Bonds That Make Us Free, Session 6: Every Backslide is an Opportunity to Learn
"We do not, we cannot, become considerate, self-forgetful, and generous beings in a moment."
If you were hoping for cookbook instructions aimed at personal change, Meditations, Man’s Search for Meaning, and Bonds That Make Us Free have surely disappointed you.
Marcus Aurelius, Viktor Frankl, and C. Terry Warner offer philosophies for us to apply in the circumstances of our own life.
In Meditations 2.17, Marcus wrote to himself:
What then can guide us through this life? Philosophy, only philosophy. It preserves the inner spirit, keeping it free from blemish and abuse, master of all pleasures and pains, and prevents it from acting without a purpose or with the intention to deceive, ensuring that we lack nothing, whatever others may do or not do. (Hicks and Hicks translation)
As we continue our work with Bonds That Make Us Free, I hope you see philosophy is highly leveraged while techniques fall short. Of course, a technique, judiciously applied, can provide a short-term burst of enthusiasm, a jump start, if you will.
Even when Warner suggests what seems to be a technique, it is meaningless without the underlying philosophy.
As a young man, Warner saw himself in a “stranglehold of pride and selfishness.” He believed he could change himself if he abided by every important “rule of conduct” he was learning. Following a cookbook didn’t lead to self-improvement. How could it?
Warner came to see that self-improvement projects fail when they are make-overs of your self-concept:
We set out to “re-invent” or “re-engineer” or “make over” ourselves personally. This requires imagining the kind of person we want to be and taking that image as our goal. Then we guide our efforts by that visualized image. Since we’re trying to change from the unacceptable, self-absorbed condition we are in, our motives spring from that condition, and there’s the rub. Being self-absorbed, we pay minimal attention to others’ hopes and needs except when they serve to advance our self-improvement. This is true even if we say we’re doing it to help them. Everything we do to obtain the goal embroils us ever more deeply in being the way we don’t want to be.
Yet, if you browse the bookstores or scroll through Amazon Books, you see far more books offering techniques rather than philosophy for self-help. Most of us want to preserve our self-concept while removing our problems.
Clinging to our self-concept, what Warner calls pride, is a barrier to change. In our readings for this coming week, Chapters 11 and 12, Warner shows us why pride is so destructive. Without a change of heart, nothing will solve the pride problem. Keep that in mind when you read the story of Brenda:
Brenda allowed herself to look at herself, and she saw a woman filled with accusations. She could feel them inhibiting the spirit of life in her. There was a difference between (1) her accusing, self-excusing feelings and (2) the discomfort she felt when she observed herself having and defending those feelings. And she could discern this difference.
Warner explains the lesson: