I’ve been chatting with a friend who, like me, has been involved in different healing communities. The question we’ve asked is, do those communities - and our societies - have a bias toward fixing things and is that bias closing us off from other opportunities?
Is there another whole way?
Quite often I think there might be.
There’s good reason for an emphasis on problem-awareness and problem solving of course. Those of our ancestors who could sense and see the tiger and protect themselves and the family survived better than those who didn’t. Over time we’ve developed complex systems to become safer and more secure. They’ve worked - and they haven’t. We’re currently besieged by unintended consequences.
The move beyond fixing, even briefly seems to entail an intentional stepping away, a shift in consciousness. But if we do step away, what do we have in that larger consciousness?
It's well encapsulated in the notion of the seed. The seed is a miraculous possibility and a central symbol of a new possibility coming into being. Something tiny containing within it the flowering of something much, much greater than it. From the acorn comes the mighty oak as everyone knows.
But we’re like this too. Ideas and thoughts when planted in good thinking have a tendency to sprout and go on their own way and become something bigger and different. Good stories are seeds too. When stories fall on new ears, they propagate. The stories talk to each other. They come up with something new, like kids do after they’ve listened to the adults talking.
But it seems there has to be a little pause from fixing.
It’s to first of all recognize that there is such a beyond fixing, another altitude of thought.
Perhaps throughout history we've been so preoccupied with survival and with what needs to be done in order to to survive - to stay eating, to stay physically and mentally vital – that we’re perpetually in fixing mode.
Fixing looks like us trying to make stable and long lasting solutions. Such solutions succeed to a point but they also keep the impermanence and spontaneity of life away. They're like a solid structure that we can belong in but also like a prison. Fixing wants to build that permanent structure. But beyond that is the world of impermanence. It’s not empty or difficult as I’ve observed from my brief visits. Everything comes to you fresh and unencumbered and starts to grow like a seed of something more wonderful than you could ever have figured out.
That seed’s not interested in fixing anything yet things get better anyhow.
In the 60s or the 70s there was an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog that had a slogan on one of the covers that said “We can't put it together, it is together.” Also from the Catalog I think was the saying that “The world is falling apart and the only thing that will help is if we do nothing to try and stop it.”
When out beyond fixing, and doing nothing to stop it, images and things come - mini-visions, little flying carpets of possibilities glimmers of a larger picture of the future.
They have a characteristically exciting but also unclear quality. I experience them as both being here in this world and coming from beyond.
They already exist, a little like the oak in the acorn. They don't have to be created or figured out so much as entertained. The futures that we want may be already floating around but we don’t see them. We’re too busy trying to fix things! They’re there as a deeper unity, like the unity and complementarity of men and women that’s often forgotten in the fractious debate.
In those times it seems that each of us is connected to a larger wholeness in which our earthly life and body are situated but are only a part. At the same time, our consciousness has an opening to an otherness that includes the night sky with all the stars, a vast otherness that we scarcely dare to notice might be there. Part of it’s nature is that we don’t know much about it. It’s beyond us! And it's just not part of our awareness in the fix’n it world. Down here in the fix’n it world we’re tied to laws and things need urgent attention. The law of cause and effect, the laws of karma, are in effect. These are true as far as they go.
To what extent is it possible that we could actually see and move toward larger possibilities that are not commonly imagined? Or can we? Could we work with these seeds and activate them somehow? I think we can but not with our usual attention. There seems to be another factor involved that’s a pure gift - a tanager lands near you, for example, when you’re sitting in a tree. You could never never make it land there but you can be sitting quietly and waiting, with attention.
The thing we want is beyond strategy and our usual intention. If it could be controlled or summoned we’d just be left with our control and it’s comically bad side effects. The ones we have now. Something larger holds all this. It can’t be fixed and doesn’t need fixing. And yet our knowing this at those moments when we do seems to be part of what helps.
Dear Reader, as you know I’m often after writing about men and women and often too about the dire challenges of our time. But it feels good to remember and perhaps put this wider perspective at the centre. It belongs there in my own life and is fun to write about.
I’m inspired by your feedback, especially when you make it public. Much encouraged by your paid support too. Thanks so much; you know who you are. Writers love feedback! Feedback is food and I like to think nourishment goes both ways like a potluck! I’m curious how this more lofty and spiritually oriented writing lands for you. It’s fun for me and close to my heart! I get to wrestle with some challenging questions like am I being a big know-it-all. But then I figure some of you are also wondering how to bring private concerns to the fore in a challenging time like this.
The Wholeness beyond Fixing
Love the quotes from the Whole Earth Catalogue. I see you addressing the paradox between doing and being, between intention and action. Appreciate you dancing with these ideas, never as a know-it-all, always as a fellow traveler on the journey.
This is perfectly timely for me to read today. Thank you Andrew. This perfect connected moment is serving as validation of my choice to follow the impulse to stop, to mostly disconnect and to wait, pray, gather energetically that came in 2018. I have had global validation, for sure. But at this long-seeming moment in the pause, I can feel the hint of despair some days. You remind me here of the wisdom and purpose in this rest.