Samsara of Perfectionism — Part 2: The Architecture of Mind
In the previous part of the series, we learned how Mother Lucy went through cycles of seasons and learned humility. It’s surprising to find that the concept of Samsara fits well with the agricultural life cycle of our ancestors. In this part, we’ll explore its relation to the most important knowledge of humankind — the architecture of our mind — and see how it can help Jackie find his way out of this cycle of suffering.
Being humble isn’t a quality one can be proud of, but an acceptance to be sustained.
“Humility” is a deep word, and understanding it is the key to ending our suffering. It may be the solution to most, if not all, of the emotional struggles we face.
Why did our ancestors call themselves “human,” or humble beings, in the first place? It seems they discovered some important mechanics of our cognitive system that influence our quirky behaviors and tried to pass that wisdom down, transcending the boundaries of time by packaging it in symbolizations.
We’ve seen these symbolizations scattered throughout different cultures: tales about gods, demons, ghosts, and the “earthling” humans; the 7 deadly sins in Christian teachings; the 3 poisons and the idea of attachment in Buddhism. Though each culture has its own interpretation, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. As long as the symbols are there, so too are the wisdoms.
The Architecture of the Unhealthy Mind
Many cultures believe that we live in 2 parallel worlds, the material and the spiritual. This is similar to the 2 axes we use in our reasoning (judging) to digest factual and emotional information.
At the 2 ends of the Material and Spiritual axes lie 4 groups of qualities that were once parts of a single, unnamed holistic value. They’re torn apart by the need to align with social judgment. They were then given names and assigned qualities, good or bad, according to social preferences. We tear ourselves apart desperately to prove to others that we’re worthy of living in society; this worthiness is as important as our life and death.
We project an image of ourselves onto other people and our own consciousness, becoming fixated on it. This image is a combination of the qualities on the upper side. They’re parts of our social mask, the ego.
The lower side contains all the values that we desperately run away from to retain our mask, the shadow. When we say we are or aren’t something, we’re just running away from the other side of that thing.
Spiritual Safety
For an unhealthy mind, our spiritual ego is fixated on ideals. Examples are the fixation on being unselfish, compassionate, successful, excellent, hardworking, responsible, etc. “Pride” is a handy word for a mnemonic reference to these qualities. We use them to create a safe space spiritually. While desperately retaining them, we create another fixation on the other side of the spiritual axis, embodying all the qualities that we deem “dirty” relative to the values we consider good.
Material Safety
“Ambition” is on the material side of our ego. It has an unhealthy name called “Greed” when being fixated on. It’s a fixation on being materially safe. And while striving for that, another poor identity of ourselves sits on the shadow side, holding the laziness or anything we deem “Lousy” or related to a “Loser.”
Vital Axes
Another two axes play a “vital” role in our cognitive system — Life and Self-Worth. As material safety is important to our life, our spiritual safety relies on our sense of self-worth.
Fixation on something implies that we tie that thing to our life and death. We run away from our shadow because we presume it leads to death physically and spiritually. When we fight, we either hurt each other physically by cutting short their materials or spiritually by depriving their self-worth.
Emotional Reasoning
In the language of judging and reasoning, we invalidate some of other people’s reasons to maintain the validity of our own. Similarly, we invalidate some qualities of others to maintain the validity of our own qualities.
Validity means life and worthiness, while invalidity means death and shame. We don’t like to do something that’s not sound and valid; in the same sense, it will be difficult to bring ourselves to do or express qualities that are not spiritually sound (not in our spiritual ego) or not spiritually valid (are in our spiritual shadow).
And that’s why we tend to invalidate other people’s worth if they express something that defies the validity of our spiritual ego.
Principal State
As we cycle through environments, we exert ourselves to achieve or avoid something and get stuck in one of the four realms. We then express a predictable tendency of behaviors due to the realm we’re currently in.
- In the (unhealthy) Animal realm, we’re likely to live a passive life and be reactive to stimuli. We may procrastinate, be lazy, or avoidant. Or we can be anxious, envious, hateful, etc., when the situation squeezes us.
- In the (unhealthy) Demon realm, we’re likely to excessively push ourselves to achieve the ideal and be hard on others in regard to the ideal.
- In the (unhealthy) Ghost realm, we can excessively yield ourselves to the behaviors that we deem “dirty,” which is similar to what we call the yo-yo effect.
- In the (unhealthy) Human realm, we’re greedy and act according to the impulse to acquire resources without consideration. We’re also conceited in ourselves based on the hardships we’ve overcome in the past.
