Becoming What We Do

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the July/August 2015 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced her with permission.]

They lived thousands of miles apart on different continents, in different centuries – two men that would go on to become the most influential philosophers in history. They never met, but they shared a common question. What are the mechanics of moral transformation?

In 6^th century B.C.E. China, Confucius taught that action precedes internal transformation. We become what we do. Confucius believed that human nature was essentially good, but our innate goodness existed only as potential. In order to actualize our potential, we need to cultivate three primary virtues: shu, ren, and li.

Shu is the consciousness of empathy; the imaginative understanding of how our actions impact others. For Confucius it came down to one simple rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.”

On this empathetic foundation one then cultivates ren or kindness, the willful decision to work for the good of others with no thought of what we might receive in return. Moving from quid pro quo toward altruism, Confucian morality favors duty over self-interest.

Still, the seeds of shu and ren bear no fruit until they are embodied in the actions of our everyday lives.

Li means proper behavior or decorum – all of the little rituals of life that demonstrate our care and respect for one another. For Confucius, human excellence, like any other art form, is realized through conscious choice and willful practice, in the same way one masters the violin. You don’t get good at violin by thinking about it, or admiring it from afar. You have to pick it up and play. After a lifetime of practice, virtuous behavior becomes internalized and unconscious. What began as rote repetition attains graceful naturalness in time. Our innate goodness is externalized through action. We become good. And everyone benefits.

A century after Confucius and half a world away, a young student at the Platonic Academy in Athens began to formulate his own ethical theories, eventually emerging from the shadow of his famous teacher Plato. Like his mentor, and in a curious alignment with Confucius, Aristotle taught that humans were by nature good, but our goodness was a seed that would flourish only with proper cultivation. For a human being to reach their full moral potential, four things would have to happen: education, reason, habit, and character.

Education is essential because it trains our faculty of reason, and reason is required to discern the good. Then the good must be practiced repeatedly until it becomes habit. And habit constructs character. As Confucius argued a century earlier, we become what we do.

For example courage.

For the ancient Greeks, courage was the most important virtue because without it none of the other virtues are possible. One must be brave to be compassionate. But how do we zero in on courage? How can we tell if we’ve stopped short in cowardice, or overshot into rashness? For Aristotle only reason can make this determination. Critical thinking and rational deliberation are requirements for moral action because they correctly identify the Golden Mean, the virtuous middle point between the vices of excess and deficit. On this Aristotle and Confucius agree – we cannot become good without first developing keen discernment and an iron will.

From the Confucian and Aristotelian perspective, the mechanics of moral transformation are fairly straightforward. Correctly identify the good. Practice it until you embody it – act courageous until you embody courage, choose compassion until you embody compassion. Watch old habits fall away, replaced by new habits that give full expression to your innate goodness. Thus is the good, both individually and communally, realized.

We aren’t talking about mere conformity to arbitrary norms or obedience to whatever fleeting laws currently hold sway – we’re talking about becoming who we really are.

In the end, by embracing transformation and embodying virtue we become integrated, no longer in conflict with ourselves. Our thoughts and actions align with our innate higher nature resulting in serenity, freedom, and happiness. For Confucius and Aristotle, the fully realized life is natural, joyful, and deeply rewarding. Who doesn’t want that? And it begins with action.  

All the World's a Stage

A stage is a strange vantage point from which to see the world – all of those faces looking up at you, waiting for the magic to begin, and hoping you’re the one who can deliver it. In all the thousands of times I’ve been on stage as a singer-songwriter, guitarist, band leader, side man or speaker it never ceases to amaze me just how weird it is, how audacious, how presumptuous, to step out in front of a crowd and claim the right to everyone’s attention, and how volatile the situation really is – you could crash and burn or rise up in transcendence. You just never know. In live performance there are no second takes, no do-overs and no mercy. What you see is what you get. Your blunder will live forever on YouTube. In so many ways, that hour on stage is not all that different from the other 23 hours of the day. In fact, the lessons learned on stage apply with equal force to our so-called normal, everyday lives, because Shakespeare was right – all the world’s a stage.

Be here now. When you take the stage you must leave behind your divided mind and show up as a single point of clarity and simplicity. So too in life, our effectiveness suffers when we show up as a convoluted swarm of tangled thoughts. Dissipated and drained, our energy wanes just when we need it most. And for what? All our busy-mind machinations produce nothing. Only when we arrive fully in the present moment do we have a real shot at getting it right.

Fall in love with what is. Your best performance, and your best life, can only arise in the consciousness of acceptance. Struggling against a bunch of little things that don’t align with your arbitrary preferences only saps your strength and dilutes your essence. Resistance to what is kicks up a lot of dust, like a mule dragging its hooves on a dusty trail it doesn’t want to go down, making it hard to see and even harder to breathe. Instead, renounce resentment and fall in love with the messy perfection of this moment, a unique alignment of disparate elements that have never before and will never again occur in this specific fashion. Buddhist philosophy calls it tathata, the ordinary miracle of every moment. Why would you want to miss that?

Trust your team. Assuming you’ve attracted the right people and chosen well, stop trying to run everything and let the strength of those around you carry you. Allow the unexpected power and creativity of the good people around to you find solutions, build bridges, and show you the way. When you stop meddling and interfering, people feel free to be their best. Everyone has a job to do and a role to play. Let them.

Let yourself be lifted. When you are here now, in love with what is and graced by the brilliance of your team, feel yourself lifted. Let the ground slip away and float on a wave of beauty. Feel fully the freedom that can only exist when you let slip the pedestrian concerns of more fearful souls. This light, this grace, this sublime clarity – this is what you have prepared so arduously for. Don’t forget to experience it.

Smile. You work hard when you’re on stage. You are fastidiously processing a million things at once. Your memory is working overtime – lyrics, lines, notes, timing, phrases, cues. In the middle of singing the third verse you’re thinking should I plug the CD after this song or later in the set? In the midst of all this heavy lifting, don’t forget to smile. This is supposed to be fun, remember? Bringing a sense of play and a sense of joy to your work, no matter what your job is, opens channels within and without you – channels through which the love you and your audience have for each other can flow. Slow down and let the joy of the work sink in. It’ll be over soon enough and after the show you’ll be just another schmuck stuck in traffic. Enjoy this while you can. When you smile, you empower others to feel their own joy.

Feel it, don’t think it. No matter what you’re doing on stage, make sure your heart leads the way. Once the preparations are done, it is essential that you stop thinking and start feeling. What your audience wants most is to feel something, and they’re looking to you for leadership. So too in your daily work leave room for inexplicable kindness and impractical compassion. Institutional and bureaucratic structures are designed to serve humanity, not the other way around. When the machinery of intellect fails, use the Force Luke.

Prepare thoroughly. Do your homework. Know your tools. Practice all your moves and build a brilliant skill set. Art is not just inspiration. Before the creative frenzy begins, make sure you’ve thought through all the probable steps. There can be no inspiration without preparation. Chefs measure out all their ingredients and gather their tools before a single spoon hits the pan. What if we brought this same attention to detail to our everyday lives? Instead of flailing around and wondering why we feel so uninspired, draw up some plans. Like they say, fail to plan? Plan to fail.

Let go completely. On the other side of the planning process, when the house lights go down and the curtain comes up, abandon all your fastidiousness. Let loose the dogs of war. Time to revel in your abandon. Get a little crazy. Forget about who you are and what you’re supposed to do. Surrender to a childlike sense of play. Step off the path and see what you find. In any endeavor there comes a time to let go completely and trust the process and the preparation and the good people around you and the audience, especially the audience, because they will rise to meet you in that sacred place where all of the lines blur. So to in our everyday lives when we let spirit guide us we feel our fear slipping away and in its place arises a boldness, a willingness, a powerful creativity not entirely of our own making, and on this wave of grace we are carried to a place we could not have found or even recognized on our own. We come together around stages in bars, in nightclubs, in theaters, in concert halls, and also in classrooms, in churches, in seminars and sports arenas to let our alienation and loneliness fade away in the bright light of our collective reverie.

Play the role you have been given. In art and in life we must play the role that best suits our strengths and abilities – it does us no good, nor anyone else, if we attempt to tackle a task ill suited to our temperament or talent. Start, and end, with the truth of who you are. Careful, honest and generous self-assessment combined with a courageous willingness to experiment and fail will lead you through a sometimes painful but utterly necessary series of trials and errors until you finally find the yellow brick road that leads you home to your authentic self and your rightful place in the sun. Your true purpose and greatest joy lay within you. You don’t have to be a professional performer. You don’t need a spotlight or a three-camera shoot with a director shouting, “Action!” You can begin right where you are. Because all the world’s a stage.