It was in the late 1980s that I read Ken and Treya Wilber’s candid article, “Do We Make Ourselves Sick?” and recognized in it a truth that went against my own longterm fascination with the then widely popular subject of “consciousness-as-cause.” In the article, which is well worth the read (it’s still floating around the Internet, for anyone interested), The Wilbers make the simple but powerful point that the New Age claim that our thoughts and beliefs create every aspect of our experience is not only seriously mistaken, but dangerous.

Personalities including Abraham (Esther Hicks), the late Wayne Dyer, Rhonda Byrne and Jack Canfield of “The Secret” fame, and others have made millions selling this idea, which came to be known as the “law of attraction,” proving that wishful thinking indeed can command a high price tag, but it is wishful thinking nonetheless. Beyond the groundlessness of the claim, there is the serious ethical implication, equally misguided, that whatever happens to us, we bring upon ourselves through some convolution of our personal consciousness. If we are ill, then, we have in some unwitting way, brought this upon ourselves. And if we cannot mobilize consciousness to bring ourselves back to a state of health through the various recommended inner techniques, then in addition to being sick, we have to carry the burden of having failed spiritually in some essential way.

It is not a spiritual failing, however, if one becomes ill, not an unwanted condition that one brought upon oneself, somehow, or “attracted” in order to learn some esoteric life lesson, though this by no means rules out the benefits of learning from our experience. Even the simplest illness can result from many things, none of which the New Age “law” takes into account. Causes are often complex and convergent, and while belief can play a role, sometimes an important one, sometimes perhaps even a decisive one, it is not the sole player. Anyone who puts this to the test will learn quickly that while the universe certainly can surprise us through synchronicities—a term Jung coined to describe startlingly helpful, even guiding correspondences between our outer and inner life—it never seems to do so directly when bidden. Life itself, like health, love, prosperity, and all the other conditions that the alleged law of attraction tells us are ours if only we will “feel it real,” is far less predictable than the simplistic formula propounded by New Agers. The events that make up our worldly experience seem less governed by visualization, affirmation, and other tricks of consciousness than by the elusive currents of chance and some inscrutable timing that wends its way mysteriously through the metronomic passing of the hours, days, and weeks, or the months and years, according to laws far subtler and autonomous than the law of attraction would have us believe.

In his philosophical work on scientific truth, Karl Popper established falsifiability as the defining criterion of scientific validity. In other words, a truth claim that nothing would count as falsifying may be many things, but scientific it is not, because scientific truths, based on empirical observation and inductive thinking, are ever subject to revision. Something could come along that would prove the claim false. Pseudosciences, such as astrology, like dogmatic religious systems, never allow any condition to count against what they profess to be true. In this self-conferred authority, they seek to elevate their claims to the status of absolute knowledge, knowledge that is beyond any possible invalidation, but in Popper’s view, their belief is no longer scientific, no longer supported by evidence, and while they may have value in other terms, they cannot be taken seriously as claims of how the world is organized and operates. An example makes this clear: If I make the truth claim, “The cat is sleeping on the bed,” I am asserting that a certain set of observable conditions is in effect, and the claim is scientific, because one can carry out the experiment of observing the bed in question to see if there is indeed a cat sleeping on it. Making this experiment and finding no cat on the bed would falsify the claim. If, however, I insist that the statement is true in a way that nothing can falsify—that the cat is sleeping on the bed whether it is there or not, then the statement becomes nonsensical, for what can it mean to maintain that the statement, “The cat is sleeping on the bed” is true in those cases when the cat is observed to be sleeping on the bed and also in those cases when it is observed not to be? Apart from further observation that might provide new information, the statement is not scientific, not asserting an empirically demonstrable set of conditions that observation can both confirm and falsify.

