Don’t worry, be happy… or unhappy? Your choice!


“Explorers did not seek for the cause of the Nile but its source. So while Science wants to find the cause, Soul wants to find the source. “

 

MAPPING THE SOUL -CAUSE OR SOURCE?

I have just come from an inspiring Storywise colloquy with long time colleagues Mary and Phil.  The conversation moved to the question of Mapping the Soul, and the difference that language invites us to consider between cause and source.

Yoga and other such practices, Mary tells us, speak about source, or core, while our public life and politics, Phil remarks, is obsessed with finding a cause, and thereby someone or something to blame. What if we made the switch from cause to source? Now there’s a thought.

What if the coming election was less about finding and fixing the cause of our recession, and more about reclaiming the source of our vitality as a nation and a people? Would that mean we would  be looking for the sources of new life, rather than haggling over our ailing body politic.

It might boil down to a simple and yet fundamental existential dilemma. Do we want to find the cause of our unhappiness? or do we want to find the source of our happiness, our life-energy? Put another way, do we want to excavate our despair or unearth the  foundations of our hope? Do we create  life energy consuming our past or creating our future?

Some would argue that this is all too simple,  that you can’t answer the second without answering the first. But what if like the indeterminacy principle, our brains were not wired to do both. What we most pay attention to inadvertently shapes our intention. The quest behind the question  reveals whether we are determined on happiness or unhappiness. As a nation, the “pursuit of happiness” is hardwired into our governance.  The founders might wonder what happened to that? We seem to have turned it into the “pursuit of unhappiness.”

On a more practical level, when floods, fire or storms hit, what is the question that fosters resilience? Is it, How are we ever going to get through all this? Or, “What is it that we have that no storm, fire or flood can destroy and that we need to connect to now? And in the aftermath, how much energy gets wasted in “finding who caused the failure of rescue or warning?” instead of tapping a different energy by asking ” We did get through it, so how do we keep doing that?”

Two questions, two paths-What is the cause? creates a very different life economy than asking What is the source?  After a Katrina, we can look back and say “Never again” or we can look forward and say,” We can even get through worse than this.”

The media and government policy seems focused more on survival and less on resilience. Why? Because stories best chronicle our unhappiness perhaps, and that patient endurance does not win many headlines. But headlines are hardly happiness. No one expects to read “New Orleans happy again.”

So, we ask ourselves, if life is that proverbial river like the Nile, what is the sense of finding the cause when what we really seek to understand is the source.  We can only fully understand the flood when we truly understand the flow.

 

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