Having the right sort of motivation is like the feather that broke the camel's back: the weightless difference between two very different outcomes, between broke and unbroke, between achieving your goal and not achieving it.
So here is an observation. It's from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Narrator and ten year old son are hiking up a mountain.
Up ahead all of Chris's movements seem tired and angry. He stumbles on things, lets branches tear at him, instead of pulling them to one side.
I'm sorry to see this. Some blame can be put on the YMCA camp he attended for two weeks just before we started. From what he's told me, they made a big ego thing out of the whole outdoor experience. A proof-of-manhood thing. He began in a lowly class they were careful to point out was rather disgraceful to be in...original sin. Then he was allowed to prove himself with a long series of accomplishments - swimming, rope tying... he mentioned a dozen of them, but I've forgotten them.
It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way.At this point you might imagine this all sounds moralistic. Preachy. A sermon about good and bad behaviour. But I must ask you to put aside that mode of looking at things for just a moment, because this isn't about what is Good and what is Bad. It's about what Works. Think of it as a technical problem. When your mentor says that being systematic is going to make you a more effective debugger, she isn't preaching a Moral Dogma. She's merely pointing out a fact borne out by experience.
And the fact here is that ego goals are hard to attain. I'll let Pirsig explain:
Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.
He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage when on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn't enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn't enough either. He didn't think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn't ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk if forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be further up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be "here".... Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
This seems to be Chris's problem now.For an atheist who spent over two decades convinced that religious feeling was just self-satisfying delusion by another name, this is a troubling passage. But then being who I am today, I am willing to read it. Because these days I am open to the possibility that religious feeling may in fact have actual scientific, as well as subjective, reality. I know that academic research into how this feeling can be reliably induced using psychedelics is restarting, after half a century of censorship. I know that bans on research with drugs such as LSD are being lifted, that we may be only a few short decades away from serious breakthroughs into our understanding of consciousness. I have The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sitting up on my shelf. So I am open to the possibility that rational materialism might not be the sole and whole explanation of reality.
I became open to this possibility out of simple necessity. I needed more drive. I felt I wasn't living and working and pursuing my goals with enough gusto. Something lacked. I did not experience every waking minute of existence as being aflame with the same fire that lit the sacred stars. My work didn't feel meaningful.
So now is the point where I have to confess to a long running habit of setting ego-goals. My goals have far too much been about me, my success, my self-improvement. Me me me me. I was so tired of me. Then one day I discovered, almost by accident, how it felt to serve a higher purpose.
It happened like this.
I had spent years struggling with let's for lack of a better word call it depression. Existential melancholia. Low mood. Lack of vitality. Anger, frustration, resentment, hopelessness, the whole 12 course with 6 types of wines and interim palate-cleansing pickled ginger Michelin-star feast. Not fun stuff. And I wanted to "feel better". And you'd think that "feeling better" would be a self-evidently worthwhile goal to pursue. I mean, what's more autotelic that "feeling better", surely? Or so my consciousness thought. But my unconscious adamantly refused to pursue this agenda and remained as stubbornly miserable as before.
Until, that is, on day in June. I've tried to write about this before, badly, as I'm sure I'll continue to try. It was an odd enough gestalt.
Best I can describe it is that during one moment of particularly low mood and morbid existential despair, all that I'd spent the previous 9 months studying suddenly came together in a splendid, clear, unavoidable, transcendental, revelatory realisation. The Project of Being. It was something like this. Human beings are a social species. As such, we are a node in a Network. We are connected to other living humans whether we like and approve of it or not. We are by necessity someone's child, sibling, lover, friend, employee, tenant, audience. It's inevitable. OK, so now something bad happens. Maybe to us, maybe near us. It doesn't matter. We suffer. And when we suffer, two knee-jerk reactions appear possible: anger and depression: the world is awful or we are awful: hatred or self-loathing. OK, now here's the problem: both reactions damage the Network. If we hate, all we do is take the pain we experience and push it back out into the Network, usually many times multiplied. If we self-hate, we damage ourselves and by unavoidable extension the nodes in the Network we are immediately connected to. In both scenarios the Network suffers. The Project of Being suffers. And in my 9 months study I'd come to rather like the Project of Being, in complex and awe-inspiring totto. Because, let's face it, the Project of Being is kind of cool. Whatever this thing called Being is (from inorganic molecules to your very own Homo Sometimes if Proded by Necessity Sapiens), it's a whole lot more interesting than Not Being. Or so I decided to feel. And here is the gestalt. The minute I decided I loved The Project of Being, feeling better stopped being an Ego Goal. It was no longer something I needed to do for myself. It wasn't For My Own Pleasure. It was for a greater good and a good that I felt was worth it. You must keep the love of living alive, in spite of the Tragedy of Existence, because the alternative is damaging the Network and thereby the Project of Being. Well yes. This is the point at which many religious people would go: d'uh.
But the point is that all of a sudden, what felt impossible before, felt now not only possible, but easy. I became a pilgrim. "We must imagine Sisyphus to be happy", said Nietzsche. Of course!
So at some very high abstract level, I'd solved it. But the trouble with something as immense and undefined as The Project of Being is that it doesn't tell you very much about what exactly to pursue in your far more pedestrian daily existence. The quest is by no means over.
But that's not the point. The point is that now I know to stay away from Ego Goals. I know that whatever I'm searching for is something transcendental. Value. Quality, to use Pirsig's term. The Buddha. Whatever. But the knowledge I'm after is no long likely to lie in the epistemology section. What comes next is about Aesthetics. What is Valuable? What is worth giving my time to, worth loving? Worth climbing a Mountain for?
