The # 1 Reason For Work Is...?

Why would we work when there is not even any financial obligation for us to do so? Does it mean that work is not merely a labour-intensive means to some financial end? Does it mean that work is more than just money?

For many work seems to offer a semblance of meaning, as well as structure. After all, who among us adults does not find their day structured around this cornerstone of life we call 'work?' It consumes the greater part of our hours. And for all those who despise the work they are made to do out of necessity there are those who work for reasons that are compelling in their own right. Reasons such as this: that work offers us a sense of belonging. This is work as the building and maintaining of community. Work as communion.

Most of us work in a collective setting. Even if we have our own personal desires and designs empowering us to go work on a daily basis (i.e., our daughter needs braces for her teeth, the car needs a new muffler, we have Christmas coming up) there is also the ever-present collective dimension of work whereby we are joined with others towards a common goal. It can run the gamut of 'defending the Homeland' to 'ensuring public safety.' It can span the spectrum of 'schooling the next generation to come' to joining as one with all the other 'shiny, happy people at Wal-Mart' ready to great this season's throngs of commodity hungry consumers.

We can even, at times, find oursleves 'falling in love' at work. Just as it was back in the day at school, one of our motivations for getting up everyday could be the fact that a hot new associate has just joined the team. We are eager to spend time with this attractive person. Our intrigue and more than slight sexual interest can inspire us at work in ways that can be quite surprising. We could find that our creativity takes a quantum leap, simply because we are eager--in that evolutionary way--to impress this person with our skills. We desire to make a good impression.

We end up buying new clothes, courtesy of American Express. Which leads us back to what is perhaps the most primary reason for work: economic.

Work As A Fluid: Moving & Taking Shape

One can easily chart the supposed 'evolution of humanity' (which anyone who has been to Las Vegas could easily disupte) through the lens of human work and labour. Agricultural Revolution. Industrial Revolution. The Age of Information. Each suggests a movement or progression in a collective sense. They seem to stand out as the passages by which a species has evolved, come into itself, adapted, changed, transformed. As such, work may be defined somewhat differently in each age or era.

When I first went to work it was not to take care of a family. Being a child who was the product of preceding revolutions in agriculture and industry it came to pass that work became more of a means to satisfy my own personal desires/inclinations. I did not have to work in order to survive. I worked not because I needed to, but because I wanted to. My own desires (rather than, say, necessity) made work appealing. Work was the road I would travel to satisfaction (or, at the very least, the illusion of satisfaction!).

Anthropologists have attempted to understand various human cultures in relation to their form and manner of work. In Marxist terms, it is to ask and ponder the question of 'How does a specific culture acquire the material means to subsist, if not prosper?' Do they hunt and gather? Do they produce commodities for exchange? Do they rape and pillage? Do they sow and reap?

The potential answers that reveal themselves in the asking of such questions can disclose much about who we are, what we value, as well as what will be expected of us by the members of the culture that we are embedded in. For work evolves. Work is transformed relative to the individual as well as the collective. It is a more increasingly known fact that the average person can expect to change jobs upwards of 10 times in their lifetime. It seems to indicate to us how very fluid work is becoming. The era of adopting a vocation and adhering to a particular path (though still relevant for artisans, craftsman, and artists alike) is not the apparent fate of many. It is even moreso becoming the case in an era marked by global competition where multinational corporations can leverage the work-force/people of one nation against the work-force/people of other nations. Those corporations threaten the worker with constant flight if the workers do not concede to concessions across the board--that include the end of healthcare and retirement, as well as the cutting-back of wages and other benefits. It makes work an even more tenuous place for human-beings to inhabit.

Which maybe makes 'following one's bliss' all that much more appealing. I mean, if you are going to have insecurity at work, then you might as well have it while doing something you love, right?

When I Was A Young Boy

Early in life I didn't really consider the nature of work so much as I just wanted a job--any job!--so that I could make a few bucks. I remember wanting 'things.' I remember desire and how desire made work and getting a job a virtual necessity. Work, for me--as for so many others--became a means for satisfying those desires that spoke to me in private.

I wanted a new bicycle. I wanted to be able to purchase clothes that I wanted--above and beyond what my parents could (or would) spend. I wanted--later on--drugs, alcohol, a car, new music, a guitar, an amplifier.

For several years in my teens--throughout my adolescence--that is the way it worked. I worked whatever job I could get merely for the pleasure of being able to feed those desires. Work was the means by which I could satisfy them. Apart from a life of crime I would have to delover papers and mow lawns and rake leaves and baby-sit the neighbourhood children. Apart from a life of crime and theft I would have to earn the right to satify desire. I was on my way into the adult world. Transitioning.

