I've been aware from a young age of the disparity between potential and actual. Nothing cosmic here, just the effect of my mother constantly telling me that it didn't matter how smart I was, what mattered was what I did with it. But sitting around contemplating the nature of self and reality were not what she had in mind; she was thinking more along the lines of letters like M.D. or J.D., or even D.D.S. So here I am today: my mother's son, the college dropout.
But that's not the whole story. What my mother meant to teach me about specifically about career path, I understood on a broader level. As a teenager began to realize that there were disparities between I thought I should be capable of, and what I actually was doing. So I started to look for ways to close that gap. So I started setting goals -- pretty much the only tool society teaches us for making changes to ourselves. In the beginning, I was focused exclusively on behavior modification again, because that's what we're taught. Work harder, get up earlier, be more disciplined, communicate in a certain manner; every goal was to be something different than I was at the time through efforts to change my behavior.
This led to several very frustrating years filled with failure from which I learned two things: First, no matter how badly I thought I wanted something when I was just sitting thinking about it, there would arise a situation where I wanted something else more. That's obvious, right? No matter how badly I say want to get up at 5:30 when I'm fully awake and rested, it can be a very different story when 5:30 rolls around and it's cold outside the bed and what am I going to do with myself at 5:30 in the morning anyway? Second, I realized that no matter how important I felt the desire was, I was always capable of forgetting it. In fact, it seemed I forgot more than I remembered. Remembering seemed to happen the most right after I had failed to do perform the subject of my goal.
On Moral Perfection
A few years later I found myself spending some time in the newly-accessible ex-Soviet country of Ukraine still grappling with the same difficulties. My spiritual journey was, at the time, was leading me through a deep examination of traditional religion, specifically Christianity. There was a strong emphasis in the denomination of my family on the the perfection of the body of the church, so I became interested in the model of Jesus as the perfect being, and was inspired with new meaning behind my efforts at self-improvement. I realized the New Testament, that this wasn't just a matter of eliminating certain behaviors, it was about creating a new foundation for the character.
This spoke to me of the need for virtue, and above all love. It seemed to me that my goal had to be more than just a rigid model for behavior, so changing my behavior became a part of a larger goal of moral perfection. As I was arriving at this new perspective of what comprises personal growth, I was also practicing an informal form of introspective journaling. It was very stream of consciousness and without any intentional purpose other than outlet. But the simple act of putting my thoughts onto a page led me to a greater awareness of my actions outside the context in which they occurred. I learned two important things from this.
First, I began to see there were many influencing factors behind my behavior: the same moral principles that I was reading about or their lack. It became very clear in my mind that Jesus' teaching was not about changing behavior; behavior on its own meant nothing. As he clearly illustrated on a number of occasions, it is our intent -- whether to lay up treasure on earth or in heaven -- that determines the inherent quality of our actions. I realized that I needed to elevate my focus above specific behaviors to the principles or virtues I aspired to embody.
Through journaling I also saw that both behavior and the embodiment of virtue in action could be observed over time. This completely changed my perspective on self-improvement. Little did I know it at the time, but I was arriving at the same conclusion and method that Benjamin Franklin had come to 265 years earlier, also while traveling at the age of twenty coincidentally:
It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I bad imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin devised a practice that included daily evaluation of his embodiment of thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, chastity, tranquility, and humility. He would focus his attention on each in turn, for a week's time, after which he would start at the beginning. Each day, he evaluated his performance relative to the current virtue placing a red mark for each failing with the goal of eventually living with no red marks. He even kept a journal with a chart for tracking this with him at all times, even when he wasn't actively practicing it.
My system was slightly different, but principally the same: I made a list of what I wanted to improve, and each night I would put a mark in my journal, rating my performance on a scale. (I used marks similar to the Consumer Reports dots, if you've ever seen the magazine.) It was an open-ended list based on a desire to be specific combined with the assumption that growth would create broader, finer-grained awareness of what I could improve. I ended up revising the list every couple of weeks, tweaking or swapping items. I varied the size of the list, experimenting with the number of items I could effectively focus on. But in the end I was limited by time.
The review process was cumbersome, in part because -- probably as a side-effect of having written software professionally since I was thirteen -- I saw this as data that should be normalized. But how do you normalize subjective evaluation of subjective topics? Well, I realized that absolute scientific rigor was impossible, but that was okay because nobody was going to build nuclear reactors based on my math. So I decided that subjective consistency was sufficient. But I was using an ostensibly absolute scale, meaning that the black dot was supposed to represent the same amount of suckitude, regardless of when it was noted. But that's too much context to deal with, so I would review the past couple of days each night, markings an comments. Did I mention it was cumbersome?
But it worked. I saw myself changing over time, even if I couldn't adequately quantify it. And most importantly, I felt happier when I practiced it.
Casting Away the Speckled Axe
When I returned home, I tried to maintain the practice, but fell away before too long. It was too demanding and cumbersome to fit in with the demands of my rapidly-changing adult life. Before long life was moving faster than my methodology could keep up with. I was back writing business software; I attended college and dropped out of college; I got married; we had a child; I started a business, the business failed; had another child. Through all of this, I felt the want for something like I had practiced those nine months in Kiev. I made a similar observation about this practice that Franklin did about his attention to his virtue of order:
I found that, tho' it might be practicable where a man's business was such as to leave him the disposition of his time, that of a journeyman printer, for instance, it was not possible to be exactly observed by a master, who must mix with the world, and often receive people of business at their own hours...This article, therefore, cost me so much painful attention, and my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt, and content myself with a faulty character in that respect, like the man who, in buying an ax of a smith, my neighbour, desired to have the whole of its surface as bright as the edge. The smith consented to grind it bright for him if he would turn the wheel; he turn'd, while the smith press'd the broad face of the ax hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing. The man came every now and then from the wheel to see how the work went on, and at length would take his ax as it was, without farther grinding. "No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes," said the man, "but I think I like a speckled ax best." And I believe this may have been the case with many, who, having, for want of some such means as I employ'd, found the difficulty of obtaining good and breaking bad habits in other points of vice and virtue, have given up the struggle, and concluded that "a speckled ax was best"; for something, that pretended to be reason, was every now and then suggesting to me that such extream nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous; that a perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.
We were in perfect agreement. Except for the point about allowing a few faults in oneself. Well, that and having a sense of humor about the matter. Neither of those would come for a number of years. Though my conclusion differed in practice, in desire it did not. I returned to it time and time again in my mind, trying to devise a way to improve it and adapt it for my busy and changing life. But each time I returned to it, I found I had changed as well, and found myself faced with recombining an entirely different formula. So the practice gave way to the memory of the practice.
Is There Life After the Death of the Practice?
Lately, my mind has been returning to that period of time. It has had a powerful and lasting impact even thought it only lasted a short time. It taught me that personal growth and the spiritual path are not separate. Not that we need to spiritualize personal development or vice versa, but that there is no separation between person and spirit. We are both; our nature craves expansion on both levels.
It also showed, though I didn't realize it at the time, that there are viable models for combining rational methods and formalism with spirituality. No, it wouldn't hold up to scientific rigor, but it's not scientific--science is designed to answer questions about the exterior world. This is entirely an interior pursuit. Part of the dialectic of modern culture is that we have not successfully reconciled the interior and exterior aspects of our experience. It fails because science demands objective measurement, and the interior can only be apprehended through interpretive assertion. We experience something, then we tell a story about it -- which is the only thing we can do -- but then we make a critical mistake. We misinterpret the truthfulness of our interpretation with the truth of it. This is a simple behavior to explain: we expect to find concrete answers of the variety that rational empiricism provides, so we frame our subjective experience in the perspective of objectivity and thus miss the point entirely.
If we accept that the epistemology and outcomes of interior experience are fundamentally different from those of exterior experience, then we can begin to formalize a valid approach for approaching personal growth in a reliable manner. What I mean is, making a subjective, relative-scale judgment on the degree to which one has embodied a non-absolute characteristic clearly does not hold up to scientific rigor. But it's fundamentally not an objectively observable experience. Sure, we can measure the brain waves of Tibetan monks meditating and show that something different is happening, but science cannot in any way qualify their interior experience. So we have to come up with a different way of evaluating these experiences. And with different methods of examination comes a different range of outcomes. "True or false," the primary concern of the scientific method, becomes irrelevant. Both the examination and the experience are of exclusively interior value, and inform only future interior experience.
On the other side, we have to stop blindly accepting as gospel formulas for growth from self-proclaimed experts who have only proven themselves successful at selling formulas for growth. Yes, there's a lot of good information out there--I'm not knocking anyone who's selling good ideas. But as Shunryu Suzuki said, words are like food for the mind; the mind needs some food, but not too much. What we need is practice. And at this point in history, when our rational capacities have come as far as they have, recognizing as we do that we are as diverse as we are numerous and that the same techniques will not be equally effective for everyone, we cannot simply adopt the practice of another on faith. We have to develop sound methods for living the life we want, and for demonstrating to ourselves that those methods work. It's the only way to eliminate the dialectic between our mind and our spirit. If we want to affect change in our life, it will only come by changing our approach to life.
At the time and for years afterwards, I thought I had found the blueprint for the perfect growth paradigm and I just lacked the will to act on it. But what I really had was a sketch written in crayon on a restaurant menu of an equation overheard from a conversation between physicists; not fully understood, only recognized as meaningful. Only now am I realizing that it was the existence of something to be overheard, not the substance of that particular formula, that was important.
