True Gratitude, Playfulness & Transcendence
The essential approach to start, grow, accelerate and actualise in our key pursuits of purpose.
THIS IS ONE OF SEVERAL ‘KEY CONCEPT’ ARTICLES THAT WILL FORM THE CORE OF THE CORPUS OF MY WORK HERE ON SUBSTACK. THESE ARTICLES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE SOME SENSE ON THEIR OWN, BUT THEIR FULLNESS OF CONTEXT ONLY BECOMES VISIBLE IN RELATION TO THE CONSTELLATION OF MEANING PROVIDED BY THE OTHER CORE ARTICLES WHICH WILL BE NOTICABLE BY THE CONSTELLATION KEY ICON YOU SEE ABOVE.
David Whyte wrote a book called The Three Marriages - Reimagining Work, Self and Relationships. One of the key take aways from the book is that we commit ourselves, well or poorly, to three marriages in our life, one to our work on ourselves, one to our containers (our relationships), and one to our occupations.
I say occupations and not careers for a specific reason; Only if we are very fortunate, the occupations in question, are the careers we get paid for, but they are that which occupy us nevertheless and we dedicate some life energy to, and they become a core part of how we define ourselves. Tragically, some people live their entire life not understanding that there is an opportunity to actualise. The definition of tragedy is not when the bad thing happened, but that it happened and that it had been avoidable.
I have a friend who for many years lived with and championed the essence of a cracker of a quote from the book ‘Who Not How’ by Dan Sullivan: “The definition of hell is: Your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.”
This is about the power of regret, specifically how, whether we realise it or not, we are trying to reach the end of a day, a month, a relationship even and particularly our life, with minimal regret. Some regret is unavoidable, that is simply a fact of what David Whyte calls The Conversational Nature of Life; that is to say, Life is a conversation, one in which the answer is not always ‘yes’.
The surest way to avoid the avoidable regrets, to avoid the Dan Sullivan definition of hell, is True Actualisation.
True Actualisation
The definition I refer to here is not so narrow as Abraham Maslow’s definition at the top tier of his hierarchy of needs.
Specifically, as per the inset in the diagram above, it is the effort and inclination to actualise, to achieve fulfilment of one’s innate purpose, which is by definition everything about us outside or beyond our shared and fundamental human needs.
Ancient Greek philosophy gives us these two related concepts:
Entelecheia
that which realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential.
and
Telos
the ancient Greek term for an end, fulfilment, completion, goal or aim.
Telos is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. Telos is the root of the modern term teleology, the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions.
Actualisation in the context I am referring to, is not simply excelling at something, or a sense of fulfilment because of said accomplishment - this is merely an extension of Esteem needs of the Fourth Tier of the hierarchy of needs. I am referring to the pursuit of Purpose, in alignment with the un-scratchable itch some of us are plagued by, whereby we cannot come to rest without making this pursuit a part of our lives. Whenever I mention Actualisation, in any of my writing, this is what I am referring to. And it is not something which is confined to the level of an individual either. A band can actualise. Nations can actualise. If I have anything to do with it, we will begin to wake up to the realisation that our species can actualise, but that is an expansive conversation for another article, another day.
We Are Not Just One Thing.
We aren’t just our passion for Violin or poetry. We are also husbands, and wives, and friends and partners, and parents and a dozen other worthy identities besides. We also have our own bodies, our intellects, our emotional competencies and a dozen other ways of slicing the panoply of human experience. We can actualise in the context of all of them. We can seek to become the best and authentic version of ourselves in the context of our relationships, in the context of our fitness and wellness as well as through our occupations, be they considered hobbies or passions or obscure interests.
For every other project we busy ourselves with, we are answering other people’s questions, pursuing borrowed ambitions with abstract bars of achievement.
I often say, full potential can never be known by the ambitious man. This is very simply because ambitions are finite and limiting and almost always the pursuit of goals and outcomes valued by someone else that we inherit in our search for meaning in life.
My definition of Actualisation is always aligned with one’s own sense of purpose, integrity and authenticity, and if followed truly, seldom has anything to do with ‘having more’, it is always aligned with some sense of service to Life. It is the following of our own star - the cultivation and exploration of our own genius - and we all have one.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I say, the life not invested in the pursuit of purpose is not worth celebrating.
The life not invested in the pursuit of purpose, is not worth celebrating.
It is towards this noble pursuit that this post is aimed. In this context actualisation can be thought of like transcendence, not in a mystical sense, but as in transcendence of the mundane and transcendence of our raw original self, in the realisation of both our own potential and how we are able to evolve a field or special interest through our efforts.
Apprenticeship is an essential aspect of actualisation. Even on our way to our own mastery, especially on our way to our own mastery, a necessary part of that journey usually has to involve an apprenticeship to the work of at least one other master in a related field. Ironically, the intention is always to outgrow that necessary tutelage. We cannot always surpass the master in their own expression of their craft, but we can wake up to the way our genius wants to sing and work through us so that we might become masters in our own right. My advocacy is not against humility -on the contrary; Rather, I am advocating a necessary limit to humility that can give way, necessarily to our own self-permission. We are called, in our authentic pursuit, to follow our own golden bird through the dark forest.
