If you learn
anything in life, it's because you made a mistake or failed. We don't
really learn anything from success. Rather, we learn best what we once
got wrong. Recognizing this, we can begin to truly understand the
Buddha's First Noble Truth, which boils down to: Life is suffering.
What he meant was that the most meaningful things we learn come from
what we sacrificed or suffered to learn.
An offshoot
from this idea is a balloon-popper for one of our cultural myths. You
can live without happiness, but you can't live without meaning and
purpose. If you make happiness your goal, you're destined to become a
victim. Once you achieve victim status, you'll lobby for entitlements
to guarantee your happiness (which will never come, of course, so you
will get to be a bigger victim). This is where a lot of teens get high
centered. A lot of adults, (chronologically speaking) are also stuck
here, still laboring for futile happiness.
Meaning, on
the other hand, assumes that a goal worth achieving comes with a price
tag: suffering. The thing is that goals change as we change. If you
refuse to change, you simply end up a victim again. So, even though
goals give you meaning for your life, the underlying goal you must
adopt is a paradox. The journey of life is the goal. Why? Because you,
me—all of us—are a mystery unfolding.
Given the
complex and contradictory nature of these fundamental truths, how do
we begin to follow them? The simple answer is a rite of passage.
Unfortunately, our culture let this key ritual drop out of our
teen-training program long ago. We really need to reconstruct it,
however, or we'll be knee-deep in victims.
A legitimate
rite of passage must satisfy three conditions: 1) normalize suffering;
2) push for commitments to personal goals; and 3) dethrone the ego by
bringing a teen face-to-face with the mystery of existence.
Each of these
tasks has gate-keepers, guardians that one needs to defeat. However,
there is one guardian common to them all: boredom. A Zen saying
(loosely translated) is: boredom is the door to spirituality.
By contrast,
all the stuff marketed to the teen culture today plays on the need to
escape boredom. Since it cannot be escaped, guess what? You're back to
becoming a victim once more. It's a vicious circle.
Some form of
rite of passage is the only way out. Because our culture has no
institutionalized way to guide us through one, those of us who are
actually adult constructed our own. For me, it was getting a black
belt in martial arts. It took years. I had to get rid of my hot
buttons because my instructor didn't give a black belt to the
emotionally immature. My training ended up costing me a marriage. And
then, when I was finally awarded a black belt, I realized who I had
become was someone who didn't need a black belt anymore. My goals
changed because of who I had become during the training itself. The
mystery of me, in fact, could now unfold in new and exciting ways
because of the foundation my black belt gave me.
So: a rite of
passage forces us to face ourselves, to heal ourselves, to train
ourselves, to defeat boredom and achieve goals that are, in the end,
prerequisites for ascending the next rungs on the ladder of
development—a ladder that extends into the clouds of the Unknown. As
scary and as difficult as this journey may seem, it's immensely
better—and more healthy—than the victim's vicious circle.
Bruce
Bibee
is a licensed professional counselor in private practice and a Kung-fu
instructor. His one published book is The
Deep Healing Process, Infinity Publishing.
