Cultivating A More Congenial Soul

How to dance with others more gracefully in a world filled with fixed points of view

Lately I have found myself both honoring and appreciating the boundless wisdom and creative potentials that appear when I hold my mind open (fully present) to new possibilities, by remaining aware yet unattached to my own assumptions, projections, or fixed interpretations.

Maintaining an open mind enables me to alter my own understanding of the world with far greater ease and grace than I was ever able to achieve through a tightly closed, fearful, angry, judgmental, or accusatory mind. I realize now that a hostile, victimized attitude used to prevail within me whenever new information, experiences, or realizations begin tapping against the access doors to my own self-conscious awareness. These days though, I notice fairly quickly whenever a fearful or aggressive attitude reemerges inside of me, because it feels so unusual (even icky!) to react in those ways to anything anymore. And I no longer notice so acutely that a sudden burst of hostility or self-pity is fading away, because inner peacefulness now feels normal instead of utterly novel.

I like to think of self-consciousness as the localized, semipermeable membrane surrounding an open, illumined meadow of pure awareness; the function of self-consciousness was never to wall off that field from all future incoming information, but to serve as a compassionately caring filtration system that honors and supports the overall beauty, natural expression, and regenerative integrity of that living field of awareness itself.

By cultivating a willingly compassionate, open-minded experience, I can now listen to the perspectives of others without contracting immediately into negative reactivity or expressing energetic resistance just because another has dared to probe into aspects of my own beliefs that I’ve convinced myself are solidly unassailable. It took some time to deprogram myself, but eventually I did realize that any resistance I may feel to the intimate probing of my own beliefs by another actually results from my own, subconscious fear or anxiety that another may indeed have spotted a logical fallacy, weakness, or gap in my “solid” walls of fervent belief, which might reveal to me they may not have been quite as solid as I’d hoped. Yet if my logic is indeed unassailable, then there’s no need for me to fear that it will fail—so why resist an attempt to explore it for flaws?

I notice that the more irrationally passionate another person tends to be, the less logically sound their own perspective will be. Shooting the messenger seems to have lately become a common human reaction to unwanted or anxiety-provoking information—as if shooting the messenger somehow negates the existence of any new information. Talk about shooting myself in the foot while attempting to shoot something else! The harder or more violently I push back against new information, because I fear becoming aware of my own not knowing, the less able I am to learn, to grow, and to evolve within this living and ever-changing shared reality.

If I fear subconsciously that my own beliefs are actually resting on shaky ground, I may notice myself repeating my assumptions, ever more insistently, just to try and shore them up. And if another person persists in questioning or challenging the solidity of my own, anxiously held beliefs, I might even attack them personally to distract and deflect them from pressing in on an issue for which I (as yet) have no good defense. When I instead relax and allow new information into awareness less resistantly, I can now begin to seek creatively beautiful new ways to weave it more colorfully into my own understanding, through a peacefully patient and co-creative (more integrative) process.

I also notice, a bit ironically, that my longstanding fear of being blindsided and forcefully made wrong (and perhaps even burning in hell for all of eternity!) has gradually been dissolving, because I have already entertained so many exciting, diverse, and unique points of view that it now seems rare and feels incredibly exciting for another to proffer a point of view I have not yet entertained, so know nothing about. When I do encounter that sort of exotic perspective, I now relish the opportunity for them to reveal new worlds I can marvel at and potentially explore, instead of feeling fearful that they might upend my own carefully curated, well-defended interior walls of belief, or produce a better case for their world that I fear might then overwhelm or destroy my own, personal point of view.

Once I ceased concretizing my own beliefs by creating whole cities of expectation out of them, I learned to better appreciate the uniquely conceived aspects of another’s point of view, even if I’m not in full agreement with their interpretation of what they know. I can also better understand and flow with their present moment physical limitations, emotional needs, and mental capacities, because I’m no longer so busy trying to get my own perspective seen and accepted as “the one and only truth” that my mind has little remaining capacity to hold their perspective more gracefully while I seek to understand how and why it converges with, or diverges from, my own.

It’s taken me decades to cultivate this more open-minded way of being, yet still I regress on occasion to adopting either a prosecutorial or a defensive stance when communicating with others. I notice that happening most often when I run into a preexisting, highly intense, super-positional, wildly discharging frequency of energy (think Donald Trump!) that cuts like a laser right into the ambient light of relaxed awareness. Whenever another feels provoked into discharging such an excessive amount of energy, so as to seize and control all of the attention within range of its own line of sight and its own mighty voice, I can now spot the presence of a fully self-conscious (thus non-congenial) soul that is seeking to focus the entire field of awareness upon what they have come to view as “MY one and only, perfect point of view.”

Seeing this, I can breathe deeply into that experience before I decide if I want to respond, so that I do not react subconsciously by becoming more aggressive or defensive. It is not my place to fight back against another’s command for me to “pay all of my attention” to their personal perspective. My role is to simply relax and attend to the presence of pure awareness within myself, so it can expand and absorb all these plaintive cries for attention and personal fealty, effortlessly—without feeding more energy to these expressions of self-conscious anger or victimization.

