The Backward Step - Getting Unstuck by Moving Forward and Backward at the Same Time

The Backward Step

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

Today we consider an essential aspect of philosophy or LoveWisdom: How do we move forward in our lives? Maybe you have some problem or challenge in your personal life, or in your professional life. Or maybe you can sense the general stuckness of humanity, and maybe you even take that to be your own stuckness. Given all the confusion of the world, all the fear and uncertainty within our own soul and in the soul of the world, how can we find genuinely creative and beautiful ways to cultivate our lives forward, and cultivate the life of the world forward at the same time?

It turns out we can only move forward in the most vitalizing and liberating ways if we also move backward at the same time. It’s an aspect of one of the basic paradoxes of LoveWisdom, and we’re going to explore it in today’s episode.

Let’s begin with a pair of quotations. The first comes from the great psychologist Carl Jung. He wrote:

“I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love.” ~ Jung (MDR, 353)

What do you think of that quote? Are there paradoxes of love? What is a paradox of love—a genuine paradox? Not just something strange or funny or interesting, but a genuine paradox. Before you think too much about it, let me give you a second quote, this one from the Japanese philosopher Dōgen:

“You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after ideas, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self . . . your original face will manifest itself. If you wish to realize reality, you should practice reality without delay.” ~ Dōgen

Isn’t that delightfully simple? If we wish to realize reality, we should practice reality. What is it we ordinarily practice, and how can we get perspective on that, and turn ourselves toward reality? Who is this joker to even suggest we are not living in reality?

And what does Dōgen mean we should cease practice based on intellectual understanding? If you have ever read any Dōgen, you know his works demand a lot of deep thinking. Dōgen would never tell us to stop studying and thinking deeply. But we can discern a difference between mere conceptual understanding and a wonderstanding based on extensive practice.

What is the practice of life itself? We know what it means to practice the piano. What does it mean to practice our life?

Dōgen and Jung were deeply committed to philosophy, to LoveWisdom, and LoveWisdom always begins with a backward step. We have to take a step back, out of our habitual ways of thinking and relating with ourselves, others, and the world. If those ways of thinking and relating were working wonderfully, we would be realizing our fullest potential for Love and Liberation, and there wouldn’t be so much suffering in the world. As things stand we are in a paradoxical situation: We think of ourselves as realistic, but we are somehow practicing delusions of various kinds. Another way to put that is that we seem to be awake, but in fact we are asleep.

This was how Socrates described his message: That the people of Athens were asleep in their lives, and all he did was go around trying to get them to wake up, and to attend to their Souls. This is such a paradoxical and disturbing invitation that the people of Athens killed him for it.

When you think about it, it’s provocative and a bit unnerving to contemplate the possibility that we might be asleep in our own lives. When we are seemingly awake during the day, we don’t feel asleep, and we think of ourselves as realistic. We don’t imagine we are somehow practicing something that is not reality. And it’s somehow frightening for us to consider renouncing everything that might be keeping us asleep, to think of letting go of everything that keeps us from living in the Soul. What if waking up means we can’t keep medicating ourselves in our favorite ways?

Intellectually, we might not find any of this very daunting. But when we sit with it for awhile, and we start to really look at our lives, we may find out that, in one way or another, in one place or another in our lives, we would rather stay asleep—so much so that we will ignore, then ridicule, then denounce, and perhaps even kill anyone who tells us that we are asleep, anyone who tells us that being asleep is creating suffering for ourselves and others, and that we need to take care of our Soul.

The backward step is something like a rupture with our habitual mind, and also a significant break with our culture, if our culture isn’t rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty. In our present situation, we might even suggest that when we say culture, the emphasis is on the cult. We need to take a step back from the cult of capitalism, the cult of consumerism, the cult of celebrity, the cult of catastrophe, the cult of self-help, the cult of attraction, the cult of superficial success, the cult of social media, the cult of trauma, the cult of virtue signaling, the cult of building businesses and making money. Once we drink the drugged wines of these cults, our Soul gets fogged up.

