More and more as I progress through my own growth and development, I’m reminded of a quote from a book I bought back in 1986, when I was in my early twenties, which was a translation of the Tao Te Ching entitled The Tao of Power.
Lao Tzu believed that when people do not have a sense of power they become resentful and uncooperative. Individuals who do not feel personal power feel fear. They fear the unknown because they do not identify with the world outside of themselves; thus their psychic integration is severely damaged and they are a danger to their society. Tyrants do not feel power, they feel frustration and impotency. They wield force, but it is a form of aggression, not authority. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that individuals who dominate others are, in fact, enslaved by insecurity and are slowly and mysteriously hurt by their own actions. Lao Tzu attributed most of the world’s ills to the fact that people do not feel powerful and independent.
R.L. Wing (Rita Aero), The Tao of Power
While most might interpret this quote to being about dictators, it’s not. It really applies to anyone. It could be about the CEO of a company or it could be about a lowly frontline employee within the same company. In fact, it could even be about me because I actually see aspects of myself within it.
When we feel fear, often related to uncertainties or ambiguities of life, we will often feel anger and aggression which will often be directed outwards at the world and others in turn.
And in our rapidly changing world today, I see this everywhere. Primarily because many of us are within a liminal in-between state, where the old is disintegrating and dying and the new is still emerging and being born. Thus this sense of uncertainty and ambiguity is making us feel nervous and afraid, causing us to be more aggressive and angry at our life’s circumstances.
And I’m not immune to this either. In fact, I’m noticing myself being distracting by anything online that I can contribute to because it gives me a sense of power and control to contribute to it.
But the more and more I do this, the more and more I realize these are just distractions keeping me from my real work of articulating my life’s work as a creative act.
This is mentioned within the book The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz when he spoke about three types of people: reactive, responsive, and creative.
Reactive and responsive people are effectively those people who are fighting the old systems. Creative people however are those that realize fighting the old system only wastes energy and actually reinforces it. Instead they create the new, thus making the old system obsolete, similar to Buckminster Fuller’s quote below.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
Buckminster Fuller
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
What’s ironic is what I think is required of this. That being going off the grid and truly focusing on one’s work. Why this is ironic is because this is what I have done in the past to avoid my work. Yet to truly focus on it intentionally, it seems like I may have to do this again, so as to focus my full attention on what really matters to me.
This requires one to have an unwavering stillness of solitude, perhaps to such an extent that it begins to disintegrates one’s old sense of self and births a larger sense of Self in turn. This feels like what I’m on the cusp of experiencing myself, if I can still myself.
The best way to visualize the feeling of this experience is using a scene from the tv series Dune: Prophecy whereby the main character has to stand and face her deepest fears and let them flow through her, disintegrating her old sense of “self” in the process. In doing so, with the show showing it as an internal process within her, she both survives and grows from the process. In comparison though, others who earlier tried to fight their fears directly were eventually overthrown and succumbed to them, literally dying in the process.
In a sense, what this communicates is that our fears aren’t there to stop or block our growth and development but rather they’re there as guardians to mark the edge of our old sense of “self”. Thus when we can stand and face these fearful guardians, realizing what role they play, we ourselves can step into a much larger role to play ourselves.