Curiosity and Self-Permission are the two wings of the Soul.
The following outlines what I have discovered is essential to initiation, apprenticeship and mastery of any such pursuit:
True Gratitude, Playfulness & Transcendence
There is a quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein which has been my constant companion throughout my own incredible journey:
The Limits of my Language become the limits of my World.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
More prosaically stated: “We cannot visit worlds for which we do not have the language.”
I discovered this the direct, arduous way through the following adventure.
During a sacred plant medicine ceremony one night, my first, I was actually a little underwhelmed. My experience was nothing akin to the inspiring musings of Terrence McKenna.
I received no visions, and no mystical transformative experiences. I was simply given the following quatrain, out aloud, though no mouth spoke it, I heard it as clear as if the speaker was in the room beside me:
"First The Child must learn True Gratitude, then The Adult can learn the Playfulness of a child, Finally, the sage may learn, to forget all. -And not a single one of these words is wasted."
I did not understand the words really, to begin with, but I never doubted for a second their power and significance. The full account of how I came to hear them is a story for another time, but what I discovered them to mean is what is relevant here.
The short(er) version, I came to understand was this:
I began with the last line of the quatrain, about how not a single one of the words was wasted. That was the nagging thorn that I could not remove. The earlier three lines could easily sound trite, like a fortune cookie. The last line forced me to pay attention to the phrasing and the exact words, like the ‘True’ in ‘True Gratitude’ - “why was it there?” I asked myself.
During my first months of sitting with the implications of these words, I stumbled across the key; that earlier quote by Wittgenstein.
“We cannot visit worlds for which we do not have the language.”
This led me back to the beginning, to the first line: First The Child must learn True Gratitude.
True Gratitude
I knew what gratitude meant. It means saying '“thank you”, it meant showing appreciation. Since I was assured not a single one of the words was wasted, it suggested this definition was not True gratitude. True Gratitude, I came to discover was the essence of which we attach the word but to a dim, distorted reflection. True Gratitude can have nothing to do with what we say, or what we demonstrate to others to signal our humility. True Gratitude is something you arrive at after ‘the talk’ with yourself, in front of whichever ‘Anubis’ of judgement you deem final.
This pre-requisite is what makes True Gratitude and Self-Permission so elusive and confounding to so many people I have attempted to explain this to; because if you don’t know to what you hold yourself ultimately accountable, you cannot understand True Gratitude. Put as simply as I can, most of us never quite resolve the confusion we have about God, or morality. What we ‘ought to do’ is usually a mish-mash of norms and promises and agreements we inherit along the way, before we have the presence of mind to erect and manage boundaries, while we are totally vulnerable and impressionable.
We like to believe that Faith decides Fate. This is a popular belief that suggests whatever your faith, that is to say your religious beliefs, whatever you hold to in this domain, will decide the fate of your soul in some afterlife. The sobering truth is that your fate decides your faith: The family you are born into, decides the language you grow up speaking, and defines in no small part, the way you believe about everything, including morality and God.
Until you know what that is, and you reconfigure your relationship with power, authority and permission in accordance with what you believe right down to your bones, you cannot determine with finality if you are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ by your own standards. For most of us, for most of our lives, we either think we have this sorted, again via inherited beliefs we have never critically qualified, or it is just something that drifts around in the basement of our subconscious, until we find ourselves urgently rummaging around there in a moment of crisis. If you do arrive at the place where you can work that out and be clear in yourself, you finally, finally, can begin to understand True Gratitude.
My life’s mission at that time was simple - I wanted to be well, really well, as in I was able to love the face I saw in the mirror and I was living aligned to finding my way to scratch the un-scratchable itch that had both plagued and evaded me my whole adult life.
In any endeavour, such as the one I had embarked on, the starting point to begin the ‘real work’, is True Gratitude. This is not the outward affectations of gratitude and humility we show the world in order to validate our worthiness. It is the very private sense of appreciation we wake up to, about how our challenges are perfectly designed to help us grow, and that we are blessed beyond measure with Life and all its wonders. When we begin with True Gratitude, we find we drop all the bowing and genuflecting and we touch the essence of true humility - how small and insignificant we are and how great our opportunity to live a life worth living. A whole genre of piety and humility that seems to belong to modern spiritual traditions and social norms, just drops away. It is synonymous with Self-Permission.
Playfulness
True Gratitude is also the essential prerequisite to the Playfulness mentioned in the second line of the quatrain. I discovered, it of course did not mean glibness or flippancy -it meant simply that all real growth and learning, that is to say what can be harvested from life without book-learning and direct instruction, can only be learned through Play. This is how baby animals learn and this is what makes Jiu Jitsu such a unique modality. Games, are an instantiation of life, whereby we can emulate some of the risks and challenges without the full implication of loss that would apply in real life, while still carrying enough incentive to keep us engaged enough to play as if it were real.