There was nothing selective about my early experiences with work. I was certainly not an idealist. Nor had Marx entered my consciousness except as a passing reference mentioned in World HIstory class at school. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do anything so as to make money... so as to satisfy desire. Fulfilling desire was the end. Any means would do.

I was fortunate, I suppose, in that I was able to secure some relatively innocuous work, making a little money, satisfying those teen-age desires. Work was, at that time, not something that I sought to derive meaning from. More meaning and significance came from relationships to and with friends. Work was just something that we all did on the side so that we could go out on a Friday night and cruise the backroads drinking, smoking, and sexing. Work gave us freedom to explore the often illicit nature of our burgeoning desires.

For instance, if I had enough money to purchase and support a car (gas, insurance, maintenance) then I could perhaps convince one of the young ladies to join me on a Saturday night. We could go to the dance in Ithaca. We could then take the backway home. We could then park down off the road a ways on one of the quiet two tracks that led back into a cornfield. We could then move our way to the proverbial 'backseat' and explore the sensual nature of each other's bodies. We could find out what our desires meant. We could discover together---her and I--what it was like to be free to follow the avenue of desire. And it was work--that often dirty word to teenagers all across the world--that made it possible. For without work we would be traveling back and forth to the dance in one of parent's cars. We would have been one of the kids who had to wait for their older sister to come and pick us up at midnight. We would have left the nature of our desires unknown. We would not have known the touch of another's skin, the taste of another's lips, the smell you can only gather as you move along the sensitive slope of another's neck.

Work opened up so many avenues by which I could explore sex and sexuality--with both positive and negative consequences. I could purchase clothes to make myself appear more stylish to the ladies. I could buy my way into a 'hip' self who would attract attention not by who he was, as much as by what kinds of surfaces I could afford. And it was all, in a manner of speaking, an exploration. I was naive and innocent in the way that many of us were. I was just going along with the crowd doing what I thought was expected of me. I had the same needs for attention. I had the same craving to be noticed... to be special.. to be seen... to be wanted... to be desired.

And not until today, have I realized how work was the primary means by which I sought to make myself more 'desirable to the ladies.' Not unlike the diligent little man-bird who builds a nest in the hope of it being satisfactory to the interests and intents of the lady-bird, I, too, busted my ass to try and get uhm... lucky. Even if 'getting lucky' back then was to just cop a feel. Translation: 2nd base.

I

Birthing Worlds

There is more than a fair share of earnestness and striving when it comes to work and love. There is both so much desire and frustration of that desire. We want, long, plan, plot, scheme, beg, plead, and pray for meaning in both our jobs and our intimacies.

Careers and relationships have truly been a 'hot topic' for many, many years now. There may have never been a time when we didn't wonder, 'What am I to do?,' along with 'Who am I to do it with?' This 'What am I here for?' and 'Who I am to be here with?' are central questions that we strive to answer in the journey that is our life. People who have traversed continents and travelled across oceans are living examples of the significance held by those questions.

Perhaps our life is really an ongoing attempt to answer those questions: to find meaning and significance in terms of who or what we give birth to as well as who we give birth with. Do we give birth with Exxon-Mobil? Do we give birth with the United States military establishment? Do we give birth with the Giovanni crime syndicate? Do we give birth with Ken Wilber and his Integral Fellows? Do we give birth with that young man who caught our eye last night? Who do we dance with in the 'making of a world?'

Isn't that it? Aren't we in the process of constructing worlds in alliance with those we dance with? Whether that dance resembles a 'mosh-pit' or a 'tango,' isn't the primary point that we are in thge process of 'giving birth to a world' in the form and manner of our relations with others. Worlds of War. Worlds of Peace. Worlds of Strife and Vengeance. Worlds of Welcoming Warmth and Friendly Faces. Worlds arise in our dancing, in our commingling, in our exchanges.

We build trust or we build animosity in our relations. The nature of our exchanges largely determines the nature of the world we will come to inhabit. We cheat others and the unconscious guilt we feel over that will plague us with fantasies of paranoia. We will literally feel threatened--attacked by our own conscience.

The world is being made now.... and now... and now... and yes, even now worlds are coming into being on the qualitative basis of our exchanges. And where do the primary exchanges take place if not in our working and our loving?

The Work Of Nature As Birthing

The German mystic Meister Eckhardt spoke, in one of his many sermons, about the nature of the immanent-God--the Divine here and now, the Suchness/Thusness of... well... just this!--as being one of constant labouring. God is perpetually creative. The Divine is uhm... er.. obsessively, chronically, compulsively pregnant!

God seems to be (and I am sorry you Conservative Christians out there) not unlike the stereotypical 'welfare mom!' Barefoot and pregnant? Indeed! Yes! That is the nature of Nature, the thusness of the Suchness: constant, unending labour in the act of giving birth to worlds within worlds within worlds as both natural as well as super-natural.

Multiply. Create. Give birth. Labour to manifest that which it is in your nature--the Tao, the Dharma--to do so. These are the commandments given to all persons, to all beings--to all of Creation and Createdness! Labour deliciously. Sweat and bleed and groan and agonize over what you are destined to have pass through you; to that which shall come out of you one way or another!

And though there is that sweating, that bleeding, and that agonizing, there is also the natural ease and effortlessness of the gently falling snow that does not try to fall, nor intend to be blown upon the wind, nor will to be what is in its nature to both be and do. Snow is just snow. You are just you. I am... well, just me! The nature that expresses itself in exquisite ease and effortlessness via falling snow is the same nature that permeates the totality of our existence as apparent human-beings; meaning that our work can be as effortless and graceful as the falling snow.

Perhaps it comes about for us in our capacity to crystallize a specific form of work in the same way that snow crystallizes within a 'perfect set of conditions' that make the transformation of elements into 'falling snow' just happen so easily. It may be that we have to wait on our work in the same way that evaporated moisture waits on cold winds aloft. It may be that we are turned over and tranformed through the seasons and the cycles--seeming to never attain our chosen direction--only to be pleasantly surprised one day when we find ourselves 'falling into our labours' like a delicate crystal birthed in the midst of the openness of the sky.

The same work... the same labours... that pull on us with a gravitational force... gently, though persistently...so that it seems as if we have 'no choice' in the matter of what we will do. It just happens! Or, we can say that our nature (falling snow), in accordance with work and labour, may have an element of choicelessness that invokes images of Taoist sages and reclusive Zen masters who seem to be so 'in accord' with the nature of things as they are that no movement is ever wasted. Every gesture seems perfect because there is no conflict between who one is... and what one does.

Just like the falling snow does not second-guess itself half way down to the ground... ; o )

Makes me wonder if... just being who we are... is such that the doing of that which one is always takes care of itself. It is done. It just happens.

Is it our alignment with Being (healing the split, resolving the illusion of separateness from our own Nature) that makes all of our doing not unlike the falling of the snow?

Following Bliss As Goal... Or... As Process?

I suspect that there are couple of different ways that one can look Joseph Cambell's injunction to 'follow your bliss.' For instance, there is the way of bliss as related to a goal. The actual process involved may not be particularly 'bliss-inducing' and/or 'bliss-generating;' however, the perceived outcome or goal of the process is one that we may be able to associate with the production of bliss.This is probably what happens with parents who work a labour intensive job for years and years--all the way up until their death--simply so that they can experience the bliss of knowing that they set the stage for a better life for their children (not to mention their grandchildren!). The bliss comes in knowing we have attained the larger purpose of caring for another in a way that will make their life better. Perhaps they can even go on to 'do something that they love' with all their heart, mind, spirit and soul.

The above example points to what I happen to see as being some lvery limiting (pre)conceptions with regards to a thorough understanding of what it actually means to 'follow your bliss.' Not everyone needs to be an artist or an authour in order to be able to experience the production of bliss. Bliss can arise through the simplest of tasks. Bliss is in setting an exquisite table and serving your family a delicious, healthy, nourishing meal. Bliss is is knowing you have laid your new-born son down for a comfortable nap, well-fed and swaddled in fleece. Bliss is in knowing you are present for your dying grandmother, as she recounts her final story. Bliss is in showing up for what is being demanded of us, now.

Bliss is, in large part, merely the result of 'answering the call of the moment.'

What if I go to work and I spend time earning money so that my son can eat a healthy meal? Ought that not leave me with some sense of utter satisfaction? What if, then, no matter what I am doing, there can be experienced a residual degree of bliss... precisely because of 'why I am at work.'

It may mean that the why of the process (even though the process may be pain-staking and labourious in a physically-demanding sense... even though the process may be classified in the category of mere drudgery) can result in a most supreme sense of satisfaction and pure bliss. It can mean that bliss is not so much the result of what I do for 'my so-called 'self' as much as what I am 'doing for others.' Bliss, then, as tied to the future and a following generation of descendants for whom I gladly swallow the bitter poison of coaldust in the dank hallows of a West Virgiania mine.. so that a better life might be had by those who come after.

And that to me is the interesting side of Cambell's 'follow your bliss' injunction. The aspect that has not been spoken of as if it existed, let alone mattered. For how can I smile at night when I lay down to sleep when I have been in trenches of the mundane all day long? How can I shiver with bliss when I did nothing for my own sake this day, but everything for everyone else's sake? How can that be? How can I lose myself for the sake of others and go to bed at night so damn full? How is that possible?

Is it because there is one who breathes... one for whom I live for--who doesn't answer the call of the 'I,' but whom that 'I' serves?

Emanating Bliss In The World Now

'Follow your bliss' is that oft-quoted instruction on a life well-lived from the late mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell. Do what you love, in other words. Do what brings you joy. Do what resonates with your inmost nature and Being. Do that which leaves you with a fulfilled heart and a satisfied conscience at the end of the day. Do what brings you peace.

The alternative to doing so, is to continually and chronically radiate suffering out into the world. If we are constantly and chronically dis-satisfied with what we are doing on a dialy basis (oftentime upwards of 10, 12, or even 14 hours a day) then imagine the 'vibe' that we are sending out into the environment around us. It is as if we are a 'suffering generator,' a 'duhkka-machine' that is churning out discontent and dissatisfaction the majourity of the hours of our day.

It may then be part of the Bodhisattva's task to 'invest and engage in activities that are in accordance with the production of bliss.' Not just to alleviate the suffering of others, but to also make sure that acquiring 'our daily bread' is not done so with an underlying tone of chronic, pervasive discontent. The twist would be that in 'following our bliss' we would be doing far more to relieve the suffering of others than if we were to adopt some virtue of 'noble suffering' while at the workplace so we can fork over a few charitable contributions at the end of another dreadful work-week.

The question we might want to ask then is this: not 'What can I do to relieve the suffering of others?' so much as 'What can I do that will produce bliss and generate peace?' Such that bliss (the absence of suffering) and peace (the absence of strife and conflict) will then radiate outward into the world... thereby affecting others in a subtle manner... if no less transformative and powerful.

Worldly Resistance To Soul-Emergence

If we are authentic in what we do (our work, specifically) then it seems to follow that we are going to encounter resistance of one sort or another. In fact, one might even be able to suggest that the level of resistance that one encounters in terms of actualizing soul in our work is directly proportional to the level of soul in that work. No resistance, on the other hand, may be said to be more or less evidence for a 'lack of soul.'

Soul is that provocative. In a way, soul is alien to this-world. We are, as soul 'not of this-world,' as a wise man once put it. Therefore, it would seem to follow that to the degree that we are actually embodying and expressing soul in work would elicit some sense of alien-ness from the world. The world (the status quo, the given, pre-constructed traditions based on the wasness and the isness alike) is perplexed by soul. Soul seems 'other' to a world formed on the basis of so many yesterdays. Soul appears odd and disconcerting to the world. Hence, the resistance soul provokes.

Where's Your Conflict Lie?

Is the struggle to free ourselves up to work better and love more a contest whose battlefield resides in the social and the cultural, ala Marxism? Or might it be better to suggest that the battlefield resides within, ala Freud and psychoanalysis?

For example, if we do something we are not particularly aroused by in terms of working and loving we are going to experience an internal conflict. The Self, ala Jung, will plague us. The soul will rebel; she will generate symptoms until we align with our Muse, passion, daemon, and so forth.

The alternative conflict seems to be one where we align with the Self and then experience resistance without--in the social and cultural. The struggle becomes one of finding our Way amidst the crowd, the herd, the masses. We may expereince peace and harmony psychologically, while experiencing a degree of conflict in our relationships with others--meaning, those who may not understand the designs and contours of the soul that can only be called 'our own.'

Freeing Energy Up To Relate & Create

Freud realized that there were various and diverse inhibitions within people that prevented them from realizing a fuller capacity for life and living. Love and relationships were frustrated in the form of repressed/denied libido. There were chains on the human capacity to be free and unfettered in relationships.

Work and creativity were also frustrated due to similar reasons. Human-beings, Freud saw, were paralyzed in their creative pursuits. And whle Freud saw mainly psycho-social reasons for such a state of affairs (inhibitions that manifested in the psyche in the form of what Freud termed the 'superego') it was Karl Marx who saw mainly historical-material reasons for humanity's troublesome relationship with work.

