The War of Art

rotten wives or disloyal husbands; fear of failing to support our families, of sacrificing their dreams for ours. Fear of betraying our race, our ’hood, our homies. Fear of failure. Fear of being ridiculous. Fear of throwing away the education, the training, the preparation that those we love have sacrificed so much for, that we ourselves have worked our butts off for. Fear of launching into the void, of hurtling too far out there; fear of passing some point of no return, beyond which we cannot recant, cannot reverse, cannot rescind, but must live with this cocked-up choice for the rest of our lives. Fear of madness. Fear of insanity. Fear of death.
     
    These are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it.
     
    Fear That We Will Succeed.
     
    That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess.
     
    That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.
     
    This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years.
     
    We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.
     
    We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.
     
    Of course this is exactly what happens. But here’s the trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustiblesource of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they’re better friends, truer friends. And we’re better and truer to them.
     
    Do you believe me?

 
    THE AUTHENTIC SELF
    ----
     
    Do you have kids?
     
    T hen you know that not one of them popped out as tabula rasa, a blank slate. Each came into this world with a distinct and unique personality, an identity so set that you can fling stardust and great balls of fire at it and not morph it by one micro-dot. Each kid was who he was. Even identical twins, constituted of the exact same genetic material, were radically different from Day One and always would be.
     
    Personally I’m with Wordsworth:
     
    Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
    The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
    Hath had elsewhere its setting,
    And cometh from afar:
    Not in entire forgetfulness,
    And not in utter nakedness,
    But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
    From God who is our home.
     
    In other words, none of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.
     
    Another way of thinking of it is this: We’re not born with unlimited choices.
     
    We can’t be anything we want to be.
     
    We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it.
     
    Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
     
    If we were born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter.
     
    If we were born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother.
     
    If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice of the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.

 
    TERRITORY VERSUS HIERARCHY
    ----
     
    In the animal kingdom, individuals define themselves in one of two ways—by their rank within a hierarchy (a hen in a pecking order, a wolf in a pack) or by their connection to a territory (a home base, a hunting ground, a turf).
     
    This is how individuals—humans as well as animals—