{Readers/Writers Note: From this chapter, onward, most of the text will utilize a more theater-script format. This is primarily due to the fact that almost all of the following chapters are much more dialogue-focused than expository background descriptions.}
Tuesday, December 27
Upon David’s return to the sanctuary, early the following morning, both he and Walton were ready for action. The Worm and his Wizard continued the lessons that would hopefully lead to David’s ability to solve his own personal Sweet Mystery.
Walton: I see that you managed to breathe continually since our last get-together.
David: Sure thing. Low, slow, nose, and flow. Helping me grow, above and below, from my head to my toe, through the sleet and the snow!
Walton: We’s got ourselfs a poet, folks, trying his best to show it, hope he don’t blow it! Well, Rhymin’ Simon, let’s jump right back into our soul climbin’!
David: Right on, Bro Daddio!
After taking a few moments to get settled near the front of the church inner sanctum, and re-stoking the woodstove fire, Walton began this day’s discourse.
Walton: You’ve heard me say this before. I will say it again. And I will probably repeat it quite a few more times until it sinks into the hole in your soul and finally fills the whole of your soul.
Life should be simpler than it is.
This is what you are going to find out for yourself as you take those long slow walks around the cold, dark streets of Maine.
David: Maybe, just maybe, the problem I have been having is with the word “simple.” I came here those first few nights, and, through my point of view at that time, life was as far from simple as it could get. But then, you wazzle-razzle-dazzled my brain with a few explosions of your belief-busting bombs – and now it seems different to me. But what is really different? Or simpler?
Walton: Here’s why I still make the claim that life, especially human life, should be much simpler than the typical human organism makes it out to be. First example – look at the rest of the living world. The energies in Nature carry on day-to-day within a simple paradigm known as “the path of least resistance.” And, except for an unruly intrusion by humankind, Nature does well for itself. A semblance of balance is maintained. The “producers” and the “consumers” and the “de-composers” of all shapes and sizes co-habitate in a basic ritual of life cycles, death cycles, and evolutionary cycles. Even seemingly lifeless matter does the same: solid-liquid-gas-plasma forms just rotate around and around, trading places in the dance of energy transformation cycles. And, may I add, some form of simple Energy is at the heart of these cycles!!
David: Well, we humans are parts of all of those. We are made up of solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma matter. We go through the steps of producing, consuming, and eventually de-composing. Like Mozart, before, during, and after! Still not seeing the difference.
Walton: All life, and all natural life forms, should exist in a simpler manner than they do. But humans are not “natural.” They are different, “above” or “beyond” the rest of the planet. They don’t think that they need to conform to simple, “least resistance” rules of order, because they claim to have this magical potion called Free Will. And they are arrogant enough to insist that no other “lowly creature” has the same. So they control, they resist, they over-power, they manipulate their physical, natural environment into a complex array of shrines to Self-worship.
David: You seem really intense again today. You must have spent a long time, and a lot of energy, working through whatever’s about to come erupting out into the conversation throughout the day. Should I step back?
Walton: Only if you don’t want to get any of it on you. But that would only be demonstrating my previous point. Most non-Human Earth-based life-forms take what they get, and go with the flow of responses “natural” to them. You, my sample typical human, are going to pretend to use your illusory power called “free will” and choose to listen, to be aware, OR to tune out and cop out at the mercy of your past trance dance. Instead, you could and should want, more than anything, to “get any of it on you.” Open up. Awake and aware. I am openly intense, and you seek to hide away in tents!
Again, I repeat, life should be simpler than it is. And a very long time ago, I vowed to continuously focus my full energies, similar to your own present search, on that affirmation until I discovered a “why,” and a “how,” and a “what-to-do-about- it.” I had a quest. A Holy Grail. A burning desire to seek simplicity amidst the on-rushing crush of maddening humanness that surrounded me. I had a primal need to discover the basic, original, fundamental, common elements which hid behind the mask of human complexity.
David: I suppose it just interrupts your focused flow if I annoyingly ask you – ‘How’s that working for ya?’.
Walton: I expect nothing less from my young worm – no, wait! Tonight you are not going to be the worm. You are going to be the ANT! Yes, the famous Trance Ant. Once again, from Thoreau’s airwaves, to your antennae: “Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; …… it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.” The wretched mean-living ant, supposedly having evolved into humans once upon a time, but here, now, still groveling for the shallowest of existences! Your complex life is “frittered away by detail.” Scramble in the dirt of your beliefs, little ant. Remain in the trance dance step of your “ant-cestors”!