For Marx work was difficult for far too many people because of historical forces that lay outside of the individual. Marx tended towards an 'outside-in approach' relative to work. If the conditions within a society were made friendly to human labour then labour would thrive and people would be far more prone to self-actualize. This is why Marxism has tended to give rise to a revolutionary zeal: just remake the social and cultural fabric (e.g., Mao's Cultural Revolution) and people will experience a newfound freedom in their labours.

Of course, we know that in practical terms that has not tended to be the case. It doesn't mean that there isn't a need for social and cultural revolution in certain circumstances, though it does point out how it is not possible to 'change people from the outside-in.' People oftentimes, make their own chains. As Freud saw too well--and as many of his intellectual descendants have in his wake--there is a prison-house within that no amount of external manipulation in the social and cultural value-spheres can ever touch.

It is a point that has been argued convincingly by Integral philosopher Ken Wilber. In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality Mr. Wilber expounds on the necessity of an 'transformation of consciousness.' Short of an internal shift--a further unfolding of Spirit in the form of human-beings--there is no hope. This is not Mao's 'cultural re-education' we are talking about, as much as it is a way of pointing to the fact that unless human-beings become free and unfettered within--in relation to the Psyche--there can be no free and unfettered loving or working, relating or creating.

The Kingdom of Heaven is indeed within, as a wise man once proclaimed. Trouble is it is often concealed behind the mists of our own inherited guilt and cultural shame. Those societal shoulds and organizational oughts cripple the soul of man, the spirit of woman, the essence of everyone. As Mr. Wilber also has stated, 'we fall into hell,' and it becomes as close as our own mind. Something that no manipulation of matter can ever address in a way that results in a freeing up of the energies locked within us so that we might love more and better, not to mention work with a full heart.

The Mutually Infectious Nature Of Love & Work

From a psychoanalytic perspective--indeliably owed to Frued no doubt--there are seen to be really only two areas of general concern. And while the manifestations of actual pathology (our human difficulties, struggles, dis-eases) can be diverse and multiflorous, those manifestations tend to arise as a result of issues within the arenas of work and love. Those twin towers remain the two principle regions wherein human-beings have their greatest defeats, not to mention victories.

It is really another way of saying that 'relationships' and 'creativity' are the essence of what it means to be human. Relate and create. Create and relate. And so, if there is a problem in one area there will tend to be a bleed through into the other area (this has been discussed in brief here before, please see here (http://syntegral.blogspot.com/2005/10/eros-of-marx.html) for more). For instance, many hetero-women may notice that they have problems in relationships with men who have yet to establish themsleves in a career--meaning, work. A vague worker who has yet to devote himself to his own peculiar passion in life sort of makes for a vague, non-committed lover. This is probably no surprise to many women out there!

On the positive side, while a man can become obsessed with his work to the detriment of his love, there is a bonus in the man who has chosen to align himself with a purpose he can call his own. Such a man tends to have the sort of 'backbone' that turns a woman on in not only a sexual way, but in a psychological and emotional way as well. This 'firmness of conviction' is not the ideological sort of some neo-con conspiracy to remake the Middle East, as much as it is the 'firmness of a man who has discovered his dharma.' That man knows what he exists for. He is easier to love and be in relationsihp because he is not constantly plaguing his lover with a steady stream of concerns about 'What am I going to do in life?' Such a man 'just does' and then comes home so he can 'just love.'

There is a steadiness that is present in the committed working-man that allows a woman to 'just melt' as her softness. Her juices can flow all that much more freely when she can surrender in an open way, precisely because she trusts that her man has discovered his own firmness. In other words, she doesn't have to try to spend her time being 'firm' for her man because her man has embodied his own firmness. She can be woman. Together they can relate. With work having been decided it is out of the way--i.e., it is no longer an open question, as much as an ongoing journey that commenced with a commitment--such that the two can open towards one another in their loving. Now both worlds flower. The dance becomes mutual. The working and the loving feed one another. Both thrive in a non-competitive cooperation of the Spirit.

How this can be fostered? Let's go there next, ok?

Impediments To Mindfulness During Work

There are definitely distinct impediments that arise during work; impediments that often serve to set us apart from our activities. We are talking about divorce at work--alienation, dissociation. A full engagement of our whole being in the midst of work is both the problem of the one who is working, as well as of the product or service being rendered, not to mention the leader striving to get the best out of his or her people.

For instance, if we are the worker whose mindfulness is being disabled--such that we are not fully engaged and present in what we are doing--then we suffer an irretrievable loss of our own existence. Moments escape us. Our life slips through the cracks. We miss out on the simple fact of being because we have gone elsewhere. Body and mind are not one--fused, united, whole, or cohesive.

