I had an experience a number of weeks ago that struck me as very odd and somewhat jarring. I had consulted with my mother and with my boss and decided on the date that I would fly out of Boston. I put it on my to-do list to buy a ticket for that date. Later, when I was going online to buy the ticket, I had an overwhelming feeling that I should not buy it. It was so bizarre. I explored that feeling and decided that I felt better about postponing my departure by one week. I was having a moment of intuition, and it was surprisingly uncomfortable.

I think intuition in some ways can be explained as the logic of the subconscious mind. Looking back, I could find some reasons to stay, ones that I already had the necessary information to discern, although I had not consciously done so. I did end up following my intuition and making arrangements to stay the extra week. I ended up being very glad that I had made this decision, because important things happened that I would have missed by not being in Boston during that time.

Apart from the role of intuition in decision-making, for me it also has a very special role in interpersonal relationships. In this case I see it simply as heart-based perception. I often experience a great sensitivity to other people’s emotional states, even if they are attempting to keep them hidden. I used to have the reservation that maybe I’m deluding myself or just projecting my own feelings and reading someone wrong, and that may play some part, but if so, then maybe even projections themselves have a basis in truth. Because over time people usually open up more on their own, and experience tells me that I’m right. But this puts me in the position where people’s hearts are telling me something that they are not consciously willing to share, and I find that I need to be careful with that, because I tend to seek emotional intimacy in my friendships, and I have to consciously remind myself to respect boundaries and comfort levels and not let my intuition turn into invasiveness.

I guess the conclusion to all of this is that intuition can be a very powerful tool, but it can be a heavy and challenging tool to wield, and it needs to be used with care and wisdom.

Thoughts?

As someone who gravitates toward minimalism, this feels a tad contradictory. But it can’t be helped. As man is organic with his environment, he must actively adjust his environment in order to support his growth and development.

Last year I discovered that I needed a day job — a meaningful occupation with opportunity for social connection. Now I’m discovering that in order to do my job well, I need to be healthy. I need to sleep well. I need to eat well. In order to eat well, I need to cook for myself more often. In order to do this, I need a functional kitchen. In order to recuperate from a diligent day’s work, I need to spend some time at home in the evenings. I need a clean, welcoming, spiritually uplifting home environment.

To make a long story short, for the first time in my life, I feel like I really need my own apartment. Luckily, I can afford to rent one. I feel the need to be mindful of this sentiment – what if I should find myself in a situation where I can no longer afford this? Will I still be able to be content? I don’t know. I really hope so. But in a situation where I’ve been given choice and control, I can’t justify myself neglecting my perceived needs for the sake of detachment. Perhaps I could become content, basically subsisting on the fringe of life, but it would be wrong for me to choose that, you know?

I’m so grateful to have a chance to do what I think I need to do to support my growth and my ability to serve.

I was recently looking for a place to live and I found one near my work that I could afford. It’s actually a very nice location on the corner of a wide, well-lit and well-travelled street. It is, however, within the limits of a city neighborhood that some people consider to be unsafe. I have my suspicions that this perception has a large basis in fear and exaggeration, fueled by suburbanite mistrust of low-income and high-black areas. I have lived here for six weeks and my gut feeling of safety has suffered no erosion on either a conscious or subconscious level.

Now, given the vigilance of my behavior, my risk of being randomly attacked is realistically only infinitesimally more on my street than in any other urban area. But there are some that would say that even such a slight reduction in personal risk as moving to another neighborhood could afford me would be worth expense and the inconvenience.

Here’s where I disagree, and this brings me to how I think of risk. None of these people is considering that risk is not only confined to physical considerations. We also have to look at the metaphysical risks involved. Do I want to risk becoming the sort of person who lives in fear? Do I want to risk becoming unaccustomed to interacting with people of another race? Can I afford the risk of considering my personal safety more important than that of the men, women and children who call this neighborhood home?

A metaphysical view of risk can apply to so many other situations. The point is, if our risk aversion leads us to extremes in seeking comfort and security, we run the risk of leading dull and meaningless lives. We risk ignorance. We risk selfishness. We risk regret.

Tread carefully.

…But is it bringing me closer to God?

The answer is, it CAN be. At the end of the day, I answer that question. And not just by stating what it is, but by actively choosing what it is. I can use this to grow spiritually, one example of which is to strive to see the increase in responsibility that comes with an increase in privilege.  But the whole point of this post is the following realization that came to me this morning.