When I began writing my first book, “Sacred Economics: The Currency of Life”, I challenged myself, for the five long years that completing the manuscript took, to describe our modern challenges without resorting to accusations, scapegoating, blaming, shaming, or any other forms of thought-based aggression against others, because I knew that my doing so would only trigger reactive resistance in very the minds that I most sought to reach and connect with in an integrative, win/win way. Over time, I came to appreciate that if I genuinely wished to be received and understood and congenially collaborated with—and not merely to hear myself firing off my own unprocessed emotions aimed at the people who have triggered frustration in me—then I needed to both cultivate and nurture what Socrates once referred to as “a congenial soul.”

Socrates described the congenial soul as one who enters every engagement with enough self-aware openness to appreciate that their own minds might well come away changed—possibly even dramatically—after every single exchange of energy. The congenial soul feels okay with not knowing, ahead of time, whether or not such a dramatic change might occur within themselves.

Encountering a mind where another person’s neural pathways do not appear remotely pliable enough to shift even slightly to accommodate new data or an alternative perspective—regardless of the quality, intensity, creative potential, or sincerity of the interaction—used to feel discouraging to me. I grew up in a rather insular Midwest, religiously focused, conservative minded community, and in an era when my own, highly wondering mind encountered this sort of walled-off, defensive/aggressive kind of mind at every interesting turn that my own mind sought to take—which explains why I felt so alone and so beleaguered so much of the time. I conditioned myself as a child to protect my own mind from all of the violent aggressions and cruel emotional trespasses that it so often encountered for simply daring to ask a question of the people who had been insisting they had the right answers.

What enables me to release my former sense of discouragement about “talking to a brick wall?” The realization that it’s never my responsibility to change someone else’s mind, or to break down their own inner defensive walls. Especially once they have concretized their own beliefs and built for themselves a self-protective bunker, complete with hand grenades and rocket launchers should another get too close to its cracks, or spot less-defended or unknown openings.

My job is to be present with whatever density of mind reveals itself when I tap upon its door, and to hold myself accountable for the times I may inadvertently help another to strengthen their own walls of self-conscious separation. Being compassionately present with another mind, rather than in instant opposition to it, invites me to notice that the perspectives of others do indeed sometimes soften, expand, and help clarify my own, boggy or semi-solidified forms of thinking. Present moment awareness enables me to notice when my own shifting, inner atmospheric conditions (my current attitudes) are shutting me down and increasing the likelihood that I might reactively reject useful information, or might cling anxiously but firmly to an idea that isn’t the most solid ground upon which my own mind really ought to be resting right now.

Being flexibly, resiliently present, rather than aggressively or firmly positional, enables me to enjoy the openness, relaxed curiosity, and wonder that fills and nourishes me when I do not create entire cinderblock structures of belief inside my own mind, which will then require my anxious defending so that I can maintain them.

Every fresh encounter now becomes a new opportunity for me to learn something beneficial. Therefore I can always feel grateful for having had the exchanges I’ve had—no matter their content, who participated, or even the eventual outcome of any given exchange.

If I’m simply trying to “win” an argument, or else to prove myself right, there’s a high degree of possibility I may either lose, or grow more fearful that I might indeed be wrong. If I’m trying to convince or enroll another into adopting and manning my own defensive position on a solid wall of belief, alongside me, there’s a good chance I may experience disappointment, disillusionment, or even outright anger if they refuse to take the job I have offered to them.

These days, I’m nearly always trying to learn something new to expand and grow the entire field of wisdom within which I rest. Since I’m not seeking to weaponize my own ideas and thoughts anymore so that I can better rebuff an attack against my own inner walls of belief, and when I’m not trying to craft new weapons to attack any invasive or intrusive ideas, literally ZERO possibility exists that I will not, or cannot, benefit from every single exchange of energy.

As such, I can now maintain (mostly, since I’m neither static nor perfect!) an attitude of nonjudgmental goodwill toward others—regardless of what we discuss, how we discuss it, or whether or not we agree about what we’re discussing. I can feel gratitude for each encounter and can come away wiser for it—even when it becomes clear to me that the other person did not show up to engage with me with as a truly congenial soul—but with an agenda.

I know notice fairly quickly whenever the congeniality of my own soul begins to sour, contract into a defensive crouch, or lean into a more aggressive posture. And because I practice maintaining conscious awareness of the attitudinal expansions and contractions that occur within myself, I can now respectfully end, or at least withdraw temporarily, from any exchange of energy once I sense that my own soul is losing touch with its own capacity to be present.

I aim now to be graceful, feel compassionate, share wisely, and co-create beauty more peacefully with others. And I invite all others who tire of human-on-human warfare and violence to test this approach, and to see for themselves if the quality of their own exchanges with other people improves. I cannot promise success, but when I am doing what doesn’t work, doing more of it more forcefully has never delivered the kind of results I prefer.