The Tapestry of our true being

Think about it — By Ryan on May 5, 2010 4:35 am

One of the most commonly used metaphors I use to help people understand their inner-self is that of the Tapestry.  That our lives and ourselves can be seen as a great Tapestry sitting on a loom, the facets of who we are, while in the end form a beautiful piece of work, are comprised of many individual threads.  As human beings we are very adapt at making quick judgements on just about everything.  We take instant snapshots and then compare this to that, what we know to what is new and instantly form opinions based on little or no understanding.  Rarely do we take a step forward and break things down to what they truly are, to see the tree’s through the forest so to speak, or the threads in the tapestry.  Our quick and dirty method of understanding the world around us certainly has served its purpose, it is wonderful at allowing us to make snap fight or flight decisions in the wild because as we can ,instantly and with very little energy spent on thought, take immediate action which has no doubt kept us from being dinner to larger predators.  However this is another example of a survival instinct carried forward from our days in the bush that is being used in situations which it was never intended for.  It leads to us to a comfortable, lazy and complacent  ‘understanding’ of the world around us and more importantly ourselves.  One which, in my opinion, takes us further and further away from true happiness.  A happiness, which I believe, can only be experienced once the tapestry of our world and ourselves has been unraveled, where we can not only revel in the grandeur and complexity of it but also to understand the threads that make up this tapestry.  It is through this understanding that we remove the subjective perspective from our view of the world, we stop seeing things as bad or good in relative terms to what we think we know and start seeing things simply as they are.  Which is more than likely a product of countless threads that have been woven which itself forms a thread of another even more complex tapestry and so on into infinity.

I imagine the thread of my tapestry that inspired this metaphor no doubt can be traced back to being 10 or so and playing the game Loom by Lucasfilm Games.  Regardless it seems well suited for helping people conceptualize and understand an aspect of their being

It is fairly safe to say  that, relatively speaking, people are born with a fairly blank slate, Tabula Rasa so to speak.  Ruling aside the role of DNA and even a concept like genetic memory, we can all agree that a child entering kindergarten has an exponentially less complex personality than the 60 year old alcoholic war veteran coming out of his 3rd failed marriage.   The tapestry of the child has just begun to form while the 60 year old has a rich and colorful one woven from 1000′s of threads to form the person he is and is becoming.    At a distance you can see the overall form and color of the tapestry, at a distance it is very easy and tempting to form a subjective opinion of the good and the bad of this tapestry.  We form a relative opinion that is based almost entirely on the tapestry of your life instead of the objective understanding of the weave sitting in front of us .  To you it may seem ugly or unsightly, perhaps compared to what you are accustomed to it looks to be a big tangled mess of unorganized colors, or perhaps when you look at yourself in the same fashion you see the same thing, and herein lies the problem with using this very basic survival instinct to form complex opinions on infinitely more complex situations and subject matter.  It brings us no closer to gleaming the truth but even worse it satisfies the primitive part of our brain with what it thinks it knows, ceasing all inquisition so that it can preserve energy for more pressing matters(like changing the channel, or exterminating an entire population of humanity).    When we form opinions on the tapestry of others or we view of the world in this manner it can prevent us from understanding or appreciating much of the world around us.   All of it stemming from this basic survival instinct of seeing something not as it is but as it is relative to what we know or what we are used to.  We look at the tapestry of others, through the lense of our own tapestry but more importantly we look at our own tapestry through the removed lense of the tapestry of others.  All of this spells disaster, not only for others but more importantly for ourselves.  This instinctual and unquestioned behavior puts us in a loop, especially when it is concerning ourselves, which is what I will spend the rest of my time focusing on.

