RULES OF THE GAME
From the Chicano Critical Review, March 25, 2006
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
Emeritus Professor of English, Texas State University System–Sul Ross; Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in English, Texas A&M University– Kingsville.
E llis Cose may feel free to define his place in
the world (Newsweek, January 28, 2002,
52) but that is not a reality for many others
of color. However, Cose’s list of “things you must
know to survive and thrive in America” is a list of
things everyone ought to know to survive and thrive
anywhere. Here’s Cose’s list:
Don’t expect complaints about the raw deal
you’ve gotten in life to get you anywhere.
Do better than the world expects of you; live in
a bigger world than the one you see.
Don’t expect support from those who have not
accomplished very much in their lives.
Those who bring out your most self-destructive
tendencies are not your friends.
Don’t be too proud to ask for help, particularly
from those who are wiser and older.
Recognize that being true to yourself is not the
same as being true to a stereotype.
Don’t let glitter blind you.
Don’t expect competence and hard work alone
to get you the recognition or rewards you
think you deserve.
Seize the time, for it’s already later than you
think.
Lost time is hard to make up.
Have faith in yourself, even if you fake it.
Don’t force innocent others to bear the price of
your pain.
I would add:
With all its risks, life is to be lived not feared.
As a teacher in the public schools and later in
colleges and universities, I have observed with con-
siderable concern the motivational index of people
of all ages. Like Par Lagerqvist’s panoramic hordes
or Tolkien’s masses, I saw in those people the end-
less string of humanity struggling in what we call
the human condition, most of them held in place by
a fear of their own making, accepting the
proposition that all of us have a specified place in
the great chain of being, immovable, irrevocable.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century
political philosopher, observed during his time that
“man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
We tend to equate that remark with political
oppression of the past, totalitarian regimes that
actually put their subjects in chains. But the deeper
meaning of Rousseau’s statement links up with
William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles” which
bind people to their own oppressive behaviors. A
century later, Karl Marx, another political
philosopher, proclaimed that “man” had to throw
off those mind-forged manacles which shackled him
before he could achieve self-fulfillment. In the 19th
century struggle for Black emancipation, Frederick
Douglas saw clearly that the limits of oppression
are set not by the oppressors but by the oppressed.
F
ortune often favors folly, even bravery,
sometimes naiveté, seldom cowardice or
fear because the essence of life is risk. I
don’t agree with Samuel Johnson that life is to be
endured. Life is what we make of it. Life need not
be a hassle. That does not mean there are not
obstacles to overcome, to surmount, to circumvent.
However, the more one “struggles” against
obstacles, the greater the resis-tance. In the martial
arts “resistance” is an internal opponent. In Judo,
for example (a martial art in which I earned a Black
Belt) one does not resist the thrust of an opponent
but, rather, one “flows” with those thrusts, using
them against the opponent. This is turning
opposition to one’s advantage
In open societies people are not chained any-
more, but many people are “enchained”
nevertheless by par-ticular kinds of self-defeating
notions and behavior, oppressive, internally
controlled drives of their own making. Samuel J.
Warner put it this way: “When people consider their
failure to succeed in some aspect of life, they
generally overlook completely the causal roles
played by forces within themselves in the ultimate
outcome of that failure.” Instead they blame
external forces: the boss, the wife, the husband, the
job, the system, the parents (oh yes, the parents)
any-one except themselves. Paul Tournier summed
it up as: “People who complain of being thwarted
have nearly always their own weakness to blame.”
We’ve read about gamblers, drunks, spenders
with compulsive behaviors , unable to curb them
for their own good; of men and women married to
alcoholics, divorce them, and keep on marrying
alcoholics. Psychologically such behavior has been
explain-ed as one which seeks punishment for
whatever rea-sons are embedded in the mind—a co-
dependency chaining them to impulses that are
anathema to themselves and the public weal. We are
controlled by feelings , not by logic or reason. In
the Epistle to the Romans (7:19), St. Paul discloses:
“For the good that I should, I do not; but the evil
which I should not, that I do.”
Paradoxical as that may sound, behavior is, un-
fortunately, often motivated by forces inimical to
the best interests of the individual. Death wishes are
manifestations of those forces. Warner calls people
driven by those forces “gargoyles of their
genotype,” exhibiting behavior assuring their defeat
and failure, oftentimes a manifestation of
immaturity, petulance, dependency, and naiveté.
This behavior “helps” them avoid coming to grips
with truths about themselves or looking squarely at
their lives, examining them close-ly.
Gargoyles are grotesque human or animal fig-
ures. In ancient—and down to fairly modern times
—gar-goyles adorned tops and corners of buildings
to ward off evil spirits. Later, architects used
gargoyles as gut-ter spouts to throw rain water
clear of buildings. Gar-goyles are not fashionable in
architecture these days, but here and there one can
still see on old buildings gargoyles protruding from
roofs. The gargoyles of Notre Dame cathedral are
still there. Mind-forged manacles of behavior make
gargoyles of people, sit-ing atop edifices of doubt,
of their own design and construction, waiting for
imagined evils and obsta-cles.
Shakespeare remarked that “there is nothing
but thinking makes it so.” Indeed, if we think we
are “powerless” with little hope of getting ahead
then we are powerless with little hope of getting
ahead. The mind becomes the servant of that
thought and, in turn, the self also becomes a servant
of that thought. The tail now wags the dog. The
English poet Milton conceptualized “the mind” as
“a little world made cunning” for it could “make of
heaven a hell, and a hell of heaven.” Indeed the
mind can be the enemy within, a sort of fifth
column destroying hopes and dreams by making us
think we are less than what we are, planting seeds
of doubt, cynicism, and skepticism in all we do. The
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mind can be a formidable opponent, but not
invincible.
P
lato opined that “the unexamined life is not
worth the living” yet countless numbers of
people go through life without examining
their lives, unaware of the underpinnings of their
existence.
The first step in creating a fulfilling life is to
assume responsibility for one’s own behavior, what
is going on in one’s life in the here and now. We
have first to see “what” is going on in our lives,
then ask “why” it’s going on.
The ancient Greeks believed reason was the
lamp of life. The world could be organized (and
changed) by reason. Thus, if we can reason that
“attitude for-mation” is an acquired process, then
we can reason that attitude can be “re-formed.”
William James, the eminent American psychologist,
posited that “human beings, by changing the inner
attitudes of their minds, can change the outer
aspects of their lives.” He was talking about
“transformation—the metamorphosis of self.”
Resistance to inner change prevents self-know-
ledge, perpetuating self-defeating behavior. To
begin the process of personal renewal we need first
to acknowledge resistance, examine “reactive” and
“avoidance” behavior, look for “unconscious” resis-
tance in our interactions with people. For example,
to live one’s life predominantly in relation to one’s
parents, seeking always to please them is to prolong
“the little world of childhood” and to prolong one’s
transit to adulthood. To be in constant conflict with
one’s parents is to thwart one’s self-realization.
Seeking their approval long past the time when such
approval is appropriate is simply an extension—
though it may not appear to be that—of the parent-
child mode. To renew the human spirit we must
strive towards creative self-fulfillment; towards
self-direc-ted independence, propelling us towards
true auto-nomy. This is accomplished by creating
strong, open relationships based on realistic
perspectives of how life works, not the way we
think it ought to work. This means being willing to
listen with the inner ear, to see with the inner eye. It
means moving from being self-centered to being
centered on self. The difference is profound.
I n describing the life and travels of Mingliaotse,
Tu Lung, the Buddhist philosopher, explains
that
He who has attained the Tao can go into water
without becoming wet, jump into fire without being
burned, walk upon reality as if it were a void and
travel on a void as if it were reality. One who has
attained the Tao is master of himself. Throw him in
the company of the soiled, and he will be like a
lotus flower growing from muddy water, touched by
it, yet unstained.
Tu Lung goes on to explain that many of us are like
the willow tree, following the wind—when the wind
is quiet, we are quiet; when the wind moves, we
move—like sand in water, as clean or as muddy as
the water flowing over us and around us. That’s not
transformation. That’s being at the effect of life, not
at cause, nor at choice.
Buddhist philosophy does not create meaning
for any particular object in relation/distinction to
something else. In Buddhist philosophy everything
has a meaning of its own; things point to no reality
other than themselves. A woman is not a flower—a
wo-man is a woman; and a flower is a flower. Wer-
ner Erhard, the founder of EST, once explained,
“Water’s wet, rocks are hard, and mother is
mother.” In Buddhist reality things are what they
are, not what they are not, what we want them to
be. That’s an im-portant part of transformation but
the most difficult to grasp. To become transformed
we must start with things the way they are, not the
way they are not. That means we have to start with
a clear vision of what is and work from there. We
must be clear about where to start. For if we start
with false premises and false expectations, that way
disappointment lies.
Many of us are looking for the Way (the Tao),
believing that its discovery will shed some light on
who we are and what we ought to do in life. But the
Way, like the Tao, points to no discovery or purpose
other than its own. Its reality is its own, pointing to
no other reality. That’s the point of transformation:
dealing with things as they are, not the way they are
not.
What often confuses people about Buddhist
philosophy is its paradoxical nature, its way of
speaking to the point and, yet, beyond it. For
example, “the Tao that can be expressed is not the
real Tao,” according to Lao Tzu, writing some
2,500 years ago. That paradox is like saying we
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ought to deal with things as they are, not as they are
not. Since the “real Tao” is “inexpressible” then
anything expressed as the real Tao must be false.
So, too, if we deal with things the way they are not,
then that is not transfor-mation.
When Master Shin-t’ou was asked about ulti-
mate revelation in Buddhism, he pointed out that no
account could explain it. “Until one has it, one does
not understand it. But once one has it, there is no
need of an explanation.” Werner Erhard said some-
thing close to this when he spoke of being unable to
change what we know, explaining that what we can
change is the way we know something. It’s out of
that response—the way we know something—that
mean-ingful change can occur for us.
For example, in the great Western Renaissance
of the 13th century, a whole new spirit of the age, a
zeitgeist, emerged from looking at the values of
Greek and Roman antiquity in a way different from
the way they had been viewed. That produced a
whole new wave of creativity—bringing forth the
new out of what was already there.
Creative energy flows out of our willingness to
hold something differently. By “hold” I mean the
way an attitude or belief is part of us. Consider the
following: If we hold a bird too tightly, for example,
it cannot fly. And held too tightly, once freed, more
than likely it will not return to our hand. That’s how
change, creativity, and transformation work.
Holding them too tightly doesn’t give them a chance
to take wing. That’s why the great Western
Renaissance worked, why it produced such great
luminaries as Galileo, Bacon, Michelangelo,
DaVinci, et al. They let go of the view of how
things were—fixed notions about life—for the
vision of how things could be: the bird in flight, the
dynamic for the static, the examined life. The
rigidity of ideas had held the Western world hostage
in a thousand years of “immobility”—the Dark
Ages.
T
he way we know something is called con-
sciousness. And the way to consciousness
be-gins with awareness . . . awareness that
rigidity of mind leaves us in a maze out of which
there is no exit. Change is what gives free rein to
the infrastructure of ideas resident in all of us.
When I completed EST training in the early
70's “I ‘got’ that everything I thought I needed to
know I already knew.” I already had the
infrastructure of ideas within me which when given
free rein provides us with the knowledge we need at
our fingertips. All of us have access to the wisdom.
Unfortunately some of us are “shut down”
internally, and the infrastructure of ideas within us
is dormant, thus keeping us from wisdom. It doesn’t
matter how we came to be “shut down.” What’s
important is to know we’re “shut down” and to
admit it. That first step— admission—is what
opens the door to awareness and lets the luminosity
of creativity into our interior selves, giving us full
view to the infrastructure of ideas, waiting there, as
it has been, for us “to play” with, to be creative
with. Who knows how many Galileos, Bacons,
Michelangelos or DaVincis are within us?
But changing old habits, no matter how liberat-
ing that change, is not easy despite the fact that
change is part of the inexorable process of life in all
its manifestations.
A span of time goes from light to dark, then
back to light again. Plants, shrubs and trees change
from one season to the next. Over the span of
millennia, organized societies changed from primal
village cultures to contemporary urban cultures.
Change takes place all around us. Even within
our bodies, without our consent. We are born, grow
older, and die, returning to the “chaos” of creation
out of which God first brought forth light and
heaven and earth. Change is in the nature of
existence, yet humans, unlike other beings of earth,
seem to resist it, preferring the comfortable to the
controversial, the familiar to the new.
People become creatures of habit, going
through well-worn routines day after day. Not all
people, to be sure. Indeed, one would be hard put to
say just how many people we’re talking about.
Suffice to say, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau exclaimed.
Or following “foolish consistencies”—the
hobgoblin of little minds
—that Ralph Waldo Emerson described.
Resistance has become the principal impe-
diment to achieving the transformed life. Stuck!
That’s another word for resistance. We get stuck in
our lives, with all our “stuff”—the script we need,
according to Werner Erhard—to keep the soap
opera of our lives going day after day.
No one can change another person; no one can
transform another human being—unless we do so
as Dr. Frankenstein did with his creation. In the
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end, even that proved impossible. Each of us guards
a gate of change within us, a gate which only we
can open. Thus, the only person we can transform
is our self. But that’s the real beginning of social
transformation. It begins with our own
transformation.
Resistance to change prevents self-knowledge,
perpetuating self-defeating behaviors. Out of this
resistance human beings live out their destinies like
ants, instead of shaping those destinies like trans-
formed human beings.
“Man alone is the architect of his destiny,” Wil-
liam James concluded, but everywhere man is still
chained to the powers of pessimism, negativism and
defeat, sitting in Plato’s cave, eyes fixed on
shadows of a reality that is not theirs. “Mind forged
manacles” as William Bake called them.
I
n the electrical sciences, a “transformer” is a
device that receives one type of energy (direct
current) and changes it to another (alternating
current). The lexical meaning of the word “trans-
form” is (1) to change in composition or structure,
(2) to change the outward form of appearance, (3)
to change in character or condition. Ice, for
example,
is a transformation of water, just as steam is
another transformation of water. Clouds are another
transformation of water via condensation. All
around us transformation happens.
A Water > B Transform> Ice/Steam
In the above illustration, B is always potential
in A; and A is always inherent in B. “Change” is at
the heart of transformation. We can see that
transformation involves a manifestation of the
“original” in another form. In humans, outward
form or appearance may involve a change in
hairstyles or sartorial choices. Or a change in
character, the latter being the most dramatic, as in
the case of Ebenezer Scrooge who was “trans-
formed” from a miserly anti-Christmas curmudgeon
to a warm and festive-loving person who learned
how to keep Christmas in his heart. Changes in hair
styles or dress can be short-lived. So can changes in
character or behavior, but the likelihood of
permanent, more lasting change, comes from
change within, from what Tantric philosophy calls
Samahdi—the internal experience of luminosity—
growing out of a change in attitude towards those
around us, the world, and the things in it.
Tantric philosophy, for example, asserts that
the divine may be discovered through the human
body, touching the spirit of God within it. Like
other philosophies, Tantric philosophy believes that
the spirit of God, as the creator of all things, resides
in all of God’s creations.
Tantric philosophy focuses on “Shiwa”—the
doc-trine of positive thought—an ancient form of
mind control. Shiwa requires discipline, persever-
ance, ba-lance, and a centered self. In Tantra, our
“self-image” does not depend upon what others say
or think about us, rather, our self-image depends
upon what “we think” about ourselves, who we
think we are. Unfor-tunately, as Blaise Pascal, the
French philosopher, put it: “We strive continually to
adorn and preserve out imaginary self, negating the
true one.”
We are who we think we are. Cartesian philoso-
phers expressed it as cogito ergo sum—I think,
there-fore I am. This doesn’t mean if we think we’re
Tom Cruise or Michelle Pfeiffer we are Tom Cruise
or Michelle Pfeiffer. It means, perhaps
convolutedly, that since we are thinking creatures
we are who we think we are. We can’t trans-
substantiate ourselves into another person, but we
can transform ourselves into who we can be. We
can transform the negative energy within us into
positive energy.
To become the person we can be, we must work
on the capacity to “see” our faults and to change
them accordingly. The transformed life is the life of
“inten-tion” translated into action—praxis, suiting
the action to the word. The transformed life is living
one’s intention, touching the power within us to
make a difference in the world. The first step
toward trans-formation is starting where you are—
no matter where you are. It matters not how small
the beginning may seem. In time you will find that
your whole life is a life of intention. This means not
giving up if you don’t realize your intentions. It
means, simply, renewing your intentions and going
on from there.
B
ecome who you can be. Start with the faith
that you can become the person you can be
and soon you will see that you have become
that person. I often tell people that I have become
the person I have always wanted to be. The
argument that “I am who I am and that’s how
people must accept me” cuts off possibilities for
growth and development of the person. With that
attitude we proffer to those around us a “static”
picture of ourselves, stuck in an unchangeable
eiconic image of who we think we are, expecting
people to validate our self-limiting perspec-ives and
behaviors. And for the most part they do, helping us
to add more links to the chains that already bind us.
We become, thus, our own jailers and war-dens,
oblivious of the fact that the prison we are in is but
a figment of our imagination, a prison whose walls
are invisible but will not come down until we tear
them down ourselves.
Some of this commentary is drawn from Transformation: The Metamor-
phosis of Self by the author (Caravel Press, 1988).
Copyright © 2006 by the author.
All rights reserved.