It is interesting to note that in the wild proliferation of books, tapes, workshops and self-named gurus dealing with the “law of attraction,” one finds no claim that any amount of experience could falsify. If one conducts the experiment of consciousness-as-cause as presented by the New Age, one finds that far more often than not—that is, almost always—that the prescribed visualization, affirmation, and other such techniques fail to materialize the desired conditions. The so-called law, it turns out, is not a law at all, for a law—a word reserved for a scientifically demonstrable principle that describes how the universe works—is reliable within the framework of observation. The law of gravity is a good example. If I drop a coin off a building within the system of Earth’s gravity, it will fall every time at a rate of 32 feet per second per second. Every single time. It will not fall at this rate sometimes, and at other times grow wings and fly away. Or vanish. Or turn to wine. The philosopher David Hume raised profound questions about whether we have any basis for inferring from this that there is a law of causality working, for “law” implies necessity, as we have said, and Hume pointed out that we never observe necessity. He argued that we really have no empirical grounds for believing that there is any such thing as causal law, strictly speaking, but that we assume there is simply because we have observed certain kinds of events following other kinds of events—but there is no contradiction in the idea that events might depart from the inferred causal link. The coin dropped off the building might grow wings and fly off—and while we might be hard pressed to explain it, according to Hume, there is no law preventing it, only a belief in a law based on past experience—he called it “custom”—and that there is nothing that obligates the future to conform to the past.

Now, if the status of causality as a law is subject to skeptical deconstruction, so that we are invited, if not philosophically compelled, by Hume’s reasoning, to investigate our beliefs about causality more closely than we may have to date, then what of the “law of attraction,” which as a pseudoscientific principle, sidesteps falsifiability in order to give itself an unassailable if stolen authority, which as Popper has made plain, actually has the reverse effect? If I visualize or affirm prosperity, and nothing changes in my financial life, the practitioner of the so-called law of attraction will suggest that I unwittingly derailed the process, that I am not willing to receive the thing I have claimed in consciousness, that there is some greater reason the universe has for postponing the manifestation, that I must learn release and surrender, and so on—all of which may be true, but invoking these reasons to defend a pseudoscientific truth claim, one that states that the universe operates thus-and-such but refuses to accept any observable condition as disproof—this is dealing from the bottom of the deck. It is faulty thinking. The law of attraction, as it turns out, is more aptly the “flaw of attraction.”

Why make so much of it? Well, there is much at stake. People have bet their lives on the New Age’s exaggerations, and lost. As the Wilbers point out in their article, many who are struggling with grave illness (or other adverse conditions), taken in by New Age oversimplifications, may forego traditional treatment resulting in disastrous health outcomes. While enduring all this, they may suffer the additional burden of self-judgment, believing that they somehow have failed spiritually, because they can’t seem to lay hold of the reins of creative consciousness—or perhaps they come to the conclusion that they are being given a particularly harsh course of instruction by the universe—but in this, the New Agers confess a heartlessness that will end the discussion with anyone who has even a modicum of empathy. Rhonda Byrne, for example, states that those starving in Darfur have created their reality of misery through negative thinking. Here we have the New Age at its darkest in a thoughtless and heartless promotion of “blame the victim.” But surely, the laws of the universe are not so cruel. Even an indifferent universe would be kinder than that.

Good science is, of course, open minded. Its methods, rooted in fair play, protect it from dogmatic thinking. Its descriptions of how the universe works take on living power and credibility because science stands ready and willing to stipulate some set of conditions, even if only a theoretical one, that it will count as falsifying what any given hypothesis claims. As for consciousness-as-cause—it is an area that we will do well to examine with honesty and clear thinking, avoiding exaggeration, taking care to avoid hasty generalizing, and letting our experience reveal to us over time what is true and what is not. To be sure, there is a mind-body connection, a correspondence between our beliefs and the world. To some extent, we get what we look for. There is no denying it. Emotions have a real effect on health and recovery outcomes. A persistently bad mood can ruin a meeting or a marriage, and when we “go negative,” our good seems to leap from our hands. None of this, however, can be fairly generalized into a “law” or method for manipulating our worldly reality as though it were nothing more than a matrix of “vibrations” or “energy” that has no choice but to do our bidding like some cosmic Amazon Prime. The universe is a baffling, complex, unpredictable place, and events far more often than not seem to follow a timing dictated by hidden and chaotic forces among which our most heartfelt intentions are only a small part. In the end, allowing that one’s beliefs are subject to falsifiability comes down to humility. We are not here to order the universe around, but to live and grow and discover, to learn to move with rather than against, to best adversity, transcend contradiction, and rise to the occasion of our being-here. To reduce experience to some putative law based on magical thinking is far too limiting and childish. It arrests our development and opens the door to mayhem, a terrible place where the losers of elections can declare themselves winners, and a deadly virus can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. At the very least, let us recognize it for what it is.

