Amazing Grace

This morning I was watching the movie, Amazing Grace. About a third of the way through, the protagonist sings Amazing Grace. I have heard this song many times, but until this morning, it never had personal meaning for me.

During the past almost 3 years now, I have been struggling with the issue of identity - who I am and who I say I am. This struggle has not been easy as I've been bitter and I've been, although knowing that I love people, not existentially present to love for them. I knew I was bound in some way that I held my values/beliefs and in so doing, I was granted no grace. The things that I have tried before petered out. I was set on the rough seas of the soul, pissed that they were rough - refusing to accept the anger, the hatred and the upset.

At some point I got that I was bitter. I had gotten hints of that but had refused to accept it. Bitterness has always meant not just a little failure, but a huge failure in the striving for something really important. Could it be that my whole life was in the toilet? The thought was not entertainable!

I gratuitously read a review of a story that used the phrase, "when his life didn't work out as he had hoped, he was plunged into bitterness." Ah-hah! That phrase in black and white made the bitterness real. Within a couple hours, I came to accept myself as I was - bitter.

Although the waves on the sea were still big, they were no longer angry. I looked at them more closely and pondered how they worked. I began to postulate cause and effect. "When I accepted this, these results followed." This was the form of my working hypothesis. In my conversations, I would speak these statements: "Because of x, y." I would get agreement from people or not. Either way, I questioned more. I tried out many hypotheses and usually made people or belief systems or courses, accompanied by lots of anger, the cause of my plight. I did it around people who held various aspects of these causes valuable so they would react and give me something to work with.

The linchpin of this whole enterprise, the two premises I was unwilling to give up, was that there is no split between mind and body and that my mind is capable of grasping and making sense of reality. If you do something that is not consistent with your nature as a human being, then you will pay a price in both your consciousness and your body for attempting to manifest values which negate each other. Thus I began to look carefully at the values I pursued and whether they were consistent with each other and whether they corresponded to reality. I began to think that as long as I was so angry, I was placing the primary cause out there when it might be an inappropriate, some-way-inconsistent value that I was pursuing.

One value that I had pursued for many years in the form of courses at Landmark Education was coming to know myself, and consequently people in general. How do I and they really operate? Because this was an important value, I began to realize that there was some part of myself that I was giving up on because I wanted people in my life. I had come to the place where I was taking courses for no reason other than having people in my life to play and grow with. It advanced to the point where I neglected my career to play with these people. What happened and how did this work? That was a mystery worth solving.

Needless to say, the anger and battling with myself and others was the way to learn how this contradiction worked. So, I accepted that I was that way. So what if my friends left me. And, they did. They couldn't handle what my personality and behavior had become. Ironically, the more I accepted myself in this manner, the more fun I began to have. A new energy was coming into my life.

About a month ago I listened to a recorded lecture delivered by Ayn Rand in the mid-60s at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. She told the story of a brilliant and talented person devoid of motivation to do anything. He was "dead in the water," so to speak. Then I got an email story about a little boy who lost his mom when he was in the first grade. He was so distraught that he no longer cared about school, where he had previously excelled. Finally several years later when a teacher discovered what had happened and granted him some space, he told her of his loss. With that came acceptance and he again excelled.

In both cases, we are talking about soul problems. I have friends who think soul is a bad word to use because it implies the idea that whatever it is extends beyond this life and this body. What baloney. Like every other profound emotion and mental state, be it sacred, worship or whatever, it has been taken over by religion to the point that people do not realize that these are all deeply held human values and emotional responses which exist in response to the real world and prior to a particular story on which to hang them such as a religious worldview.

So, let me state here what I mean. The soul is one's life force, it is the energy that you have to live your life. It is comprised of your ideals and values and whether you triumphed or failed, specifically who you were in the matter of your life and whether you went for it or sold out. If you have stood for your self and acted consistent with your values and reality, then that will register in your soul as energy and an opening to the future. If, on the other hand, you sold out and gave up on an important value, that will register as a loss of energy and a shutting down of your future. The soul is the record book within your consciousness of what you have done to yourself - consciously or unconsciously, knowingly or unknowingly. We all are men of self-made soul because one's soul is unique and only available to the individual. In matters of the soul we are not anti-social, but un-social. The soul is a completely private domain.

Hearing these stories of souls off the track, I realized that the soul is individual, unique and private. It is shown to the world through our being, but no one controls it except us. Man's rational faculty, his reason, is his means of survival. It is through his reason that he gains knowledge, makes choices and experiences happiness. When we take hold of the controls of our souls ourselves - the levers, dials and steering wheel - and apply the universal laws which apply to us because we are a particular kind of entity, namely human, then we build our soul and reap the rewards. If we do not, we get what we get and put up with the results, which can never be happy and will result in a rough and angry sea, if not resignation and death.

In my wanting to have human beings in my life as an end in itself rather than have particular human beings who are an expression of my values and a response to my values, I never discovered that my soul was individual and mine. I left the piloting of my soul to wherever that value took me...I became its slave and lost my power.

Epihany! The seas calmed but ironically there was a new fierce means of power. How is this possible? The resurgence of the life force energy propelled my ship and it no longer depended on the wind.

Now, this is real grace - Amazing Grace!!!

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see."