Since we start sipping these drugs in childhood, it’s extraordinarily challenging to take the backward step, since stepping in any direction is preceded by a movement of unconscious forces that shape our experience.

But there is magic in the backward step. The backward step itself can cut off these forces. The very inspiration to wake up is already the dissolution of the drugs that addle our awakening heart.

We can begin to see what the culture is doing—not just some of it, but all of it. We can begin to sense what we ourselves are doing. And we can begin to let go of all this doing.

The philosopher Krishnamurti said the following:

I think it is essential sometimes to go into retreat, to stop everything that you have been doing, to stop your beliefs and experiences completely and look at them anew, not keep on repeating like machines whether you believe or don’t believe. You would let fresh air into your minds, wouldn’t you? That means you must be insecure, must you not? If you can do so, you would be open to the mysteries of nature and to things that are whispering about us, which you would not otherwise reach; you would reach the god that is waiting to come, the truth that cannot be invited but comes itself. But we are not open to love, and other finer processes that are taking place within us, because we are all too enclosed by our own desires. Surely, it is good to retreat from all that . . . In a retreat, do not plunge into something else, do not take some book and be absorbed in new knowledge and new acquisitions. Have a complete break with the past and see what happens . . . do it, and you will see delight. You will see vast expanses. When your heart is open, then reality can come. Then the whisperings of your own prejudices, your own noises are not heard. That is why it is good to take a retreat, to go away and to stop the routine, not only the routine of outward existence but the routine which the mind establishes for its own safety and convenience.

This expresses the basic paradox of LoveWisdom, that in order to truly step forward, we have to step backward; we have to arrive at a Way of being in which stepping forward and stepping backward are not two things. In order to truly take action in our lives, we have to stop all our doing, drop our ordinary sense of action and effort.

It’s like taking a hiatus from ordinary life, a hiatus from habit. We can’t take a hiatus from life itself, because the point of LoveWisdom is that we seek Intimacy with reality, not some form of escapism. The hiatus we want is not any kind of running away.

A hiatus is a pause, an opening. It comes from a Latin root that indicates “standing open”.

Imagine standing in place while someone you dislike approaches. Even though you are standing in place, you are not still. You are agitated. Tension arises as you experience the prickly nature of your relationship with this person. You get thrown into the same old feelings they always provoke in you.

Now imagine standing still while someone you love approaches. Maybe your child is running up to you, or your little puppy, or some other beloved person. You feel an openness of heart. You are ready to embrace them. You want it to be a living embrace, a blossoming flower, open and fresh. You want to offer them a feeling of love and warmth. Your heart is at peace, settled, and yet brimming with energy. You let go of your worries for a moment. Your worries are on hiatus. The mind of problems is on hiatus.

That hiatus, that standing open, that open-hearted dancing . . . What if we could turn toward our own Soul like that, with all its light and darkness, all the voices in the Soul that seem to give us grief, all the aspects of ourselves that don’t seem like allies, but are in fact allies once we embrace them?

What if we could turn toward Life like that, with all its sentient beings—even the ones we now find difficult?

What if we could turn toward the Cosmos like that, in all its sentient being?

T.S. Eliot explored many traditions of LoveWisdom to capture the essence of this idea in the following lines:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

The backward step takes us to the still point. It does not occur in time as we know it. And this still point is the very Dance of Life, so it is not ordinary stillness. Arriving there, we arrive in the Dance, arrive in our lives, as if for the first time. We see our true nature as Dancers—as the Dance itself.

When we Dance with someone, we open our arms to them—and we open our Heart. We stand in Openness.

We have to give the ego a hiatus if the dancing will truly become the Dance.

The ego is not in charge of Dancing, and it can only function as a barrier between us and our beautiful Dance partner, whether that Dance partner is a sentient being or Life itself, Sophia Herself, the Divine Itself, or whatever you want to call it.

