“Life is always now. Whatever happens, whatever you experience, feel, think, do - it’s always now. It’s all there is. And if you continuously miss the now – resist it, dislike it, try to get away from it, reduce it to a means to an end, then you miss the essence of your life, and you are stuck in a dream world of images, concepts, labels, interpretations, judgments."
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now
Clinging to the past and anticipating the future
Mystics, philosophers, poets and wise folk throughout the ages try to wake us up to the simple yet mysterious fact that our whole life happens in the present moment. Through image, story, poetry and symbol, those few humans who do manage to fully dwell in the present remind the rest of us not to get too caught up in dwelling on the past or striving for the future. Our pressing task, and warm invitation as humans is simply, in the words of Ram Dass, to be here now.
But it’s not so easy, it seems.
Most of us are driven by a sense of striving, moving, aiming at some future state. Many are also driven in equal measure by the idea of trying to escape from, overcome, or compensate for the past, their early life events, family conditioning or ancestral wounds.
In today’s culture, the language of therapy and self-development quickly gets caught up with an idea of freeing oneself from the past. The language of work, career and business fixates very strongly on forward looking striving, ambition, and the struggle for future achievement.
I am against neither therapy nor modern business. I enjoy and appreciate both.
But I think we could also be a little suspicious.
I wonder what it’s doing to us, individually and as a culture, when the most powerful stories about our life and our work repeatedly take us away from the present moment. Particularly when we do not notice that that is what’s happening.
In a culture obsessed with overcoming the past and improving the future, what are we missing in the present?
In this short series of posts / articles (this is the first of, I think, 3) I want to focus on how a strong future fixation, present as ambition, achievement orientation, goal setting and the pursuit of growth in business and career settings affects us all. I want to consider whether there is a better way we could be relating to that part of life.
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Nowness and Ambition
My meditation teacher, Rigdzin Shikpo used to tell a wonderful story about meeting with his teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (one of the great Tibetan meditation masters of the 20th century). One day my teacher, then simply called Mike, visited Trungpa Rinpoche. At some point in the conversation, presumably about the finer points of meditation technique and Buddhist teachings, Trungpa just looked at him and said, with a sense of total relaxation and ultimate peace, “it’s so good to know that you … don’t … have … to do …. an-y-thing”.
As Rigdzin Shikpo told the story, it was the palpable atmosphere in the room, not just the words spoken, that conveyed the message most strongly. In that moment it was so clearly, undeniably true – what all the great masters have said.
All is yours already,
Don't search any further.
Don't go into the inextricable jungle looking for the elephant who is quietly at home
Nothing to do
Nothing to force
And everything happens by itself.
Gendun Rinpoche
This was a powerful moment in my teacher’s life.
And … (here comes the punchline) … Mike then went away thinking to himself “well he can’t mean me, now. I can’t do that! Maybe one day if I meditate hard enough, and study well enough, and develop myself, then eventually in the future I will come to know that there is nothing to do!”
We hear it. We get glimpses of it. We get inspired by teachings, teachers, poems or stories that remind us that there is only this moment to relax into. But somehow at a deep level, we remain convinced that we have to work hard to get there!
We suffer burn out, exhaustion, fatigue and frustration. We beat ourselves up for not getting where we think we ‘should’ be getting to, quickly enough. We evaluate our lives based on weird notions about where we think we should be, rarely reflecting on the measures and yardsticks we use, or where on earth they came from. In my coaching work with leaders in different sectors, I see many people experience deep down a sense of the futility of continually trying to climb the ladder, get to the next place, achieve the next thing. And yet feel themselves compelled to keep going!
Our society is held fast in the grip of ambition.
It’s such a compelling idea – this personal striving toward some better future. We’ve been socialised into this way of thinking. The idea of a personal effort towards a future goal is bound up with ideas developing over the last few hundred years about: causality, Newtonian physics, industrialisation, modernism, and core notions of time and identity.
Yet other stories are also told – in other cultures and other places.
Might we do well to listen to them too?
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The sickness of effort
The Tibetans have a phrase for this future oriented, ambitious way of being. They call it the ‘sickness of effort’.
What could that possibly mean?
They are trying to point out something like this: If in some basic existential sense all we ever have is our present moment experience, then our main task is surely to learn to rest in, relax into, and trust, whatever is NOW. Now is the only place our life actually happens. To use Buddhist terminology, to become Buddha (Buddha simply means ‘one who is Awake’) is to wake up to the significance of what is staring us in the face the whole time – that our present moment awareness / experience is ultimately all we have; that anything and everything we may be looking for, ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ is only ever in the present moment.
