Shave and a haircut, two…

How many of you automatically added “bits” to the end of the title of this post?

There’s a great scene in a Steve Martin movie: We’re outside his hotel door and hear him practicing the tuba. A woman walks to the door. He plays the tune for “Shave and a haircut, two…” and the woman knocks, interrupting the last note. Steve answers the door and and engages in a conversation with his female visitor, but the longer the conversation goes on, the more agitated he’s getting… until he says, “Hold on!” slams the door, and plays the last note, “… bits.” He opens the door, relieved as if he had just, well… you get the idea.

The mind seems to have only a few simple “jobs.” One is to make meaning out of events and link cause and effect (“Well, the sun came up this morning after we ripped the heart out of that virgin last night, so CLEARLY ripping out virgin hearts makes the sun come up!”) or to group things a context so we don’t have to analyze every event we experience (“__(Ethnic Group, plural)__ all smell like __(type of cheese)__, are great at __(something you suck at)__, and have sex like __(another type of cheese)__.”).

But another of its jobs, and the one I’m thinking of with the Steve Martin story (btw, anyone remember the title of the movie?), is the desire to resolve tension. And one form of tension is created by asking a question.

Ask the mind a question, it will look for an answer and it won’t rest until it finds one.

If I ask, “What’s wrong with you?” you’ll find a list of answers.

If I ask, “What’s right with you?” you’ll find a list of answers (and, if you look carefully, you may notice that everything you thought was “wrong” with you, could just as accurately be a list of what’s “right” with you!).

The problem is that the mind doesn’t care if the answer is RIGHT, it just wants to resolve the tension of having an open-ended question. If it can’t find a simple answer, it’ll make up a story and use that in place of a valid answer.

Any answer will do, as long as it FEELS LIKE it resolves the tension. And if it FEELS LIKE resolution, we believe the answer is correct. I mean, it has to be right, or I wouldn’t feel so sure about it, right?

Wrong, it feels right because coming up with any answer gives you a pleasant burst of dopamine (that sounds like an ad slogan for some futuristic gum). The dopamine hit that comes from  resolving the tension creates the feeling that makes us think the answer is accurate.
I call those things that “feel right” but aren’t necessarily, resonant lies.

It FEELS right that you have problems as an adult because of something that happened to you:

• as a child
• as a fetus
• in a past life
• all of the above

But there’s no evidence that any of those are true. The idea that “something happened to me then, which is why I have a specific problem now” is just a THEORY. And, it suggests that we’ve accurately assessed that “this thing that’s happening now” is, in fact, a problem.

In other words, by calling something “a problem” we’ve basically asked the mind: “What’s the cause of this problem?” We’ve created the tension by asking the question… And then we’ll go on a hunt until we find something, anything, that resolves that tension!

AND, the hunt seems like a valid thing to do only because we forgot that that made up the reason for the hunt!

So, I was invited to watch a video of a currently famous spiritual teacher — I won’t mention his name because: a) I don’t want to give him the free press, and; b) If I don’t say who it is, people will think I’m talking about any of a hundred people who this will sound like — and he says, “In order to discover the truth, you need to WANT it more than anything.”

Really?

Once we think, “There is a ‘truth’ that I don’t know, and knowing it would make make my life better”… we’ll go on the hunt for it. We’ll listen to anyone who says they found it, we’ll believe them when they say they know how to get there (even though their story of how they got there could be a resonant lie), and we’ll argue with anyone who suggests the path does not lead to a prize at the end of the rainbow.

We forgot that we made up the idea of a path, and then put ourselves on it.

Just because you think there’s a thing called “spiritual” (which is better than “mundane”) doesn’t mean there is a spiritual path.

Just because we can make a list of things we think are wrong with us (even though almost every human on the planet has the same list), that doesn’t mean there’s a path of self-improvement.

I don’t care how many people can clearly visualize unicorns, we won’t see a herd of them (or is it a “gaggle” of unicorns?) clomping through my backyard with someone’s drying laundry caught on their horns.