Un-Copula Yourself: What We Yearn For

Master Bruce Lee Says…

Please do not be concerned with soft versus firm, kicking versus striking, grappling versus hitting and kicking, long-range fighting versus in-fighting. There is no such thing as “this” is better than “that”. Should there be one thing we must guard against, let it be partiality that robs us of our pristine wholeness and make us lose unity in the midst of duality.

- Bruce Lee

My partner in our soon-to-be announced company gave me a Zen Koan. She didn’t know she did. She has mad skills!

I’ve spent at least a week of hard work on it. I researched the challenge. I reflected on it. I am stuck.

My partner one of the best in the country helping someone get unstuck. She charges wild rates and works with crazy famous people.

She is a ‘stuckness’ master. I just never thought her mastery extended to creating ‘stuckness.’ I think she stored up all the ‘stuckness’ she pulled out of her clients and transferred it to me.

What did she do?

Writing Out Loud

Our business is built around the grounded idea that we use experience to modify experience. This idea is both as old as time and the center of so much contemporary neuroscience and psychology. There is a sophistication to this practice, which is found in every mystic tradition and extends all the way to how specialized therapists treat PTSD.

This grounded, yet sophisticated, approach is valuable when deal with tormenting memories. It is extremely potent when used for routine distress. It is like getting an hour of massage because your foot feels a little tired. Not only does the foot feel better, but everything seems to tingle afterwords.

My partner and I are experts at stuck and getting unstuck. Right now, I’m trying out every tool in my tool box. Writing out loud is one of them - a desperate one. It’s why I posted this post.

What did she do?

Downside Torment,
Eliminate Personal Growth

In a couple of my previous posts - If Experience Is Who We Are, How Do We Change Experience and How More Experience Creates Better Experience - I downsized the concept of “torment.” Sure, if we feel torment, we want relief. But really, we want relief from all the minor and no-so-minor hassles as well. “Torment” is, at best, illustrative, but at worse, it is both melodramatic and misleading. Consider the way I use it:

Some memories enrich our life experience. Some torment us. Personal growth calms the distress and mines past hardship for wisdom and insight.

“Torment” is attention grabbing, but distracting. To really catch the insight of age-old tradition and contemporary science, we focus on the small doses of momentary distress, not stressors so big they cause “torment.”

My partner, bless her soul but damn the predicament she caused, pointed out “Personal Growth” is a more sloppy a term as “torment.” We don’t personally grow after all.

What is “Personal Growth?” As an outcome, “Personal Growth” is meaningless.

Her questions, “What is it we mean when we say ‘personal growth?’ What is a simple, understandable term for ‘personal growth?’ What is it that happens when we help a client get unstuck?”

She doesn’t worry too much about the answers. She helps clients do it, whatever it is. I am the one who needs the answer.

Let’s consider a sequence of synonyms:

• Succeed, prosper, thrive, flourish.

Is this what we did to get unstuck? Is this the benefit when we are unstuck? “Thrive” and “flourish” are words which best describe plants and gardens and suggest both a peak and an inevitable decline. Fall and then winter follow summer after all.

How about these sequences of synonyms:

• Adapt, adjust, accommodate, conform, reconcile.
• Improve, recover, recuperate, convalesce, gain.
• Join, conjoin, combine, unite, connect, link, associate, relate.

Nothing here for me. I’m stuck.

It All: What We Want
and
Want To Be Rid Of

“Personal Growth” is a dysfunctional concept: we might grow as a person, but do we personally grow? We don’t grow as plants might, with inevitable over-growing and dormancy. What is it when we feel when we have somehow “personally grown?”

If we seek “Personal Growth,” what does that mean exactly?

My iPod tried to help. It has mystical powers.

It reminded me of an awesome song - Afterall by William Fitzsimmons. Download it, but know I enjoy the melodrama. Remember the unasked question: after all what? Afterall evokes, builds up, and celebrates a passionate sense of yearning. Yearning for what?

Lets imagine we are separated from it all. No ToDo list, bills, or car trouble, no chronic pain, heart-ache, disgruntled boss, distracted spouse, or crazy kids, no worries about what someone said, meant, did, or seemed to threaten to do, no disillusionment, cynicism, world-weariness, or wonder what it all is about. How do we feel?

Personally, I love Bruce Lee’s term: Pristine Wholeness. To which partiality, the breaking of things into judged parts, is a devastating threat.

