Back in the day, there was a businessman from out East Texas named B.J. Williamson. He was about a pure bred a Texan as they come. He knew a little ‘bout a lot; he could run you clear off a straight with a pair of deuces; when it came to making a deal with him, it felt like he put a snake in your pocket and then asked you for a match. Didn’t drink no beer but Lonestar. I could right well say, without exaggerating, if BJ Williamson was in the pot, he dam sure always had the best of it.

So, as I was sayin’, he was on the top of his game when he gets an offer from one o’ those A-rab oil companies. They ask him to come over to one o’ them places where they just as soon buy a new Cadillac as wash one when it was dirty. He knew if he swung that one he’d be fixed for life. But, beings it would take a few years, and knowin’ anything could happen, he figured it was even up that he could go busted as well.

Now BJ wasn’t nobody’s pigeon, so he figured if he did tap out, he’d keep a stake back home just in case. That way he could start over if he had to. Thought about what he would do for a while ‘cause ‘round them times the banks weren’t worth two for five or half of that. Finally he came up with the idea that he’d hide it right out in the open. He fancied the price of iron never changed much and he figured he could buy a few tons of it and store it at Jim Preston’s shed ‘till he got back. Even if the price went down, he reckoned it wouldn’t go down so much that he couldn’t start over for what he paid if he sold it. Jim was a old poker playin’ buddy and he told BJ he didn’t care one way or the other if he stored it at his place. ‘Bout a week later a big rig pulled up at Jim’s place and dropped its load.

BJ went of to Arabia to work with them rag-heads for close on to two years. He didn’t have one single drink the whole time and he damn sure didn’t touch one o’ their women. But that wasn’t the half of it, ‘cause even though he raked a few pots, in the end he went broke. So he came back to Texas figurin’ he could count on his stake.

When he got there, Jim’s shed was as empty as county stadium on a Tuesday mornin’ in July. Seems Jim ran into some financial problems a year before and he went and sold that iron thinkin’ when he got out o’ hot water he’d put it back in his shed and nobody would be none the wiser for it. It didn’t work out that way though. When BJ showed up he‘bout split a gut when he saw the shed empty.

Jim drove up in his pickup and when he sees BJ he just about shit. He knew he better have a damn good story and bein’ scared as he was sure didn’t stand in the way of commin’ up with one. He’ says to BJ, ‘We been havin’ a real vicious problem with ants ‘round here lately and this bein’ Texas they aint no ordinary ants. Now you might find it hard to believe, but last year, we had such a load o’ mean ants here that ate all your iron and I couldn’t do a thing to stop ‘em. Poison didn’t touch ‘em, fact they thrived on it.”

BJ smelled a rat right off and he wasn’t ‘bout to be conned out o’ his case money. So he plays along and says, “Goddamn, that was dumb o’ me. Y’ know, before I left, I coated that iron with rust stopper and I’ll bet that made that iron tasty t’ them little devils. Must have ate it like candy.” Jim started to breathe easy thinkin’ he was home free so he invites BJ over for a Barbeque that night. BJ comes and acts likes he’s havin’ a good old time while the whole time he’s thinkin’ up a storm tryin’ to come up with a plan.

Finally he gets the idea to snatch Jim’s son and hide ‘im in his cellar. Next day BJ sees Jim downtown all bent out o’ shape. ‘What’s wrong with you?” BJ asks, actin’ like he donn’t know what’s goin’ on. Jim breaks down and tells him his son is gone. BJ rocks back on his heels and asks, “Is he ‘bout ten year old?” “Yeh,” says Jim. “And does he have blond hair and come up to about here on me?” Jim was getting’ real excited and says, “Sure enough.” So BJ says, “I saw a redtail swoop down on ‘im yesterday and carry ‘im off by the hair. Jim gets red in the face and hotter than a pistol. He calls BJ a cock sucker every which way sayin’ “That aint no thing to be jokin’ ‘bout.”

BJ looks ‘im square in the eye and says, “In a place where ants can eat thirty ton o’ iron, wouldn’t surprise me if a red tail carried off a ten year old boy.” Jim knew he couldn’t go no further so he spills the beans and tells BJ the whole truth ‘bout how he sold the iron. He says, “Don’t be mad now, I’ll pay you for the iron and then some.” BJ says, “Don’t be cryin’ for your boy cause I got him.” BJ got his money back and Jim got his son back. But, y’ know, no matter how many times they crossed paths after that, they never looked at or talked to each other again.

My son did not go to college until he was twenty-seven. Instead, he had diverse experiences working in Antarctica, creating art, learning languages, being a computer engineer, and many others. He recounted that recently he was waiting for an examination outside a classroom, where many students were apprehensively questioning each other. Confident that he knew the material, he withdrew to a bench and went to sleep. He was soon awakened by an anxious student who said, “Wake up! Would you freak out once in a while? You’re making me nervous!”

“I’m afraid I might find out something I don’t want to know.

Can you give me a hand? Can you help me?”

“Ninety-nine percent of getting help for you would be asking for it. You are very much attuned to your wish for help but unaware of your help-rejecting side.”

“I am totally aware of my help rejecting side.”

I’m always acting. I can’t stop acting.

What’s in it for you to act?

I don’t want anyone to know me.

Ah, I see, that’s the problem

What is?

Many years ago I played poker with a man who had a tell. Do you know what a tell is?

No

A tell is any gesture, mannerism, noticeable physiologic response that gives one away. There was a player called Fat Bill who had a tell. His tell was that if he had a winning hand he would act. He would be focused on the content of his act. No matter what act he put on, people threw their hands away. He complained bitterly that he couldn’t make any money on a good hand. If he acted weak, they threw their hands away. If he acted strong, they threw their hands away. Of course, what he was unaware of was that he was a bad actor. Everyone knew that he was acting. They weren’t deceived by what the act was, they only had to know that he was acting. He was the one who was deceived!

From the moment of his birth, they had gazed at him. He was a genius. He was wiser than his father. He was good. He did no wrong. They radiated delight. Such a special boy.

There he lay, three months old, on display in the middle of the room. They all sat watching, anticipating. He turned over. Instantly, they cheered. He startled, and in that moment turned away from his inwardness. The adulation of the crowd drew him away from himself. The delay of a tenth of a second before applauding would have been enough. The taste of accomplishment might have been his, but it belonged to them. He belonged to them. In that moment what could have been icing on the cake became the cake itself.

As he grew, they disciplined his appetite. Three meals a day allowed him to be free to attend to activities other than securing his next meal. If they had only known of the appetite for attention, that it was necessary for life, that there was a balance between attracting, giving, getting and exchanging it. They knew obesity was unhealthy, yet they gorged him with attention. He lived in a garden of delight, obese with self-esteem.

They meant no harm. He was the realization of their hopes, the fulfillment of their lacks, the abatement of their fears. They had spent their lives waiting in railroad stations, when the object was to be on the train.

The choice was his: remain safely with them in the station or ride with his perpetual becoming?

Humility is not taught by means of humiliation. Humiliation instills only a behavior that gives the outward appearance of humility. True humility teaches itself, over time. A failure to learn is the evidence of its lack. Humility is not a virtue, but it is a necessary means to learning.

He entered into the conversation saying he experienced himself as “tense and dense,” and didn’t know why. He couldn’t shake the feeling since the previous day. He felt that he couldn’t bear it any more and wanted to rid himself of it.

I said, “You have a multitude of assumptions.” I shared some speculations. “First, you assume this experience should be removed; second, that you can know why you have it; that it can be removed; that you will know how to remove it if you know why, and implicit in what you say is an assumption that precludes the possibility that something might need to be added.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” he said. “They all seem true.”

“You don’t have to abandon your assumptions, but see if you can hold them in abeyance. I happen to know you have artistic ability. Create two cartoon characters named Tense and Dense, and make up a plot that engages them.”

He smiled. “What comes to mind immediately is Laurel and Hardy. Dense is Hardy, Tense is Laurel.”

“What are they doing?”

“Dense is trying to roll around on the floor in a jolly way and Tense is holding him back.”

His face took on a serious look and became pensive. “I remember a dream I had in 1984. I remember the year because I wrote it down, and made drawings of all of my dreams that year.”

“Two beggars approach the door of the garden of the house where we lived when I was a child and where my sister was born. I realize instantly that they are malingerers–two figures from a French book of fairy-tales. One of them pretends to be blind and the other one feigns a heavy body disease. Both are now in front of the garden door. I have a beer bottle in my hand and go to meet them. I take a mouthful and act as if I’m going to spray beer on them. They do not react as if they are really blind or diseased. I repeat the maneuver. I now realize that the ‘blind’ man–from my point of view the right one–is imitating the movements of my mouth. Indeed, he is not blind. I now begin to spray the liquid, but without really hitting them. While making these efforts, my eyes meet the eyes of the ‘blind’ man. It is as if I manage to see by these efforts. I become very clear-sighted. The field around the ‘blind’ one’s eyes opens up and I see that it is the face of an eight-or-ten-year-old boy. He has a pipe in his mouth–my father smoked a pipe–and he looks around with alert grey eyes.”

Agape, he paused. “My mother recently revealed that my sister does not have the same father as I.” He continued angrily. “For all those years she led me to believe she was a saint and that my father and men were not to be trusted.”

I added, “Dense wants to roll around and Tense is restraining him. Sounds like your saintly mother had a roll in the hay.” (This expression took some explaining in translation.)

He felt a sense of relaxation and commented on his sudden change of mood. “I had another dream at that time. I am standing in the middle of a church. A mass is being celebrated. My mother calls out to me that I am the devil and ‘j’en ai marre’ (I am fed up with it). It is cold and I am freezing. I think, how could I be cold if I were really the devil? Gliding in the air, I rise in the middle of the nave. On my back there is a guardian angel–or an archangel? I feel his hand on my back. It gives me the moral support and strength to confront her declaration that I am the devil. My flesh begins to creep and I wake up.”

He shook his head. “All those years, all those years I colluded with my mother against my father. I had to speak French with her and only French. I had to speak German with him and only him. With our children my wife and I have spoken only French, thinking they would be confused if we spoke both. I did not realize I was divided between two worlds. I tried to make it so my children would not be divided like me.”

Another dream came to mind: “A young woman asks me how to bring depth to a drawing. I tell her that you have to show the foreground to get depth, and I draw a priority sign. It is the priority sign of the stream (Rhine river).

As if incredulous that it was happening to him, he said he felt complete relaxation and no longer had his tense and dense feelings.

“Show the foreground,” I said. “Show the foreground. To see what it’s like, speak to your mother in German and tell her, ‘I am no longer my mother’s son.’”

He reacted. “But I can’t speak German to my mother. Besides, that is impossible; I will always be my mother’s son”

“What’s stopping you?”

“I never spoke German to my mother.”

“Do you have a taboo? If you do what I ask, will you feel as if you are instantly wrong?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way. I thought only primitive people have taboos.”

“You don’t have to abandon your expectation, but are you willing to risk seeing what it is like to say, in German, to her, ‘I am no longer my mother’s son.’”

“Ich bin nicht mehr der Sohn meiner Mutter”. His voice quavered. He said it again, this time with conviction.

As our eyes met he said, “My relationship with my mother was a secret between us while we lived in a climate of secrets, and she kept her secret from me. I will no longer keep secrets.”

“I will always be my mother’s son and I am no longer my mother’s son. Both are true. I will no longer speak only French with my children.”

I was feeling affectionate and mischievous and said, “I imagine you talking to your psychoanalyst of many years ago and he asks you how you came to such an insight as ‘I am no longer my mother’s son. I will always be my mother’s son.’

“’It was simple,’ you say. ‘ Laurel and Hardy pointed the way.’”

Assumption: You can never do what you should.
Assumption behind assumption: You can do what you should only when you are convinced that you can.
Ignore all evidence that shows you can do it.
Look for all evidence that shows you cannot do it.
Find what you are looking for.

Be fearful of the frustrations you might encounter in doing what you should.
Assume that you should be inspired and not have to encounter frustration.
Look and see that you have already done something.
Ignore this and limit attention to coping with the anticipation of frustration.
Divert attention away from the work involved in doing what you should.
Imagine that if you do what you should it will be imitative, or trite, or incomprehensible.
Find it to be so.

Note that a wish to do what you should is not doing it.
A wish is a wish.
Doing is doing.
When you are wishing to do something you are not doing it.
You are wishing.
You wish to do what you should but only if you are inspired and without effort or frustration.
Therefore, you will never do what you should.

Contemplate these:

I will always be my parents’ son/daughter
I am no longer my parents’ son/daughter
Both of these statements are true.

There is seeing things from ‘both sides.’ Then again, there is seeing things in the round.

When I want to learn something, nothing can stop me.
When I don’t want to learn something, nothing can make me.
When I think I want to learn something but don’t, nothing can make me.

I do what I want 100 percent of the time. Most people confuse not liking what they are doing for not wanting to do it. What I am doing is what I want, not what I tell myself.

My self-justifying behavior is worse than the original act. It has a certain unsavory flavor. However, if I pay close attention to it ,that allows me to do something about it. Even worse is when I don’t believe that I am self-deceived in ‘good’ approaches. I am usually lost in this sphere.