From this perspective a culture, such as ours, built around continually trying to improve, develop, and get somewhere else we choose to call ‘better’, is actually rather sick. A person channelling their life energy into endlessly chasing some future state, while never being present to now, is suffering from the sickness of effort.
It is, within the Tibetan world view, quite literally a sickness. It makes us ill in body and mind. This compulsion to chase forever a never quite arriving future, distorts our precious life energy, depletes us, spreads us thin and wears us out.
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Good laziness and bad laziness
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
Henry David Thoreau
A related idea is our Western confusion as to what is lazy and what is productive.
In our caffeine, activity and achievement fuelled culture those who (apparently) don’t get up to much are deemed to be lazy. And lazy in our industrial, protestant work ethic inspired culture is bad (it’s basically one of the 7 deadly sins). The devil, so they say, makes work for idle hands!
No wonder so many people have trouble resting, simply being present, or allowing themselves even to recover from illness. Its why we talk about ‘time off’ meaning the time when we are not working. It’s why so many people I coach have an existential crisis when they step out of a work role, because they no longer know what to say when people ask them ‘so what do you do?’.
It’s important to see how deeply entrenched this idea of ‘you are what you do’ and the value of doing over being, has become in our culture. Most people’s sense of identity is inextricably bound up with their doing, and particularly with doing to create or achieve some future thing. This is so automatic to most modern westerners that once again we rarely question it.
To the Tibetans however a fixation on doing – whether work, or recreational, is actually a form of laziness! Why? Because a large percentage of our doing (check for yourself) is ultimately just routine, habit and distraction. It channels our inability to simply be present into activity of some kind. It doesn’t much matter whether the doing that results is picking our nose, making a sandwich, building a career or business empire, or reading spiritual books. To the extent that our doing is an unconscious attempt to avoid the emptiness, openness and raw poignancy of simply being present, it can be said to be a somewhat neurotic distraction, taking us away from present moment experience.
To the Tibetans therefore, continually allowing ourselves to turn away from present moment experience (which again is all we ever have really) is very lazy indeed. Building a culture that creates more and more ways to avoid being present, more and more baubles, trinkets, flashing lights and distractions is, from this perspective, a sick and lazy culture.
On the other hand, finding the courage, commitment, discipline and motivation to simply be, to relax into the present moment – free from pressure, agenda, ambition or goal, is considered a courageous and valuable action. This is the true work for all humans. And not at all lazy – however strange that may seem to ambitious, confused westerners!
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The Paradox of Ambition
This leads us to the basic paradox of ambition (my phrase, not as far as I know a traditional one).
The paradox of ambition goes something like this:
To be driven by ambition is to work towards a better future state (better version of me, more satisfaction, more of something I want). To invest in ambition requires me therefore to consider the present moment as in some way lacking or insufficient – there is something out there in the future that I lack, or we lack, or that is not present now.
So, the more I am fuelled by ambition (of any kind) the harder it will be for me to rest in the present moment and experience it as sufficient, let alone perfect.
Therefore, the more ambitious I am, the less likely I am to actually experience genuine fulfilment or satisfaction in the present moment.
Recall that the present moment is the only place we can ever experience anything, and you’ll see how unlikely it becomes that ambition can actually deliver what we truly are looking for.
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Questions, resistances and implications
I am sure this raises many questions and resistances. I’ll touch on some common ones here, briefly, but I hope enough to offer ideas for further reflection.
Fear of passivity
The first objection that often comes up around this idea is a fear of passivity, a sense that, ‘if I let go of ambition and just relax, I’ll just sit on my sofa dribbling all day and nothing will happen’.
That sort of passivity is not what we are talking about here. Passivity is not at all the same as being beyond the sickness of effort, or the paradox of ambition.
if you have this concern (and most of us do!), notice how quickly it arises in you. Consider the speed and strength of that response as in itself part of a deep, unconscious resistance to the idea of letting go and non-doing. Be curious about that. It will tell you something about yourself and about our whole culture and what drives it.
Next, consider whether there is some part of you that would actually like to sit on your sofa all day! While acknowledging that this is not what is implied here, it’s also interesting to notice where your mind goes by way of resistance. Maybe, in Jungian terms, there is a shadow here – a possibility raised that is disturbing and provoking, but potentially helpful. So many of us have lives that are absolutely full of doing, and often not very fulfilling or meaningful doing, that it's entirely likely that at a deeper level some part of our being yearns to drop it all. So, although becoming passive and inactive is not what the Tibetans are talking about (see below), consider that a part of you right now might love to do that!