The ego is not in charge of the Dance. Rather the Embrace is in charge, as is the music, the mountains outside, the stars in the sky, and the total situation of the dancehall and the Cosmos.

The Dance is in charge of the Dance. And if we embrace someone in order to Dance, there will be forward stepping and backward stepping at the same time. If one of us is stepping forward, that is the very backward step of the other.

But why should we think there is truly an “other” here? If we are Co-Creating the Dance together, then the Dance Itself is stepping forward and backward at the same time. If we embrace Sophia, the goddess of Wisdom, and we allow Wisdom, Love, and Beauty to make the Dance, then She is the stepping forward and the stepping backward.

We must go beyond ordinary notions of action and freedom, and we find this in meditation. Meditation is the practice of hiatus, the practice of standing open, of allowing our complete openness and lucid presence to dance itself forth.

It involves the discovery and creation of the true meaning of freedom. We cannot have freedom without the mind of meditation.

Eliot tries to illuminate this in the lines that follow directly from the ones we already considered. Here’s how it continues:

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Let’s contemplate that together. There is freedom here—total freedom from Sorrowville, the place we often find ourselves living. Sorrowville could be the name for our whole culture of insanity. Eliot read the great traditions of LoveWisdom, and he found that they all declare the possibility of freedom.

But there is also a horror. Why horror? There is something horrifying because it is unresolved, because it is partial. It is the horror we must resolve in order to enter freedom, in order to enter Sophia’s loving embrace, the loving embrace of the sacred, the embrace of the great mystery, or whatever you want to call it.

This horror is the horror of what we have made ourselves into, the horror of our delusions, based on our partiality, the horror of not seeing how freedom involves a surrender—not a “giving up,” not passivity or quiescence, but something inconceivable to the ego.

When we do not become what we are, we remain what we have become. We remain stuck in Sorrowville, caught in what some philosophies call samsara, caught by the hooks of hope and fear in our bloody cheeks, the necks of countless sentient beings under our boot.

We are not innocent of the suffering in the world. We are co-creating it, by remaining caught, by refusing to wake up. We may claim that we have woken up, but waking up is not an intellectual proposition.

It’s a little like lucid dreaming. Maybe you have had a dream in which you said something like this to yourself in the dream: “That was a strange thing to see. But of course this is just a dream, so those sorts of things happen.” If you are anything like me, you sometimes have noted, quite nonchalantly, that you are dreaming.

At those moments, we sort of “know” we are dreaming. Some part of us “knows”. But no big shift happens, no sparkle of wonderstanding transforms us, fills us with Joy, and opens us to Inspiration. We have not actually become fully empowered by an Insight that shifts everything. The dream continues as before, and we just stumble along with it.

When we become profoundly lucid in a dream, we realize that everything we are seeing is our own mind. That genuinely changes things. That fills the dream with wonder. It fills our heart with possibility.

We can now engage with the dream in a far more intimate way. Even if we let things unfold as they wish, we can look, listen, and feel with far more care, and we will remember much more in the morning.

But we can also actively invite Wisdom, actively open up space for insight. We might ask to meet with a spiritual teacher. We might ask an important question of anyone at all appearing in the dream. We are fully awake. But we are also sleeping. It’s something of a paradoxical situation.

Imagine experiencing that when you are in the waking state. You think you are awake. But what if you suddenly saw something, suddenly felt the spark of wonder and insight, and realized that you have been asleep, but that now you are awake. You were awake before, but you weren’t actually awake. Now you are awake, and all sorts of wondrous possibilities present themselves. Things that before might have seemed paradoxical or even impossible are now seen to be important wonders to enter into with the heart of your being—as the heart of your being.

It is essential to understand that we must avoid a strong duality between the backward step and the forward step. The highest spiritual realization involves the nonduality of stepping backward and forward, so that every movement is a hiatus, and our whole lives are the dance of the still point.

