Friday, June 22, 2012

Paths Beyond Ego

...the spiritual agenda is paramount, which is the conversion process. Whether we know it or not, we're all transforming, because we're hungry for the opposite of our vice... Helen Palmer
A key question for coaches is how to balance clients' immediate needs with our knowledge of their transformational potential. Sometimes they don't know to ask for what they really need. 

This path is not easy, often blocked by what Kierkegaard called "tranquilization by the trivial." For many years, passages from Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision have inspired me to engage my clients' spiritual hunger: 
"Growth involves movement into the unknown and often requires surrendering familiar ways of being. Consequently, we tend to fear growth. The tragic result... is that we actually deny and defend against our greatness and potential... What are the common characteristics of profound transpersonal experiences? The words vary but people's accounts worldwide agree that a central realization is penetrating insight into one's nature or identity... Undertaking this process is regarded by the great wisdom traditions as the highest goal and greatest good of human existence... A common characteristic of higher development is that our identity or ego changes, eventually losing the sense of solidity and separateness and becoming transpersonal" (pp. 110 - 114).
Here's how one of my clients describes her own process:
"The word transformation gives me a bit of trouble because I think of transforming from something to something, which is a one-shot deal, and that's not how I've experienced it in my life. I think of an evolution of consciousness that's endless. Transformation is a word we use in the West because we want to get someplace.  There is a grand scheme and there’s no manual. It comes a paragraph at a time. It’s what your heart is calling you to do.

"In the process of our evolution we have things that block us, that get in the way. Leonard Laskow speaks of treasured wounds. So for me the exploration is seeing how I've held things that kept me from moving forward. 

"What has changed most in me is not blaming myself as much. I went from 'It’s all my problem,' to 'It’s not at all my problem' and digging in, to becoming an observer of all that, seeing how it unfolds, not judging. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. I’m lighter, more present. I still get caught, but I get 'uncaught' quicker."

Saturday, June 9, 2012

"K" is for Krishnamurti

The devil and a friend were walking down the street, when they saw a man stoop to pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket.
The friend said to the devil, "What did that man pick up?"
"He picked up a piece of the truth," said the devil.

"That's a very bad business for you, then," said his friend.

"Not at all," the devil replied, "I'm going to help him organize it."
This was a favorite story of Jiddu Krishnamurti, fondly remembered as "K" by community members of the Krishnamurti Centre in England, where I worked as a co-op for two weeks some years ago.

K maintained that "Truth, being limitless (and) unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path."

Imagine the paradox Krishnamurti then faced: trying to teach the unteachable. He came to this pathless path years after being "discovered" in adolescence by leaders of the Theosophical Society and groomed to be the World Leader of what later became the Order of the Star.

After experiencing his own process, a state of clarity I would call presence, he realized he could only embody the teaching by not being a leader. His proclamation met with dismay within the Order, but to me is the ultimate example of "walking the talk":
"I do not know how many thousands throughout the world -- members of the Order -- have been preparing for me for eighteen years, and yet now they are not willing to listen unconditionally, wholly, to what I say... You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it." (Proclaimed leader in 1912, disbanded the Order in 1929).
Krishnamurti frequently claimed that the great religious teachers had come not to found religions but to destroy them, and throughout his life he asked questions of his audience to lead them toward discovering the path within themselves. This is good advice to us as coaches: 
"In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give either the key or the door to open, except yourself."