Topic: Development

[Endless~Knot]

Development is often used, as I do in my book, in conjunction with spirituality. Spirituality is a bad enough word, but development is even worse. I cringe using these words, but in the pursuit of communication I am happy enough to employ them. Of course what I am really interested in is far from the popular understanding of 'spirituality', but no other word is useful, without considerable explanation. It is indicative of a lack of comprehension in our culture. Steiner used the term 'Spiritual Science', but that seems very clunky.

Development holds similar problems, mainly because we live in an obsessive 'development' world. There are even laws in many countries that if you are not developing a resource, like land, it can be taken off you by the government. This has become more than a mindless craze, it is a serious and devastation cause of the current earth illness.

In spiritual terms, we tend to speak of 'removal' of the mote in the eye, or the dust from the mirror, material enchantment, kundabuffer, or the obfuscation from the pure mind and so forth. And this is all very fine. However there is a place for development nonetheless.

I speak of how we grow and learn. If you wish to learn music, and fully appreciate music, you have to apply yourself to developing the physical skills and appreciative-awareness distinctions and discernment. This takes a long time. It is wrong to think you have the receptive or expressive tools immediately available in any field, including love. Training and determination - development is a journey of enhancement.

There is a problem in this when we speak of spiritual development. I have so often observed serious and well intended conversations in which a point of failing or needed development is clearly realised and a determination for change is accepted. But nothing comes of it. All our resolutions are futile.

This has been observed for centuries by the best human minds, and many answers have been put forward. Buddhism has multiple explanations and solutions, but I have never been inspired by them myself. Steiner once was asked this question, and he decided it was the food we eat - no longer having the refined qualities that are required for this result. There is possibly truth in that, yet I feel it is far to simplistic an answer.

For example, someone realises they need to stop blaming others for their problems and accept personal responsibility for whatever situation in which they find themselves. But as soon as something goes wrong in their world, immediately they are back longing for their mother and blaming everything around them for their troubles. All their fine resolve is like a faint mist blown away by the first gust of wind.

For a very long time, wise people have recognised we have two quite distinct 'selves'. An outer one, typically called the personality, which is the sum development of our cultured, social or intellectual self - much the work of everything we have learned since our first day at school, although it goes back further than that. It is what our fellow humans have taught and what we have learned through life. The other is an inner self, typically called 'character'. All parents know they are assessing this aspect when they are weighing up the intended marriage partners of their children. It is also highly valued by soldiers in battle.

Spiritual teachers have often made a mistake of ignoring the role of the development of the personality, seeing it as a fly-by-night aspect of our overall aspirations. Thus they disparage any efforts to develop the mind and the finer cultural sensitivities. They despise books and the acquiring of knowledge from those who have passed on insights from others.

Other spiritual teachers go the the opposite extremes and strongly discourage any form of personal experience-based knowledge. These traditions build vast edifices of intellectual knowledge, under which they bury themselves.

The problem we face, is that our resolutions for betterment are made by our personality, which is powerless in the face of 'pressure'. We tell ourselves sincerely that we wish to change our attitude or behaviour, and then there are all kinds of techniques and insightful understanding around to assist us, but when pressure is applied, we are back at our character’s level of development, which for most of us is around the age of eight. If we don’t develop the inner self, then any development of the outer self is a waste of time.

But, how to develop the inner self, the character? Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to develop this aspect except through hardship and extended dedication. The more ‘effort’ we expend in anything, the more our character develops. To work directly and fruitfully on character development, we have to place ourselves in an environment of ‘pressure’ with an attitude of persistence and grace. Grace is important, because inside our eight-year-old character is screaming for our mother, but outside we maintain a conscious and assumed grace. There has to be a struggle, in which a third aspect of ourselves - a deeper ‘adult’ self - succeeds in denying the tantrum preference of our child character. We do have to allow it to voice it’s frustration, else we become twisted and repressed. The child’s anguish has to be acknowledged and given space to relieve. Then the adult core of our being makes its ‘separated’ statement. This way, the character can grow.

But it is more difficult than saying. The main problem is that our personality succeeds in avoiding any struggle or pressure situations. We decide we can do spiritual development in comfort. There is no reason to risk our comfort - everything is available from the pleasure of our pleasure. Alas, that is a lie. Some say there is enough trouble in life without looking for more, and it is true we have plenty of difficulties we can’t escape to utilise in developing our character, but that is insufficient, because in most cases they are controlled situations in which we have familiar leverage points.

