"You Have Work To Do"

Listening to your deeper voice

Greetings everyone,

I hope you are all living in joy and working in purpose. These do not come automatically to us humans. We must self-reflect in order to get below the level of our sophisticated but oh-so-limited neocortex-based superstructures of understanding.

All of our ideas about ourselves, our lives, success, what’s possible, what we need to do, what we are supposed to do …. all of them are woven from past experiences and become quasi-fixed in constellated nervous system patternings of body and mind. These patternings limit our aliveness and our imaginations.

Zen Master Hakuin called this primary human condition “habit-ridden consciousness.”

Our habit-ridden consciousness gives us the illusion that we are somehow separate from the universe’s vast and indivisible energy field. It has convinced us (for the last 500 years of humanity at least) that the material world is inert and that non-humans possess, at best, “lower orders” of consciousness.

It also gives us a vastly over-simplified understanding of time and space, which in turn diminishes our experience of life.

The last two weeks of my life have been pretty momentous. I will share more details in time, but the main events have been the death of a distant family member and the destruction of my wife’s childhood home…. both under remarkable circumstances that I can’t help but see as profound intelligence and karmic unfolding at work. The result has been an access of joy and a deep healing of intergenerational wounds.

Starting this week, I intend to increase my newsletters to twice a week. I am working with fifteen people right now in one-on-one programs and enjoying the magic of vow-guided work. I’ll be sharing some experiences of how their lives have changed after applying Zen practices and principles.

If you are seeking depth and fulfillment in your work, life or relationships, I invite you to sign up for a free Discovery call. We’ll discuss if I can help you find it.

I will also be opening applications for my next Catalyst Group this week! I’ll be posting more information very soon.

Today’s post is an account of another momentous event in my life, when I felt a communication from a higher intelligence. I wrote this up a few years ago as the Preface to my book (still in manuscript) Zen@Work: Living with Presence and Purpose.

I hope you enjoy!

• Paul

“You Have Work to Do” 

When I was twenty-six years old I had an initiatory experience that set my life on a new course. I did not recognize it as such at the time; in fact, it took me years to realize what had happened. 

It was New Year’s Eve, 1989. I was at a party at a small apartment in New York City. At the time, I was in intense emotional turmoil, having recently ended a relationship with a deeply loving partner who had been at the center of my life for the previous three and a half years. I was in the first few weeks of what would turn into a major depression. 

My emotional extremity was exacerbated by the alcohol I had consumed that night and the stronger drugs I had taken the night before. 

I was, as we say, in a very bad place. 

The dance floor in the small apartment was packed and music was loud. I didn’t know anyone at the party. I had gone with my friend Ted, who lived in the City. It was a great place to obliterate my pain. 

One moment I was furiously dancing, and the next thing I knew everything went black. I no longer had any sense of my body; my consciousness was in a black void. But I was not blacked out. I was completely aware. 

In the next moment, I felt a profound softness and stillness. I sank deeper into the womb-like blackness, dimly aware that I was withdrawing from the physical world. As my sense perspective pointed up toward the world of form and noise, I was acutely aware of how much more pleasurable this dark realm was than the painful world that my life had become. I was drawn down into the quiet softness, and a huge part of me welcomed its comfort, unexpected and unearned.  

That’s when I heard it: a voice spoke within my consciousness and -- with some indication directed upward to the physical world -- said clearly: “You have work to do”. I had no knowing of the source of the voice, but I felt it’s profound depth. It was directing me back toward life.

At that moment I directed my attention up, I saw a pinprick of light. I moved toward it and it rapidly expanded to a larger circle. I could not see anything other than white light in the circle but I started to hear indistinct murmurings that I recognized as human voices, other people.

This was very uncomfortable and for a moment I resisted the return. I withdrew again, back to the soft dark, and the circle shrank. I sensed very clearly I was at a choice point. I could withdraw further into the quietness, or I could go back up to the noisy and painful world of people and things. 

I felt a complete sense of agency, and what’s more, there was no cosmic judgement about my decision. Either one would be fine. 

In the next moment, I surged upward toward the light. The circle expanded and in a flash the “real world” re-enveloped me. The music was still pounding, and the noise was almost unbearable after the quiet of the darkness. I looked up to see a circle of faces staring down at me. I was lying on my back in the middle of the dance floor. Someone helped me up, and some time later, Ted took me back to his place where I slept for I don’t know how long. 

I had no idea what had happened or what it meant, but I felt the depth of it. In the following months, I moved to Los Angeles, began formal Zen practice at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and also took my first job in the technology industry, as a technical writer for a small software company in Encino. 

These would become my primary paths for the next thirty years. Throughout that time, those paths were parallel, yet mutually supportive. Over the years, I came to an understanding of what the voice meant. I had work to do: the work of “waking up” in self-awareness and “stepping up” to work-in-the-world. I have been blessed to have the opportunity to apply myself to both of these paths so intensely.

I still have no idea where the voice came from, although I am quite sure it was not an artifact of my personal egoic self-sense. Although I have not heard any voices quite as distinctly throughout my life, my Zen practice has given me a clear sense of who I am, and who I am not. Specifically I am far larger and less fixed than I once believed myself to be. And I am not the “person” defined by my biographical story, personal qualities and credentials.

Working as a professional from this place of no-place and self of no-self, everything seems to work out perfectly in ways I could never imagine. Sometimes pleasurable, oftentimes not, but NEVER the way I expect.

In my life the paths of waking up and stepping up have become one path. And I still have work to do. 

I believe we all receive messages about our paths in various ways…. through our desires, affinities, interests, synchronicities. And voices of our guides … family members, mentors, animals, poets, disembodied communications….

If you are looking for a compass (and aren’t we all?), I recommend you listen closely to your own life. Your innate wisdom will tell you the most interesting things.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash