Part Two: Integrity Loss and Recovery
sacrifice and increasing the force of commitment
© 2005 Antero Alli (updated 12/23/11)
We speak of “making real connection with others". How is this possible ? The experience of making real connections with others can elude us without an internal resonance with what is "real" for ourselves. Without this internal resonance no real connection may be possible with others. When we are cut off from what makes life real for us, our thirst for "the real" can become so strong as to simulate its own mirages, delusions, and fantasies of "the real" to sustain our inner lives and our links with others and the world. These illusions of reality may require complicated justifications and nonstop, external confirmations from those who buy into our delusions (also see Paratheatre and self-delusion) -- the Cheerleading Squadrons of Yes Men and Yes Women.
What is real ? To silently know what is real may not be enough if we cannot also commit to acting on what is real. Think of commitment as a force, an energy that can be developed, applied, and directed. The force of self-commitment can be increased as we learn to legitimatize our direct firsthand experience as a primary source of authority, integrity, and autonomy. Once this self-commitment has stabilized within us, we are more free to interact with others from a place of greater integrity and less self-betrayal.
SACRIFICE AND THE FORCE OF COMMITMENT
To sacrifice means to "make sacred", to offer up something we have grown attached to, or has given us much comfort and/or has become near and dear to our hearts. Any act of real sacrifice accomplishes: 1) the creation and expansion of internal space 2) the release of psychic forces towards a more open and direct capacity for experience.
A culture's sacrificial rituals enact whatever must be released, offered and/or given away for that culture's traditions to persist and survive. What needs releasing for any tradition to survive ? Whatever is killing that tradition and/or devitalizing its originating culture. Without ongoing conscious enactments of ritual offerings and sacrifices, any culture can die a slow death -- where previously vital rituals calcify into dead routines. Bali, one of the world's oldest originating cultures, has kept its traditions alive for centuries by an undying commitment to daily ritual offerings and sacrifices. In context to our integrity as individuals, whatever diminishes our capacity for self-commitment may be the very thing that needs sacrificing. (Also read "A Human Sacrifice" by Matt Mitler, director of Theatre Dzieci).
Sometimes what we cherish the most turns out to be the very thing holding us back and/or draining us of the power to evolve and transform. Whether this is a cherished attachment or addiction to self-indulgent behavior (laziness, vanity, procrastination) or an emotional habit of engaging half-baked relationships, or the empirical skepticism that refuses to commit fully to any truth except empirical skepticism -- whatever decreases the force of our commitment results in integrity loss.
Our full integrity only exists where we are willing and able to commit 100 per cent. If this 100% notion seems extreme, consider the consequences of not knowing where you can hold your ground and stand without wavering. If there is any place in your life -- no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential -- where you can say, "I can stand behind this 100%", that place expresses your total integrity. If you can find no place to stand behind without wavering, then perhaps your integrity exists in your total commitment to wavering.
At its root, the innate force of commitment expresses a deeper survival instinct of the degree we are commited to actually being on this planet. If you are still here and breathing, some part of you remains commited to being here. Integrity-building results from any process that strengthens and develops this innate force of self-commitment. Once we have discovered that area in our lives that we can stand behind 100% without wavering, that very force of commitment can also be redirected to assist other areas in our life currently suffering from integrity loss or, lack of follow-through. Commitment is an energy that can be increased, distributed, and circulated.
Integrity loss is not entirely a personal issue; it is not entirely our fault that we lack the power of follow-through. We live in extreme times where integrity loss expresses a cultural casualty of any hyper-materialistic, death-ignorant society morally broken by its own spiritual bankruptcy. Many of us endure this spiritual damage as a burden we carry for the impersonal culture. Even though this damage is not personal to us, many of us shoulder the blame of impersonal culture as a personal cause. Sometimes, this helps to alleviate impersonal cultural guilt. All this is a complete waste of time and energy. The impersonal culture at large does not, cannot, care about the person. The impersonal culture at large is like a corporation that uses the person to advance its impersonal agendas.
Those who drop the impersonal burden of cultural guilt do not become free of suffering. They merely become free of the impersonal culture of suffering that de-personalizes its populace. After you embrace the honest burden of your own existence, it becomes unnecessary to take on the tragedy of the world. When you are fully accountable for your life, you are less likely to believe you are accountable for saving others. The world does not need saving. People need saving from themselves. This does not mean any withdrawal from lending a helping hand. This means learning more about where and how you actually can and cannot help anyone else.
Most suffering is self-created and made meaningless by its own circuitous nature. Suffering becomes meaningless when it results in a meaningless life. Meaningful suffering results from the continual exposure to the existing conditions of our lives -- not the life we wanted or believed we should or could have had, if only things were different. No. I’m talking about your actual life. This is no dismal, dreary fatalism but a herald of the living mystery pulsing within the heart of the existing conditions of our lives - - a mystery that can be experienced firsthand after self-betrayal and its resulting integrity loss are exposed and uprooted. In the wake of this exposure, we are more likely to discover the buried treasure of what makes our lives worth living. And like any good pirate, I vow to find this treasure and steal myself blind!
Integrity-building amounts to increasing the force of your commitment to whatever makes your life worth living. To increase the force of commitment, look to where your integrity is already intact, that place -- no matter how small or seemingly insignificant -- where you can stand behind something or someone one hundred per cent with your whole being, with no ambivalence, hesitation, or wavering. This action feeds the being. The being is fed whenever you can hold a position of total unwavering commitment. The being does not fuss over appearances and forms. The being does not care what you commit to or what it looks like -- as long you commit all the way.
MANIFESTO LINKS
Part One: Orientation
culture, paratheatre, the emotional plague
Part Three: The Performer/Audience Romance
talent and skill, the total act, love, the No-Form technique
Part Four: Self-Observation and Ego
the ego, on playing contraries, 3 stages of paratheatre
Part Five: Double Vision
on the first and second attentions
Part Six: Self-initiation
bridge between worlds, what drains the power of dreaming
Part Seven: A Cultural Overview
the war in heaven and a society gone mad