“I am my only limiting factor in life, because I have the power to deprive myself of God’s bounties, whereas no one else can take them from me.”

Whether one is tempted by bitterness and despair or by frivolity and ease, the need for vigilance and self-accountability is constant.

O SON OF MY HANDMAID! Be not troubled in poverty nor confident in riches, for poverty is followed by riches, and riches are followed by poverty. Yet to be poor in all save God is a wondrous gift, belittle not the value thereof, for in the end it will make thee rich in God, and thus thou shalt know the meaning of the utterance, “In truth ye are the poor,” and the holy words, “God is the all-possessing,” shall even as the true morn break forth gloriously resplendent upon the horizon of the lover’s heart, and abide secure on the throne of wealth.

For every one of you his paramount duty is to choose for himself that on which no other may infringe and none usurp from him. Such a thing—and to this the Almighty is My witness—is the love of God, could ye but perceive it. Build ye for yourselves such houses as the rain and floods can never destroy, which shall protect you from the changes and chances of this life. This is the instruction of Him Whom the world hath wronged and forsaken.

For seven months, I lived at home at my dad’s house. I moved back after my year of service, which was not quite a year, but eleven months of dramatic upheavals of my inner monologue. I came home with a great sense of relief that my time in South Carolina had finally drawn to a close, but, besides this feeling, I was also saturated with a mercurial haze of confusion.

I’m going through my journals and I just can’t make sense of anything I wrote from the first few months. At first I thought I was leaving the country and heading for South America. Then I decided that I was bound for China. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get involved in NGOs and peacemaking. After attending a graduate seminar (which brought me to the first strands of real clarity and insight I’d had in quite a while), I decided I might be destined to make a contribution to the realm of medical science. But even then, everything was scattered. I was going to move to Portland and work for a while and study alternative medicine and go to one of the ND schools out there. Then I decided that I should just nanny and do volunteer work in Minnesota while studying medical science on my own. Then I lost my nanny job and tried to find plebian jobs in natural healthcare. Finally, I decided to set my sights on full-time jobs that would use my degree and get me out of the house.

During this time I was trying my best to re-integrate myself into life and the world around me. But the connection just wasn’t fully happening. For too many hours of too many days, I was left with nowhere to go and no one to see. I could see the grand meaning in life and I could find meaning in the little things, but there’s something about that glorious and intermediate level of meaning known as a career or life calling.

Near the end of August I was overtaken by a great and mighty swell of restlessness. I was ready to really find my path, to be of service, to make something of my life and most of all to live completely. I went for long walks in the late summer air and turned my face skyward and moved and breathed and burned with a passionate yearning after true, intense, authentic, spiritual, emotional and material LIFE.

Almost simply to prove my point, I turned around and fell in love with everything about the life I already had. I decided to stop complaining. From that point on, I would supplicate, and I would be, and I would do, but I would not complain. I set myself on a mission to LIVE or to die trying.

Enter about 10 weeks of a heroic struggle to embrace life, to trust in God, and to do everything in my power to achieve my destiny. I turned inward and found certainty in my calling towards the medical sciences. I clung to Bahá’u’lláh’s injunction to “earn a livelihood by my calling.” I figured, if this is the right thing to do, then I will be assisted in doing it! It was only a matter of time and effort. I was very determined to make my attitude independent of my circumstance. I was reading The Hidden Words and forcing myself to really consider their implications…such as, much as I would like to lament for a lack of something or other, the TRUTH is that I have all of the inner resources that I need, because within the heart of every atom (person), there is a powerful and blazing sun. “For My work is perfect and My command is binding. Question it not, nor have a doubt thereof.”

I held on so tightly. I had some small inner victories, where I would use despair to provoke a sense of defiance against said despair, which increased my resolve. But I was slipping. I was brave up to the point where I’d had a phone interview for technical writing, no other job leads, and nothing to do but wait and see what happened. It was the waiting that drove me insane.

