Assuming that simply being alive and making any kind of progress is a never-ending hamster wheel, an ouroboros where the outcome you worked diligently toward is swallowed up in the gaping maw of the next problem, challenge, or opportunity, there’s a certain point in any cycle where it seems unlikely that you’ll make it back around to the starting point. Think of it like that moment when the tilt-a-whirl hits its maximum spin and you hit the metal side of the car with a lurch in your stomach that anticipates but doesn’t quite expect the reverse cycle to kick off.
More often than not, those pause points or moments of relative uncertainty function as epiphany enablers. Like a song in a Broadway musical, they introduce plot devices that take you from one point-of-view (like you’re really mortal enemies) to one diametrically opposed (like now you’re madly in love), without the benefit of developmental dialog and/or theatrical business in between.
Given that, and in the absence of any solid way to measure evolution, how do you actually know you’re making any kind of progress whatsoever? Do the problems get smaller, does your calm take an increasingly larger percentage of your time, are your vital signs like blood pressure, sugar, and activity antibodies more in line with acceptable standards from reputable medical authorities?
A lot of the world’s spiritual traditions suggest that you don’t really know you’re making any headway until you stop thinking about making headway. The best of them even say that making progress is the easiest way to know you’re not making progress. In Soto Zen, for example, the practice is the outcome. You don’t meditate to transform yourself into an enlightened being, a bodhisattva, because you already are one. Just sitting, shikantaza in Japanese, is the enlightenment of just practicing. Shunryu Suzuki said we’re all perfect, we could just use a little improvement. Mac Rebennack might have agreed, saying “You’re on the right trip, but in the wrong car.” In any case, the trick is to arrive without travelling, right?
But what does that really mean? If there’s nowhere to go, and time is mere artificial construct, a house of mirrors reflecting forward and backward in the House of Now, then why are so many of us interested in self-improvement and self-awareness, and so battle-worn resisting self-interest, self-doubt, self-aggrandizement, and self-pity?
Self-help is a mega-million dollar industry built on the history of human fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of death, fear of not being enough, fear of dying without living. As if you had a choice. UG Krishnamurti, the other Krishnamurti, said we are all asking a question we already are able to answer. We just don’t like the answer – and want somebody else to tell us we don’t have to do any work on ourselves by ourselves. Once you stop asking questions, he said, you no longer need any answers. You just live. Until you don’t.
Do we really want to live forever? What for? What do you think you’ll get done in the next two to three hundred years that you haven’t managed to screw up already? We don’t want to learn, to become wise, to reach enlightenment. Because when we do, all the great religious traditions tell us we become one with the divine. That’s what atonement (at-one-ment) really means, after all. You can’t really take the salt back out of salt water once you’ve dissolved it. If you could, what’s the point? Isn’t that like imagining you get more than one once in a lifetime opportunity?
Once you get the chance to level up, some traditions say the best course is to hold off on that advancement until everyone else gets there too. But if you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, you understand that the only way to not keep accumulating experience points is to die. It’s only when you’re dead that the rest of your squad has an opportunity to catch up with you. And some beings take a lot longer than others and gain points in different ways. We don’t all regenerate hit points or magic in the same way, nor do we advance levels at the same rate. In that respect, we’re not all created equal. Each of has our own set of skills, our selected bag of tricks, that give us a myriad of complex, complementary, and often contradictory means to accomplish our objectives. We don’t even necessarily have the same objectives – except of course to remain alive at the end of the quest.
You go with what you know. And you go into what you don’t know. And as is often said, unless you know where you’re going, there’s not much point in choosing who you need along for the journey. In the same way you don’t measure the quality of a goldfish by its ability to climb a tree, you don’t need an elephant to help you on a long sea voyage.
Sometimes, though, it’s the skills you don’t know you need in your party that make all the difference. Once again, Dunning-Kruger plays a part. If you don’t know anything, you don’t even know what you don’t know. So how do you know who should lead you, or when you need to lead, or follow?
You get to roll the dice. Isn’t that enough for now?
08 APR 2025