In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle holds, along with Socrates, that happiness is attained through living virtuously and thus is a function of one’s character, but he departs from the Socratic view in adding that this is conditional—that is, that happiness to some extent also depends on outer conditions. Even a virtuous man cannot be happy if he is starving or otherwise in the grip of dire circumstances, and so in Aristotle’s view, worldly conditions are not entirely irrelevant, as Socrates maintains they are, to achieving happiness. We can only imagine that looking back, Aristotle must have come to regard his teacher as idealistic in the sense of failing to consider certain practicalities, while Socrates, if he could have looked ahead to the direction his pupil would take, might have shaken his head with resignation at how ready even great thinkers are to assign the world more importance than it deserves. We could point out that Socrates was a Stoic, and Aristotle, a patrician—but these facts would only serve to introduce ad hominem arguments into the discussion and distract us from considering the Socratic and Aristotelian positions on their own merits.

The issue is not just an academic one. How much our happiness depends on our worldly circumstances is as timely and central a question today as it was when Socrates and Aristotle trod the dust of Athens two and a half thousand years ago. On one hand, it seems obvious that we cannot be happy if we’re not right with ourselves. Mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual disorders may take many and diverse forms, but one thing they seem to have in common is the state of misery they inflict on the person who suffers from them. If we manage to obtain the various things that most people count as necessary for happiness, but our soul is not “well ordered,” then those things will prove to be curses, not blessings. In other words, where generally desirable conditions seem to contribute to or enhance a person’s happiness, it is only because of the virtue—the groundedness and clarity and other attributes of good character that such a person embodies—and not because of the conditions themselves, which are inherently neither good nor evil, but will serve to amplify and mirror either our inner integrity or whatever deficiencies of character we have not yet addressed and corrected in ourselves. Point Socrates. On the other hand, we might wonder if people living, say, in a concentration camp, wouldn’t find their happiness at least deeply sullied by the horrific conditions around them. It seems almost heartless to hold in such a case that happiness is entirely an “inside job,” and that our circumstances play no part in it. Point Aristotle.

Perhaps it is a matter of balances. In a consumerist society, we would seem to have strayed too far into the Aristotelian camp, and might even find ourselves using Aristotle’s position to justify an extreme he never meant. When we are defeated by conditions, when we live for them, when the slightest disappointment or adversity sends us into spasms of reaction, we have lost the wisdom of the Socratic view. We may allow, as Aristotle did, that the world is not irrelevant to the state of our soul. Human beings are creatures, after all, and creatures do not live “by spirit alone.” In our time, however, the instruction we need to recollect seems to belong more to the Socratic transcendence of the world and the self-work through which we can become better people, more truthful, more responsible, clearer, more trustworthy, kinder and more compassionate, more mindful, more just, more grounded and present, humbler before the many forces we cannot control, and so on. The clarity, poise, and self-possession that characterize the well-ordered soul are enormously rewarding in themselves.

There is a further point here. The Greek word eudaimonia, loosely translated as “happiness,” finds its better translation in the phrase, “human flourishing.” Even a cursory examination reveals that our flourishing does not depend upon our being happy, because flourishing humanly often and inevitably involves inner victories and transcendences whose roots go far deeper than happiness as we usually think of it. Socrates was flourishing even as he drank the hemlock, because he lived and died in the service of truth and virtue, knowing he knew nothing, not even enough to be afraid of death, which as he said may be the greatest good that can come to us. Those who do not let themselves forget how little we know can take refuge in this not-knowing. They are more open to mystery than those who pretend to know what they do not know, and so by that measure more equipped to meet mystery, even when it knocks at the door. The point is that Socrates’s execution was anything but a happy occasion; on the contrary it was one of great loss and sorrow. Yet humanly, it was a triumph, the last marker in a life so brilliantly well lived, that these many centuries later, we still talk of Socrates and study his teachings, and are humbled by the depth of his commitment to truthfulness, even to his last breath.

This eudaimonia, this human flourishing, allows us to live “well in our skin” regardless of our situation, and at least in this, Socrates seems to have been onto something more fundamental and farther reaching than was Aristotle. Many of the world’s spiritual traditions agree that the fulfillment of human life can’t be found in outer conditions, but only by means of an inner shift through which one “overcomes the world.” Whatever the circumstances in which we find ourselves, our inner life determines how experience shapes up for us, whether we move with the forces at hand or against them, and so whether we endure or succumb. Even in the nightmare-world of the concentration camp, reports Viktor Frankel, founder of logotherapy and himself an Auschwitz survivor, many prisoners found life-affirming value and meaning in the final act of placing their hands on the electrified fence as a rejection and repudiation of their captivity at the hands of the Nazis. The courage of these people is almost beyond imagining, yet we can understand that this choice to say no to a life that had become meaningless and intolerable represents a triumph of character over conditions. Each of us may face the same choice many times in a day under far less severe circumstances. Happiness may seem to be unavailable for the moment; certainly the conditions that we may have come to think of as the bringers of happiness may be absent. Even so, we are free to transcend, to refuse to be victims or hostages, to call upon a deep solidarity with the best in us. There is, in this, a happiness of a different and more enduring sort.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.
| Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Someone said that the secret to a happy marriage is knowing what to ignore. Couples who go to war over a cap left off the toothpaste or a toilet seat left up often are dealing with unresolved underlying issues that are far more charged and daunting, issues that the incidental dispute only triggered. If one or the other of the two is willing to step back, refrain from blame and recriminations, and turn attention to how he or she is being triggered to react, a Copernican shift occurs, and progress that was impossible before becomes not only possible but likely. This involves a kind of surfacing out of the dream of the world, a dream in which the other person’s culpability appears self-evident, to a more wakeful awareness of one’s participation in a previously hidden reality that was operating all along in the shadows. Note I said “If one or the other of the two is willing.” Intriguingly, in any conflict between two parties, even just one of the two being willing to stop exporting the cause and start working from the inside out can be sufficient to interrupt the vicious cycle and place both parties on track to understanding and resolution, provided even a modicum of willingness on the part of the other. As clinical psychologist Dr. Jonathan Fader says: “Even if it’s 99% them…it’s still 1% me. So I’m going to use my 1%.”

The immersion in the world-story that works against and hinders this sort of waking up to one’s role in the dramatic conflict follows in part from the fact that we are creatures who live in a medium not only of facts and objects but also of stories and meanings that inform and permeate reality. The “subjective” and the “objective,” traditionally regarded as discrete aspects, in truth commingle in a way that produces a kind of ontological gravity and momentum that can be difficult to overcome or redirect. The overcoming and redirecting of momentums that leave a person snared in contradiction, chronic struggle, and suffering is one of the central aims of philosophical counseling, because in light of the hybrid nature of reality, a shift in ourselves effects a shift in our reality. At the end of the day, we can change only our own stories and meanings, the conclusions and assumptions that we bring to the table of worldly experience. Indeed, attempts to change other people directly as a rule results in a backlash, resistance, and unwanted outcomes.

Let’s go back to our example. John has left the cap off the toothpaste again, and Jill is offended, because she has asked him countless times to put the cap back on, and he has refused to oblige, and now she is living in the story is that he has no respect for her, or is conveniently “forgetful” as a passive-aggressive tactic, or that she simply doesn’t matter to him—an old story for her where “the man” is concerned. She asks for so little, and now this again! Clearly, the issue is highly charged for her. John’s response is to defend himself, accuse Jill of making a big deal out of nothing, feel rejected and angry and less inclined to “capitulate” to her “demands” than ever. Now, in this situation, both have been triggered by unfinished business that has created what will appear to be, in terms of the toothpaste cap skirmish, a certain oversensitivity, a certain tenderness, because there is a wound in each that has not been healed. From within a different story, one kinder and more aware, and so more liberated, they naturally would become allies, each for the other, in the work of healing these inner wounds. Their stories, however, keep them stuck in a reality where they can be triggered, where “the truth” as each sees it can lead only to more wounding. At some point, perhaps stirred by a recollection of how much she loves John, Jill may surface. She may realize that there’s something crazy about going to war over a toothpaste cap. She may intuitively anticipate the reality in which this petty annoyance “shrinks” so that it is just that and nothing more, not a symptom of something more serious, not personal. What she had experienced as a violation becomes an inconvenience. Further self work may transform it into a laughable quirk. She may realize that she was overreacting, and begin looking at what it is about herself, her conclusions, beliefs, and assumptions that made her “triggerable.” And along this path of expanded self-awareness and transformation, John, no longer triggered by Jill’s triggered reaction, is invited to transcend his own story, whereupon he may find it takes nothing to replace the cap on the tube as a tiny gesture of consideration for the woman he loves. Waking up to this now obvious truth, he also may wonder what was going on in him that gave the matter so much importance. Whether or not he responds in this way, however, Jill’s self-work will have removed her trigger, resolving the seeming issue by resolving the underlying one in a creative moment of transcendence, freed awareness, and choice.