That means we can let go of making excuses. The most important hiatus we can take is the hiatus from excuses, blame, and other forms of egocentrism.

We don’t have to go to a retreat center to practice, and we don’t have to go on retreat in order to wake up to what we are and what the world is. Moreover, as the great Sage Hakuin put it, a single moment of meditation in the midst of action is worth a million years on the meditation cushion.

However, approached properly, our practice on the cushion can empower our practice in the midst of action, and vice versa. Formal practice and actual retreats are important for most of us. Hakuin never said we don’t need a daily practice. In fact we do. We need the practice of meditation, both in stillness and in motion.

Spending at least 3 days in Nature, mindfully, not merely hiking about, can transform us. Spending at least 3 days in some form of spiritual retreat, preferably in a natural setting, and definitely including some form of formal meditation practice in a holistic ecology of philosophical teachings, that can heal our own soul and the soul of the world.

The backward step involves something we could call a liminal awareness or a threshold awareness. That’s what we touch in meditation, in a deep hiatus from habitual mind.

It is an awareness beneath the threshold of our habitual consciousness, a way of being we don’t typically have access to, because of how our culture and our personal habits function. This threshold is the bardo of Tibetan philosophy, which means it is the very mind of meditation, the mind of insight and profound realization.

We can enter it at any moment. But, because it is an in-between kind of state, between our thoughts, we typically walk on top of this threshold rather than allowing ourselves to enter it. We walk past it, again and again, rather than walking through it.

It seems so important to honor the challenges of taking the backward step. The main challenge involves the countless forms of spiritual materialism that prevent us from taking this backward step in the first place, and then which continually morph into delusions that we have taken that backward step when really we have slipped back into the habits of delusion that constitute the ego and the culture.

In various traditions around the world, we find a basic medicine for this problem, and that medicine is love. We work with love in two ways: Love inspires us to take the backward step, and love strengthens us to keep taking that backward step instead of going back to sleep.

I’m thinking here in part of Rumi, the great poet of love, who wrote a beautiful short poem that goes like this:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth

across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

This poem evokes the rupture with our habitual mind, the rupture with paranoia and the shift to metanoia, a turning of the mind toward wisdom, love, and beauty. Rumi evokes the liminal here, the bardo, and he calls us to stay on the path of awakening.

We can also bring Plato to mind. His dialogue called the Symposium names the activity of skillful living, and we still use that name today: LoveWisdom. Plato presents the path to wisdom as the path of love.

This came up recently, when the Wiccan Priestess Phyllis Curott visited us. I mentioned this dialogue to Phyllis, and noted that we encounter something amazing when we read it: Socrates, who always claims to know nothing, finally says he knows a little about something in particular, namely love. Significantly, he arrived at his understanding by means of initiation—by a woman, a priestess named Diotima. Socrates shares with us the dialogue he engaged in during his encounter with Diotima.

In the dialogue between Diotima and Socrates, we see that the understanding of love to which Diotima leads us can have no other description than aesthetic, spiritual, and philosophical, altogether. We have a clear sense that the love of wisdom can arise as the most authentic kind of love.

How do we get to that spiritual kind of philosophy, that spiritual kind of love for wisdom or love for another being? We could put the answer this way: love demands a rupture into rapture.

The core of this love lesson (one among several Socrates shares) has to do with the conversion of our whole being. If we have loved anyone or anything at all, we know this feeling, this feeling of conversion, this feeling of everything changing, and our wanting to be the best version of ourselves, for the sake of our beloved. This is the very essence of the backward step.

Love not only precipitates such a conversion—love demands it. Love demands a movement from rupture to rapture, and then to fully consummated responsiveness—a movement, in short, from doing our lives to dancing them, dancing the whole of life onward in a spirit of sacredness and wonder, embracing all sentient beings and all of sentient being in a living, loving cosmic tango.

Love inspires understanding. We want and need to understand the person we love. We cannot claim to fully love what we do not understand.

Nor can we claim to fully love what we cannot fully attend to. When we love someone, that love creates a rupture in our habitual patterns of attention. We find ourselves able to attend to them with much greater clarity and focus. We don’t get so easily distracted—at least not when the love feels strong. In other words, love brings us close to the mind of meditation, and the more we realize love the more we recognize the importance of mediation.

If we could listen to love, we could hear its demand for meditation and for wisdom. If we allow it, love creates a hiatus, an opening, by means of a rupture with our habitual mind, and into that opening, true wisdom and beauty can reveal themselves. Too often, we end up trying to control the divine madness of love, and we don’t let the rupture have its full impact.

Pierre Hadot discusses this rupture and how the ancients understood it and struggled with it:

of life hardly knew. (Hadot,: 1995

The philosophy found everywhere remains philosophy—but not really. If it lacks the soul-stirring conversion that makes us want to give up our crassness, ignorance, and mindless habits, and if we lack that broken-open humility characterizing a real conversion, then such philosophy lacks the genuine mind of love. We must awaken a true mind of love in order to truly call ourselves lovers—of wisdom or anything else.

In various ways—and often with tragic irony—most of us flee from this mind of love, with all the madness it awakens in us. Socrates wanted people to stop this flight from ourselves. That’s all the backward step really is—a step backward, out of this flight from ourselves—and it’s what makes philosophy or spirituality so vital: We need to stop fleeing from reality, stop fleeing from life, from love, and from ourselves, fleeing each other, fleeing the world, fleeing wildness and wonder. He wanted us to wake up, and that means awakening the mind of love, and taking the backward step love demands.

Nietzsche gives us a meditation on this flight from love, this flight from ourselves:

rom himself . . . (Nietzsche,: 1997

n of his being” (Nietzsche,: 1997

f malice . . .” (Nietzsche,: 1997

Even in our ordinary life, we encounter people for whom the utterance of truth, the challenging of habitual experience, strikes them like a discharge of malice. You would think you had attacked them in some aggressive way, because they respond as if you meant them harm, even if you meant only to broaden their perspective.

People will dig in their heals and cling to their experience, cling to their stories, and will get reactive in a thousand ways to anything that challenges that experience and those stories about themselves, even if those stories do nothing but keep them trapped in suffering and confusion. To challenge them evokes reactivity in the form of anger, shame, and clashing arguments.

The heroic life Nietzsche describes may seem strange to us. As he puts it:

be aware of life. (Nietzsche,: 1997

In this heroic person awakens “a dreadful resolve,” dreadful because now they will have to “descend into the depths of existence . . .” (154). Let’s linger on what he says here: A heroic life has nothing to do with “being gifted” or “being compelled”. Such notions—common still—ignore the courage it takes to feel the proprioception of the soul and let it guide us, hearing a calling and answering it. That means doing the sometimes mucky, murky work demanded of us, at times descending into unknown depths of existence and experience.

ing what I am?” (Nietzsche,: 1997

oy it plays with. (Nietzsche,: 1997

Nietzsche does a fine job of sounding Socratic here. He gives us a contrast between life in the cave (or, in contemporary terms, life in The Matrix), bound and fettered to delusory objects of “love,” versus the demanding life of love, the life of following love’s admonitions, awakening the mind of love and following it even into dangerous places, places that scare us, for the benefit of those we may think we cannot help.

We must take care we don’t forget that these love lessons apply not just to our love of Sophia, but to humans and the more-than-human World as well. With any beloved we must listen to the admonitions of the heart-and-mind—admonitions of body and soul, of World and Cosmos, which we sense with the proprioception of the soul—following them with a level of fearlessness that may seem frightening to those who would rather watch the puppet-play of the moment.

