Thresholds

Life doesn’t move in a straight line.

It progresses as a wave form, modulating between opposites around a middle way - or as the saying goes, ‘sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes sunny, sometimes rain.”

And just as life moves in a wave form, so too does everything IN a life.

As any athlete knows, there is a wave pattern to their training progress - not only in physical prowess, but also in their levels of aptitude and motivation. The first progress wave is slow, but steady. There is always a freshness of mind in beginning any enterprise, which gains momentum as confidence grows. Then comes the elation of continued progress, in which the athlete feels like a master of the universe.

Then, right at the peak of confidence and prowess comes the lapse - an apparent decline in ability, progress and motivation.

This is followed by shock at the decline, and (if there is no coach to enlighten them) failing confidence as the athlete becomes demoralized. Then, right at the point where things seem darkest, comes the beginning of the next wave up.

It’s the same in the share market - any trader knows that the market moves in waves - the wave up being made of three smaller progressions, then two progressions in the inevitable wave down. And that entire movement forms the progression a much larger wave, also of three up and two down, which is a progression in a larger wave and so on. Waves within waves.

Anyone who has read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ or any of the voluminous material available about Fibonacci numbers or the aesthetic notions of ‘The Golden Mean’ or ‘Golden Section’ would know that this wave movement of all things, and the proportions in which the waves move seems to be universal - roughly 1.6 to 1. Nobody seems to know exactly why the universe moves in this way, but everything in it seems to obey this ratio, from art to the flux between peace and war in the world arena.

The same movement can be seen in our own emotional phases and moods - and the way an emotion rises, plays out, then fades - beginning, consolidation, intensification, extinction burst, then dissipation.

From making love, to the ebb and flow of oceans, to the rise and fall of empires - everything moves in waves.

For myself, a perfect example of this wave pattern became apparent when I was a songwriter.

Though I didn’t know about wave theory at the time, I got to know that there were certain thresholds I had to pass through to craft a good song. It’d start of from a small core idea - a chord progression, riff or feel - or perhaps a key lyric of about one or two lines. Usually this first wave would come spontaneously with the intimation of a complete song already resonating within it - I’d almost be able to hear it just a few steps away, somewhere in the ether.

So I’d start jamming around the the idea, collecting more ideas around that central core - and, in a flurry of inspiration, this wave would gain momentum - the most pleasurable part.

Confidence would grow as the ideas spilled out faster and faster together with feelings of happiness and invincibility - thoughts like, “this is the best thing I’ve ever done”, and “I’m a fucking genius!”

Then, right at the peak of this euphoria, would come a brief but intense realization of confusion as all the parts I’d come up would suddenly seem not to fit. It would be as if all the incredible beauty I had seen before had evaporated, and I was left with the mess of its remains.

Shock and dejection would follow as I’d look around at the all the un-matchable lyrics scattered around the floor, and listen to the hurriedly recorded bits jangling in the speakers, and as the initial dream of the song faded to nothing, I would feel hopelessness and desolation - thoughts like, “I hate songwriting”, I’ll never write a song again”.

In later years I learnt that this was the time to walk away - but in the stubbornness of youth, I often used to exhaust myself trying to write my way through this valley of the spirit, only exhausting myself in the process.

The next stage would come after a break, whether voluntary or enforced. Whether an hour or a year, it’s amazing how a break can clear a congested mind. I’d come back and immediately see something new in the mess of what I’d done. So, though the original dream would be gone, a new one would arise like a phoenix from its ashes and the next wave up would begin, usually resulting in a finished song, and my confidence as a songwriter would be vindicated.

At the time I called these phases ‘thresholds of pain’ and as I became more experienced I got used to them, even predicting when they would occur. And in conversation with other songwriters, as well as authors and painters, I learnt that they too, all had their own strategies for surmounting these thresholds.

This wave formation is innate to the learning of any new skill - and it’s especially present in learning how to meditate.

When I was training people to meditate, I watched so many pass through the usual wave patterns - elation, then the subtle arrogance of ease, then having it all fall in a heap as their practice and motivation seemingly dissipated - at which point some would give up right at the time when it seemed most hopeless - which was usually, ironically, just before the next breakthrough.

For me as a trainer, it was excruciating when a trainee would decide to give up. As they reiterated each others plaintive declarations of defeat, saying, “It’s just not for me”, or “I’m just no good at it”, I always knew that right at that moment of defeat, they were closest to the next breakthrough and it was up to me as a trainer to help them see this. So the hard work would begin - the battle to keep them going through their valley of doom, even as their mind told them it was hopeless, they don’t have time, and so on.

Because the conscious mind is such a tawdry politician. It will always ‘follow the polls’, so to speak, chanting the litany of whatever temporary phase is happening in the mind/body - particularly negative phases, anxiety or pain, because they are the most compelling.

Mountain climbers and marathon runners say their greatest challenge is not the physical task they undertake, so much as it is their conscious mind - the hysterical mess of thoughts screaming for them to stop. These thoughts are a part of any endeavor and they do a bad cop good cop routine with the more subtle and soothing thoughts that tell you you don’t need to do this: “my life is complete without this” , and “I could be comfortable at home” ...and the most compelling of all - “it’s obviously not the right time for me to do this”.

All of these thoughts, the viciously demoralizing ones and the soothing procrastinators, are designed to get you to balk at whatever threshold you’re stuck at - to stop you passing through the fire to victory at the other side.

In a book I wrote on meditation practice,’ Happy to Burn’, I said of this:

“The ego is threatened by meditation because it fears change. It equates change, even if it is positive, with danger and the possibility of death - not necessarily death of the organism, but death of itself. It is of no matter that many of our habits limit our life, or even threaten our survival; the Ego will always try to keep the status quo, because that’s all it’s ever known.

Its operating creed is: ‘The way things have always been is best because it works. How do I know it works?

‘Well, I’m alive aren’t I?’ That is all it cares about - survival, not quality, or happiness, or satisfaction; just brute survival.

So the ego will resist any attempts that are made to change the way it functions, and in this campaign of resistance it has all our conditioned habits of laziness, procrastination, fear, desire, guilt, anger and hatred to draw on as an arsenal of coercive weapons. We all have conditioned weaknesses in our personalities, and it is these that will arise in practice of meditation.”

I’ll finish with a quote that always sits at the back of my head, reminding me of what’s important - it was said in an interview by Peter Brook, a British stage director:

"Never stop. One always stops as soon as something is about to happen."