Chapter Six
The previous chapter discussed the significance of meeting and doing well with your connections- the people and activities you have an important relationship with. These connections are more significant than other people because they give you practical things, fulfill your emotional needs, or help you navigate the next step of your life. To make these connections and do well with them, it is vital you have a clear understanding of your relationship with them and find a good way of dealing with any troubling aspects of the relationship. This chapter discusses the most important practical techniques of doing these two things through discussing my career.
In the late 1980s, while I was reading many scholarly books, my wife had a friend in her Ph. D. program who was a Tibetan Buddhist. One of his favorite sayings was that “the past did not exist.” This phrase was encouragement to people to live in the present moment. Later on, many popular spiritual teachers, especially Eckhart Tolle in his book The Power of Now, would say people should ignore the past and only live in the present moment.
I was horrified at my Buddhist friend and his disparagement of
thinking about the past. In my spiritual practice, I had noticed that in order to live well in the present and the future, a person needed to study her past mistakes in making connections and learn from them. The past could make your future much better as similar relationships and situation will come up again. If you learnt the lesson of why you did not respond well to the earlier relationship, then you can respond much better next time it reoccurs.
In my meditations I particularly looked at the times when I missed my connections with money and jobs and therefore ended up with an inadequate amount of money. Through compiling a list of these times and ferreting out the similarities in my underlying behavior, I noticed I had a tendency to focus on my feelings and not pay enough attention to thinking about the future. This information later became very valuable in helping me find my right career.
After five years of reading scholarly books, one day I sensed this phase of my life was over, and I was not sure what I should do next. As my youngest child was about to enter kindergarten, and our two older children were having more expenses as they became teenagers, my wife thought it was time for me to get a job. That made sense to me. But I had spent ten years at home raising our children while my wife worked, and thus I had no skills or recent employment history. Furthermore, I did not even have a high school degree, much less a college one.
The most important problem, though, was that I had no idea what kind of job I would be good at. Through studying my past, I knew I had issues about jobs and money, and had made many bad decisions about them. In particular, it seemed I had a stupid pattern of only focusing on my feelings in the present moment and totally missing the larger picture of needing money for the future.
What I needed now was clear insight into the kind of person I was and the kind of career I would do well at. But I could not see any good possibilities at all. Then I got lucky: a friend suggested that I should finish college, get a Ph. D., and become a professor.
Even though I had gone to an Ivy League college without ever graduating from high school, and had spent the last five years reading more scholarly books than anyone I knew, becoming a professor had absolutely never occurred to me. I was not able to see how well suited I was for the job because I was overwhelmed with my hatred for the whole academic system. When I had taken courses, I had to study what other people wanted and so my mind felt controlled by them. The system also seemed like it delighted in trying to stamp out any spiritual concerns. Furthermore, I disliked most professors as many of them pictured themselves as cool rebels while they actually were boring defenders of middle class conventionality. I did not need to take courses to learn things, and most people were not interested in learning what the system required them to learn, so I did not see the usefulness of the whole system.
Because of my intense dislike of professors and the whole academic system, I could not see that I was extremely well suited to be a professor. My dislike of the system was so strong I probably still would have not become a professor except that I knew that I had often missed job and money connections by focusing on my feelings. But I knew I had such a poor track record in this area of my life, I had to reject my usual way of doing things.
To be a professor I would have to go to graduate school, which meant I first would have to graduate from college. It was no problem affording college: because I was poor, I received a full scholarship from Syracuse University and some government grants. This meant I actually made money getting a college degree. The problem, though, was that a person does not just become a professor, she becomes a professor of a certain subject. So I had to figure out what subject I wanted to teach. That meant I had to know myself and the academic system well enough to know where I fit in best.
I knew myself well enough to know that humanities was the best general area for me, but I was not sure what specific area I wanted to teach. I knew classical Greek well and liked reading it, and the same with Chinese. I loved reading about religious studies, and I had majored in philosophy at Dartmouth College. So one of those four areas seemed the smartest to specialize in. But it was far from clear which one was best for me.
Lately there has been much discussion in books and articles about whether the best way of making decisions is by following intuition or rationality. From my perspective, this whole discussion misses the deeper necessity of clearing away the misperceptions, fears, and other things that get in the way of clearly seeing the situation or relationship you are in. Once these things are cleared away, no decision is really necessary as the right choice is obvious. It is not important whether the answer comes through rational thinking, intuition, feelings, or some other mode of cognition; the key thing is to spend the time removing the problems that get in the way of understanding the relationship or the situation clearly. Once these obstructions are out of the way, your right move will be clear.
The whole discussion of whether you can trust your feelings or your rational mind assumes that there is one answer to this question. But I have noticed that in some areas of my life I don’t have that many problems so my feelings are relatively trustworthy. But in other areas, I have many problems so my feelings are not very trustworthy. So in the earlier part of my life, my feelings led me very well to making connections while I was traveling. But with career and money, I had many problems and my feelings were untrustworthy.
As I thought about my problem of what subject I should teach, I realized to be a professor in a particular subject meant going to graduate school and spending years learning about a subject and then decades more teaching that subject. It was like a marriage in that a person spent a vast amount of time with her partner. So I had better have a deep connection with the subject; otherwise the desire to make money would probably not be enough to get me through the long grind of graduate school and teaching.
Thinking of it this way made me want to reject both classics and East Asian studies. While I knew both ancient Greek and Chinese well, and loved reading them, both of these areas had big liabilities. It felt tremendously suffocating to be confined to just thinking about the beginning of Western classical civilization when the world was so much larger and more interesting. And to do well in East Asian studies, I would have to learn Japanese, and I just did not want to learn a whole new language about a culture I was not interested in.
But these were just feelings I had, how did I know if I could trust them or not? Were these feelings indicators of the right way or just temporary feelings getting in the way of seeing the right way for me? The solution was to put aside the feelings and look at the situation without them. Would pursuing classics or East Asian studies lead to getting money? Thinking of it this way, the answer was obvious that I should eliminate these fields as I did not like them enough and neither field had many jobs in them or offered teaching assistantships.
This left religious studies or philosophy. Religious studies was fascinating because it allowed me to study very spiritual and religious people doing unconventional, interesting, and influential things. Because I found this area so compelling, it was the subject I had concentrated on during the last five years. I could easily see myself loving it in graduate school. On the other hand, modern philosophy as it was taught in the vast majority of American universities was mind-numbingly boring. This kind of philosophy, called analytical philosophy, was centered on the analysis of language and abstract problems, and denied any possibility of spiritual knowledge. I was so bored by modern philosophy it was the one area I had not bothered to read anything about in the last five years.
Unfortunately, religious studies had the significant downside of putting me in the same field with my wife. I thought this could easily be troublesome later on in getting jobs. Even worse, religious studies programs generally did not offer teaching assistantships unless you already had a master’s degree, and that meant I would have to pay a tremendous amount of money while getting that degree. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth and now at Syracuse, I had gotten a full scholarship and money, so it did not fit into my normal life flow to be losing money going to college. For other people this might not be a concern, but it seemed to go against my basic life karma.
Philosophy departments, on the other hand, had many more teaching assistantships which they gave to people with just an undergraduate degree. Moreover, all American colleges and universities had philosophy departments, which meant that there were many more jobs in the field than in religious studies. So in terms of practicality, philosophy was much better choice than religious studies. I had also majored in it at Dartmouth, and loved Greek philosophy. Furthermore, it was also the one important area of the humanities that I had not assiduously studied in the last five years. Thus I could see how it might be very good in the long run for me to know more about it. The big downside of philosophy was that I did not know if I could survive graduate school with all the mind-numbing garbage I would have to learn.
It was not clear which field was the best for one for me. I knew enough about making connections to realize that something was blocking my ability to see my best course of action. I also knew that once these obstructions were gone, the relationship or situation would become clearer and the right decision would become obvious. To get through these blocks, I had to look at my issues and misperceptions. So while I put off a decision, I meditated on the psychological issues or other problems that would block me from seeing my connection.