Triggers may not be easy to recognize. Any reality, which is to say any lived story, tends to be self-justifying and self-proving, and immersion can make even unreasonable conclusions convincing. Sometimes we may feel too hurt or too exhausted to do self-work, and that’s just the way it is until we gather our forces again. Yet the willingness to question the obvious. to consider that our truth might not be the only truth operating in a given situation, and to accept responsibility for our reactions when we are triggered can be saving, because it points us in the right direction, which is always within. Taking the enemy out of the story, we find that we cannot be triggered, and so have no further need of weapons.

When everything goes wrong, what a joy to test your soul and see if it has endurance and courage! An invisible and all-powerful enemy—some call him God, others the Devil, seems to rush upon us to destroy us; but we are not destroyed.
| NIkos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

For the Homeric Greeks up through the pre-Socratics, courage was understood in terms of acting fearlessly in the face of danger. Homer’s epic poems are filled with verses extolling this sort of courage, and it is not until Socrates that the Greek view shifts, and courage is viewed not in terms of action but rather in terms of character. Aristotle carries this new paradigm forward in his Nichomachean Ethics (Book III) where he cites courage as one of the virtues, then goes on to point out that courage is not fearlessness but confidence in the face of fear. Many dispositions resemble courage, but in truth involve something else, such as wrong motive or ignorance, and these are in Aristotle’s view to be counted neither as courageous nor as virtuous. Here, as in the Socratic view, we see courage being addressed in terms of motive, clarity, purpose—qualities of character rather than qualities of action alone.

Nowadays, adversity is for the most part not met in the spirit that recognizes its power to reveal us to ourselves, as an opportunity to look into the mirror of our soul and refine our character under pressure. It seems that as a rule, we seek to avoid adversity, or at least to be done with as soon as possible, and we may be far more ready to adopt the stance of the victim than to rise to the occasion, submit to the “test” and use the fires of adversity to forge a more excellent self.

In philosophical counseling sessions, we see the stance of the victim assumed in many forms, some subtle, some not so subtle. It is in every case, however, characterized by a state of reaction to conditions in which one feels oneself to be powerless, unlucky, poorly treated, and in various other ways oppressed by conditions. Self-work always depends upon recognizing and assuming an empowering responsibility; consequently, any intrusion of the victim persona tends to bring the work in progress to a halt, or rather, examining the choice to be a victim becomes the work.

The arc from victimhood to courage, from suffering at the hands of adversity to transcending it through acceptance and the cultivation of character is not one that can be traversed in theory alone. It is only under real-world conditions of hardship that we can see where we stand. We do not seek such tests; life brings them to us soon enough. They may test us to our marrow, yet it is just under such conditions that we may discover something extraordinary in ourselves. As Thomas Carlyle writes, “No pressure, no diamonds.”

In a book I wrote some years ago, Recovering From A Broken Heart, I relate the story of a young man whom I met when I was teaching philosophy to inmates in jail and prison. B.K., as I refer to him, remains one of the most outstanding examples I’ve come across of courage in the face of adversity and the refusal to be a victim. Here’s an excerpt from the book about him:

His sense of himself was not only uninjured by the fear and cruelty inherent in the penal system, but it actually seemed to thrive under those adverse conditions. He was a tall, muscular man, around twenty-five then. . .. He never said much during our classes, but he always wore a subtle smile of appreciation and listened attentively. After several months in the jail, he was released to a halfway house. One night, standing outside, looking at the beautiful, starry sky, he was approached by a guard who ordered him to put out his cigarette. B.K. looked at the man, dropped his cigarette, and extinguished it under his heel. The guard told him to go inside; B.K. turned to oblige.

“Wait a minute,” the guard said, seeing that he was unable to provoke B.K., “I can put you on restriction any time I want.”

Continuing to gaze into the sky, B.K. replied, “Look at that star, man.”

“I said I can put you on restriction. I could do it right now,” the guard threatened.

