For some reason, I feel particularly compelled to write in my blog today, so I’m going to roll with it, with some stream of consciousness stuff that perhaps will be of interest to me in years to come. I watched a few times this week a movie which I’ve seen many times before but which I try to watch every now and then when I think I need to hear its message. It’s called The Shift and it is made by Wayne Dyer, who is hard to describe but I guess best known as a sort of self-help dude and motivational speaker. But that doesn’t really do him justice. He’s not full of himself like many are, and while he believes in meditation and such it’s really his message about authenticity that resonates with me. I speak about him in the present tense but unfortunately he died just a while ago…hold on let me see when. OK actually it was in 2015. So I guess it’s been a while. But I was introduced to him before he died, I remember that. Not sure when I saw the movie first, I can’t recall. Somebody showed it to me, but I forget who. (I sorta forget everything today, I have a bit of a weird headache and some tension in my neck).
Anyway the movie is an interesting artistic vehicle because it’s this unique - and, it turns out, uniquely effective - combination of fiction and non-fiction, set around a semi-fictional weekend at Asilomar down near Monterey and the idea that he’s there filming some stuff about his most recent book, while a bunch of families and other folks are just there staying for the weekend for their own reasons. There’s a rich obnoxious dude there with his wife who’s going to announce that she’s pregnant, a mother of two who’s feeling cooped up by constantly needing to be there for her husband and kids, and the erstwhile fictional documentary filmmaker, who is trying to make his “masterpiece” but finds out he lost the funding. You watch all of them go through their own shift while they have what Dyer calls their “quantum moment”, which is just a way of saying that sometimes when you hit rock bottom you get to a point when you realize that what worked for you up until that point - what Dyer calls “the morning of your life” - just isn’t working anymore in the “afternoon”.
It’s a message that really resonates with me because basically what he winds up saying is that you get to a point when the only thing that really matters to you is being able to be yourself. Which is funny because a lot of people might say the point is to do good, or be successful, or find inner peace or whatever, but he basically says it’s just plain and simply about being yourself. He plays around with different ways of putting it - following your Dharma, letting go, a “future pull”, letting God work through you, etc. but it just basically boils down to authenticity. And I really resonate with that because I think I have gotten to that point in my life - or at least will very soon. I’m honestly done caring nearly as much as I did before about what people think of me - my father, my mom, my brother, my many dates and partners, my coworkers. I just don’t care anymore, not because I suddenly grew a spine or because I had an epiphany but rather simply because I correctly recognized that whatever perils lie down the path of being yourself, the suffering you endure going any other way is way, way worse. It’s sort of a self-serving thing and the great paradox is that it turns out it’s also the way to wind up doing the best things for other people. It’s kind of a happy accident about people that when you let them be themselves, they want to do good things for other people. I sincerely believe that a lot if not all of the violence and problems of today come from sets of people who just don’t feel like they can be genuine or be themselves.
Maybe more about this tomorrow.