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Beauty, skill and play > future oriented ambition
The key point here is that ambition, striving, and fixation on future results is NOT really about activity in the end. It’s a state of mind. A restless, discontent way of approaching life, work, creativity and relationship that colours everything with a sense of effort, striving, and need for attainment. Ultimately it is this state of mind that is the sickness not the activity per se.
Most westerners just assume that this up tight, striving, dissatisfied, future oriented state of mind is necessary for activity to happen! Most of us literally cannot imagine doing things or activity happening outside of a state of stress, striving and future ambition. That’s the sickness right there. It’s pervasive and so deeply woven into the fabric of our culture right now that it’s hard to imagine going beyond.
As an aside note that the origin of many words describing ‘work’ in European languages links to the idea of suffering or inconvenience. The French ‘travailler’ (to work) is related to sufferings and woes, and has its origins in the name of a 3 pronged medieval torture instrument! The idea of offering ‘compensation’ (money) for work links to the idea that we must be compensated for inconvenience and the pain of doing what we don’t want to do. No one has to compensate you for doing what you love all day! Why would they?
We will need different words to describe purposeful, fulfilling activity that takes us away from the pain and striving of future oriented effort, while assuaging some of the fears about passivity – this idea that without the striving nothing at all would, or could, happen.
I’ve found a traditional Buddhist meditation teaching helpful here. The 3 aspects of meditation are sometimes described as ‘beauty, skill and play’. In fact, at a deep level these are said to be three natural aspects of how our mind itself works. But for now, let’s take them at the more practical level and apply them to any activity, specifically work.
As you read, please reflect on your own work and imagine what would be different for you if these 3 qualities became your touchstones for work, career choices, and activity.
Play
First, we adopt an attitude of play. We try things out. We explore and we experiment. We are prepared to get things wrong.
Play is a natural function of the human mind at a deep level. In some sense it is the only way anything is discovered.
Note that children and other young mammals naturally play. They are not born knowing about this thing we call ‘work’ but they readily and naturally play.
As Alan Watts points out, play is the name we give to any activity that is purposeless yet meaningful, because the meaning is in the present moment not in the future pay off. We play music – with no thought about getting to the end of the song quicker or better, but because the playing itself is pleasurable. We play sport and games. Yes, we may enjoy winning. But we don’t want to get to the end without the play itself. Children play at different roles, identities and imagination, not to get to the end, or to get somewhere else, but because there is something fascinating and joyful about the play.
Play is always a present moment experience.
So – the first hallmark of your work beyond the paradox of ambition is to bring to it an attitude of play.
Beauty
As we play, we occasionally hit a point, mode, experience or discovery that feels particularly good. It just feels right, harmonious, meaningful, resonant in some way. We have discovered this not because we have been seeking it in an uptight or goal oriented way, but because naturally as we play, different moments and experiences will arise and resonate in different ways.
Our task is not to manufacture such moments of what traditionally translates as ‘beauty’ but simply to notice and acknowledge them when they arise.
Moments of beauty, arising naturally, are messages, signposts, signals. They tell us something about a direction to pursue in our play, or a possibility ready to emerge in a certain area. But they are not fuelled by a fixed idea of needing to get somewhere.
As we play – in any aspect of life and work, we will naturally discover moments of beauty. We can then choose to stay with these, hang out with them, amplify them. But always as part of the play. If we get too fixated on holding on or manufacturing moments of beauty they inevitably disappear.
Skill
Gradually through play and the recognition of those moments of beauty that arise, we develop skill. An important traditional insight here, is that it is not ‘me’ in the ego sense that develops the skill. Rather my mind (which is way beyond any egoic identity story of me-ness) naturally glimpses directions to move in and becomes more skilful at moving in that way. So even the development of skill itself is not part of a story of personal achievement, or personal striving. Rather it is a process emerging naturally and organically from beauty and play.
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Work beyond the sickness of effort and paradox of ambition
There are doubtless many other ways to think about work and activity beyond the sickness of effort and the paradox of ambition. Eckhart Tolle has described what he calls ‘Awakened Doing’ in terms of acceptance, enjoyment and enthusiasm.
The classic Hindu text, the Bhagvad Gita has its own description of pure work:
I will teach thee the truth of pure work,
And this truth shall make thee free…
All actions take place in time by the interweaving of the forces of Nature;
But the person lost in selfish delusion
Thinks he himself is the actor”
Bhagvad Gita
And bringing this back to each of us, beyond the Taoist, Buddhist or Vedic sages, the real question is how we can relax into our own work and activities, as a present moment experience, free from the sickness of effort and the paradox of ambition.