23 Feb Anaesthetic, Distraction & Delusion
The following post, anaesthetic, distraction & delusion draws entirely from the book “Coherence” by Dr Alan Watkins, which is an utterly brilliant book. I can’t remember a time I learnt so much from one book!
“When inflicted with the disease of meaning, people ask themselves, ‘What’s the point?’ They feel despondent because they kept their side of the bargain. They believe they have been a dutiful husband/wife, father/mother, leader, worker, friend and colleague and it still didn’t work out. They feel cheated. After all they played their part – they followed the rules but the reward never arrived or if it did it wasn’t nearly as good as they were led to believe!”
“Not everyone catches the disease of meaning through an acute crisis; for some it creeps up on them as a growing sense of dissatisfaction and a recognition that something’s not working. At this stage people feel as though their life has not turned out as they expected it would, that somehow they are missing out on something. Sometimes the pain of this realization can be very sharp indeed. In religious terms this sub-stage is often referred to as purgatory or ‘hell on earth’.”
“Many people spend their life stuck in this ‘meaningless’ swamp of early transpersonal awareness without realizing that it’s just a developmental stage. Instead of moving on to higher levels of consciousness, they wrongly believe it’s something they have to live with and set out on a quest to dull the pain.”
“The two most popular strategies to dull the pain are anaesthetic and distraction”
“Anaesthetizing the pain usually takes the form of excessive alcohol or drug consumptions – prescription or otherwise. Alcohol is especially popular with busy executives, who frequently get by with a glass of wine or whisky every lunch time or every evening. The range of distraction strategies and games that people play to avoid facing the issue of meaning are numerous.
The commonest example of the ‘mid-life crisis’ is having an affair. During the excitement of deception or the act of physical intimacy, individuals may be distracted from the perceived lack of real meaning in their life. Unfortunately affairs end or the novelty wears off and the pain returns, only now it’s amplified by remorse and guilt. And repeated or multiple simultaneous affairs don’t solve the problem either.
Materialism is another common distraction strategy. When you are roaring around in a new Ferrari you are too exhilarated to consider the deeper meaning of life and why you are doing what you are doing. For a few weeks your life may actually take on new meaning as you tend to your beloved car, driving fast and showing off to colleagues, family and friends. But again, it soon wears off, the car is dented or scratched and you get used to the speed and envious looks. Before long it’s just another car and the disease of meaning has flared up again. Spending money on any major purchase or shopping until you literally can’t carry another bag is another common distraction strategy that delivers nothing more than a temporary balm and an inflated credit card bill.
Obsessive exercise is another beautiful distraction strategy, where executives turn into ‘gym bunnies’ obsessed with the ‘body beautiful’. When they are ‘feeling the burn’ on the stair-master they do not have to think about meaning. Unfortunately the preoccupation with exercise wears off too and the disease of meaning returns.
All these strategies are seeking to find meaning using the Have, Do, Be recipe and they just don’t work. The only real solution is to fully wake up and start growing up the levels of consciousness.
At some point the pain of the mid-life crisis becomes very intense; often this is necessary in order to facilitate a breakthrough. People hit ‘rock bottom’ and enter a very dark phase; they appreciate that their life isn’t working and perhaps most importantly that nobody is coming to help. There is no white knight charging in on a majestic steed to save the day.
This is the most important moment in any life. When we finally realize that our parents aren’t going to fix it, our boss isn’t going to fix it, society or the government aren’t going to fix it and that it’s down to us to fix it – we finally take ownership, we evolve and we expand our awareness and our potential exponentially. At this stage individuals are forced to turn their attention from the outside to the inside. They finally realize that the blame and recrimination they have directed toward other people, situations or events has not helped to change the situation. It has kept them stuck in the meaninglessness of purgatory, and so they finally let go of the idea that someone else is to blame and look inside. As they do they swallow the red pill they ignored 20 years earlier and finally unplug from the Matrix. This is what Joseph Campbell (2012) called ‘crossing the threshold’ – the liberating realization that the move from ignorance to enlightenment is down to us and us alone. Just as I am responsible for my personal growth and vertical development, you are responsible for your personal growth and vertical development.”
In the next post we will look at “crossing the threshold”.
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