David: Welllll, smarty p’ants’! If I am just a trance ant, then what are you, oh great and groovey guru?? Huh?
Walton: Maybe I am also just another ant, or an uncle. A gi-’ant’ ant! Or maybe I am just awake and aware. And you are not, yet. So, you are the ‘Trance Ant’, and I am the one who will show you how to become a ‘Trance-End-Ant’ like myself!! Get it??
David: ‘Trance-end-ant’, huh? Like the sage of Walden Pond? Walton and Walden??
Walton: Maybe so, maybe no. May I now resume my focused flow…?
I observed that many humans desired to seek complexity as a solution to their challenges and problems. I was determined to walk in the opposite direction. You’ve got your wintry wonderland wanderings, I had my dry and dusty West Texas dirt roads. I was going to explore a new alternative, first for myself, and then for anyone else who might later listen to this odd spirit ranting and raving amidst his mesquite and tumbleweed. Maybe even some young punk New Englander such as yourself.
David: A punk-ant. And his relatives, the punk-kins.
Walton: Sure. Whatever.
Eventually, quite a few years ago, probably before you were an egg-ant and your momma was pregn-ant, I completed that conquest, that search, that exploration. The Holy Ghostly Grail had been uncovered. Finally, I returned myself and my tired body from those long wild west walks. I settled comfortably in front of a fireplace with a snifter of brandy and a Toshiba tablet PC laptop. I was ready to share that story with trance ants like yourself, and any other creatures who were ready to become trance-end-ants themselves. Who wants to listen? Who is there to hear? That is, if you are, in fact, ready and able to hear. Awake and aware.
An ancient story about a much earlier trance-end-ant proclaimed: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
David: So you’ve probably written a book or something?
Walton: No, nothing so grand. Just a collection of random scribblings in one particular journal, which I plan to pass along to some other worthy seeker of Absolute Truths. Is this your lucky day?
David {animated, but not quite serious}: Hey, Mister Mystic! Here am I!! Send me! Send me!! I see ya! I hear ya!
Walton: Like you tell me your parents sent you to college for four years or more of servitude to the Temples of Trance? No, I won’t send you anywhere like that. This professor here has no similar intentions for you. No professions, no concessions, and no confessions.
Unlike the ridiculous and inessential chores that most college professors put you through, you won’t find any support notes or references to other material in my story. I may paraphrase Thoreau once in a while, or perhaps grab a pithy phrase from some other inspired work. Otherwise, absolutely everything I share with you, every explanation, every exercise, every example, and every event is based totally on direct, personal experiences. Many of those experiences occurred, as I earlier stated, while taking those long caliche road desert walks. They consisted of moments of profound reflection, psychic disruption, re-structuring, emotional release, and self-examination. And finally a bunch of blown-up beliefs and the built-in barriers that are associated with them. Kaboom! A gentle mental explosion experience!
David: Did you ever do the hippie thing? Like travel around the country, aimlessly? Go to other countries? Sit at the feet of guys with nothing but long gray hair all over and under their heads? Trip out and flip out on nature’s pharmacological cornucopia?? Whiff the wild weed? Toke the choking smoke? Pop the poppies? Consume the shrooms?
Walton: No, I didn’t. I did not need to ingest Nature’s chemistry set. I did not consult grungy gurus, or slick-hair preachers, or trance channelers, or smoking psychics, or neurotic psychotherapists, or Aquarian Age motivationalists, or ivory tower professors, or religious tomes, or daily horror-scopes, or week-end workshops, or … there are so many other crutches out there that most other “self-improvement” writers consult. I consulted my own self for my own improvement. Simply me. Single-minded, and simple-minded, focus. My “feed-back”, or “food-back” was more like a starvation diet of the mind and body.
I dived as deeply as possible into both the sense and the nonsense that had already filled me with enough mental manure to cover the entire crop-circled fields of the mid-west. It was not a necessary step to gather more crap from those crops. Instead, the next step for me was to let go and allow the Toilet of Time to flush away its waste. Dump the dung. Pop the poo. Delete the dookie! Blow out the BS!
David: Yech!! Gross. I can tell now that I won’t be getting much sleep tonight with those images in my head.
Walton: Nor should you go back to sleep, my busy-brain monkey-mind trance-ant. Ever again! It is time to crawl out of the hole! Climb out from your Hole of hibernation! Into the Whole of habitation! Being here totally, trance-less. Swing freely through the trees of simplicity! Awake and aware from now on. Make that simple mantra all you need to be here now. “Awake and Aware.”