Second, our work suffers because of the alienation we experience when mind and body are not one. Any service we render will be less than it can be. Any product we are in the process of constructing will suffer too. The consequences of an ongoing impediment to mindfulness during work will have their say for both the one who is working as well as that which is being worked. Value for both the worker and the object of work--whether tangible or intangible--will be diminished.

Lastly, any leader who is experiencing deficits of mindfulness among his or her charges will find that any stated goals are more difficult to achieve than they otherwise would be. The trick for the leader is to engage those in the midst of work. In this sense, it is for the leader to seek to minimize the impediments to mindfulness. This may take the form of simply 'inquiring into the worker's condition.' If we see someone struggling, and we are a leader, then it is up to us to not put more pressure on that person, but to find out the reasons why they are already feeling/experiencing a pressure that is dividing their attention--literally splitting them into pieces; a pressure that is an impediment to mindfulness. An impediment to mindfulness that is a detriment to work (meaning, the value in the midst of being created) as well as a detriment to the work-experience as a whole.


The Total Value Of Mindfulness

Mindfulness is never not a rewarding addition to any moment. In fact, if I were to ask you if you wanted to enjoy life more, and I played to the selfish interest of human nature to capitalize on the fullest enjoyment of existence possible, and you said 'Yes, I do want to enjoy life more... i do want to capitalize on each moment,' I would point you in the direction of mindfulness.

Want better sex? Mindfulness.
Want a better career? Mindfulness.
Want better finances? Mindfulness.
Want to be a better leader? Mindfulness.
Want to do well in school? Mindfulness.
Want your work to stand out? Mindfulness.

There is really no area of human endeavours where the addition of mindfulness will not be a blessing. Why has Buddhism tended to have at its nexus the cultivation of mindfulness? Because as the Buddha is reported to have said, 'All things have mind in the lead...'

If our mind is scattered and discordant then so, too, will our work come across as scattered and discordant; so, too, will our relationships be such as our mindfulness is. Whatever the quality and nature of mind in each moment will be the quality and nature of our work. As a result value will be extended or diminished relative to mindfulness. And that is why mindfulness (as well as the impediments to mindfulness, which I intended to touch on, but will now save for another day) is so important a topic in every area of human endeavour and concern. Parenting. Education. Finance. Politics. Sex. Relationships. Sports. Entertainment. Art. Everything!

So, if you want to do one thing that will add 'value' to your world--meaning, to your experience of the world, which will inevitably touch, affect, and colour your every relationship--then be mind-full; understand the impediments to mind-fullness; and do what you can to bring your-Self to your each and every moment. If you do, I promise you that life will never again be the same for you. The value of everything you do (or don't do) will most definitely increase.

Impediments To Mindfulness During Work

There are definitely distinct impediments that arise during work; impediments that often serve to set us apart from our activities. We are talking about divorce at work--alienation, dissociation. A full engagement of our whole being in the midst of work is both the problem of the one who is working, as well as of the product or service being rendered, not to mention the leader striving to get the best out of his or her people.

For instance, if we are the worker whose mindfulness is being disabled--such that we are not fully engaged and present in what we are doing--then we suffer an irretrievable loss of our own existence. Moments escape us. Our life slips through the cracks. We miss out on the simple fact of being because we have gone elsewhere. Body and mind are not one--fused, united, whole, or cohesive.

Second, our

Mindfulness As The Soul Infusion of Being Into Doing

There are times when even the best of us just 'go through the motions.' We are not really present to what we are doing . Our body may be involved in the task, but we are mentally, psychologically, emotionally--and maybe even spiritually--elsewhere.

Perhaps the task doesn't interest us. Perhaps we are not totally engaged in the activity in question. Maybe the task is ordinary, hum-drum, boring. And if that is the case we presume to have reason to 'tune out' and not really 'invest our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls' into what we are doing. It doesn't matter. We are just washing the dishes. No big deal.

No Excuses To Dis-Engage The Immediacy

If you buy into the validity of Zen then we are never just washing the dishes. No task is un-worthy. No doing is to be divorced from being, alienated from a fitting and proper infusion of soul. This is why the 'ordinary' is such a steady influence when it comes to the training ground of that pristine attentiveness to the uninterrupted flow of the present tense that is Zen (and is also vipassana and the Buddha's Four Foundations of Mindfulness). After all, it is easy to be alert and attentive when our interest is piqued in accordance with our desires or preferences. That is easy. Everyone can pretty much do that. But not so with the ordinary and banal. There is no excitement inherent in the activity of the ordinary unless we infuse our doing with being. Where we care about every act. Where we come to assume a worship-full stance in relation to even the most trivial of events and instances, because 'just this' is our life... just this is Eternity expressed in the everyday. For the practitioner of Zen (and some might say all of the world's Non-Dual Wisdom Traditions) there is never a worthy excuse for dis-engaging the immediate. No matter how colourless and bland it may seem, if we bring the totality of being at our disposal into our doing then it all comes alive. The Buddha in the dishes and the diapers, the dust and the driving is revealed. As soon as we show up, so does the Buddha.