A month or so later there was a seemingly small thing which made the right course for me obvious: I noticed that most of the professors in religious studies dressed in very fancy suits, while the philosophy professors were totally unconcerned about their clothes. As I thought about it, the religion professors’ meticulous clothing was not a minor, insignificant thing; it was a manifestation of how much they cared about fitting into society’s conventional values and playing the social game. Philosophy professors, on the other hand, did not at all care about their clothes and conventionality. Their core value was examining and wondering about anything, with no concern about what society thought. I was very much like the philosophers in that I had did not care what society thought about things and had no concern for fitting into conventional social patterns, either in my thinking or my clothes. I then realized I approached things like a philosopher in that I liked clear analysis of the situation, good arguments, and wondering whether socially accepted verities were really true. While I hated the slump philosophy had been in for the last three hundred years, I had been awakened spiritually by Socrates and thought very much like him and other philosophers. I now saw that philosophy was my connection, and like any person with whom you may be in a long term relationship with, philosophy was just going through a really long rough patch. It had taken me over three months, but I had finally seen my connection because I finally understood the situation clearly.
I was happy to realize the process was over and I knew was going to go to philosophy graduate school and become a philosophy professor. But this happiness only lasted until I realized that going to philosophy graduate school meant that I would have to take as many undergraduate philosophy classes as possible. I had thought I could put off these totally boring classes until graduate school, but it was obvious I needed to take the classes now so that I could have a better undergraduate resume and get good recommendations from professors in the field. I was so horrified I almost cried when I realized I would soon have to take these undergraduate philosophy classes. But I knew I had a problem with letting my feelings sidetrack me from making my connections with jobs, and I was not going to let them mess me up again.
Before I started my first philosophy class, I decided that I did not have the right attitude towards them. Because these classes were my connections, this meant there must be a good way of relating to them. Even if the classes themselves were horrible, I had to face up to the fact that if I was in a negative relationship with them, I had something that was contributing to me being in this relationship. Being stuck in a bad class was no different than being stuck in a bad hitchhiking situation: if I had nothing holding me to the bad situation, I would not be stuck in it.
With this change of attitude, I was able to find ways to do get through the classes in a good way. Instead of concentrating on the incredibly dull things the professor was talking about, I would watch his eyebrows move while he talked, or his cigarette smoke making nice swirls as it drifted up, or study foreign language vocabulary cards.
Some months later I received a five-year teaching assistantship from the Syracuse University philosophy department, and I knew I had successfully run the gauntlet. This teaching assistantship, which I would not have gotten in religious studies, paid my tuition for five years and also came with a very good stipend. If I had not spent so my time learning from the past and the mistakes I made about money, I would have been pushed off course and ended up in another bad place.
Seven months later, I was learning how to be a teaching assistant. In the training, they said that in order to get the students excited about the material, it was necessary for the professor to be excited about it. I knew there was no way I could get excited about the incredibly boring material they taught in modern philosophy. Thinking about how to do the best I could in my situation, I realized that the people saying I needed to be excited about the material I taught were professional educators; in other words, they cared a lot about education. This meant it was easy for them to think other people cared about education too if someone could just get them to see the good aspects of a subject. I thought these professional educators were missing the motivation of the vast majority of students: these students did not see themselves as engaging in learning or getting an education. The vast majority thought they were just jumping through the next hoop on the way to something they wanted to do.
I clearly faced my situation: I could not get excited about the stupid things I was required to teach, and the students themselves were not interested in what they were learning. Thankfully, this possibly very negative situation was not a problem, as I quickly saw I could play a much different game. I could make it obvious I understood the students’ negative situation and how they were jumping through hoops. I could also make it clear my goal was to make the hoop-jumping as pleasant as possible for them. It helped that because I was oriented to God and serving others, I did not need or want any validation from the students in my class. This meant I could let them be the stars of the class and there was the space for them to look smart. It turned out that while many other teaching assistants often had trouble getting their students involved in a philosophical discussion, my students had long, very interesting, and sometimes even wild discussions about the material.
Despite all my apprehensions about philosophy, I discovered I was excellent at teaching it, I was energized by teaching it, and I was well-paid for doing it. Because teaching did not take energy from me, and I was so efficient at seeing how to do it well, I could teach many more courses in a term than other people. The normal load for graduate students at Syracuse was teaching two courses while taking two or three more. But I was so efficient, the last term I taught five courses (at three different colleges), and took four courses myself. Things work like that in normal life situations: if you are oriented to doing the right thing, and you clearly understand your situation, and you see how you can make the best of the situation, it is much easier to be successful.
I applied the same attitude towards my dissertation and in less than four months wrote one on the Stoics, who are generally ignored now but were very influential ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. The dissertation was titled The Joy of Torture and was about the Stoics’ idea that a person doing God’s work would always be happy, even if she were tortured.
My wife, partially because of academic papers she had written on women who had received divine voices, was given a tenure-track job in the University of Wisconsin system. In 1994, we all moved to central Wisconsin and in the following years I earned very good money being a mostly part time philosophy professor.
By 1996 my two oldest children were in high school, and for thrills I would play a video game called Dr. Mario with them. When they both went off to Dartmouth College together, I turned to short term stock trading with the money I had made from teaching extra courses. (Short term trading meant holding a stock for seconds, hours, days, or sometimes even months.) Many experts say that you cannot beat the market, but by closely observing the situation, I figured out that there were times when very good companies are tremendously undervalued. I realized that if I understood a company, the economy, and the market better than other people, I could take advantage of the times when people’s emotional biases and misperceptions caused them to stupidly sell off a good stock. Because I saw the situation better than other people (by doing extensive research on particular companies and the general economy), and I did not get caught in the emotional fears or hopes that distorted other people’s perceptions, I often made money very quickly. I did well because I never complained about the many stupidities of the system, but just worked the angles to my advantage. By correctly apprizing the situation, I made five times my original investment during a time (late 1997 through early 2009) when the market as a whole was down ten percent.
Because of my stock trading, I understood the economy and how it worked, and this allowed me to see that the crash of 2008-9 was eventually coming. We not only made prudent financial investments in the time before the 2008-9 recession, but I actually made money trading stocks in the crash. By this time we were among the top 20% of Americans in terms of yearly income, had very secure jobs, and our three children had all graduated from Ivy League colleges.
But this financial good fortune was not very meaningful compared to the fact I was not succeeding in what I really cared about: helping people with my spiritual ideas. When I was working on my dissertation, it occurred to me that instead of helping individuals deal with their negative patterns of thinking and behavior, I could have even more of an impact if I dealt with Western culture’s negative patterns. Just like individuals had to look at their past to understand where they had made mistakes, Western culture as a whole could be seen as an individual with a past and patterns of thought and behavior. I was particularly interested in the way modern thinkers had developed the modern paradigm and how spirituality fit into this development. (One subject I investigated was the relationship between the rise of modern science and the decline of Neoplatonism, the last major spiritual paradigm of the West. I discussed this topic in chapter one.) I soon saw deep similarities between the thinking of the major thinkers of New Age movement and the thinkers of two other important earlier cultural movements, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The Enlightenment (which lasted from about 1650 to 1800) included such people as Thomas Jefferson, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire. Romanticism (which lasted from about 1800 to 1850) included luminaries such as Hegel, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Novalis. The New Age movement was like these two cultural movements in that all three had no central leader, no central doctrines, were composed of loose networks of relationships, and exerted a profound influence on the larger culture.
As I investigated Western cultural history by reading the writings of major Romantics, I saw many important similarities between them and major thinkers of the New Age movement. For example, many major thinkers in both movements emphasized mysticism and becoming One with God or the Infinite. Many major thinkers in both movements emphasized the power of the imagination and how reality was created by our thoughts. They also both emphasized that human consciousness was the Earth or Spirit becoming aware of it self. They both emphasized that feelings were the criterion of what was true, and thought channeling and crystals were important. Many other important New Age beliefs were originally part of Romanticism; in fact for many New Age ideas a direct line of influence could be traced from the Romantics through intermediate movements (such as Theosophy, Spiritualism, New Thought, and Transcendentalism) to New Agers. I was not discovering an original insight here; some other scholars had also seen the similarities between the two movements.