For example, in your own complicated cognition-based search, the one you blathered on about a few nights ago, how successful have you been? What have you discovered so far? Anything useful?
David: Uh, no. More questions than answers. More chaos and confusion, and very little clarity. I’ve studied comparative religions, philosophies, psychotherapy methods, and so much more. So many conflicts, so much complexity. Hardly simple at all. Especially because they all claim to hold the absolute truths with which to understand the complete nature of the human condition. But that is statistically and logically impossible.
Walton: So it’s Absolute Truth you’re looking for, huh? And now are you waking up to the possibility that no one really knows what it is?
David: Pretty much so, yeah. Like that thing you did to me the other night, when you asked me to come up with a truth, and then to try to prove it.
Walton: And yet I did a reverse twist on you at the time. I kept asking for proof for your belief. And yet, here’s the second twist: One of the primary problems here is the world’s incessant need for proof. What is proof? Isn’t it just more BS on top of the old BS?? Beliefs upon beliefs upon stacks of beliefs? Kind of like “turtles all the way down!”
David: Huh? What do turtles have to do with this?
Walton: I will share that little story with you much later.
In putting this current “simple” little project together, the one I will be sharing with you for the next few days, I was faced with certain paradoxical compromises. The very essence of this paradigm directs a person to a place where “proof” is NOT a priority; the only accurate and efficient method for learning is personal experience. “Proof” is the borrowing of the beliefs of others in order to validate one’s own beliefs. That is one reason why you won’t get a lot of quotes from other sources with me. Any time someone is quoting someone else, especially in those dreadfully overdrawn college theses and dissertations, it is an attempt to validate oneself with the beliefs of others. An escape, if you will, from originality. But there is no “proof” at all in the illusory beliefs of others.
David: So all their proof is just more poo poo? The Poo is in the pudding?
Walton: That is “pudding” it mildly! Dissertation defecation. Thesis feces. Word turds.
David: You sound a bit vindictive here. Are there some personal issues we need to discuss?? Need a terror-apist?
Walton: Been there, didn’t want that. I spent plenty of years in the hallowed halls of academia. Searching through the ever-expanding set of Psychological Abstracts articles. Time that would have better spent in the halls of autodidactia.
David: Auto … what?
Walton: An autodidact is a self-taught person. One whose own innate curiosity is intense enough to lead the learner into his or her own world of natural classrooms. Books, places, people, life events, long walks, simple sitting … every space in every time is a potential classroom with messages and lessons floating through that environment. But, you first have to awaken, or re-awaken, that natural curiosity. Lots of questions. “Why” is the way, the truth and the real life.
David: Why?
Walton: Yes, why. Along with “why not.” And maybe the other “w’s”. When, who, what, where, how.
David: How?
Walton: Now, brown cow. It is always now. And now, back to business.
The paradigm I am offering you is not about validating and strengthening one’s Belief System, one’s collection of “proofs”. It is about radically altering the condition of that very Belief System, from the inside outward. This paradigm will not replace, or “prove,” anything you now claim to “know.” It should only work to assist you with shaping what you “know” into a more efficient structure. And in that shaping, you may decide to just chuck the whole “knowing” thing. The “knowing” is “slowing” your “growing!”
Instead, seek ye the way of wonderful word-less not-knowing. Instant enlightenment!! Trance-ending your previous obsessive need for knowledge. Yes, my paradigm consists of belief-busting “tools,” not Belief System replacements.
David: So no more BS, I guess.
Walton: Yes. No mo’ BS.
David: That would be best.
Walton: For now, give it a rest, little poetry pest, or we will be here well into next year.
David: But the next year is only a few days away.
Walton: And may all your new year’s resolutions be new year revolutions!
David: Power to the masses and their messes! And the misters and their misses!
Walton: I appreciate that you still seem to be having fun with this whole thing. And it should be fun, a light-hearted and enlightened look for the light within, but it is truly a unique type of internal revolution that may also provide you with quite a few moments of painful conflict. Last night, you asked me the following question: “How do you know all this stuff, anyway?”
Although I recognize that we cannot escape the indirect influence of outside studies on our thinking and feeling processes, like you and those thousands of books you’ve read over the years, the things I will be sharing with you make up a pretty total synthesis of a half century of living. Books served as stepping stones, but they were not the path, nor the map, nor the process of growth that I describe herein. If anything I say sounds familiar to you, it is either because they are familiar terms to most anyone, or they may actually be old terms with a new emphasis. You better watch carefully for these. As you already know, I am quite prepared to make up random stuff, if I feel like it.
