Denial is often viewed as a failure of acceptance.  When viewed as such, denial seems irrational.  But, of course, it isn’t.  Denial is an affirmation of status quo.  Denial is an insistence on what subjectively is.  Reality changes non-stop.  But mind doesn’t.  Mind first creates an illusion of permanence and then clings to its own version of reality.  How wondrous!

Denial is an essential part of our survival know-how.  Accept the coping legitimacy of denial.

But denial is more than just survival.  Denial is evidence of our remarkable ability to re-create reality to fit precisely with our moment-specific needs.

Denial is customized perception, a pattern-hold, an amazing unconscious (!) transformation of the stone-hard reality into a soft pillow of the mind-specific dream-world.  There is a dream-weaving magician inside each and every one of us.

Denial is the 8th Wonder of the world.

People say: “Perfection is unattainable.”  And yet they chase it.  What a psychologically toxic set-up!  What a self-fulfilling destiny of dissatisfaction!  Chasing theoretical perfection is like hunting unicorns.  Good luck.

Dare to consider: reality is (already) perfect and perfectible.  This “and” is the hardest “and” to swallow for a dualistic mind.  Reality is already the best that it can be at any given point in time and it can still be better.

Notice the ordinary (real-time) perfection of what (already) is.  There is no other reality than the here-and-now reality that right now is: everything that right now can be already is.  The rest is fantasy.  So, take a break from hunting non-existent unicorns and notice the cornucopia of the present moment.

Psychologically speaking, koans are a unique way to inoculate a human mind to the anxiety of uncertainty.  When we encounter uncertainty, we are stumped.  Uncertainty frustrates us with its enigmatic nonsense.  Koans, in their unanswerable quality, effectively simulate such moments of uncertainty.  Author Hee-Jin Kim explains: the koans are “realized, not solved” (1975, 101).

Admittedly, this explanation is a bit of a puzzle itself.  But here’s how I make sense of it.  A koan, once again, is an unanswerable puzzle.  If we take it on, we begin banging our head against the wall of the unknown.  At some point, we realize that there is no solution, and we settle into a don’t-know mind.  This realization, of course, comes up pretty early in the koan work.  And it serves as the true beginning, not the end of the process.

Knowing in advance that you are working with an unanswerable question, you accept your limitations. No longer trying to know the unknowable, you calmly remain with the question in a state of not knowing.  Knowingly, you keep chasing the tail of not knowing in a process that, I believe, very much parallels the day-to-day mystery of life.  Thus, the potential therapeutic value of koan work as a kind of one-question-therapy that can help soothe the perfectionistic thirst for answers.

Here are a few of the koans [from the Present Perfect book] that I developed to challenge perfectionistic thinking for my clients and my readers:

Imagination is always at least one step ahead of reality.  When we appraise the world, ourselves, or others, we compare what is (the real) with what theoretically could be (the imagined).

Say you got a B on a test.  You look at this grade and you think that you could have done better, that you could have gotten an A.  But that’s theory.  The reality is that you got a B, not an A, and this B represented your practical (not theoretical) best.

With this in mind, let me ask you this: what do you mean by perfection—the theoretical best or the practical best?  When you think about perfection, are you thinking about the imaginary perfection of what could be or about the perfection of what actually is?  Of course, this is something of a rhetorical question.  I know the answer: as a perfectionist, you define perfection as a theoretical best.  That’s exactly why you are never satisfied with reality as it is.

There is no evil.  Do an inventory of this planet and you will find no living, breathing, menacing evil.  There is just human behavior, in all its self-serving short-sightedness.  Evil is a concept, a reification of an observed pattern.  It is a useful semantic short-cut to flag dangerous (as in “unsafe”) people.  But there is no evil per se.

The topic of evil has been a long-standing interest of mine and this writing is to acknowledge that a major cultural milestone has been reached in the discussion of evil.  Read Simon-Baron Cohen’s “The Science of Evil” or at least a review of it by NY Times.

Much of what I have been blogging and writing about has been focused on compassion and forgiveness.  As I see it, all human behavior breaks down to two elements of psychology: motive and effort.  Motive is universal: we are all pursuing wellbeing, moving from minus to plus, operating – at core – on the pleasure principle.  So, in this sense, we are all motivationally-innocent.  No evil here.   Just living.  Effort-wise, we are all doing the best we can at any given moment in time.  Of course, one’s best is safe and beneficial to others but another’s best is dangerous and even possibly sadistic. Why is that? 

I love junk email: its desperation, its naiveté, its brazenness.  I can relate to the humanity (psychology) behind it.  Can you?

For example (from this morning): “LOAN OFFER!  READ THE ATTACHED FILE AND CONTACT MR. CLARK.”

Yes, it was all in caps.  And no, I didn’t contact Mr. Clark…

You just know there’s suffering and ambition behind this.

Suffering + Ambition = Humanity

Who are we saving all these word-processing files for?

Are we going to read what we wrote?!  All these unfinished poems?  All these unpolished stories of narrative fiction?  All these drafts of actualities?

Of course, not: we are once, we are ever a-changing, we are - in a sense – never…

Even if we save a memory-file, it will be opened by the echoes of our here-and-now Essence (i.e. by what we are yet to be (if we are lucky to still be in some hypothetical – however near – future).

Psychological health – it seems – has evolved to include electronic health [e-health].

Purge the digital dust.  In the overall schema of thing-less things, memory is just ones and zeros anyway (foreground and background).

Good hardware is software: it flexes and bends with twists and turns of life, without clinging to its to Form.

Memory is a waste of information.

Live [breathe, love, think] now:

Summertime means bugs (particularly, stink bugs in Eastern US).  Bugs bug us.  We don’t like to be bugged so we kill bugs.  We are playing gods, taking it upon ourselves to decide matters of life and death.   No big deal, right?  After all, it’s just a bug, right?  Right, it is just a bug.

Where am I going with this?  Right here, to this thought: you are missing an opportunity for compassion-training.  Get yourself a $30 dollar BugZooka (which is a battery-free, catch-and-release, pump action hand-vac) and spend this summer practicing compassion.

Let me clarify a couple of things.  First, I am not advocating for bugs.  I am advocating for myself.  I live in the world that is more of a jungle than it theoretically has to be, in a world that plays mindless god left and right, in a world that could certainly benefit from a bit of compassion-training.  This kind of world is unsafe, for me, for you, for anyone.   So, my interest in compassion-training is entirely self-serving.  Sure, I care about the bugs too.

Case in point, one recent morning as I got up to wash my face there was a moth in the sink on its back, flapping its wings.  It was stuck.  Its wings were “glued” to the walls of the sink by the moisture.  I opened the trashcan and rummaged for something thin yet hard to help the moth peel off away from the surface of the sink.  I found the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper and tried to use this.  It didn’t work: as I tried to scoop up the moth, I kept damaging its wings and it would flap wiggle its body in desperate agony.  I felt like Saddam Hussein in a torture chamber with a  captive audience.

I knew the BugZooka wouldn’t work in this situation because the wet moth would be stuck inside the capture chamber and I’d have to scrape it out somehow.  So, I opened the faucet, hoping that as the water fills up the moth might be able to flip over on its stomach at which point I could try to scoop it out once again.  It didn’t work.  It got sucked into the drain to its death.  I felt bummed out for a moment: as primitive of a life as it was, it ended.  There was no lingering guilt (after all, I did the best I could) just a moment of regret, a moment of identification, a moment of compassion, a moment of humanity.