Pristine Wholeness is 98% mystical and 2% grounded. Bruce Lee said it so that counts for something. There is something which connects mastery - Bruce Lee was an exemplary master - and pristine wholeness.

Mastery bridges mystical to practical. My partner has this type of mastery. It’s why she doesn’t worry how to describe what her clients do. “They get unstuck,” is good enough for her - because it is a complete, simple answer.

“Get unstuck” is a mystical process for most of us. What is the practical thing we do to develop or own mastery and our own practical competence?

Bruce Lee understood something about the practicality of Pristine Wholeness. I cannot find practical words to describe what he understood. I’m stuck.

iPods Gone Wild: Into The Mystic

I believe our most primal, necessary behaviors are reflected in everyday simple language. Nothing about Pristine Wholeness is simple or everyday. Where are those words?

My iPod offered more help. Michael Snipe of R.E.M sang:

I come to you, defenses down, with the trust of a child

- Peter Gabriel, Red Rain (Snipe’s version is haunting)

This was important if for no other reason than my partner has, in a way, worked with Peter Gabriel. She has this thing with crazy famous people, after all.

Maybe we come to pristine wholeness “defenses down, with the trust of a child.” Maybe pristine wholeness allows us world-weary adults to drop our defenses and to again feel acceptance and surrender. How else might we get close to Bruce Lee’s pristine wholeness?

My iPod helped again. Like Bruce Lee, and my partner, my iPod is a master. It reaches into the mystic and creates something practical and useful, specifically context and subtext. It amazes me how music contextualizes life experience. It’s why movie soundtracks are so important.

My iPod played What Light by Wilco. In this song, Light is Jeff Tweedy’s analog to Pristine Wholeness.

I could write 3,000 words about the brilliance of Jeff Tweedy without taking a breath. At the end of the song, he doesn’t ask the inevitable question, “What light?” He knows of the light and there is none. To him, and indeed many, Pristine Wholeness is nothing.

Being all reflecting and mystical got me nowhere. I’m stuck afterall.

I’m Copula-ed

What about a hard-core analytical approach?

It’s amazing how grammar describes the most fundamental qualities of humanity. Ready for a second, brief grammar lesson?

Consider the sentence: I am. This sentence implies the question: what is it that I am?

There is the what which I am. There is both seperateness of what from I and unification of what and I.

However much we incorporate what into I am, the what is still a part which describes something we are partial to. For Bruce Lee, partiality destroys his pristine wholeness.

Wholeness is the absence of the thing in the between what and I.

The name for this thing in between is “copula” - a fun word open to many innuendos (that seventeen people besides me would be interested in).

Pieces are united, but wholeness is not union. Bruce Lee’s pristine wholeness is devoid of copulas although we must use copulas to describe either the mystical or practical aspects of pristine wholeness.

More to the point, we want a life without being “copula-ed.” That sounds like the most practical thing I have said this whole ramble.

My partner didn’t make me stuck. She “copula-ed” me. Sounds about right.

What we yearn to do is to “un-copula” ourselves. Maybe “dis-copula” is a better word. This description is practical, but very obtuse.

Would Bruce Lee ever let himself be “copula-ed?”

Monks: Master “Un-Copula-ers”

I will finish with another mystical quote from verse. It’s from the famous Ten Ox-Herding Pictures. The qualities of this line describe the concept of “Personal Growth” far better than the words “personal” and “growth.”

He causes withered trees to bloom.

The monk in the verse is a master “un-copula-er.” My partner is such a master!

Maybe master monks are not only celibate, but they can bring celibacy to others. We experience, for a moment, the graceful trust of a child. We feel pristine and are whole. Many of my partner’s clients would say they feel this way after a session or two.

What do we do with our celibacy?

We go out into the world, get accosted by some random predicament and f* it all up again. This is the it all we want and want relief from afterall.

One last thought: These days, what monk would enter a marketplace without an iPod?

One more last thought: It’s not “Personal Growth” we are after. Rather, it’s as Bruce Lee describes: We want to feel pure and be whole. The words feel and be are a copulas. The un-copula-ed version is pure and whole. It is what we yearn for.

Yet another last thought: What is it we do to get from distressed to feeling pure and being whole? And where is the neuroscience and biology in all this? If “Personal Growth” refers to a process, it is this process. What is a practical description of this basic process?

I’m still stuck.