Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Like Music and Dance

I’ve been engaged in the effort to overcome a pattern of arrogance that has haunted me, and undermined most of what I have valued throughout my life. The learning process, has been hard, humiliating, discouraging, and extremely educative. In some strange way, the darkness has shined a light on a surprising awareness. The obvious is not always so obvious. At least not to the arrogant.

I was able to make sense of a family pattern of protective inflation that I’d inherited. I thought I was better than everyone, because that had been the traditional way of dealing with the threat of inferior feelings in my family for centuries. I was a good son of the Goff family. I was arrogant, proud, and subtle with my dishonesty. In other words, I hid well. That is good, in public, external ways — but not so good in personal intimate terms. Arrogance is a bad seedbed for loving.

As you can imagine, it has been very deflating to see this. Grief and regret accompany me, like the angels that haunted Scrooge. They accompany me, and remind me of the graveyard.

All of this sadness has had a purpose. It is sensitizing me. The water of culture, that I have been swimming in, is becoming more visible and nuanced. For instance, I can now see how my tendency toward arrogance (which first grew out of my family’s sense of inferiority) lent itself well to a cultural reliance on authority. I went from secretly feeling inferior, like I didn’t belong, to being trained as a professional helper. I became a valued commodity, a knowledge pro, someone who could be looked to for guidance. This is a great place for an arrogant one to hide. There is nothing so disguising as being socially sanctioned.

The training even convinced me, that if I knew something, I must be valuable. I went from a wrong sense of inferiority to an equally wrong sense of inflated rightness. I was a valued cultural caricature of expertise — the embodiment of the reliance on knowing that infects our times. I was so well hidden that I hardly knew myself. I came to believe that by being transplanted into a valued member of society. I had overcome the family uncertainty.

Learning how untrue that is  —  has been one of the greatest and most humiliating boons of this re-orienting process. To some extent, some of the cultural trance has worn off. I can see that the metaphor of the journey, the endless pursuit of some sense of something to come, has prevented me from enjoying the moment. I have been so goal-oriented, that I’ve been missing out on what is going on around me. Instead of playing, I’ve been trying to prove myself in societal terms.

I have been brought by a deeply chagrining self-revelation, to an awareness, that my arrogance is part of a larger arrogance, a cultural assumption that life is really about achievement. It is the goal-less — the momentary dance —  that really carries the energy of delight, and alignment with the larger processes of life. In my family pattern of arrogance, and then later in the cultural pattern of arrogance (the reliance on knowing), I missed the boat.

Joy is in the music of the moment, the expanded now, that some elders are capable of experiencing. Joy isn’t in becoming, there isn’t any salvation project that can deliver it, it’s in being, taking the moment more fully in. In my arrogance, in my family’s misdirected attempts, in our culture’s glorification of knowledge to be gained, is an abiding failure. Life is playing through us — dancing to a music that has no goal but delightful beauty. 

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