But the more interesting fact I discovered was the extensive similarities between the ways of thought common among Enlightenment figures and ways of thought common among New Agers. Most people who research the Enlightenment generally concentrate on only a few thinkers (like David Hume and Immanuel Kant) that were supposedly representative of the period. Instead of studying a few thinkers whom we anoint as the period’s representative figures, I read a much broader array of hundreds of thinkers that were influential in that time but were mostly ignored now. These thinkers included people such as Francis Hutcheson, John Trenchard, Thomas Reid, Lord Kames, Samuel Clarke, Charles Bonnet, Charles Buffon, John Needham, Thomas Chubb, Maximilian Robespierre, Leonhard Euler, and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just.
Going through vast numbers of Enlightenment texts, I continually came across passages that were much less secular and much more God-centered than how the Enlightenment was portrayed by scholars. I started realizing that the vast majority of Enlightenment thinkers were spiritually-oriented people.
Wondering how the Enlightenment thinkers could be so spiritual, but be portrayed as so secular, I eventually realized most contemporary scholars had reasons to ignore the Enlightenment thinkers’ spirituality. The Enlightenment is commonly seen as being an important aspect of rise of the modern world, so when scholars discuss the Enlightenment, they are often looking at through the lens of their view of the modern secular paradigm. Those who like secular modernity have a reason to see the Enlightenment thinkers as secular thinkers because this makes the Enlightenment part of their heritage. (Peter Gay’s book on the Enlightenment is the best example of this mode of thought.) Those Marxist Leftists who critique the modern world as over-rational, (for example Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment) also want see the Enlightenment thinkers as rational secularists so they can critique it. It tremendously complicates the narrative of both of these groups if many Enlightenment thinkers were very pious and God-centered.
Reading so many Enlightenment thinkers and comparing their principles to major New Agers, I saw they both emphasized some key principles. The principles were expressed in different words, but compared to a modern secular paradigm, the Enlightenment thinkers had some extremely important similarities to New Age thinkers; in fact, in many ways they were closer to New Agers than modern secularists. Many major thinkers in both movements thought God or some type of spiritual force was involved with the creation of the universe and providentially cared for the people in the world. Many major thinkers in both traditions thought Nature was a manifestation of God’s goodness and if we were in tune with Nature we were living the way God meant us to live. Many major thinkers in both traditions emphasized the importance of natural law and guiding our actions by these laws. They also thought that, because we lived in a good universe guided by God’s goodness, it was realistic to have a very optimistic attitude towards life and our ability to do well in this world.
From all this research, I saw that the best way of understanding the New Age movement was as a cultural movement with a foundation in the Enlightenment worldview and which then supplemented this with elements of Romanticism. The sensationalistic Romantic elements (channeling and crystals for example) received all the attention, but New Agers saw these things in an Enlightenment way of God caring for us and working by natural laws. The New Age movement went astray when it overemphasized Romantic elements (such as the Oneness of all things or we create our own reality) and denigrated important elements of the Enlightenment (such as critical thinking and rationality).
After years of studying the original writings from hundreds of thinkers from all three periods, I wrote a manuscript demonstrating how the major thinkers of the New Age movement had many of the same principles as major thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. After writing the manuscript, however, I realized that there was little hope that anyone would publish it. Half the problem was that one major audience for the book, modern spiritually-oriented people, did not want to see themselves as integrally related to the sweep of Western cultural history, and so no New Age publisher would want the book. The other possible audience for the book, scholars, would never even consider the thesis unless I first demonstrated that the Enlightenment thinkers were much more spiritual than most scholars believed.
Thinking I had a better chance of changing the opinions of scholars than New Agers, I started writing academic pieces on how the vast majority of Enlightenment thinkers were actually pious people. After I finished an article and a book on this topic, I became discouraged. It seemed so many academics were so invested in seeing the Enlightenment thinkers as secular that I could never find a way around their prejudices. As I thought I was stuck in a relationship that I could not get to work, I gave up on it and stopped doing scholarly work.
Instead I spent the next five years reading novels in Chinese and daytrading stocks. These activities were not contributing anything to help anyone, but I liked reading Chinese and was trying to find the best intellectual stimulation I could.