No excuses.

Another Of Life's Maxims

I fully realize that there are times when we need to be willing to 'do what we prefer not to' in order to be able to 'do what we wish to.' And while this sounds like something simple in words, in terms of life/practice it can be much more complex and nuanced. That is why I am inviting you to stick around--to, I suppose, tune in over the next week or so--as we look into such matters all that much more closely.

(with a bow and nod to my comrade e-buddha--check him out at http://integralpractice.blogharbor.com/blog)

A Labour Of Love

How many people can say that they 'love what they do;' that their daily efforts in the work-world are full of being, infused with all they are? 1 in 10? 1 in 50? Worse yet, 1 in 100?

Think about it for just a moment: If our doing were so infused with our being then there would be no divide such that we were left fantasizing about 'doing something else.' Our work--and the world constructed on the basis of that work--would be, quite literally, soul-full. Full of soul.

A World Bereft of Substitute Gratifications

It is hard to say what the exact numbers are, but suffice it to say that the greater majourity of human-beings are unhappy with work. Few are those able to do what they love. Few, in other words, are those who have found an exquisite balance between being and doing.

For the majourity of us, then, life is a constant, pervasive, often unending conflict between who and what we feel we are (being) and who and what we are asked to do the majourity of our waking hours (doing). The general result of this situation is that we are compelled to seek forms of gratification intended to act as substitutes for the huge deficit we experience in our working life. We are, in other words, forced to try and find immediate forms of substitue gratification in order to compensate for what is severely lacking in our work--which is that our being and doing are not in harmony, acting in concert with one another.

For example, many experience a near total absence of psychological presence while at work. The body is present and accounted for in form only, but not in spirit. Because we don't love what we are doing we cannot invest, immerse all of our being into that doing.

Ideally, in some sense, our work and our play ought to be joined. This notion--outdated, archaic, and deadly as it is!--that we ought to know a sharp division between work and play is about extreme a fallacy as one can arrive at. The best workers are those who are able to experience and express an element of play in their working. It is the same with lovers and loving. The more playful the lover and the loving then the more genuine does tend to be the experience of the lover and the loving on behalf of the beloved.

Overly serious work, like overly serious play, is psychologically exhausting. It will drain you like nothing else. Much of that attitude derives from a sense of work as this arena of conquest where we are always and forevermore locked in mortal combat with some competitive element that is going to squash us if we don't get serious and get serious now! Yet, no one can long survive in an atmosphere totally devoid of play, let alone thrive in that atmosphere. And mounting visits to the Dr.'s office to be prescribed drugs to 'get you up' (SRI'S) and drugs to 'get you down' (barbituates) is some of the clearest evidence we have for the fact that human-beings must be able to bring their whole being into their work-doing or there will be severe psychological, physical, and relational (not to mention financial) consequences.

Some of those consequences are in the form of attempting to 'consume our way to happiness and well-being' because we are not fulfilled in our doing. Others are addictions to alcohol and drugs, sex and domination. The ways that we seek to compensate for failures in our working-environment is probably one of the more little understood facts of (post)modern existence. And it is also something that Marx was driving at in his analysis of Kapital: that work must nourish us directly, not indirectly; that our labours must feed us first, in every sense of that word, for then can we feed others.

But that is not how Kapital tends to work. It does in some cases... but not in the majourity. The way current tendencies are is that work leaves us exhausted and deprived; then we go in search of gratification and fulfillment 'outside of work.' And that is, according to all signs and indications, a un-winnable proposition for each of us. It is but a brutal cycle upon which the breaking of depends much of humanity's happiness--yours and mine, ours, our childrens, and their children as well.

Marx & The Individual: Work As Primary Means Of Self-Actualization

There are numerous assumptions when it comes to Karl Marx and his peculiar brand of philosophy/enquiry. Thanks to our friends Stalin and Mao there has come to be an insinuation that Marx is to be equated with 'collectivism'--and, as such, is against the individual. Nothing could be further from the truth though. When one actually takes the time to read Marx what one notices, again and again, is a deep and abiding concern with the specific human-being and his or her capacity to derive the fullest benefit (read, value) from his or her labours. Marx's philosophy--the spirit of his own labour--was the farthest thing from the sort of collectivism and state-controlled communism that has come to be associated with his name. Karl Marx was for the individual and the actualization of each individual's unique gifts.

