Inner Work and Outer Mess
Mechanisms of correlation
Why do “inner work” people often have such messy and volatile lives? The goal of inner work is a state of well being and calm affect, a state that goes by many names: enlightenment, integration, secure attachment. But in practice guys who meditate all the time get into more than their fair share of crises.
It’s easy to adopt a snide or cynical affect, and look down on inner work people from the safe distance of normalcy. After all, they looked down on us first!
But let’s actually ask the question. Why does working on the self so often lead to a self with crazy ups and downs?
The Boring Reason
Reverse causality. Messy guys have strong incentive to become less messy. If you’re normal and well adjusted you don’t have to meditate, you just watch Love Island or whatever. But if you’re messy, you desperately look for ways to regulate yourself, and only partially succeed.
On this model, the inner work really does help, it just gets people from “totally nonfunctional” to “somewhat functional.”
The Denial
Being enlightened is famously quiet. Maybe most enlightened people are quietly happy all the time, and we mostly hear from pretenders or people stuck in the dark night of the soul. If this were true, how would we know? The Buddha is the Buddha because he made it his mission to teach the world his method; but there could easily be 100 guys who go about their lives with tranquility so perfect that nobody ever notices, for every one who preaches.
I hope this one is true! It’d be nice to believe that if I stared at a wall more often I could resolve all my psychological troubles. But I doubt it.
Painted In A Corner
Suppose one day you become enlightened, or perfectly securely attached, or integrated. Whatever the infinitely cool kids call it these days. Now what?
Well, now you have a self concept of someone whose story is complete, who is undisturbed by life’s ebb and flow. So what happens next time you encounter a problem? Your self concept is confused. You aren’t supposed to have problems. And no matter what you do, it’s likely the problem will get bigger!
Like, say someone keeps making belittling comments to you. The obvious option is to rise above it, and be unaffected. But if it really does bother you, your frustration will subtly increase over time. Until eventually, you need to choose another option. You could confront your tormentor, but that doesn’t totally fit the enlightened vibe. Or you could just get away, but that would entail admitting an ordinary problem, of the sort you’re supposed to be above. The only dignified possibility, justifying your unease, is if it’s a big problem. If the person belittling you is not only obnoxious but fundamentally toxic, an example of all that is wrong with the world. You’d better hold them accountable!
But if you hang out in spiritual spaces, they might feel the same way about you, especially after you call them out. Yikes. Guess it’s time for holy war.
Actually It’s Good To Be Messy
Maybe the ego, or the inner voice, or whatever, is a sanitizing influence. We’re all fundamentally meant to be manic dream pixie people, but our mental baggage holds us back. In this case, enlightened people have dramatic personal lives because they live more honestly. A repressed person might avoid conflict or let it simmer below the surface and slowly kill them. An enlightened person gets into insane beefs all the time because so would you, if you weren’t a coward burdened by false consciousness.
Or maybe inner work is necessarily a process that is meant to be ongoing, and the mind inventing new and exciting challenges is the highest calling available to people. Like this tweet, but with (even) more positive spin.
The Stripped Screw
People go off the rails in all sorts of ways. For some, it’s meditating 10 hours a day and becoming unable to see tables. But many more get the same results by doing way too many drugs, or burning out on work, or becoming whales in gatcha games. When you act normal you fall into the same normal pitfalls as everyone else, and when you venture out of distribution you run the risk of sanding off your protective traits and falling off the map.
This explanation is consistent with the rest. It’s a Chesterton’s Fence argument: you fundamentally change the nature of your consciousness, and it may no longer be adaptive.
What About You, Lift High The Muse?
You can call me Justis.
In high school, I read these books claimed to be authored by a channeled entity named Bartholomew. They were lovely. And at the state-level Latin competition (yes I did get medals for my etymology events, thank you very much), something clicked. I felt this profound, mysterious well being. I walked around like in a dream. I felt called to go play a piano in a certain area, and then a girl approached me, and later I lost my virginity to her.
I remember having a sense, during this brief and magical time, that it would be remarkable to keep feeling this way, but that I wouldn’t. That part of the magic was that I wasn’t clinging to it, and thus that it would escape my hands.
Indeed! That girl claimed to have cancer and later, perhaps as a way of breaking up with me, amnesia. She also claimed to be a grand duchess. When I finally made it to her hometown for a Smash Bros tournament and kicked my friends out of the hotel room, she claimed the condoms were expired and then that she’d see me again after her homecoming dance, but she stood me up.
I regret nothing.
The feeling from that Latin competition has returned, on rare occasions. Once in college, after a dance party I ran, dozens of my friends gathered in a cloud around me in a huge group hug while I knelt on the ground. I feel this is the level of personal attention which is most natural and proper for me. Though I also recall seeing exactly one friend standing in the distance, looking on in bafflement, and still respect him in a special, unique way for that choice. Anyway, I felt the feeling then, of being in precisely the right place at the right time. And that it was fleeting.
I will spare you the story of the explosion(s) that came after. What can I say? I can posit all day, but the ways of the mind are mysterious.
Whatever the reasons, this I know: the isle of perfection is ringed by fog and rocks.