that feed your ego and similarly the egos of other people, of organizations, of institutions, of nations and religious tribes are all essentially one and the same mechanism, then you can make the choice not to participate in the ego game anymore. You may choose to inflate your ego every once in a while, but you are now in charge. A healthy ego is a pleasure to have and it is a fascinating tool to experience life with.

No longer do you need to be at the mercy of an out of control balloon tossing you around ruthlessly. Rather your experience is of the hot-air balloon pilot who uses his skill and wisdom to gently release and balance each chamber, ever watchful and mindful. Then your experience of life can become one of true journey and adventure. One, where your balloon is your vehicle which carries you away to explore this vast and myriad universe that is Life.  

The Unknowable You

You can never know yourself directly. Every means you have of perceiving yourself is always in contrast to a past version of yourself. In other words, you can only think of yourself in retrospect, in hindsight.

The person you are reflecting upon no longer exists. They may look like you, feel like you, think and talk like you but that person is gone. The ‘you’ that is here right now in this very moment is beyond the grasp of your mind and intellect. Similarly, the version of the world and of other people you hold in your mind has already expired. To see into the present is to see without any knowledge of what it is you are witnessing. It is a perspective devoid of any conceptions or abstractions. This perspective is fresh, innocent and vibrantly alive.

The mind can only deal with dead and static images. It uses the limited tools of language and imagery to comprehend the vastness of reality. The English language contains approximately 230,000 words, of which the average person's vocabulary register less than 10%. And yet words, are what we use to define ourselves, other people, our world.

That voice in your head, that thought stream, that incessantly playing background monologue that is the foundation of your entire self-concept - is nothing more than a limited, rudimentary and clumsy combination of a few meaningless words. What you are, is so much vaster, so much more complex, subtle and infinitely more profound than anything language can aspire to. And yet you believe in the words you tell yourself. Yet, you place value upon opinions as if a bunch of sentences could actually capture even a microscopic fragment of your reality.

If a child asked you to construct a model of the entire Universe from 230,000 Lego pieces could you do it? And if you could would you feel satisfied that what you have created adequately represents the reality of what the Universe is for that child? What about if you had to construct a human being out of 230,000 Lego pieces? Would you believe that this would give the child a realistic sense of what it means to be human?

Words are no more than symbols. They represent reality but are not reality. A word is as much reality as a pink ribbon is cancer and as a flag is a nation. Your mind is nothing more than a processor of information. It's only function is to create abstractions which only serve to disconnect you from what is actually happening. The only way to reconnect is to let go of your reliance on your thoughts. Use your mind but don't be used by it. Re-establish yourself as master of the house.

What you truly are is only available to you in this instant. You cannot see it or know it. You can only be it.

Wake Up to Uncertainty

Uncertainty is the most honest way in which you can experience this moment. It is the sobering reality that robs you of each and every way in which you cling to control. It is the great equalizer. It reduces all beings young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, powerful or weak to the same one common denominator.

To truly see this is to face your own mortality. It is to see that all forms of Life are equally frail, equally fleeting. It is to see that no matter how you have lived your life, we all die the same.

Uncertainty is the only reality there is. And since reality is uncertain, there is no way in which to "know" this reality. There is no way to be "certain" about anything.

Becoming aware of this is a great tool for self reflection and self discovery. When you reflect on all the things you are certain about what you really see are all the ways in which you are holding on to delusion, all the ways in which you are denying the reality of what actually is.

Much of what you believe about yourself or about the world is no more than conjecture. It is one potential possibility in a universe of infinite possibilities. Certainty presupposes a reality which is static. Yet the true nature of reality is one of constant flux, in which every moment is but a drop in an endless ocean of potential moments.

To really see this is to glimpse into the magnitude of the mystery that is Life. There is no history of a past behind you, there is no image of a future in front of you. There never has been. There is only a vast abyss of potentiality surrounding you in every direction - and there is you, right here, right now.

Let go.

The Myth of Self Improvement

You can never lose yourself and therefore you cannot find yourself. You can never become any more or less, any better or worse, any more worthy or unworthy than what you already are.

You are not incomplete. At this moment you are not half yourself, 70 percent yourself or even 99.9 per cent yourself. You are and have always been wholly yourself and it cannot have been any other way.

Who you are does not and cannot change. Your body will change, your mind will change, your circumstances, opinions and ideas will change. In short, all the catalysts that feed and evolve your image of yourself, i.e. your self-concept, will change. But you, that self that you are, is the constant that never changes.   

The desire to create a better self is really the desire to create a more acceptable self-image. After all, you are what you are and have never, even for a moment, been what you are not. But what you “think” you are, is essentially what the whole notion of self improvement is about. When talking about improving or bettering yourself, what you are really referring to is creating and adopting a more acceptable self-image that your mind will be satisfied with.

And yet the mind is never satisfied. This is because the very reason the mind creates a self-image in the first place is to perpetuate this sense that something is incomplete and so needs to achieve completion. It is a sense of lack that drives the quest for self improvement. And even though, the goal of such a quest seems to be to reach a state of self perfection, all it really achieves is to perpetuate the sense of lack, of not being or having enough.

Reflect on every decision or choice you make in your life to change, to manipulate, to improve your circumstances or yourself. Look beneath all the reasons and rationalizations that your mind can come up with: the pros vs cons evaluations, the shoulds vs the shouldn’ts, the analysis and projections in the future. Look beneath all that to the root of what is motivating you in all this decision making and in your choices. If you go deep enough, you will find that more often than not the motivation is fear that rises from an assumption of lack. Our minds are always operating on an in-built assumption that there is not enough and the programmed emotional response to this assumption is fear. The problem is we have become so accustomed to operating in this way that we have a hard time even recognizing that this is the mechanism at work.

Recognize that you are already whole and complete. There is no better, more improved, happier version of you out there. There is no reality to your self-image. What your mind says you are has no connection to the truth of who you really are. It is only a distorted shadow. Your shadow changes from moment to moment at times appearing pleasant and at others appearing terrible. But it is only a shadow. Perpetually repositioning yourself in order to adjust your shadow achieves very little of value. Turn your attention instead to the one that is casting the shadow and rest easy in the knowledge that all is well.