What Tom said to the one-eyed man was what I call a great therapeutic intervention. But even radical interventions by the best of therapists are powerless unless there is a commitment by a whole and undivided being to change. All of the information in the world is of no value, and all research is irrelevant, until placed in the context of the power of intention.
We all display a kind of inconsistency among our beliefs, our wishes, and our actions in our own lives, although it may be easier to recognize in the lives of others. We have all listened to an argument play itself out between two (or more) voices within our own minds—one preaching about what we should do, and the other helplessly apologizing and explaining about how we would if we could but we can't. We all share an awareness, if we are honest, that on some fundamental level, the apparent struggle among our beliefs, actions, and desires is a false one. More often than not, the "struggle" has emerged after a choice has already been made, though perhaps unconsciously. The "struggle" manifests itself mostly as effort: "trying" to decide; "trying" to be good; "trying" to keep our word. The false struggle is invented by our minds as a distraction, to "draw fire"—to draw the fire of our attention and keep us from seeing that we have already chosen.
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When people view themselves as conglomerations of opposing forces, each force straining in a different direction with each particular component striving to wrest control from the others and dominate the future, the result is a sense of helplessness. Impotent fury is weakness. Effort is the opposite of power. That aspect of our experience that longs for happiness and righteousness never quite succeeds in gaining control over the other forces, which we view as alien and unwanted "baggage"—the unfortunate accidents of our character that somehow overpower our inner longings and cover up our true selves. We imagine that stronger or luckier people have succeeded in their battle for self-control, and that this is the source of their power. This belief that others have succeeded where we have failed becomes just another element in our battle against ourselves: our longing to be that which we are not.
The conditions we produce in our lives, the actions we repeat against our will, the circumstances that make us suffer —somehow we have perpetuated them, despite our professed beliefs and our efforts to change.
The source of our power to produce the results we want does not lie in our beliefs, our hopes, or our time-consuming struggle to change. The person who says he wants to lose weight, but says he just can't give up midnight snacks, may believe he is in a struggle between "being good" and "giving in" to his cravings, but in fact he has already chosen to keep snacking. The "struggle" that he describes serves to hide this fact.
By focusing our attention on our apparent struggle to change—the reasons and explanations and excuses that we generate instead of results—we engage in a conspiracy to pretend that we are each an accidental grouping of disharmonious parts working against each other. Why "parts"? When you say, "I want to look for a new job, but I can't seem to get started," who is it that "wants to" and who is it that "can't"? It is as though there were two of you and one—the one who "can't"—had more power than the other. You pretend that the "real" you is the one that "wants to." We pretend that we are not whole. The "I" who wants to get up early every morning and exercise, for instance, seems to be a different individual from the "I" who decides to sleep in. The "I" who longs for a successful, supportive marriage is not the "I" who backs down from making a commitment whenever a relationship gets too serious. Instead of examining more closely the actual way in which we operate, which consists of "trying" to get what we want and then sabotaging our own efforts, we assume our error is in not trying hard enough, and redouble both our efforts and our resistance. We always manage to stay one step ahead of ourselves, so that we never quite reach our goals. By focusing on the struggle instead of on the results, we avoid having to admit that the one who wants to change and the one who resists change are one and the same, that we are whole, and that we really do get what we want—which is struggle, rather than results. But until I can experience my own resistance as "me" just as I experience my desire to change as "me," I am doomed to be locked in the hopeless struggle for control, Tom was absolutely right about the one-eyed man: "Ya jus' askin' for it. Ya like it. Lets ya feel sorry for yaself."
Instead of amalgamations of parts having contradictory and uncontrollable purposes, suppose we consider ourselves to be already what we long to be: functional, integrated wholes who produce the results we choose, effortlessly, with our entire beings. Suppose we all, already, are that. All the apparent contradictions and dichotomies—the fat person struggling to be thin, the sinner trying to be good, the workaholic longing for time with his family—are actually smokescreens, false struggles enacted by our own minds to hide from others or ourselves our true intent. Our true intent is to do just what we do.
As complete, integrated human beings, we direct our lives with purpose, with effortless control, and with unchecked power. This is scary. The contradictions between our principles and our behavior are only superficial, only invented for the sake of appearance and to avoid acknowledging our terrifying power to make things happen. Our unwillingness to explore the possibility that what we have is what we want—that our lives function, that we are comfortable and fear change in most areas of our lives—prevents us from producing change in other areas. Our energy is totally invested in maintaining our lives the way they are, and the phony struggle for change only conceals the ways in which the status quo serves us. Our apparent battle for change is a tempest in a teapot. As long as I identify my "self only as that desire to change and not also as a presently more powerful desire to remain the same, I will remain stuck. In a sense, I can change, finally, only by giving up trying to change.
In order for things to get better, they must first get worse. In order to get out of debt, we have to acknowledge how it serves us to be in debt. In order to lose weight, we have to be in touch with, and confront, how we also want to stay fat. We have to stop paying attention to our struggle and turn our awareness to the ways in which these circumstances we claim we want to change serve us—the payoffs. Only after experiencing ourselves the way we are, dropping our phony struggle to change, and telling the truth about all of it, can we create the lives we have been saying we want.
This examination of our subconscious desire to avoid change, and of what lies beneath the phony struggle, can get us "unstuck." It also leads to a deeper place, a scarier place, than that of mere struggle to change. Struggling to change is what you do to hide from something worse. Struggling to change is a way to avoid facing the abyss, and if the abyss could be avoided, it would be a good idea.
The abysmal truth is that everything comes to nothing. No change matters. Whatever you don't have is only important to you because you don't have it. Something you want is very important to you until you get it, and then it's nothing after a while. This movement from anticipation to accomplishment to disillusionment is inevitable. All change is futile. The alternative kind of life—conservative, preserving beliefs, avoiding change, a kind of stagnation within the protected bounds of first-learned concepts—is an equally futile way to live. Both ways to live are merely playing tiddlywinks between predoom and postdoom. Willingness to face the abyss of meaninglessness is the power required to accomplish change. Whatever your main struggle is, it is insignificant in the face of your death; it is petty and unimportant and has no meaning at all. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.