And we should have compassion for our fear. We needn’t think we must find fearlessness “first”. We may need to leap into the unknown while experiencing a good deal of fear.

In Art and Artist, Otto Rank challenged the neurotic view Nietzsche offers as a contrast to the vision Socrates presents, a view many people fall prey to. It has to do with avoiding the heroic out of a supposed lack of “being gifted” or “being compelled”.

To understand Rank’s suggestion, we can take a silly example: Why does Superman save the world? We might follow the more deluded view and see Superman as completely unlike anyone at all, as someone completely weird. He’s from another planet. He has this special gift. That’s why he saves the world.

But Superman saves the world for one reason: He decided to become a superhero, and saving the world is what superheroes do. He could have decided to become a supervillain, or to work as a journalist or a farmer of unparalleled strength and exceptional intelligence. Moreover, our mythologies and our own personal experience tell us that we commonly avoid the call of the heroic. Deciding to follow a heroic path of any kinds arises as a fateful act.

For Otto Rank, the first act of creativity for any artist is the creative declaration, “I’m an artist.” After declaring that—especially to our friends, peers, and community—we find ourselves with an inner drive to live up to it, and we do whatever it takes.

Consider Mozart. How many child prodigies were there floating around Europe at the same time Mozart’s father was taking his son on tour? How many became great composers? Rank suggests that what separates Mozart form the other prodigies of his time comes to Mozart’s decision, “I am a great composer and musician.” Mozart’s hands were apparently deformed, and it is possible that the deformation came from incredible levels of practice. Practice is the key feature here—practice and realization, the essence of the wisdom-based view of knowledge.

We find a well-known adage, variously attributed to Paderewski, Rubenstein, Horowitz, and even Pavarotti: “If I don’t practice for one day, I know it; if I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don’t practice for three days, the whole world knows it.” In one version of the quote, after two days it is the artist’s wife (in these cases) who is said to know it. Which, as usual, leads me to Sophia. How long does it take Wisdom to notice that we are not practicing? Do we think She won’t notice from moment to moment?

And what, after all, is more challenging and more important: to play a piano concerto with creativity and joy, or to live life with creativity and joy—and wisdom and compassion? We are wise, but we must become wise. We must realize wisdom, love, and beauty in everyday life, in the ordinary-extraordinary uniqueness of our everyday lives. How else do we do that fully but practice?

Dangerous wisdom involves the practice of the four fundamental skills that allow us to function in this luminous and joyful threshold awareness. The first skill is sometimes called, Pause and Perceive. It involves making a deliberate hiatus in the midst of activity, thus softening our habit of passing by the threshold, and beginning to make a new life of mindfulness, happiness, spaciousness, a living road of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In the coming days, see if you can pause and perceive. Just pause and notice. Take an interest in whatever is unfolding as if it were your own dream, your own psyche trying to tell you something while you are asleep, trying to invite you into the liminal space, across the threshold of your ordinary awareness. Realize that everything you are looking at is the nature of mind itself, and allow yourself to marvel at it. Take a hiatus from your ordinary mind, and allow yourself to embrace life and be embraced. See what happens.

This is the essence of mediation, the essence of the hiatus: to become aware. Awareness is the essence of meditation, and the essence of any real hiatus from ignorance and suffering. So, practice awareness, and you can begin to create that hiatus anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.

By means of meditation, we can rupture the pattern of insanity, and help the whole world to return to wisdom and wildness. We will find our healing in this rupture into rapture, in this opening to love and beauty, an opening to the sacredness and wonder of life.

This episode is dedicated to the countless beings who have helped me to see more clearly into the paradoxes of LoveWisdom. Thank you all. Keep living in your Soul.

If you have reflections or questions about today’s episode, send them in, at wisdomloveandbeauty.org, and we’ll address some of them in a future episode.

Until then, this is nikos patedakis reminding you that your Soul and the Soul of the World are not two things. Take good care of them.