Every now and then however, life does throw up truly difficult pressure situations, and it is in these we reveal how effective have been our preparations, our ‘development’ efforts. If you have not been in training, you will soon realise it. Just always remember to vent. Don’t go around bound to your grace. Choose a good friend who you know will understand and pour out your child-character’s anger and sadness. It is important to speak this to another person, not just go behind a wall and smash plates, which is nonetheless also good. Then girt and gird your loins again and face up to the music with dispassion and sensibility.

Michael Maher 2012

[Endless~Knot]

What I am perceiving in this process, I will try to describe further. It is important to not reach for the words and concepts of others too quickly. It is fine to use them to get a handle on understanding, but then we have to put them aside and try to see what is happening with our own eyes. Inevitably what we see will be a mix of our own and others' concepts.

It does appear that our child self remains with us through life. I have pondered children in this regard a lot. I always had difficulty with how women treat children. They treat them as if they are children, a different gender or species, not as young humans, or young adults. I finally came to realise that women are correct in this, which is why it is a great sadness for them when their children grow up into teenagers and adults - the person who was a child is no more. The child remains inside the adult, but the child as a ‘person’ disappears, and is gone forever. The mother will try to reach through the adult into the child, but that is a mistake, it is not the same.

When I was a child, I was a deferent person. Of course there are the same inner core threads that were there, and will be there through all phases of my life, but the little boy, like the little boys and girls who I see around me, was a being that I am no more. It is not appropriate to treat a child as an adult - there has to be time for the child to be a child. Naturally the adult is inside the child and it can be related to in the correct way, but to try to get a child to respond as an adult is as unfair to the full person they are, as is introducing them to sexuality before that aspect arrives in its own natural time.

When I speak of ‘character’, I am referring to something deeper than the child or the personality. I will now use the word ‘adult’ not to describe the post-21 year old person, but those moments when we act in an ‘adult’ way. By this I mean we stand aside from our immediate situation, and can act, or comment about ourselves, in a detached dispassionate way. This adult theme is the voice of the deeper character.

Some commentators refer to the master within. I see this as something different again, and very hard to initiate or reveal. That requires the combination of the refined personality, the child, and a still deeper sense of destiny. But ‘character’ is the vehicle of the inner master in a sense, without being to tight, as the master is allowed to float across all kinds of inner and outer selves. It is not the inner master that I am speaking of here, as that is a mysterious thing. I simply want to get to that self which is the true character of a person, and which is not automatically matured and developed - it is the character’s development I am trying to get a handle on here.

It appears to me that when the personality can’t sustain it’s writ under pressure, the person reverts to the next dominant self: the child. The character could be said to have remained at the level of the child, as no adequate training for it exists in our society. But that’s not quite how I see it. To me it appears that what I am calling character, is little nourished, and remains further, in some way, below the level of the child, such that the child is all that we have to fall back on. But the child can’t support the situation for long, because once it has exhausted its emotional store, a vacuum opens.

It is precisely this vacuum we are seeking, in the development process. With a gutted personality and an exhausted child, we have nothing left but to fall back upon character. Unfortunately character is weak, and is typically unable to step in with confidence and sufficient presence to lead. Yet it is only by ripping aside our secondary selves, and revealing the true state of our character, that it has the possibility of growing. Overprotection is disastrous for inner development.

Now comes the difficult part. The problem, that is often not spoken of much, is that no one can help our character to activate. All the fine words and ideas, that we speak of here, go in the ear of the personality, but they are unavailable to the character when that vacuum opens. I’m not saying they are of no use, because there is the whole matter of how the personality relates to character, which is a different issue. But the child utterly rejects anything from the personality, and thus all its fine wisdoms are already tainted by the time the child exhausts. The child in its tantrums burns everything around it. Once the tantrum dissipates, which takes time - that is important to remember - then character is left with no ropes to cling to.

If you are in the position to observe this in someone whom you are assisting, you will recognise this moment as a very sacred phase. Nothing can be done; one has to stand back and watch: will the character appear through the mist, and how strong will it be?

To my knowledge, there is no way to prepare character, except by stripping back the personality and child; and this can only be done under pressure. In truth the being has to become discombobulated. There is no easy way. Teaching wisdom to the personality does create a small room in the mind which knows what to do, but it has no power.

The danger is that the person has connived to hold power among those around, and thus when the child surfaces, its demands must be met by all concerned. The child gets its way and thus there is no opportunity for character to be revealed. Such a person has manipulated people to jump and respond to every tantrum of the child. This is a very sad condition, usually brought about by anger which takes revenge if not placated.

