The War On Inner Terrorism
Until we can collectively get past the current sur-reality, with bombs dropping on international financial markets and the two main candidates for the top political job on the planet pitching antithetical but equally apocalyptic versions of “reality,” I’m thinking about going with a new byline for this little Internet outpost: The War On Inner Terrorism.
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I confess to sharing the morbid fascination of millions of others, as we tune in to the news channel or online news aggregator of choice, and listen to the talking heads tell us that the earth has tilted on its axis and our lives are in the crapper for the next decade, because some evildoers on Wall Street forced loans on us that now we can’t re-pay.
So, if They are to be believed, what’s going to happen is that many of us will start living in our cars and eating out of dumpsters and breadlines, while the rest of us fortunate enough to cling to some shadow of our jobs and careers will need to create new thrifty lifestyles. We will need to devote at least half our waking hours to clipping coupons and researching cheap emergency-only cellphone plans, change our travel plans to taking vacations only when we can find someone to swap homes with for a week or two, remember to always unplug every appliance and electronic gizmo from the socket when not in use, sell the cars and buy (used) bicycles, then cancel Netflix and only watch years-old DVDs borrowed for free from the public library.
I know: There are some decent ideas in there, but enough already! This is The American Way. On Monday we’re maxing out our credit cards to buy that fourth 50” plasma TV monitor for the guest room or to finance the annual Mediterranean Cruise, on Wednesday Wall Street takes a hit, on Friday we’re selling off our stock portfolio and closing out our bank accounts and putting the cash in coffee cans buried in the backyard.
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Good grief, can we climb down off the pendulum for long enough to catch a breath? I am starting to think of newscasts and newscasters as Inner Terrorists. They are flying their teleprompters into our heads and our brains are burning.
We need to fight this Inner Terrorism! Let’s stop terrorizing ourselves!
There is an upside to the sur-reality: If you want to stay sane, you’re going to have to turn your attention inward and figure out what you really believe about “reality” and start to resist all that outer “guidance” that is being offered by the folks who make their livings figuring out how to keep us watching or reading their take on “reality.”
There is a silver lining to the looming disaster clouds: They get your attention and they make you focus. When it’s all good and easy, you know how quickly life becomes a bit unfocused and your attention wanders into a comfortable routine. Right now, though, you’re focused and you’re taking a close look at your routines. Am I right? It’s as good a time as any to grow up. (And I’m not talking about thriftiness and retirement planning.)
I’m talking about where you look for guidance.
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Please bear with me while I try to assemble this metaphor: It seems like there is almost an either/or about this guidance business. Either you are looking out into space for a “Pole Star” to align your life with, or you are looking inside for some kind of “Inner Light” to follow. Extreme examples of the former way would be religious fundamentalists who don’t want to decide anything until asking some version of “What would Jesus do?” Perceived answers to this question range from inspiring to horrifying. Extreme examples of the latter way might be the guy betting his 401(k) on Count Fleet, in the fourth race, because he and the horse have the same initials and “he has a gut feeling.”
But, those are extremes, just for explanatory purposes. Of course extremes are dangerous. We don’t have to go there.
With that caveat, I say that the arc of our lives should move from looking “out there for The Pole Star” to finding and trusting the “Inner Light.” We begin life believing our parents know everything and have the right and authority to micro-manage our toilet habits, which perhaps they do, when we’re in diapers and can’t change them ourselves. They are the first and foremost Pole Star we align ourselves to. Or else. But, by the time we’re not wearing plastic pants anymore, we should be test flying a practice of telling our parents to put a sock in it, figuratively speaking, and insisting on our own right to micro-manage our lives. The same goes for the other in loco parentis stand-ins like teachers, preachers, employers, and news broadcasters. As much as they might want the job, even insist they have the job, we don’t need to let them be our Pole Star. They have some limited rights to our attention, but none are entitled to Pole Star position.
The problem is that, ultimately, you can’t ever be sure you’ve found the right Pole Star, whether it’s Oprah, Billy Graham, Suze Ormond, or Tom Brokaw. It should dawn on us, after awhile, that the reason we look to these bigger-than-life figures is that we assume they have some “Inner Light” we don’t have. That’s a helluva dangerously disempowered place to find yourself.
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Ultimately, you’ve got to find your Inner Light and follow that.
It’s not nearly as obscure or difficult as it may seem. I’m willing to bet that in any given moment you can take a few deep breaths, maybe close your eyes, and find your Inner Light. I’ll agree that sometimes events and circumstances may get your head spinning so fast you can’t find the IL, but then it’s just a matter of finding a way to stop the spinning. Deep breaths, a long lunch break, meditation, a few minutes by yourself in your car. Whatever.
For me, right now, the Inner Light feels like this:
I know my life (and your life) are not about The Money Crunch. They’re just not. We’re both much bigger than that. I know that, one way or another, we’ll both find our own ways to keep the ship afloat. We always have. If not, if we run aground or hit an iceberg, we’ll swim. If we don’t make it to shore, we’ll drown. So what? The day was coming, sooner or later, that we weren’t going to make it to shore, anyway. What you believe about what happens then is your own business. I believe I’ll be coming back in another boat. Bon Voyage!
I know that whatever Creative Intelligence is behind All This has a bias toward Love and a natural state of Wellbeing. I know that I need to find a way to solve each of my law practice clients’ problems, or refer them to someone who can, and not ignore their files. I know that I want to stay married to my Spouse in spite of her own personal belief that I should be paying more attention to Suze Ormond, and in spite of my resistance to that belief and the stress our disagreements can create. I know that I have no reason to believe that anybody “out there” is somehow more qualified to live than I am.
Imagine this: It’s lunchtime at the office. You’re working on a project that will be greatly enhanced if you finish it by quitting time. To do so, you have to hit the snack machine and work through lunch. On the other hand, Frank from Accounting wants to talk to you at lunch about some personal stress you’ve helped him with before, maybe across the way at The Red Onion. And, you’d love to spend lunch at the Bookstore, looking for something to soothe your own soul.
I guaran-damn-tee it: If you take a few minutes to feel for it - it’s more about feeling than it is about seeing - you will find the Inner Light on this conundrum. It may be a sense of mild relief when you make the right choice, there may be an actual, tactile warming feeling, you may feel like your head suddenly, literally cleared. A kind of brain release. Whatever it is, your Inner Light has a way of letting you know when it just turned on.
And so it goes with every decision and choice I (or you) make. I find that I know. It just feels right. It’s the Inner Light. I know what to do, or how to get to the place where I know what to do. I just need to trust the knowing. And, of course, act on it.
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Getting from believing that the parental figures in our lives know, but we don’t, to the place that we know, whether anybody else agrees or not, seems to me to be the main task of our adult lives.
Some get there sooner than others. There are many examples of folks who learned to follow their own Inner Lights while they were young and ended up being Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs or Jim Carrey or Barack Obama. Others, like yours truly, may spend decades floundering around, looking for a Pole Star, and only discover they have a dependable IL when they’re down to just a couple of decades to enjoy the experience. C’est la vie. Better late than never. Anyway, some of us believe we’ll get a few more lifetimes to try discovering the IL earlier in the voyage.
A couple of necessary backtracks:
There’s a difference between learning from others who have discovered their own Inner Lights and making those others your Pole Star. This may be a fine distinction, and it’s certainly easy to cross a line from learning something from someone to playing follow the leader.
Over the past ten years, it’s easy enough for me to see that I have had two main teachers. One is the novelist, Tom Robbins, and the other is Esther Hicks, principal teacher of the Abraham-Hicks material. You may or may not be familiar with either teacher. That’s not the point. The point is I am grateful for what I have learned, and continue to learn, and I will no doubt quote them more often than I probably should. I am willing to risk that, so long as I remain firm in my commitment to only follow the Inner Light, and not either of them.
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I’m running out of steam, here, so I suspect you may be, too. I’ll tie up a couple of loose ends and we can both be on our ways:
1. I write these posts because it feels like something I want to do. It’s in my Inner Light to do it. The keyword list for this Blog identifies a few elements within the focus of my Inner Light: the ones I find most compelling.
I truly hope that this little personal online diary will occasionally help someone in their own efforts to find and follow their IL.
2. The Inner Light is my guide, and your guide, into and within The Mystery, however you think of The Mystery.
3. I think it’s possible for people to find and follow their own Inner Lights and still find communion and community, if that’s something that appeals to them. To that end, I participate in another adventure called The Church of BuVu. It you’re interested, you can find more HERE.