Time and Attitude
When we’re in a principal state, we’re likely to have certain attitudes toward future and past events, unconsciously.
- In the (unhealthy) Demon realm, we’re optimistically future-facing. “Arrogance” is a handy word to represent the kind of unhealthy attitude we usually have in this state.
- In the (unhealthy) Animal realm, we’re pessimistically future-facing and likely to express “Anxiety” or other qualities with a similar attitude.
- In the (unhealthy) Ghost realm, we’re pessimistically past-facing. We express “Grief” and have an unfortunate view of events in the past.
- In the (unhealthy) Human realm, we’re optimistically past-facing. We’re full of “Conceit,” believing that we’re strong and have overcome unfortunate events in the past by ourselves.
Karma
When we’re stuck in a realm, we “navigate” to other realms by the force of “karma,” or simply the behavior we choose as a response to the struggles we face. The behavior includes both our external actions and internal thinking and feeling processes.
When we face the same or similar struggle many times, we have the tendency to repeat the same choices of karmas over and over, unintentionally and unknowingly, due to the passive and reactive nature of an Animal. Until we know, we’ve already developed many autopilot behaviors and cannot resist them. It’s like we dig a waterway deeper and deeper every time we repeat a karma, and when the waterway is too big, we cannot prevent the “current” from flowing in that way.
Please look at the first diagram to see some examples of karmas that bring Mother Lucy to different stages.
Addiction — An Infinite Cycle of Coping Mechanism
With all this knowledge equipped, we’re ready to help Jackie, a 30-year-old perfectionist, find the end to his self-hazardous loop of behaviors. Please recall from Part 1 that Jackie began his journey from the Demon realm, wearing the mask of a god, carrying the expectation to maintain his image of being excellent and successful in life that he constantly projected onto everyone’s and his own consciousness. Tightening the achievement in work vitally with his sense of self-worth, he got stuck in the Animal realm in the never-ending loop of procrastination, anxiety, and avoidance behaviors due to excessive fear of not being able to complete his work as perfectly as he expected.
Jackie navigated to the Animal realm by the karma of procrastination when facing difficult work. He froze himself, and mother nature gifted him with anxiety to try to unfreeze him and push him to do something about it. Jackie chose to avoid both anxiety and the work; he relied on some pleasures such as playing video games, watching TV series, and eating, hoping those activities would “somehow” help him develop the mood to do the work. Finally, when the deadline came, he chose to sacrifice his well-being excessively to complete the work. In his emotional reasoning, Jackie deemed the pride in work more important than his life. He sacrificed everything in his life for it, including time, money, and relationships. It might look like he spent most of his resources on pleasure, but he had never gained any relaxation or fulfillment from those activities; he used pleasure only as a solution to motivate himself to work.
In the center of the original Samsara in Buddhism, there is a painting of a pig, a rooster, and a serpent, hinting to the adventurer in Samsara to be careful about the 3 bosses of this dungeon.
The three bosses eat each other’s tails, hinting at the loop of karmas that each cycle strengthens more and more. An attempt to beat them one by one is futile because each of them is the cause of the others.
Karma Redirection
Karma Redirection is the basic mantra we use to fight the bosses. There are 3 steps to cast this mantra.
When struggling with an emotional challenge, do the following:
- Locate yourself on the Samsara map. Stop doing anything, just stay still and investigate the feeling. Which realm are you currently in? Make use of the axes in the architecture diagram to identify, starting with the vital axes. Are you feeling worthy or ashamed? Then the time-attitude axis, are you concerned about the future or past? Usually, just 2 axes can locate the location. Finally, pick a word that best describes your emotion: pride, wrathful, lazy, boring, fear, envious, hateful, lustful, gluttonous, greedy, etc. This skill is particularly called Mindfulness.
- Identify the karmas and the natural challenges that brought you there, and what autopilot karma are you going to follow uncontrollably? How strong is the current of the karma?
- Use concentration, or Samadhi, to resist the current of karma, and start digging another karma waterway, little by little, to the new behavior or thinking process.
The Box of Idealism
Beating the three bosses of Samsara is as hard as breaking an addiction. We fail most of the time. And when we think we’ve beaten them once, they’re reborn in a new form that’s stronger and stronger.
For example, when Jackie succeeded in breaking his addiction to video games, he became addicted to TV series. And when he could stop that, he became addicted to eating, and so on.
He then tried some other ways. Instead of beating the rooster of pleasure, let’s try taking down the pig of avoidance. Jackie decided to face any challenges head-on. If he couldn’t complete the work, he wouldn’t do anything else. He then sat in front of his computer, doing samadhi all day without completing any work.
What about beating the serpent of ideal fixation? Good idea, it seems the serpent is the root of everything. Fixation means he relied too much on the ideal to survive. If only he had other options, maybe he could be less fixated on the perfection of being excellent and loved. He tried some other side hustles and social activities, hoping that he could have a variety of sources of self-worth to rely on. But it turned out he just added his life to other contexts of fixation. He began fixating on some other ideals such as being compassionate or useful to others and felt very ashamed if he failed to achieve them.
As he kept trying and trying, failing and failing, it was emerging clearly that it was not his choices of karmas that caused the problem;
it was something in his “feeling process” that locked him inside a box of idealism!
This stuck could not be explained and resolved using the language of “reasoning” (a synonym of judging). It was useless to keep telling him the “reasons” or benefits of quitting being fixated on perfection. He knew and understood the reasons better than anyone else in the world, but he just couldn’t resist it.
Why? He wondered.
He needed a little push from mother nature.
Depression — The Singularity of Reasoning (Judging)
No one is ever alone; we all have mother nature by our side. In Jackie’s case, when he fixated on perfection, mother nature gifted him with challenges. When he got stuck in procrastination, she hit him with anxiety. And when he got lost forever in the cycle of addiction and depleted his sense of self-worth, mother nature pushed him gently with depression, bringing him to the Hell realm.
Our mind is quirky; it looks like our spiritual and material worlds connect and calibrate each other. When we’re sick physically, if we can keep the spiritual vitality at a high level, it can speed up the body’s recovery. On the other hand, if our spiritual vitality drops, so does our physical life.
We have no physical disease, but with depression, we’re touching the door of death in both worlds. Mother nature is asking us an important question …
She challenges our conceited “emotional reasoning” skill to its singularity. This question is very simple; a healthy person can answer it with no brainer. But idealistically fixated people will get stuck in an infinite indecisiveness to this question. She’s giving us the hint that cuts directly to the heart of the problem.
Why would we value “worth” over life?
There’s no “reason” we can use to answer this question. The only way to see the answer is to try choosing one and then “perceive” the result with our own “sense.”
The Celestial Space and The Door of Humility
Fortunately, Jackie chose life. And that means he had surrendered his endearing worth. He completely took off the mask of a god, admitting to people, and himself, with the utmost authenticity, what he is and isn’t, what he can and cannot do. It’s the first time in his life that he fought for his well-being without yielding to any expectation and asked for no understanding or love from, and showed no apology to, anyone. He “perceived” any expectation and pressure from people, and himself, with respect, a completely judgment-free acceptance.
The door to the Human realm, which he had never been able to open before, finally opened. And surprisingly, it didn’t lead to the God realm; rather, it was the Sky realm.
He descended from the Celestial Plane to the plain Earth of humble living, the place with the exact same architecture as the Celestial except every karma has the color of acceptance, a.k.a. love, mixed in it.
And here is the full view of the Earth, the Architecture of the Healthy Mind.
Think and Feel Orthogonally
By comparing the architecture of the healthy and unhealthy minds, we can see that all the axes and the nature of behaviors in each realm are the same. The only crucial difference is that the Vital Axes are now parallel to the Perceiving Axis instead of the Judging Axis.
On this axis, there is no good or bad. It’s the nonjudgmental plane, the place where “reason” has no meaning. Only gain or loss, and laugh or cry. Instead of seeking perfection, safety, and certainty, we seek opportunity and possibility. We try our best to avoid pain, but when it comes, we accept it as an experience that makes us grow.
Instead of striving for worth, we reach out for sustainability. And when it’s out of reach, we embrace the reality with compassion.
This is what mother nature tries her best to have us, her naive little children, understand. “Think outside the box, you dumb kid!”
Judging means cutting off for one best, while perceiving means exploring possibilities. A perfectionist is a person who’s clumsy in perceiving but perfect in judging, meaning their vital axis aligns very closely to the judging axis, resulting in the degree to which they’re all-in for one thing for their life.
They’re very good at noticing a single atom of invalidity and therefore have a high tendency to be indecisive, anxious, and avoidant. An emotional perfectionist is one of the kind who particularly has the judging axis inclined more toward the spiritual side than the material side.