It should not be thought we have to wait for major discombobulations for character to activate, any small situation will do. You bang your head on the car door: immediately you feel personally assaulted. You want to punish someone, anyone, but realising its your own fault, there is little room for the vindictiveness of your child to blame. There is a small moment when you acknowledge it’s simply an accident and you have to put up with the pain. That is character speaking wordlessly. After, personality reasserts and can offer all kinds of wise advice about being careful next time or adopting a philosophical approach.

Perhaps you have set your heart on something happening, but it is denied. Again the child evicts the personality and flames up in anger, despair, self-pity and turns around for mummy and daddy to fix the problem immediately else you’ll scream. Again the child seeks to blame anything it can find, in the end declaring life is worthless and you’ll throw yourself in front of a bus. But time passes once more, and soon the child’s emotion dies down. Then the vacuum, and character’s face appears in the mist.

For character to grow, it has to activate all by itself within us. No one can draw it out, or magically enhance it. This is the great problem of development - in the end, we have to do it all by ourselves, and if character can’t surface, then forget all the rest - all the guides, teachers, books and words in the world can’t help.

Michael Maher 2012

[Endless~Knot]

The next major issue is the question of time, or: how long does it take for the child to drop its angst?

As with all categorisations, they either fall apart on too close a scrutiny, or you end up making multifarious variations while forcing life to fit. It is best to hold them lightly, but drop them for another when the facts struggle to fit the scheme. Having a scheme is useful, as it assists in offering some grasp of the ultimately incoherent reality that surrounds and assails us. These structures we try to layer across the world become a trap. What can be useful, can also be a mind-prison. People eventually believe in their structures so much, that they fail to perceive reality. This is one reason for stepping out of our psychological and physical familiarity.

I will push this current categorisation one step further: the child clings tenaciously. It can pretend to be many things while simply being spoilt, and willing to create unpleasantness for ourselves and all around us for a very long time, when it doesn’t get its lollies. We can tell it’s the child at work when we are in a bad mood because some external situation doesn’t go our way. The child almost by definition is at the mercy of externals.

It is the delight of the child in us that is so rewarding when something beautiful happens. Is it fair to deny it when something unpleasant occurs? I’d say no, but it is fair to require the child does not hold us to ransom when it doesn’t get its way, and it is fair to seek deeper forms of joy than the purely spontaneous. It is the clinging to joy that becomes fake, as does clinging to a displeasure becomes rank. Spontaneity is wonderful, and we all know when that bird flits away. It is then that the spoilt child clings.

But the big question is, how do we get the child to drop out of the picture? Fake joy is just a little sad to see, but rank bad mood is an obstacle to allowing character to appear. I’m sure there are many reasons for the obsessive child - so much can happen through our lives that we shouldn’t ‘blame’ anyone for having an obsessive child. The thing to look for is the power of character. That is how I tend to view this: it is not so much the child that lets go, but character which steps in. Now, how do we get that to happen?

This is the major question of development. I don’t want to prescribe an answer to this as it is the awareness of this question and process that we should all be pondering in our lives. Answers as cheap, but questions are jewels.

However I do have a few thoughts. Why do we plod through this tawdry masquerade of life? Running from stimulation to excitation, stepping through boredom with our eyes averted ... all for the sake of our inner child’s eyes? Why don’t we stop and admit the whole pantomime of life is insufficient? How long does it take in this journey through life before we realise we’ve seen it all before?

At that point, when we hit the wall of boredom, we feel guilty, and we run for cover - cover of anything which will protect us against the disease of meaninglessness. If we are early in the game, we run back to our ‘joy’ options. If we are older in the game, we run to ‘service’ options - we want to be of value to someone, anyone. Eventually we have to admit, that we persist purely because we stay alive. This point in life, in the journey through the foreign lands of the future, is of ultimate significance. This is when the ‘god’ is passing close to us behind the veil of maya. If we don’t arrive at this point, where the child is check-mated, we haven’t begun the process of character.

All the little moments I have spoken of previously are only a preparation for this final threshold, which we come to again and again. When ‘god’ stands next to us.

This opens a possibility-door. Whether we are willing to step through depends on either the ‘master’ within us, or someone beside us in whom the ‘master’ in activated, and who can both assist us and assist the ‘god’. Here we touch on the secrets of the master which we best leave to those who know.

What is of salience in this process, is that at the very point of flatness, where we feel the most despondent, lies the most precious. The moment can easily be lost - the grail pass without the ‘question asked’ before the throne of the Wounded King - and then who knows what paths our soul would choose? Best to always know, when the music stops and we feel deflated: that is when the ‘god’ stands closest.

Michael Maher 2012