Why Do “Things Get Stale” Over Time?
“Let it be ok that nothing is happening. Let the show be over, let the movie, the story of 'I' as an individual person, be over. And see what happens.”
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I thought I might respond to Joe Martino’s recent piece on the sense of a “Lack of Novelty”.
The part of us that may feel this way is both a blessing and a curse. It both the energetic force of “doing” that the Egyptians identified with masculine Phi constant, and the perennial critic that admonishes us if, as Joe writes, things are getting stale.
Eckhart Tolle has devoted a lot of his work to this phenomenon – which he calls the “voice in the head” or “movie-making” energy which he calls the “Ego”.
I remember an experiment I did a long time ago where I decided to just sit quietly in a chair without doing anything for maybe ten or twenty minutes. I was astounded when a minute or two later my right hand reached for the laptop mouse. The body had a mind of its own.
It was around that time I got interested in Eckhart Tolle’s work -- in the video below he describes the familiar discomfort that one feels when waiting on a line or just sitting idly and has a powerful suggestion: Sit with it, feel it in your body, don’t resist it, and notice that it passes.
“You Need to Just Stop” – Taylor Swift (“You Need to Calm Down”)
This is in line with something I have discovered in my own recovery – the need to slow down and be able to rest and just simply we with what is happening. It’s like switching from the protagonist of the movie going on in the mind to just being in the audience and allowing it to play.
Jac O’Keeffe, another teacher I appreciate, helped me enormously with this short piece:
“Let it be ok that nothing is happening. Let the show be over, let the movie, the story of 'I' as an individual person, be over. And see what happens.” Jac O’Keeffe
When I was recovering from surgery and needed rest, I was forced to accept long periods of time when “nothing was happening.” After fighting it for a while I finally surrendered and discovered for myself that the less I pressured myself with old prompts from my conditioning, the easier life became.
The Voice of Trauma
Joe Martino also writes:
“I don't think the part that feels things are stale is meant to be brushed off with, ‘Oh stay in the moment, all is perfect.’ It's meant to be nurtured.”
I would connect this with Gabor Mate’s view of trauma as a wound that needs to be loved and handled gently. It’s probably different for everyone but a pervasive dissatisfaction with what is and a longing for “something else” (again also in line with what Eckhart Tolle calls the “Ego”) is probably linked to some emotion that’s never really been given space to express.
So, again, by coaxing these emotions back into awareness within the body and then welcoming them as part of the totality of what it means to be human (even the dark ones Jung calls the Shadow), we can begin to contact a layer of serenity from which to respond with presence to whatever is happening.
Eckhart Tolle contrasts the compulsion to DO with just BEING – I am versus I am doing X. I’ve connected this also with a sense of allowing things to be as they ARE – not “judging the universe.”
Could This Help Collective Healing?
I think this kind of slowing down as a society happened during the brief period during COVID when we went into a lockdown and lots of people just had to stop working.
The Collective Consciousness took a deep breath and many commented on social media about this unexpected bonus to a terrible situation – they reconnected more deeply with their human emotions as they were forced to forego their usual routines of earning a living.
This is why I agree when Joe says:
“It's acting as an evolutionary pressure for those who hear it and sense that a fresh inventiveness and aliveness wants to be born. Something that truly inspires us beyond our current stories.”
But it seems to me that true evolutionary pressure has a source beyond our own minds, and we begin to hear and sense it when we finally slow down all of the conditioned patterns which we have struggled to fulfill mindlessly in the past.
We have many signs of this. Psychedelics and mushrooms which are notable for breaking down the “Doors of Perception” or conditioned patterns are now hailed as potential treatments for the many forms of mental illness that have resulted from our mass psychosis with More and Growth.
Of course, the obvious burdens this psychosis has placed on our planet with its obvious non-sustainability, and violence to the sacred equilibrium of Nature, are now plain as ever with the massive distortions from what we have previously experienced as “normal” climate and weather. Storms are angrier and more dangerous.
What my experiment with sitting quietly showed me quite effectively was that “I” wasn’t entirely in control in ways I had previously imagined. The body had a life of its own, and that is where the dissatisfaction with “staleness” arises most profoundly.
As in many things, it is probably best to find a balance between action and rest. Eckhart Tolle makes the distinction between doing and being; suggesting that “just being”, rather than being a state of complete passivity, instead opens the organism to energies and insights that can better inform subsequent periods of doing, perhaps even fostering feelings of enthusiasm as opposed to stagnation.
(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse. His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)