One of the things that was often noted about the former Soviet Union was the way in which each individual's work was decided for them by the State. The individual had no freedom to decide or determine his or her own working-existence. What one gave birth was not up to the individual and his or her peculiar passions, as much as it was up to the State itself. One was plugged into the 'system' and made to 'fit in' to the network of a pure socialist system. The individual suffered. Dreams died. Passions became pathologies.

The peculiar thing--at least to me--is that the assumptions has been that this is only the fate of the individual in the pure 'socialist system.' The fate of the individual within Communism is a burdensome one. As Ken Wilber might put it, pathological communion rules the day. And being a forced communion it is really no communion at all.

Of course, all of that does not happen here in America does it? Nor does it happen in Western Europe, where free democratic republics rule supreme, where Capitalism holds favour. Or at least that is what we have been told. The assumption is that the individual is able to follow his or her bliss to a much greater degree in Capitalist systems than in Communist ones. And that is largely true. However, it does not mean that there are not in-born tendencies which conspire to generate the same sort of fate for the individual as was suffered by those in the former Soviet Union. It does not mean that Capitalism has its own pathologies that afflict the indiviaul with the burden of 'fitting in.'

One has only to consider the 'Self-Help' aisle of any majour bookstore and you can see instantly the burdends of work within the Capitalist system that everyday people struggle with. One has only to consider the fate of the teenager faced with the option of only joining the military and being shipped off to fight in a War he or she barely understands--if at all. One has to only consider the elderly gentleman who realizes too late that he never lived his life--the life he wanted to, the life he was given, the leife he had dreamt of, because he was too busy always 'fitting in' and measuring himself against the standards of the 'System' and not against the call of his own Heart. One has only to look around one's self as you sit in the office reading these words while on an unsolicited break from crunching numbers to realize that Capitalism is not anymore innately concerned with the fate of the individual than was/is Communism.

But Karl Marx was. He was interested in asking how one could self-actualize one's unique gifts in a world where there seemed to be a constant conspiracy against the individual doing so. And that is a thread within Marx's body of work that has been little noticed--let alone a story that has been told.

The (Dis)Empowered Worker

One of the central questions that Marx sought to address, that so much of his analysis of Kapital was interested in discovering, was how to enable a society wherein the worker--the producer, the creator, the artist, the birther--would be able to derive the full value of one's labours.

Why Marx was concerned with this matter is easy to see. It has to do with the fact that there is a 'surplus value' that is derived from the labours of the working man or woman, but that does not go to that working man or woman. The working-(wo)man does not received the full value of his or her labour. The worker works not for him- or herself, or even for his or her family and friends. The worker also works for the 'capitalist'--i.e., the one who capitalizes on the dis-advantaged position of the worker. The surplus value--or I should say, a percentage of the value of a man's or woman's labour--in the current Capitalist system, goes to one who is not even present in the act of labour and birth.. That missing agent, the 'invisible hand' of capitalism, accrues a degree of value from the labours of those who produce and do the work without ever actually being involved in those labours.

How this all comes about is a story in itself. Suffice it to say now that there is an unconscious tendency within the Capitalist System to have a perpetual state of affairs where there are these intense zones of desperation. In a manner of speaking, Capitalism thrives on a 'lack of opportunity.' Such a 'lack of opportunity' creates a set of conditions where there is an abundant supply of workers that can be taken advantage of so that 'surplus value' can be derived from their labours. That 'surplus value' is Capital.

It is not so much a state of healthy competition we are talking about here as a state of exploitation. The desperate conditions that many live in around the world happens to be a 'boon to the tried and true Capitalist.' In fact, what one can do is leverage and hedge one nation's dispossessed against another nations. This goes for both those illiterate and under-educated as well as those literate and educated to the hilt. The threat of 'losing the job' is the point of leverage for the Capitalist. It is what allows the proletariat to settle for scraps, for less, for 'just getting by.' It is what also leads to frustrations in love and relationships. The disadvantaged position of the worker leaves him or her feeling like they are 'being taken advantage of'. However, that person may not know why. So that person tends to blame those closest to him- or herself. Thus, one's family and friends--one's significant others--can come to be the unwitting scapegoats and verbal punching bags taking the brunt of frustration that is owed to a system based on the worker never deriving the 'full value' of his or her labours.