The quickest way to improve in a project, in a relationship, at parenting, in Jiu Jitsu, in poetry writing, even your own spiritual development, is to play, consciously and seriously. It sounds like a paradox, but it isn’t. If you are really serious about the outcome, if you have True Gratitude, if you are sincerely committed to improve and progress, regardless of the expectations or opinions of others, the surest way to make significant headway, is play. You have to try things and not see iterations as failure, they become necessary stepping stones, and even what others call error or failure, become the foundations on which you build your understanding and refine your competency. All experiences become positive experiences: you are either growing or you are learning. And what is more, if you are serious about how you play, you set yourself up for success. That means that not everything you do needs to look visibly like progress from the outside, sometimes it is necessary preparation, sometimes it is necessary maintenance, sometimes it is necessary ripening and sometimes it is just keeping pace with the elevated demand at the next level of the game; treading water until you find your feet.
In the end, our biggest fears are not about adversity. Humans tend to enjoy adversity provided it has limits. It is uncertainty that frightens us, and the definition of uncertainty is the potential of adversity, the limits of which might exceed our own. Games are our way of setting up controlled models of life, controlled not to remove adversity, but to limit it.
Seeing relationships, spiritual paths, self-development and work projects as games, is actually the most skillful way to accelerate rapidly, provided you are playing to learn and to grow, not playing to win. This allows the player to be motivated by Love, rather than by Fear. This is utterly profound and we will get to it later (in another foundational core concept article).
Transcendence
The third line is about Transcendence. The ‘sage’ learning, to forget all, is about the place you get to in any field of sustained endeavour, where there are no more rules, where you have to start inventing the game to keep playing it. Any true master of their craft, by definition, can no longer consult the common rule set; they begin writing and refining the rules. Transcendence is actualisation, which is the project of following one’s own star, both to fulfilment and to the benefit of all. This eventually led me to another of the powerful ideas I want to share: Stable Mutual Actualisation (to be explained in some detail in a subsequent article, which I will link here in the future).
What struck me was the universality of the wisdom in those words. It applied to every project of human effort, the ones we know about and the ones we are not aware of, yet.
Most people will hear the words, read this article and much of it will sound abstract, fanciful or obvious. It is none of those things.
We cannot visit worlds for which we do not have the language. That is to say, we cannot embrace the depth of a thing when our grasp of the language is mundane.
Curiosity and Self-Permission are the two wings of the soul.
Actualisation begins
in the welcoming home
of Authenticity,
-our first child,
which we had driven
from the home,
in favour of sparing
the uninvited guests
of the world’s petty virtues,
the burden
of their own embarrassment.
The artist responsible for this inspiring sculpture pictured above, explained the journey of creating her iconic sculpture, "Expansion". On moving to Manhattan she had discovered a prevailing bias against figurative art in favor of ‘visionary’ concepts, she decided to challenge the art world's expectations by breaking her foundation. To embody this, she literally dropped her prized piece of a meditating woman from the mezzanine of a workshop, shattering it into pieces.
Initially Bradley was devastated, but then picked up the pieces, of herself and her work, and then recast the fragments in bronze, intentionally leaving them separated to create a floating effect. The end result, glowing from within due to a specialized lighting system, resonated deeply with everyone who encounters it, affirming for Bradley that vulnerability was the necessary doorway to transcendence.
By definition, all growth requires an outgrowing of who we already are, regardless of how hard won it was.
If you are on a true path to meet your life’s purpose, your work will both break your heart and welcome you home.
We must have the sense and courage to face both. Vulnerability is the door to that house.
Note on Actualisation and Perfection
If your journey doesn’t break you along the way, there is a high chance you are going the wrong way, or so often you aren’t actually going anywhere at all.
If your work doesn’t feel like a kind of coming home, you should know, there is something out there waiting for you. And there is something inside you that wants to live in the world. It does not have to be how you make your money, it might be an art or an instrument. It could be a way we agree to belong to the great secret of life, a way we agree to listen to the voice of a place, or the way we decide to show up for someone.
We all have halos, and when we shine, they shine. Anything that does not light you up is too small to invest all your time, energy and attention. That goes for work, relationships, identities and beliefs.
Any time spent wondering what this might be, asking the impossible question, even if the answer eludes you, is not at all time wasted.
Sometimes I still wonder how I am supposed to bring my gift and magic to the world. Finding the magic is half the battle. Finding the way to let it live in the world can be just as difficult, and it can break us in totally different ways. I am starting to suspect this is essential and completely necessary.
“Be ashamed to die until you have won some small victory for humanity.”
Horace Mann
It is important to note that in the context of Actualisation, there is no end-point. Perfection is not a destination, it is a vector. If the way is not always seeking better ways, it is not THE way.
Actualisation is a vector. Our work is never done. Once it is done, we are complete and we are raising our hand to Life and to the Universe and saying with a great sense of peace and a sigh of final surrender:
“Behold this thing that I have become! This is where I stop. I have reached my end and I am home.”
Author’s Note
This is the real deal, Rocco!