Five years later, in 2009, I had run out of interesting Chinese novels to read and daytrading stocks had lost its allure. With nothing else to do, I faced up to the fact that I had made a mistake turning away from my relationship with intellectual work; instead I had to keep trying to find a way of making that relationship work.
This time I was more determined not to get discouraged and to try to find creative solutions to my troubles in the relationship. I knew I was not likely to get a book published on the troubles many New Agers get into because they think “All is One,” but I realized I could set up a website which worked towards the book. So on a website, spiritualcritiques.com, I posted essays critiquing, from a spiritual point of view, the ideas of major spiritual thinkers such as Eckhart Tolle, Pema Chodron, Neale Donald Walsch, and Deepak Chopra. I then used the money I had made from trading stocks to buy keyword ads. So when someone googled “Ken Wilber,” my ad would pop up saying, “If you want to read an intelligent critique of Ken Wilber from a spiritual perspective, click here.” People did respond to the ads, and the site was getting three hundred page views a day. As an added benefit, several thousand people then went on to look at my autobiographical Flowing book, so it was read by many more people than ever before.
I was making very clear and significant progress reaching spiritual people with my intellectual work. Sadly, I was getting nowhere on my intellectual work geared to academic audiences. I felt stuck again because they were too prejudiced to publish my writings.
I was stuck for many months until I reaped the benefits of having a spiritual practice that did not focus on the eternal now or living in the present moment. Oftentimes in my spiritual practice, I focused at looking at the parts of my life where things were not going well and thinking about other times in the past when I had messed up in similar relationships. I then looked at what kinds of ego problems I had that got in the way of the connection working smoothly. In this unrelated area of my life, I realized the cause of my troubles was focusing on what I wanted to do, rather than what the Universe or God wanted me to do. This focus on my wants and desires caused me to have a troubled relationship because it led me to focusing too much on what I wanted in a relationship and not focus enough on what the other party wanted from it.
This insight in another area of my life helped me solve my troubles with academics because I saw I was doing the same thing with academics. In my academic writing, I was totally focusing on my side of the relationship, what I wanted and needed and not seeing what the academic publishers’ wanted. I wanted to write a book with an overarching theme about the Enlightenment thinkers as the groundwork for a book on the New Age movement. But academic publishers almost never wanted such general books; they favored much smaller projects on more focused subjects.
Once I got beyond focusing on what I wanted, and instead focused on what the academic publishers wanted, an obvious idea of how to proceed just popped into my head: I realized I should write on the deists. They were important thinkers of the period, but were a much smaller topic, and not as contentiously fought over as the Enlightenment in general.
While I was very glad that I had finally made a connection with how to write about the Enlightenment, I soon started kicking myself because I had already successfully taken this approach for my dissertation. In graduate school, I wanted to write a dissertation on Socrates or Plato’s spirituality. I soon realized, however, that this was a poor choice because scholars were too heavily invested in seeing both of them as secular, modern thinkers. Rather than bemoaning my situation or the scholars’ prejudices, I faced up to the troubles in the relationship and dealt with it by writing about a later group of spiritual philosophers, the Stoics. The Stoics saw themselves as descendants of Socratic spirituality, but very few academics cared enough about the Stoics to make writing a dissertation on their spirituality impossible. The choice of the Stoics was such a good one that I had researched and wrote a three hundred page dissertation in four months. So now I was kicking myself because it had taken me fifteen years to see that I should have taken the same approach regarding my work on the Enlightenment. I felt so stupid.
I then read all the works of the most influential deists, the English ones. I wrote an article on the English deists which demonstrated that these deists were actually very pious thinkers who believed in miracles and revelation. Then I submitted my article to an academic journal. Academic journals send submitted articles to experts to solicit the experts’ opinions on whether the article is good enough to be published. When the experts sent me their opinion on my article, they said my thesis was a “staggering conclusion” but it needed certain improvements before it could be published. Unfortunately I did not understand how they wanted me to improve my article. I could have been stymied in a negative relationship with these experts, but thankfully my son understood the letter. He was now thirty, had a Ph. D., and spent his time writing academic articles so that he could get a job as a professor. Because we had him when the voice I channeled told us to, he was now old enough to understand the general academic code words and even the specific worries the experts had about my article. It had always been a blessing that we had him early, but his help in this situation was something totally unexpected. With his help, I gradually understood the experts’ criticisms and made the paper significantly better by taking them into account. The article was then accepted for publication in the academic journal.
After fifteen years, I had finally made a breakthrough in my academic writing. Because I had so misunderstood my relationship with academic publishers and it took me so long to find a good way of dealing with the relationship, it took me fifteen years to get a thirty page article published. On the other hand, with my dissertation, because I never just blamed the other people in the relationship, and was able to see how to deal with the relationship in a positive manner, I had finished something ten times longer in significantly less time.
After finishing the article on the English deists, I started writing a book on all the Enlightenment deists in general. The research came easily and I quickly got a very good sense of how the book should be written. I then excitedly wrote the first two chapters in an elegant and beautiful way. I was excited because I thought I had finally gotten through my problem with academics and I would finally do well with them.
But it did not turn out that way. To get this book published, I wrote some articles on small, focused topics about the deists. These articles were rejected by academic journals, with some of the rejection letters saying that the deists could not possibly have true spiritual values. Even worse, some of the rejection letters said that no one cared about the deists anyways. This meant to me that no matter how well I wrote about the deists or how creatively I found a way around the biases of the scholars, it would not matter as the academic establishment just did not care if these deists were spiritually oriented or not.
I had thought that writing a book on the deists would take a year or two more of work, and then I would move on to another subject. Now it seemed I would have to spend ten years fighting to get scholars to see how spiritual most of the deists were. I hated the idea of having to fight so hard for so long for something that was only a small part of my intellectual work.
Researching and writing on the deists stopped being easy and joyful. The times of the day when previously I would be happily working on the deists, I did not want to do anything at all besides lay in bed. I had no reason to get out of bed; indeed, it felt painful to get out of bed and be part of the world. If my connection to energy was like a hose, it felt like someone was standing on that hose, and little energy was flowing through to me. I was tremendously irritable and often felt like there was no reason to do anything.
I felt that no matter how good my writings on the deists were, the academic establishment would not pay attention to them. Many people have relationships where the other person does not give them something they want and feel the connection should legitimately give them. One person who was in such a situation was a very successful businessman named Tom, who had become aware of my ideas through seeing a key word ad about Ken Wilber. He then read some of my other writings and liked my approach to practical problems. He emailed me and asked if I would help him make some connections in his life. At first we worked on some easy problems and he appreciated the way this approach worked in his life. Then he ran into a much harder problem: his wife did not want to have sex as often as he wanted it. While he had a very active sex drive and wanted to play twice a day, she only wanted to play twice a month. He felt very frustrated in the relationship; he could feel certain times when he felt he should be having sex with her but she did not feel the same thing at all. Talking to her about the problem did not help and cheating on her was not an option for Tom.
Tom and I together figured out a way of dealing with relationships in which the other person did not exchange energy well. The first step was for the person who was having trouble with the relationship to understand that his troubles at particular moments came from being in such a non-reciprocating relationship. This would help would help him understand why he was having trouble during that time. The next step was avoiding doing stupid or negative things to fill up the blank time or help overcome the negative feelings. So someone had to avoid overeating, or over-drinking or indulging in other negative time-filling activities as these activities bring their own negative effects. The third thing was never blaming the other person in the relationship. Someone having a negative experience in a relationship was in some way consciously or unconsciously contributing to bringing about the situation. This person had to face up this. Expressing negativity about the other person’s lacks would only start other bad cycles in the relationship. Instead someone with a negative aspect in their relationship should keep looking at why he had problems in this area to contribute to bringing it on to him self. Finally a person in such a relationship should think of practical ways of helping herself. So in Tom’s case of sexual frustration, he should consider things like sex toys. So when the time for sex with his wife came, and he could see that he was not going to have fun with her that night, he had to be creative in taking care of himself.