Vanity-love:

The most agreeable form of this rather insipid relationship is the one in which sensual pleasure is increased by habit. In that case past memories make it seem something like real love; there is piqued vanity and sadness on being abandoned; and becoming seized by romantic ideas, you begin to think you are in love and melancholy, for your vanity always aspires to have a great passion to its credit. The one thing certain is that to whatever kind of love one owes one’s pleasures, so long as they are accompanied by mental exhilaration, they are very keen and their memory is entrancing; and in this passion, contrary to most others, the memory of what we have lost always seems sweeter than anything we can hope for in the future…………………

Stendhal

“My life is a mess.” This phrase, so often spoken, took on new meaning after a friend wrote it. Having invested her life savings with a contemporary con artist, she lost it all. His pitch was the usual assured gain without contribution. Hers had been with her all of her life. She had worked twenty years, double shifts to contribute to a “secure future.” Her embarrassment, shame, grief and bitterness were necessary accompaniments to her loss.

What is a mess? The dictionary defines it as “a dirty, untidy or disordered condition.” But how do we know what tidy or order is? In order to know disorder or tidiness we must have a preconception of how discrete objects external to each other are related in space. Things otherwise are as they are. There are no messes in nature, only a perpetual coming into being. What characterizes life is that it is inwardly dynamic and is partially determined. Inanimate objects have no inner dynamic and are fully determined; they are finished products. Objects external to each other are quantifiable by nature of their very externality and the rules of logic are a direct consequence. For example, in a logical universe, two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time.

So it struck me that the expression, “My life is a mess,” is a function of a quantitative way of seeing. The referred to “life” is not perceived as inwardly dynamic but static and fully determined. It is as if (as scientists often do) a grid has been placed over what is otherwise dynamic in order to measure it: the grid of tidiness and order. Making a process quantifiable, by nature, allows only those elements that fit within the grid and are therefore arbitrarily made external to each other to be measured. Otherwise, in a dynamic process, successive stages are seen only in retrospect. What was is no longer. What will be is unknown. My friend was ashamed, embarrassed, and grief stricken because things did not add up. The ‘secure future,’ the end product of the sum of “life as thing”, did not add up.

There are unseen consequences to this way of seeing. Most likely one who experiences a mess is prone to tidying up, ordering or making sense out of it. Much effort could be exerted in these directions only to wind up with greater confusion, greater disorder and untidiness. But certainly, one would ask how could ordering disorder make more of a mess? Surely one cannot live in a state of anarchy. Yet if the sense of order or tidiness, so importantly conditioned by our environment – we would all speak at once without it – with its requirement to see life as object, can blind one to participating in one’s own coming into being. A man obsessed with freedom is still in the chains of an obsession. As long as one’s attention is fixated on rearranging or tidying, one misses awareness of life as dynamic coming into being and must always find a ‘mess’ within the confines of the organizing tidying grid.

We are all familiar with the extreme of the ordering tendency in obsessive compulsives. However, without awareness of its operation, many systems of thought and belief destructive to human understanding have emerged that have actually been rewarded as beneficial. Scholasticism is one example in which the propensity to meet the demand for order has produced bizarre systems of thought and ideologies that have resulted in perpetuating ignorance and at times outright violence to the human race. In psychology and religion there are many belief systems purporting to comprehend humanity while serving a need for tidiness. The result has been not understanding but well ordered cults that have served only to diminish understanding. It is not unusual for scientific ‘advances’ to be made after someone has made a mess in the laboratory

It is the tyranny of expectancy unnoticed that is the source of “mess.” When the expectancy of order or tidiness operates without awareness, one can be either disappointed or pleased. Both are illusions. In disappointment the expectancy is not met and a process of coming into being is perceived as a finished product. If the expectancy is met one can feel pleased or that ‘sense’ has been made out of the non-sense of coming into being. This leaves one closed to what will happen. In either case, openness and with it learning is precluded. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty together again.

Even worse, is when one’s penchant for order or tidiness fits preconceptions for future events. This is the point when ‘things’ (events) add up. It is a certainty at such times that pessimism or optimism – both forms of certainty – will rule.

One can free oneself from the tyranny of expectancy but not without hard work. It is hard because one must learn to de-automate the quantitative way of seeing while learning participative consciousness. This does not mean that one replaces the quantitative way. Rather the participative mode acts in a complimentary fashion so that with knowledge one can choose to see the same facts differently. If I know that the “mess” I am seeing is my own construction then I necessarily know what is there is what is there- independent of my feeling state. The work requires the cultivation of openness, forbearance and patience; easily seen in the finished product mode as virtues, extremely difficult to develop as an on-going capacity perpetually coming into being. One is no longer ruled by the propensity for order or tidiness. One rules it.