“Yeah, but look; it’s one hell of a star,” B.K. said.

Frustrated, the guard finally snarled, “Okay, that’s it. You’re on restriction!”

“Really beautiful,” B.K. said, still looking up.

At that point, the guard, incensed, said incredulously,

“Didn’t you hear me? I said you’re on restriction! What’s a damned star going to do for you now?”

B.K. turned to the guard. He was not angry. He said simply, “I grow strong off of people like you.”

Because he didn’t resist, because he refused to be baited, he did not involve himself in words or actions that would have made his being put on restriction appear justified. The guard was left to support the entire, oppressive effort on his own; consequently, B.K. was not put on restriction. Even if he had lost his privileges, he would not have lost what was essential to him—his freedom—which lay in his ability to respond on his own terms rather than react to another’s. “The superior man cannot be beaten,” Lao-tze states, “because he does not contend.”

A few months later, when he’d been released from the halfway house, I ran into B.K. and he told me the story. “Let me ask you,” he said. “Which one of us do you think was really locked up?”

This refusal to react, to be a victim, to be defeated by the armies of adversity, certainly is not easy. The cultivation and deepening of excellence in ourselves always requires that we overcome the lower for the sake of the higher, that we stand up to baser impulses, turning from them to follow our better angels. There are no shortcuts, and the path is arduous. Even so, taking up the challenge may well be the most important thing we can do. For in this self-overcoming, we transform ourselves so that our life becomes much like a work of art, something uniquely beautiful, and an inspiration to others.

One of the tools we use in philosophical counseling—and this is one that anybody willing to undertake self-work can use to gain valuable insight into his or her life—is the mapping of charged experiences based on intuitively indicated themes. These “life maps” give us a picture of the issues, contradictions, unfinished business, and other holdouts in consciousness that are wanting or needing resolution, and provide directions, as maps do, for resolving them. Life maps are useful because these issues are by no means always obvious. On the contrary, they can be indirect, subtle, even camouflaged as the psyche struggles in the throes of the urge to resolve pitted against fear, shame, self-judgment, obsolete conclusions, and other inner tyrannies. In practical terms, we may be running away from some truth that needs to be acknowledged and released as vigorously as we’re reaching back toward it in order to confront it, resolve it, and finally be able to move on. Self-knowledge is self-work; it is not usually a matter of simply turning one’s cards face up on the table. By looking at this material indirectly, the way one might watch a solar eclipse in the safety of a reflected surface, we find we gain access to a different kind of vision—one that can see past the indirectness, subtlety, or camouflage and get to the underlying truth that is, as one writer put it, “begging for sympathy.”

We do this by looking away from content and toward something we call “thematic charge.” The approach recognizes that different issues in our life, certainly issues that at first look may seem entirely unrelated, may actually be stagings or expressions of the same underlying conflict. Because these stagings can appear unrelated, they may defy any direct mapping, so that the root issue remains hidden in the seeming non-relation. In those cases, however, they will share a common charge—not only an emotional charge—that is, they will feel similar—but also a charge of significance—that is, they will evoke closely related if not identical meanings when subjected to philosophical examination. This is to say that, despite what may be a wide-ranging dissimilarity, they will carry the same emotional current and will provoke the same existential response, so that under the light of dialectical scrutiny, it becomes clear that in talking about the “two” matters, one is talking about the same thing in two different ways.

The idea came to me when I was a young professor teaching writing at a local college. One of the most popular topics of the course was writer’s block. Writers seemed forever fascinated with understanding the nature of this pen-stopping affliction, always with the idea of getting beyond it, overcoming it, escaping its entropy and pressing on with the work of writing and the business of getting published. I suggested to my students that writer’s block has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with living. We write, after all, and whether we know it or not, autobiographically. Every word that a writer commits to the blank page confesses some aspect of his or her experience, how things look from his or her unique vantage, the conclusions that have presented themselves thus far. One simply cannot write from outside one’s skin. Remembering this humbles one, spares one the hubris of writing as an “authority,” and also puts the problem of writer’s block into perspective. So, I asked my students to pay close attention to the particular form of whatever block had taken their writing hostage, and to consider that writer’s block can show up in many forms. Some experience it as a sudden shortage of creative ideas; others as an excess of ideas that distract, with each one seeming better than the last, so that the writer is thrown in a new direction almost as soon as he or she begins writing. Still others experience an arresting fear as they venture close to a subject that matters to them. Or there may be a dearth of feeling that prevents the writer from moving deeply into the waters of the material, so that the project soon feels superficial and pointless. Once the student identified the particular feelings associated with the form of writer’s block that he or she was experiencing, I asked the next question: “Where else in your life are you feeling this way?” Invariably, there was a thematically related issue going on in the writer’s life that had been ignored, denied, marginalized, or lost in the endless demands and responsibilities of a busy schedule. Invariably. This, then, was the last bit of instruction: “See to that. Do what you have to do to resolve that. Then report back.” In every case, taking care of whatever non-writing problem had surfaced in the writing restored the writer’s access and voice. Life had found a way to get the attention of the student who had been blocked. In fact, the block was not a problem, but a call to a needed solution elsewhere.

This principle operates, of course, in the life of the non-writer, as well. Sometimes contradiction and the emotional, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual suffering that it brings have gone underground. Perhaps they tried to get our attention for a while, maybe years ago, and we weren’t available, weren’t paying attention. So they flowed into the underground caverns of the psyche where we could no longer engage them in saving conversations—where we could no longer even feel them, and often this is the point—to spare ourselves painful and distressing feelings. Nevertheless, the truth cannot be denied, only deferred. Sooner or later, the truth we push underground pushes back. The pressure of a truth postponed can become volcanic, erupting in unlikely places that we may not immediately recognize.

If we find ourselves “blocked” in any situation, we can help ourselves greatly by slowing down, taking a few breaths, and asking ourselves, “Where else in my life have I been feeling this way?” A life mapping may reveal itself. Sometimes the most conspicuous problem is not the one that needs our attention. By following out lines of charged feeling and meaning, we may find ourselves being directed to look beneath the surface, where a long buried treasure has been biding its time, waiting patiently to be unearthed.

The legendary psychiatrist and neurologist Viktor Frankl founded a therapeutic model he called “logotherapy,” a method of existential analysis based on the idea that we human beings live within meanings, and that it is these meanings that inform and shape the tone and impact of our experience more than factual events alone. Frankl adapted this philosophical approach in his work with clients, where he observed that the greatest stress we face is the loss of meaning, a loss that the incessant distractions of modern life and fingertip technology seem all but designed to inflict.

If we take upon ourselves the commitment to live meaningfully—that is, to conduct ourselves toward meaning, to adopt meaningful living as a requirement, and to make choices and follow directions that serve and satisfy that requirement, something remarkable happens. Events that we might have considered accidental or random acquire the significance of our commitment to meaning; that is, they become opportunities to discover deeper and richer expressions of the meaning of our identity and our story. Even if in some sense we allow that life brought us an accident, our resolve to live meaningfully transmutes the dross of accident into the gold of a serendipitous or even synchronous event.

There is a profound principle at work here, one that has the power to lift us out of despair and deliver us from feeling as though we are at the mercy of events. Given the nature of the creative, meaning-seeking beings that we are, no situation has the power to make us victims without our permission, for what the victim suffers, the student of life recognizes as instruction, a wake-up call, even guidance. The unconditional commitment to live meaningfully takes the sting out of adversity, turns defeat into sobering lessons, and transforms losses and setbacks of every sort into spiritual victories.

In counseling sessions, we see that this principle has the power to liberate instantly, even in cases where the client’s suffering has been protracted and resistant. As we watch these clients open to the meaning hidden in their predicament, we see again and again that the wound is the gift, that we can resolve anything that we can transcend. Frankl saw this enacted dramatically during his nightmare in the concentration camps, where prisoners would sometimes walk over to the electrified fence and end their lives. Under such inhuman conditions, death became the only meaningful option for some. In this act of unimaginable courage, they were not embracing death but meaning, not forsaking life but life lived meaninglessly. Their fate had brought them to the edge of the world, yet they found, even there, a way to affirm their existence—the only way left open to them.

Most of us will never face such dire conditions. Yet the principle holds. We have the power to transcend any condition by transcending accidental living and its mandate of perpetual reaction. We can rise above conditions and claim the greater awareness, truer truth, deeper self-knowledge, and stirring of wisdom that remain ever hidden from the eyes of the victim. Our life is, in the end, as meaningful as we require. That is in our nature, and nothing can take it from us.