After Tom and I figured out this approach, he started applying it to his relationship with his wife. Eight months later he emailed me and wrote that his trouble had been resolved in a positive way: his wife had noticed a younger co-worker making eyes at Tom at a company party. At first his wife did not like this, but she knew he cared too much about her to cheat. His wife also knew he was a good guy and a good husband, and he was suffering because of her lack of a libido. On her own, she said one night that it was okay with her if he had an affair with the sexy co-worker as long as it was only every other weekend. Tom was amazed, the sexy coworker was game, and they met every other weekend for two days of long passionate sex. This situation lasted for a year until the co-worker moved somewhere else. Needless to say Tom was very happy with this solution. His wife was also happy with it as she felt it helped their relationship.
It is a very tricky thing to think that you have done all the necessary right things in a relationship and then say your relationship should be working out in a better way. This attitude could be the result of you not seeing more things that you need to do. While Tom’s wife eventually agreed with him that he deserved more sex than she could give him, it could have been that he was much more at fault: he could have been that he was not making her feel loved enough and so she did not want sex with him. So I want to emphasize the third step in the process Tom and I figured out: never blame the other person and keep looking at how you are contributing to the problem.
It seemed to me that I was in a situation like Tom’s: I was connected to people in the academic establishment who were very resistant to seeing the deists as spiritual thinkers. Thus I was not getting energy back from the relationship. So I applied the method we had worked out together.
The first thing I did was realize the times when I felt so hopeless and down were times I would have been working on deist projects and getting energy from working on them. This allowed me to understand why I felt this way. It also allowed me to do the next step: make sure I did not do anything stupid during those times to try to fill up the hole in my life. Instead I would just lay in bed for hours, meditating, just watching my breath go in and out. As I was extremely irritable around those times, I would avoid other people so as not to set up any negative relationships with them. I also made sure to eat well and exercise to not disrupt further my equilibrium.
Then I started looking, with no success so far, at why I might be in such a negative relationship, and what might hold me to this negative spot.
The last step was the practical one of finding other outlets for my intellectual energy. I started significantly rewriting this book you are currently reading. I started researching a book about how many New Age thinkers get misled by the metaphysic view that “All is One.”
The night before I finally figured out my problem I was working on this chapter and wrote this paragraph: “So far I have not gotten through the problem. It took Tom eight months of using this method before he got through to the other side and his wife suggested he have an affair. I have no idea how long it will take me, but I have the right approach, and have faith I will eventually get through it to the other side, like I have done so many other times in the past.”
The next morning, I prayed to be centered on what God or the Universe wanted me to do rather than on what I wanted to do. Then I saw that with the deist problem I was not centered enough on what God wanted me to do, but on my feelings and what I wanted to do. I did not want to fight a ten year battle with the academic establishment to get them to recognize the deists’ spirituality. But so what? That might be what God wanted me to do. But I was not thinking about at that at all because I was so centered on my feelings and what I wanted to do.
Then I realized that the start of my most recent problem with the deists and academics was that I was doing the same thing I had done so many times with my career in the past thirty years: I was centering on my feelings in the present moment and letting that control me. So I was very happy writing about the deists until I felt that I would have to fight a long battle against the academic establishment that just felt so difficult. I let this feeling of it being difficult overwhelm me. So many times in the past I had made mistakes in my career and with money by letting my feelings determine what I should do next. On the other hand, I had been so successful in first deciding to be a professor and then of deciding to be a philosophy professor because I did not let my feelings overwhelm me and control my decisions. I even made significant money as a daytrader because I knew how to take advantage of times when other people’s feelings overwhelmed them and they oversold a good stock.
I knew I had to not let my feelings push me off course again. If God wanted me to do a long hard, fight for the deists, then I would do it.
A couple minutes after thinking this way, it popped into my mind how I could write about the deists in a way that would get published. I had gotten so discouraged about the whole project because, no matter how good my research was, no one cared enough about the deists I was investigating to publish it. But what if I linked my research on much lesser known deists to well-known thinkers like Kant, Jefferson, or Franklin? Scholars would care about that.
I had found a way around my problem and a few hours later started writing a whole different article I think should have an excellent chance of getting published. This article also helps lay the groundwork for the deist book I was writing.
Considering how many times in the past I have made mistakes by focusing too much on what I want to do, it would be stupid of me to say that this problem will not recur. It probably will. But hopefully I will get over it faster next time.