WRONG NOT TO WORK

"I have enough income but it feels wrong not to work.."

For those of us raised with the Protestant Work Ethic, feeling guilty about not working just comes with the territory.  I can't begin to count how many times I got imprinted with these messages as a child:

"Good people work hard."

"You play after your work is done."

These imprintings (if actually lived out) would mean we continuously exhaust ourselves with work and never play (since we always can find more work to do).  This is no way to live.

If you're one of the many caught by this double-bind (or "Knot" as psychiatrist R.D. Laing so aptly named such insanity), all is not lost.  But you can't get out from under this nonsense by using your normal method of achievement which, of course, is "working" because this just compounds the problem.  So what do you do?

You have to recognize how crazy we are to believe that the point of life is to work our butts off so "some day" we can finally "play."  Until we really understand that this is stupidity of the first rank, there's little hope.  (If you feel offended, you're definitely on the right page).  So how do you transform a mistaken belief that you've taken seriously all your life into the joke it really is?  I find I have to combine three different approaches:

First, my rational mind and ego demand evidence that they've been mistaken all this time, and they're not particularly receptive.  In this case, finding out many historians believe the average workday before the Industrial Revolution was about three hours helped me greatly; I'd been misled to believe that people had worked their butts off forever.  When I put this together with the observation that most very wealthy people (the source of the propaganda I should work all the time) were themselves working less than three hours a day, my ego and rational mind felt played for suckers, and this was very helpful in getting their cooperation.

Second, developing a playful sense of humor and absurdity about the world helps immensely.  Generally this has been easy and natural for me, but I've had enough periods of depression and righteousness to know how hard seeing the light side can be.  For me, the key to this humor is making fun of myself (I've always loved the saying, "The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly").  I do think I'm funny, especially when I'm taking myself most seriously.  It's always blown my mind that humanity could believe evolution got to us and stopped - that we are the be-all and end-all of creation.  Such self-centeredness is so extreme I can't help but laugh at it's absurdity, and this gives me a humorous perspective on my own significance.  

Third, I turn to my gut (also called intuition, self-awareness or Divine Guidance) and check out how the situation "feels."  Doing this requires putting the noise of the world aside and going into stillness where truer voices can be heard.  There are many ways of doing this - meditation, hiking, fishing, watching a sunset, etc.  When I get into this quiet space, there's "no place to go, no thing to do" and I can "know" what makes the most sense for me at this time.  It isn't that I can change myself quickly, but I can see, and do, the things necessary to let the change evolve in me.  A most recent example of this was when in 2001 I "knew" I needed to give up my consulting work and create space, perhaps for three or four years, to let go of my Second Age identity so my Third Age self could emerge (it helped my rational mind and ego to recall this was just what Carl Jung did at a similar point in his life).  I'm now about halfway through this process (I think), and even at this still uncertain point, I recommend it very highly.

So my advice is - work if you want to, and don't work if you don't want to - it only matters to you.  If it matters to somebody else, that's entirely their problem...

Love, Father William