This was the end of October. It was like I had reached the end of one level and I was waiting for the next level to load, and I was suddenly seized with a deep sense of mistrust. I could see two options. One, that the technical writing job was what I was meant to get, so that I could learn to be employed and independent. The other, that I would be subjected to another level that was exactly like the last one, in some kind of cruel test of patience and resignation. And this very possibility, though it was far from likely, made me extremely angry for about a week. I usually try to come to a place where I will be happy with whatever happens, but I just couldn’t bring myself to acquiesce to the possibility of more endless droning months of limbo. The seeming dead end and the lack of certainty about the outcome had prompted me to dwell more deeply on just how NOT OK I was with that idea. I was desperate and anxious and every day was like hell.

Finally one day I literally shook both fists at the sky, demanding mercy, demanding relief, demanding something that I could live with.

A couple days later, I learned of a new job opportunity. Just the perfect thing. It seemed to come out of nowhere. Hours later I was invited for an interview with the technical writing job. Soon after, I wrote, “I am humbled both by bounty and by adversity, having control of neither.”

November 15, I canceled my tech writing interview and accepted the job as a research assistant. Full-time medical research. The past few weeks…planning for the job, arranging a move, saying goodbye to the last 7 months. Right now…still so very humbled by the beginning of a new stage.

May I now rise to the challenge with which such a bounty has presented me.

Love Me, that I may love thee.

Obey My commandments for love of My beauty.

If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself, and if thou seekest My pleasure, regard not thine own, that thou mayest die in Me and I may eternally live in thee.

My love is in thee; know it, that thou mayest find Me near unto thee.

Make My love thy treasure and cherish it even as thy very sight and life.

Out of the clay of love I molded thee; how dost thou busy thyself with another? Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful, and self-subsisting.

I really wanted a chance to interview for a certain job and I was praying like a beggar, tweeting and posting to facebook about it, talking about it to everyone, feeling like the stars were aligning. But I got cut from the process between phone interviews and formal interviews. And it was awesome.

I feel like I’m being conditioned more and more to see the spiritual opportunity in every situation. Frankl was so enlightened to realize this. Prayers and holy words kept flooding my mind today. I have this opportunity to detach from worldly measures of success, to be patient, to be joyous, to be thankful.  For everything there is a sign. The sign of love is fortitude under My decree and patience under My trials. Sorrow not save that thou art far from Us. Rejoice not save that thou art drawing nigh and returning unto Us. The essence of wealth is love for Me; whoso loveth Me is the possessor of all things, and he that loveth Me not is indeed of the poor and needy.

I feel invincible. I feel like I have it all and nobody can ever take it away.

Thank You for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever.

The core of Viktor Frankl’s psychological theory is that the primary factor in mental health and the will to live is a person’s sense that his or her life has purpose, and, therefore, the extent to which he or she can create or discern such a purpose. Man’s Search for Meaning is divided into two parts. Part one describes his experience in a concentration camp, which, in Frankl’s own words, serves as the “existential validation” for his theories, which are expounded in part two.

The concentration camp is a unique setting in which to observe human psychology, in that people in this situation lose every tangible link with their former lives and identities, as well as any certainty regarding their own survival and that of their dearest loved ones. I would never condone performing such an experiment on people solely for the sake of gaining such insights, but Frankl did make the most of the situation he was in, as both observer and subject.

Analysis

One of the biggest insights from this book, for me, is the notion that a life circumstance involving unavoidable suffering constitutes a priceless opportunity for spiritual achievement. “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering… Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him.”

Viktor doesn’t say it in so many words, but the implication isn’t necessarily that suffering itself is a source of meaning. But if one were to recognize the concept that the purpose of human life is to develop spiritual qualities and to serve humanity, then suffering may be seen as opportunity, whereas one could never reach this conclusion if approaching the situation from a materialistic perspective.

Frankl explains that it matters little what you expect from life, when compared to the more pertinent question of what life expects from you. There’s something deeply ennobling about taking on the perspective that you have been given a great task and a high standard to live up to. It is empirically proven, if human experience is to be given any credibility, that such a perspective causes a person to be more assured and resilient. A situation will rarely match your expectations, but you will deal with it more gracefully when you frame it in terms of how best to respond, or whether you are being presented with the opportunity to take decisive action, to reflect, or simply to bear things gracefully.

What you do now, your choices and the manner in which you conduct yourself, also determines what repository of past experience you will retain for all eternity. As Frankl says, “Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.” My grandmother has always treasured her experience of patiently enduring six years’ imprisonment for being a Bahá’í. And now she’s lived her life, and it was well done indeed.

Favorite excerpts from Part II:

• On the idea that noble goals can sometimes serve as a mask for feelings of inadequacy / inner conflicts within a person:

“Unmasking…should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man’s desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing that the ‘unmasking psychologist’ really unmasks is his own ‘hidden motive’ – namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man.”

• On the interpretation that there is something wrong with one who is concerned with the apparent lack of meaning in life:

“Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient’s existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.”

• On the natural difficulty humans face in discerning meaning:

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”

• On the definition of a mentally healthy state:

“Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become… I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state.”

• On the balance between freedom and responsibility:

“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”

What I consider to be the crowning apex of Frankl’s philosophy:

“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system… The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”

Compare that with a quotation by Shoghi Effendi, the guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, who lived during the same time period as Frankl: ‎

“The more we search for ourselves, the less likely we are to find ourselves; and the more we search for God, and to serve our fellow-men, the more profoundly will we become acquainted with ourselves, and the more inwardly assured. This is one of the great spiritual laws of life.”

Conclusion

“Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.” – Viktor Frankl

“Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.” – Bahá’u'lláh

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, his is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

Thank you, Viktor Frankl, for all the trials that you endured and the wisdom that you uncovered.

From various reading which I have not bothered to bookmark or reference (because the synthesis of personal understanding need not always leave a paper trail), I have shaped an understanding that anger is a natural emotion that arises in response two main causes: a perceived threat to the well-being and safety of one’s self (or one’s loved ones), or a perceived obstacle hindering one’s progress towards specific goals (or general advancement).

Anger can then be useful when employed as a catalyst either to confront the threat or remove the obstacle standing in the way of your intentions. But this leaves many instances in which anger is useless. For example, what if your perception of a threat arises solely from within your own mind, due to some paranoia or misconception? Or what if the perceived obstacle is a reality that is outside of your capacity to change? In such cases, anger will arise in futility.

I have encountered anger within myself in my early adult years. This makes sense because I really began identifying personal goals in earnest about halfway through college, only to find myself sucked down the rabbit hole of discovering and identifying a miasma of mental habits and deep-seated attitudes that constituted a massive source of inner resistance against the noblest of my aspirations. I’m sure many people can relate to the experience without me going into details.

For the sake of illustration I will share one example each of useless and useful anger.

For me, driving a car generates a lot of useless anger. When I’m driving in or near a major city, a lot of unnecessary roadblocks can arise from the sum of individual driving habits, or as a result of accidents, construction projects, and just plain congestion. And when you’re right there in the car, you can do nothing about it. That’s the component of anger directed at obstacles. (I think the best solution in such a case is to do your best to let go of the perceived imperative to move quickly. Easier said than done, but taking deep breaths helps.)

The trickier part of road rage has to do with all of the threats to your safety. This can mostly be summed up by people driving aggressively or just plain recklessly in a too-close vicinity to you and your car. I can’t stand it! And this is an anger that I don’t know how to let go of, because on the one hand, some of my feeling threatened has to do with my general level of anxiety and fatigue, and it’s useless anyway to think that you can change the behavior of other drivers…but on the other hand, alertness and personal safety instincts can help you drive defensively and avoid accidents. This problem is still pretty unresolved for me.

Now for an example of useful anger. Now that I’m getting up and moving around more, I get these waves of anger at how slow and lethargic and weak my body has become. It’s funny how the movement itself can bring this anger to the surface…just yesterday morning I got up early and was inspired to say some prayers with yoga and stretching in between. I was in a state of serenity. Then I saw my friend going to exercise, which inspired me that I had some energy to burn and I wanted/needed to exercise too. So I went out for an alternating walk/run (I was traveling and didn’t have my dance videos to get my heart rate up…I don’t really believe in extended running, LOL). It was funny how much anger cropped up, in contrast to how serene I had been. The inner message was pretty clear. It’s obvious how good this is and that I need to do it more often, and I’m angry at the lethargy that’s gotten in the way. The emotion of anger in this case is motivating me to fight my lethargy and keep moving, which is already reaping benefits in my attitude and energy levels. For a blog about fitness and its interrelation with matters of the spirit, check out my friend Dominique at fastfunfit.blogspot.com.

So, readers, what do you think? Any insights to share about useful versus useless anger? As usual feel welcome to hit up the comments.

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