SOME SAY we contain neurotic fixations and defensive structures. Others say we contain problematic inner family systems and dysfunctional patterns. While these approaches have their merits, they are flawed in that they turn us into problems to be solved. It seems to me that Walt Whitman got it right when he said we contain multitudes, but that's a bit much to deal with in our day-to-day life. I prefer to hone in on the parts of myself that appear on a regular basis and call it a village. The subpersonalities that take turns being in charge I call “the villagers.” 

There's wisdom in a strategic exaggeration of our villager's qualities. If we exaggerate, we know it's not really who we are. We can drop our crippling idealism and slip past the poison of shame by seeing our vexations as a shared human experience of foibles, blind spots and eccentricities. This practice has helped me lighten up and accept the inherent imperfections and limitations in human life while increasing my ability to witness without heavy judgments.

This approach is quite different than the “not knowing” approach, which has a precise and rigorous quality that can be too intense for many of our villagers. Even though relaxing with not knowing is something we could achieve one day, cultivating a gentle and humorous attitude might be more doable for now. 

We are moving toward “nondoing,” yet are still in the realm of doing. We could ask ourselves, If I’m still in the realm of doing, what should I be doing? How would I know? It requires an attitude of generosity toward ourselves, a willingness to make mistakes, to do little experiments and find out what is the best next step for us. What works best for me right now (at least for the villager now speaking) is bringing humor into my spiritual practice and everyday life —even when I’m just going to the grocery store or talking with others I see on the street. When I lighten up it gets pretty funny, what we humans do. 

We need to check in with ourselves: Which villager is running the show? Does this villager have the space to open to humor? Sometimes it isn’t possible and that’s okay. We can try later. For example, it took me a little while to acknowledge that I have a villager with the tendency to bloviate. Before, I wouldn’t have liked it much at all, but now I call that villager the "The Bloviater.” I notice when he shows up — just one villager in the village — catch him and exaggerate him. Relishing this exaggerated energetic dimension is a much more enjoyable (and hilarious) way to set myself free than, for example, primal scream therapy. 
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HUXLEY'S BRILLIANT ARTICULATION OF THE "MINIMUM WORKING HYPOTHESIS" WE NEED TO GUIDE OUR INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUAL DISCOVERIES AND GROWTH.

RECENTLY I began reading Aldous Huxley’s book The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment. Perhaps because I’ve been searching in many ways my entire adult life to discover how science can be in service of awakening, I was stunned to discover that Huxley’s words expressed something I have long believed but could not express in words. He wrote that developing clarity was crucial to deepening spiritual growth and, quite unexpectedly, he also wrote that a very specific working research hypothesis was needed to “motivate and guide this research.” Luckily for me, and for you I trust, Huxley has answered in the text below his own question of "what sort and how much of a working hypothesis do we need?"

From Huxley's The Divine Within:

For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice, or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this:

MANY OF THE PROFOUND AND SUBTLE ASPECTS OF THIS ​PLANT MEDICINE CAN BE QUICKLY FORGOTTEN.

OPENING TO INNER GUIDANCE USING THE FELT SENSE.

EUGENE GENDLIN'S DISCOVERY.

​I WANT to talk about my mentor Gene's exploration of the in-between and why I love so much what he's done. How he's inspired me, and how I feel he's given me permission to take what he's given to me and take it further into the spiritual domain.

I also want to talk about other people who have done this, working with the in-between, but I want to make it most about Eugene Gendlin, and how these other people have gone where he's gone, but how they weren't able to go as far as he went. I think that will help me understand Gendlin more and help me communicate what I feel is the breakthrough that Gendlin accomplished that created a breakthrough for me. He broke open a new trail for me and I only just now am seeing it—how I can follow his way but how I’m going to do it in my own way. What I think I can contribute comes through taking in my intuitive sense of what he's accomplished and putting it in new words that are more accessible to others, and also help me understand it more deeply. I have to take his words inside myself, metabolize what he's saying and come up with an easier way for me to think about it.