When we look at ourselves, we invariably find something we don’t like.  Perhaps someone is overweight, perhaps someone drinks too much, perhaps our life has been a long history of unhappy and failed relationships.   What happens with our primitive brain is that we see the overall tapestry of our short-comings, and perhaps our strengths, and we accept it as is.  We say: “Hmmm, that is a nice piece, I like the colors here, even if that part there doesn’t look great and the the weave over there seems a bit of a mess”.  We take a surface snapshot, compare it to what we know and the file these findings off into the back of our brain where they will, no doubt, sit indefinitely.  Do these findings represent a truth at all or are they just biased opinions heavily influenced by cultural and social pressures?  Do these brief and distorted findings help us to understand why things are, or why why are the way we are?   This understanding, of ourselves and our world, represents the most critical step on our path towards self-discovery and self-betterment, our path towards happiness, and yet this understanding is forever out of reach for most because of the instinctual method we use to form the world around us and inside us.   Our views and opinions, once improperly formed are tucked away indefinitely because that primitive part of our brain is satisfied with the ‘answers’ it has and has been programmed to conserve energy, not questioning anything, until something drastic comes along that shakes its foundations.

But what if that something drastic never comes along?  What if season finales constitute the most life changing events for decades on end, as they do for huge swaths of our population.  We end up in a long cycle of accepting our unhappiness and our short-comings, we complacently accept our unhealthy lifestyles, our unhealthy bodies, our unhealthy minds and our unhealthy vices.  This is not to say we have found happiness through this acceptance, on the contrary this acceptance will fuel more resentment and ultimately more fear, feeding a fire of misery and hidden suffering that will burn away inside of people for years or their entire lives.  Lives lived where truth and purpose are replaced with fear and shame, most of the times well concealed but smoldering there non-the-less.

what if season finales constitute the most life changing events for decades on end

All of this unfolds from one simple evolutionary instinct developed over generations as a means of being able to quickly outwit predators and ensure the better survival of our species.  Simply knowing this will forever change the way we proceed and has added another thread to our tapestry of understanding, but what do we do with this?  What we do is we start to unravel the tapestry of ourselves first and eventually the world.  While we don’t reduce everything to simply being the sum of it’s parts, we need to understand these parts before we can see the truth of the sum.   We pick a thread that we don’t feel belongs and we set about understanding it fully before passing judging, we unravel it, like plucking it out of the tapestry, starting at the end and pulling out more and more of it until we reach as close to its beginning as we can.  As we learn more, understand more of this thread we pull more and more of it out of the tapestry so that we can be one step closer to seeing the tapestry as it truly is.  It is the presence of all of these threads that cloud our ability to understand and appreciate what it is we are looking at.

This is an exercise that takes dedicated time and energy, an exercise that must start with ourselves.  We must first look at the tapestry of who we are, finding all of the threads that make us up and begin unraveling them.  These threads represent everything from what we do, what we think and how we feel.  They are everything from the people we love down to the music we listen to, the emotions we feel to the opinions we hold.  There is a linear implication behind ‘unraveling‘ these threads that should be heeded.  It would be very simple to look briefly at jealousy and write it off as something negative,  but to truly unravel this thread, to understand it in its breadth you pull it out and continue pulling until we are looking at as much of the thread as we can possibly see, understanding where this thread stems from, seeing how far back it stretches.  Only then will we understand it and cease being a slave to it’s influence.  Only then will we be able to pluck it out of our tapestry.

Jealousy is one which I unraveled during hours of meditation in a furnace room down in the basement of a house in small town Alberta.  It started with the feeling of jealousy simmering in my chest.  The why of course isn’t important but the fact was at that moment I took objective notice of the jealousy itself.  Instead of looking at the situation which we would ‘assume’ was causing the jealous and telling myself “this isn’t right”, I looked at the jealous itself and said “You sir, aren’t right!”.  Upon which I proceeded to sit down and meditate on why it was that I was jealous.  The situations I will never be able to control, but myself, that is the one thing in this world that I do have control over.

The process of unraveling this thread, as well as all threads, start and end with one simple question: “Why?”, and continuing to ask this question until you have reduced it to the simplest of explanations.  Of course the question itself is pointless if we are not prepared to seek honest answers.  So often we will skirt the brutal honesty of the issues or sugar coat something, there is no room for that here and all of this is meaningless until we are able to asked an honest question and give an honest answer, regardless of how it makes you feel.

In this case I asked myself:

“Why are you feeling jealous Ryan?” to which I answered:

“Because of this situation that is happening outside of my control”

“But why does that situation make you feel jealous?”

“Because I suppose I am scared that this situation will result in me loosing someone who I love”

“And why are you scared of loosing this person?”

“Because I suppose I feel that I am not good enough for them.  That there are other people in this world that are better than me”

“And why does the thought of not being good enough for them matter to you? Why does the thought of other people being better than you bother you?”

“Because my sense of self-worth is relative to those around me.  How I stack up is a measurement arrived at through the comparison of myself to others”

“And why is it then, when you know nothing about the person or people you are fearful of not being able to measure up to, that you would have this fear?  That you would be jealous of those you don’t know, or know anything about?”

“I suppose because in the past I’ve had people who I’ve loved leave me for someone else so I’ve developed this fear of the unknown through conditioning”

‘Better yet Ryan, why are you fearful of loosing this person you love in the first place to someone else?’

…..

And so on and so forth.  This conversation carried on for hours until my final deduction came down to the fact that jealousy is a primal mental state which my ancient animal male ancestors developed as a means of keeping competing males from mating with theirr females.  It’s a standard fear/anger response developed possibly millions of years ago to ensure greater propagation of one males genes over another.  This in turn would breed the habit into the offspring as the more jealous the male was the more mates he would be able to hold while the free loving hippies that couldn’t be bothered with this would be off picking flowers by themselves in the fields.  Their free loving, non-jealous habits would be bred out as the jealous males ended up securing more and more females, at the expense of the hippie primates, propagating more and more jealousy through the lineage.  Obviously this isn’t something that developed primarily for our ancestors, it is a common trait in much of the animal kingdom but only through my lengthy deduction of where this emotion was coming from within myself was I able to understand it in it’s entirety.  Through this understand I plucked this thread out of my tapestry and immediately it began to loose it’s hold on me.  I asked myself ‘why’ would it bother me that someone was to leave me for another man?  Some of you might laugh at this question, but do you have a reason?  Why does the thought of someone who didn’t want to be with you, someone who quite obviously wasn’t right for you in the first place, why would their leaving you be a cause for concern or worthy of any negative emotions?  There is no answer besides the loss of invested time and emotion.  In the end, however, their actions are simply saving you from wasting further time and emotions.  And again the line of questioning would go on and on until I was forced to see the truth of the matter, being of course that I was a slave to irrelevant programming and emotions.

This process is repeated for every thread that I can pick out of my tapestry.  In the beginning it is easiest to start with the negative threads, the ones that stick out like a sore thumb.  They are the easiest to spot as there is no mistaking when we are overwhelmed by negative emotion.  After that the more complicated and challenging task of tackling the positive emotions began.  Asking why am I happy when this happens?  Where does this joy come from?  Why do I take delight in this or that?  It wasn’t so I could reduce my happiness but it was to understand if that ‘happiness’ was true or not, or if it was something akin to how we feel when we eat chocolate cake.  The ultimate goal is to pluck out all threads that are not true, which do not belong in my tapestry so that I can see it for what it truly is.  Only then can I understand who I am and make true decisions based on that understanding.

If it sounds like a lot of work it should, because it involves a lot of work.  Right now most peoples’ inner being is complacent and fat with no easy solution in sight.  Just as we would change your outer being through hard work and training the same must be done to our inner being.  In the beginning this training may seem arduous and time consuming but, as with physical exercise, the more we do it the more effortless and enjoyable it is until eventually our body is in a constant state of well-being with only habitual maintenance, like brushing your teeth, to keep it there.  This isn’t the clear and sole path towards inner well-being and understanding,but it is a beginning.  There are an infinite amount of ways to achieve our goal of truth, peace and happiness from within, but this is one that certainly played a large role in recent times for myself.

I have taken this analogy and applied it to everything in my life, stripping bare all things, thoughts, people, and activities which, at the time,  weren’t true.  Striped bare until the only thing left standing was my naked self and from this vulnerable point of emptiness I was able to form, for the first time, a true opinion of who I was, what I wanted and where I wanted to go.

Tags: happiness, mind training, tapestry, thread, understanding