Acceptance is a transform that turns the vital perspective of a perfectionist from the judging axis toward the perceiving axis. On the contrary, Stubbornness, or Rejection, is the inverse of Acceptance.
Mother Nature
Humility is an optimistic fear. It’s like the fear children have toward their parents. It’s a sense of recognition that there’s something greater than us taking care of us and can punish us out of love when we’re stubborn.
When we eat with humility, we eat in moderation. If we can catch 4 fish to eat, we only catch 2 of them and let the others go.
When we work and fulfill some ideal, we’re not gluttonous for it. When mother tells us to sleep, we obey.
Ideal fixation is the degree to which we hate our mother nature. When we’re fully on the perceiving plane, each karma is mixed with the language of acceptance to mother nature. On the contrary, as we’re closer to the judging plane, our karma is more and more combined with the language of rejection.
The reason we run away from our mother nature is that she used to be tough on us to a degree. Mother nature herself, like us, is ever-changing. She can be unhealthy sometimes in some aspects and then be back to her warm, lovely state. It’s us who are inflexible and have been holding a grudge toward her, unconsciously. Judging is the alertness we use to survive the danger of mother nature. But when the danger has gone, we cannot retreat that alertness and get stuck in the Celestial world.
When regarding this dynamic of mother nature in our definition, Acceptance transforms us toward mother nature, and Stubbornness (or Rejection) is our karma of running away from mother.
Sometimes, we’re mischievous and fail to notice that mother is angry.
In this case, Awareness is a transform that turns the vital perspective of a rascal from the perceiving axis toward mother nature in the direction of the judging axis. And Ignorance is the inverse of it.
Accept(Situation) or Aware(Situation) => Healthy Emotion
Reject(Situation) or Ignore(Situation) => Unhealthy Emotion
With these theories set, we may say that Emotional Cultivation is the result of transforming our vital perspective regarding the situation we’re facing. It’s about giving up something we hold dear and embracing some other thing we used to deem dirty, in order to be more sustainable. When our vital perspective changes, all other emotions will also change. They’re results of applying our perspective to the situation, not the other way around. Trying to force emotion without changing perspective only creates another form of idealistic fixation on that emotion. And there’s a particular term for this, called “spiritual materialism.”
Spiritual Materialism = Reject(Situation) or Ignore(Situation) => Unhealthy Emotion
🤔 And if we were to measure how much a person has the tendency to suffer, we may devise a test that measures how well they can notice the tiny, unimportant invalidity in exchange for the more important sustainability.
Two-World Adventurer
In the end, Jackie becomes a two-world adventurer. He can travel between the Celestial and Earth at will. He lives a happy life in which pain is unavoidable but suffering is optional. With mother nature by his side, he no longer fears any pain because no fear is greater than his loving fear, the humility, toward mother nature.
When he faces emotional struggles, he uses the mantra of karma redirection to locate himself in the celestial world. And then he looks orthogonally to find the location of mother nature and starts paving a new way of karma toward her by pouring a color of acceptance into it.
Within the embrace of mother nature, the three bosses of Samsara are transformed into his allies, manifesting in the forms of a cute little pig, a freewill eagle, and a playful dolphin.
His experience in the celestial world is his source of compassion and awareness that he uses to understand and respect other people who are facing emotional struggles related to ideal fixation. He knows how to think and feel judgmentally and ascend to the celestial world to share the suffering with his lost brothers and sisters and respect what they consider worthy and important for them, without complicating their problem by forcing anyone to love and praise him. With the warmth of love he receives from mother nature, he can now embrace uncertainty and criticism from other people. He respects people even though they dislike him.
From a perfectionist striving for the idealism of being liked, praised, and excellent in the celestial world, Jackie now finds his home and lives a humble life on Earth, flying in the sky of freedom, being content on the ground, relaxing in the ocean, and being grateful for life as a human.
When he stops tying his self-worth to his imagination about how much other people will like and dislike his work, he has the freedom to moderate the amount of work he likes to consume each day for his own sustainability, no matter how other people will judge him accordingly. He accepts and respects it but stays grounded to protect what’s important to him, even though no one understands.
When he stops the excessive exertion to achieve something, he notices that his life cycles beautifully, like a flow, up and down, push and pull, among the realms, human of achieving, to eagle of protecting, to pig of resting, and dolphin of celebrating. He clearly understands why his life has struggled so far.
Life is more about flow than exertion.
When he has ambition and wants some achievement, he pushes himself gently and lets it flow.
