Take three steps back – Vis Viva Chapter 6

Eric says we should go back to Jason Bourne today and how that willingness to step forward for the programme got him into all sorts of trouble. He says that manipulation is at the root of this and that his willingness to look only on the bright side of life is both a blessing and a curse; that most people take three steps back unless they can see some advantage in things for them. His Nan had a word for it. “Some people are very cute;” she used to say.

Eric reminds me that in my willingness to help other people, I have actually been very dis-empowering to them, and that my take charge mentality, because nothing appears to be happening, has very bad consequences; it establishes a dependency and is not liberating. The weird thing is that people nearly always want to take shortcuts and they always, always want others to take the risk for them. In effect it is manipulation. Eric says that he is now a little sick of this.

He says that people have always apparently recognised in him some sort of a potential, then tried to use him. He is not quite sure what that potential is, but reckons a part of it is remaining calm and objective in moments of crisis, some of which are of his own making. It does take a crisis though for people to actually want to listen to him. He says that the three steps back mentality, is risk averse, often controlling and already looking for a scapegoat even before things begin. On the one hand people so badly want heroes, yet they are often so willing to cast them quickly as the villain of piece.

A long time ago and apparently whilst on the Warrior’s path he was foolish enough to allow himself to be set up as a leader for a group of people. Well somebody had to do it didn’t they? There they built him up as a leader of men, they told him he was the alpha male and set him up for people to compete against and very occasionally with him. They told him all sorts of stuff and let him believe that his fate was to lead this group of people and learn what it meant to learn to lead.

Eric still thinks it funny how that all came about.

In his vanity and naïveté he had let his life get away from him and into this fantasy world. In retrospect how many people could hold together an academic position at a top university, a directorship at an evolving spin out company and an imagined position as leader of a group of people working with the Warrior’s path?

It was imagined then. He was never really the leader.

Afterwards it did all seem rather empty. It was a nice fantasy while it lasted.

If one really, really believes in fate and that in any given lifetime one’s job is to fulfil fate, then, can you imagine the impact of being led to believe that one’s fate was to lead a group of people across three continents on some great quest to unite the heart centres of the planet and then, to have that crushed and taken away over a few short weeks?

What then is one supposed to do with what appear to be the remnants of a life? What then? Eric says he truly believed that he had forfeited his fate. And that sort of thing can make one a little reckless, he comments. If the forfeit is still true then what does that leave? Who knows what lies ahead and what does it matter if the fundamental purpose of one’s existence has been swept aside and demolished?

Eric comments that these events led him to search a great many avenues and paths. He took great care to explore each one of them, as soon as a doorway appeared he would follow the path along the corridor of enquiry for a while, letting his intuition guide him.

He could not however unlearn all that he had learned.

This whole affair left him with a deep longing for a path lost and a fate abandoned. There pendant in the web of life were ghosts and visions still hanging. Eric took his time to re-run and re-perceive his life, and each interaction. How different it all looks now.

He says that because we are re-visiting that space in time we have activated some form of intent and that through the inter-connectedness of the web of life that perception is being shared some thousands of miles away. The dreamers of mankind are group conscious he reminds us. Best not to dwell too long on those thought patterns then.

He is reminded that as he was preparing to leave that group he bought himself a TV. He would need something to do instead of answering all those messages and being at the beck and call of others.

Six years later on it all seems so very, very far away and lost, forgotten in the ephemera of time.

Is that still it then? A fate abandoned and a life of decay. There was some talk back then of Eric making a “bid for power”, the theory says that a bid for power comes only once in a lifetime and that should one fail then one is either destroyed or taken back to a point somewhere in the stream of life before one found the Warrior’s path; there to wonder wistfully about what it might have been like to be a Warrior.

Perhaps this then is it. As we sit here typing away in this lovely cottage, no job, no spin out company, no great spiritual quest; a quiet life of beauty and perhaps mediocrity, with no personal power, one where I gradually fade away. Eric doesn’t believe in fat ladies and he hasn’t heard one sing for quite a while now.

Like Jason Bourne we are looking back for Treadstone. If fate really is fate, then there is nothing that can be done about it, sooner or later one has to go there and live it. There seems to be very few threads left and precious little on that island from before.

Eric says that inherent in the possession of knowledge and in positional power is a danger. It can bring out the very worst in one. He is pretty sure that he doesn’t want power any more; he does still want to learn. It seems though there aren’t that many people around that he can learn from. He says that he still has two very big questions though and that we should devise a strategy to unpick one of them first because that has massive implications for many people and for the second one. We should go one step at a time though, for here is such a tightrope. The answer to this first question has implications that are truly earth shattering in dimension.

Today though he is reading a play called Le Roi Pêcheur by Julien Gracq, one of many books that have “jumped out” at him during his life. This book in a subdued cover caught his eye in a tourist information office in Brittany. The office was closed so he had to hunt it down later. When it arrived the pages were not yet properly cut and he had to separate them with his Sabatier. It took quite a while and there was a great sense of satisfaction when he had done this.

“No more heroes, any more,
No more heroes, any more.
Whatever happened to all those heroes…?”

sang the Stranglers many decades ago now, perhaps as a sign of the times with emerging punk rock and that sense of rebellion then. Only to be followed by “Thatcher, Thatcher, the milk snatcher.”

Now we live in times where the majority of politicians are grey and boring or unable to string together a coherent sentence to drawl. There are few heroes. Eric says that you just have to look at the cars they make these days; by and large they are all pretty much the same despite the ardent claims of the manufacturers.

Who then are the male heroes of today?

He reckons that there has been so much spin that substance is hard to find. Irrespective of the vis viva having imbued the material form with life. There is no substance to the words of these politicians, despite the sound of them issuing out causing the matter of the air to vibrate. The words are not matched by deeds and nor by character.

Eric has been paying a lot of attention to spiders lately. He says that at one level they are quite remarkable creatures, they have evolved this capacity to spin the most delicate of webs and then they just wait. They wait for some food to arrive. They are predators. He reckons that many people are like this. Rather than do the hard work of being creative themselves they wait for other people to come along and then live off them and their successes. They feed. They are vampires. They suck the life force out of others.

A lot of people are like this, they are scared that they themselves cannot be creative so they act as if they are friends and bask in the glory of association. I have done this myself. I am sure you have all met the “name dropper” who has so many rich and famous friends and acquaintances; at first glance one can become captivated by the reflected glory and the glamour. The apparent connectivity and the illusion of creativity can quite quickly become jaded when the true colours begin to show.

Some people live their whole lives like this, running so very, very quickly so as not to be caught up by their own half truths and lies. I agree with him for I have seen people steal others ideas and then become quite famous passing those ideas off as their own. Eric tells me that this is how the world works. He also says that such people live lives of fear. Ultimately though, things do catch up.

He reminds me that a Warrior is always advised to look beyond the face value of a situation and see what lies beyond.

People often present a situation in a way that is perhaps most beneficial to them, whilst keeping their true motives as well hidden as possible. Eric reckons that by looking out for what isn’t said, how that isn’t said and the extent to which it isn’t said one can get a glimpse of the fear which is driving the not saying. This then, acts as a portal towards a truth other than that which is being presented.

He reckons that as we are all a mystery unto our selves we cannot easily see our own behaviours, this is sometimes called a blind spot; the best way to see ourselves is to look at those around us and ask ourselves what is it that they are reflecting for me? If we can see a behaviour in others then it must be within the realms of our own personal experience, either we have {or are} exhibited {-ing} that behaviour or someone has done that to us before. It is really handy, though not always comfortable, to be as honest as possible here.

He says that such mirrors can be past, present or future. I agree with him here. I have found that when someone comes into my life and I get a gut feel about them, whether pleasant or unpleasant, then they are going to show me something about myself and perhaps between the two of us there is some learning to be done.

It is very interesting to hear other people talk about their friends and colleagues and even about one-self. I can remember asking someone to describe how I influence others and what they saw. I know myself pretty damn well. This lady said that she saw me as someone who manipulated power behind the scenes. I listened to the face value of what she had said, balanced it against what I know about myself and made a mental note. She has seen this in me therefore it is within the scope of her experience and because it was the very first thing she recognised, to watch out, she is probably doing this right here and now.

Eric says that people do all sorts of things to hide the truth perhaps the most common of these is smoke screening; that is talking about everything but the matter at hand, he says that there is an interesting change in tone of voice when people do this. The next léger de main , is by way of telling a partial truth to cover for a much bigger mistruth, in a sense offering up something unpleasant as a cover, this appeases the other person’s sense or intuition that all is not well yet doesn’t come clean. I too have noticed this on a number of occasions and then let it run.

The thing is that lies then need supporting lies, and I use the word lie also in the sense of lying by omission. This omission creates a non sequitur in the flow or pattern of a cloth that intuitive people pick up on. They may not act on what they perceive yet that pattern of “something missing” is stored in the pattern recognition centre. From time to time then the weaver has to darn the fabric of a lie, to tend to it so that it does not all unravel.

Sometimes complete silence is the best way to encourage this darning for the weaver is always a little anxious. And a lie told often enough becomes a truth and if told by enough people the truth. These truths then, can act as submarines in the fabric of life, waiting to appear at unexpected moments, like the Lehman brothers.

Eric says that taking those three steps back is very hard for him to do, but it is unconditional. He does this more often now. This brings us both back to fate. Eric says for many years now he has wondered about what fate is and more specifically what the general look and feel of his fate are? What are the themes? Part of it is to do with this potential that others see in him. Somehow they seem to want him to materialise something that they want, a vision or direction that they want him to go in.

It goes back to bullying in a number of ways and he remembers a time where all “advised” him on how they would like him to behave. In a very real sense creating an expectation that he felt he should fulfil and a method that they wanted him to follow. He says that one of the biggest challenges for him is summarised in a single word, no. That is, he has never really said it enough.

Bullying has been a theme all his life; as has being manipulated to do the wants of others. One of his psychiatrists was always teasing him that he was a push-over; together they discussed the irony of this in that he has plenty of personal power but never really chooses to exercise it. He says that somehow he just doesn’t fit in with the world and that he is not worldly wise; he is not cute.

Although people want to take short cuts, the facts are that if you do help them, when they don’t really need it, they start to see you as a “sucker” and in time they loose respect for you, they start to take more advantage of you. They even feel sorry for you. This feeling sorry for someone or pitying them is perhaps the most disempowering thing that anyone can do to another.

It neglects the inclusion of a person’s fate in life and goes quite a long way towards robbing them of the possibility of change. It is kind of ironic to be told on the one hand that you are an alpha male and on the other to have people bullying you and trying to take advantage of you. Somehow and in someway this doesn’t fit. It is a puzzle that Eric and I have lived with for much of our lives.

Now and in retrospect Eric wonders whether this whole business about learning to lead wasn’t a complete red herring. Even so he has made quite a study of leadership and what it feels like. So it all was of some use after all. He never liked the wolf pack as an analogy, there is something in that whole approach which doesn’t suit him and it has a great deal to do with Darwinian thinking, survival of the fittest and all that; the hunter and the hunted. Eric says that perhaps it is his pomposity that finds such things distasteful. Why should he have to compete? His needs are very simple he does not need status, he does not need physical plane wealth, he does not need to shag loads of birds.

Eric says he can appear a little strange to people, in that many of them look to him for some form of direction, he does not know why. He has had it explained to him that people sense this potential in him, that he has power. Then, when he tries to point out a direction or way of being, they appear to fight him tooth and claw. It is a mystery. He wonders what the pay off in all this is. What is the purpose behind it all?

This lack of cuteness has gotten him into all sorts of scrapes; particularly with women. Until quite recently it had never really occurred to him that he was attractive or desirable to the opposite sex and this links across to another project l’homme méhaignié, because one of the challenges in this life for him has been that of masculinity. Being bullied at school for being a homo, did nothing for his self confidence. He even wondered whether they were right and that he was a homo after all. He knows he is not, now. Later to be harassed about what sort of a man he was didn’t really help. It made matters worse. Some of the perhaps best intentioned comments, rather than causing him to have the desire to fight, just made him think the other people were oh so stupid and that perhaps they were right, that he was no man after all.

Eric has a different view of masculinity to most, he says that true masculinity is about not being afraid of emotions and feelings, that vulnerability is a lead that he is happy to provide, whereas bravado, back slapping and jock-strap-ery is not masculine. This behaviour is almost as bad as “boys don’t cry”. From his perspective there is nothing more beautiful than to see a man let out tears of poignancy. This warmth and caring is the essence of true masculinity, and when true masculine warmth is expressed it does something quite magical. A friend of his once did it quite naturally to a young woman on a course; she burst into tears, never having experienced it before.

True masculine warmth is a precious substance and it can make the world go round. Being warm, sensitive and caring are all taboo, in the common view of the world and what better place to suppress them than an English boarding school, where you get teased for being a homo. Eric knows he has it and that sooner or later other men will find it too. He hides it for now though, most of the time. Most men use something like this warmth for seduction and it is easily misread as a come on. Eric laughs at the number of times he has been his charming self only to find a woman to immediately point out her relationship status to him. People’s perceptions are quite the funniest things he says.

Eric says that this warmth is closely related to compassion and arises out of being as thoroughly inclusive as one can. He says that because he is not nor has he ever been, an angel he finds it very hard to be judgemental. He knows that he is far from perfect, whatever that may mean, and that he has done many things he is not proud of. He doesn’t like to throw stones at others and laughs at glasshouses.

He reckons that at least he is honest about his own hypocrisy and that is a good place to start; aspirations, he says, are generally a good thing, though it is easy to kid oneself that aspirations have become practice and fact. Intention to change is all that is required, because sooner or later if that intention is real the actions of a being change and the beginning of transmutation takes place; some times though because of the hubris of man this can feel like Sisyphus getting up each morning for another day at the office; three steps forward and three steps back.

Eric reckons then this is the key to leadership, knowing when to step forward and when to step back, stepping forward is what he calls an intervention. Every intervention and action has impact on the flow of life and by and large it is best to do this only sparingly for by being too eager we rob others of their challenges; in effect tying them up with our own apron strings when they are already ready and able to leave the nest.