David: So I’ve noticed.
Walton: Until now, I have been pretty much out on my own here. When I began my own search, very similar to yours, there was not much to help me in the way of books, articles, or visual resources. Pre-Internet access. No new age charlatans and hocus-pocus magicians to demonstrate the potential power of a human being. The major holy books, and a handful of metaphysical writers, – they all had different descriptions of the exact same things. Quantum physics and mechanics was too new a field to provide anything helpful. The search for the elusive Unified Theory of Human Behavior was left to our own devices. Our internal senses became more and more aware of this extraordinary world. Until we got it. What we got, that is. Got it?
David: Got what?
Walton: Got what? Indeed. You will find that the question “Got What?” is about to saturate your present and hopefully saturate and satiate your immediate future.
For now, though, this project that I am sharing with you is merely little ol’ me, a loose mixture of word lessons and world experiences. The paradigm presented here, like a psychic recipe, consists of a dash of spoken word here, a spoonful of written page or diagram there, a pinch of five minutes of a college lecture thrown in, lots of inspirational ideas, brought to a boil in some random space, and then set simmering in the bed at 3 A.M. And, most of all, those long West Texas walk-a-thons.
David: Was anybody else at that time really trying to discover this Human Behavior Unified Theory, like you claim? And if so, why did it take so long? Humans have been around for thousands of years. And we still can’t get it right? We still don’t know what we need to know about ourselves? And when we finally answer that question, are you telling me that it is going to have a simple answer?
Walton: Yes, indeed, it is.
Recently, we mentioned Henry David Thoreau. Have you lately read any of the other American transcendentalist-era writers, like Emerson, or the Alcotts? Walt Whitman? Most of them sought the same thing. Especially Thoreau. And Emerson claimed to have had an actual experience of physical and mental transcendence which he records in his “Nature” essay. Look up his reference to the Transparent Eyeball sometime.
As I too experienced some of the various aspects of this paradigm first-hand, there were many moments of what I can most accurately describe as profound confusion. My Belief System struggled to maintain some semblance of order, while another part of me, an increasing sense of Awareness, sought to disrupt that order. This state of temporary confusion is not an uncommon occurrence. At its peak, it is often referred to as “the dark night of the soul.”
After a while, the terms I will explain to you may seem to push and pull at you, while your “intellect” tries to make sense of them. Fortunately, in my case, from my then expandingly new perspective, I was patient enough with my new “diminishing sense of self” to progress from an initial state of chaos, through the mist and midst of confusion, and on to reach the clarity that existed outside of my previous boundaries of thought.
So, David, my tiny trance-ant friend, if confusion sets upon you as a student, either it is due to my inability to convey proper word lessons, which is not very useful, or it is due to your Awareness System’s wake-up call to you, which is indeed a very constructive event to experience!
David: Haven’t people in the psych field tried to come up with a unified theory of human behavior before now? And how can you claim to be the first person to successfully pull it off? You’re not famous, you’re not even a nose-in-the-air academic. How is a church custodian stuck in the hinterlands of northern Maine gonna make his story known to anyone other than me?
Walton: Since I was a younger and brasher college student at the time, one of my original intentions for this project was to develop a unified paradigm for the study of psychology and counseling.
One day, trapped in the university library, hunting down cool quotes in the ever-expanding yet dry and deficient set of Psychological Abstracts, I was looking for ideas about relaxation therapy. I found an odd article called “The physiological differences between Transcendental Meditation and rest”. That was okay, but the very next article I happened upon was only one page long – very unique for any academic journal anywhere, ever! And it ended up being one of the most useful articles I had ever read. I carried around that short piece with me ever since I started working on degree completion at a local university quite a few decades ago. The final points of that article, by a uniquely inquisitive academic named Scott T. Meier, gave me hope that some kind of all-inclusive, yet creative version of a grand unified theory of human behavior might someday exist.
In a copy of the American Psychologist Journal, he wrote a brief article that discusses, and I quote: “examples of perceived disconnectedness … that illustrate the lack of integration of psychological theory.” I will be sharing the four main points of that article with you soon enough.
The development of a unified theory for all human behavior was not necessarily the intention of my own project at that early stage, but I do believe that, in the process of creating what I did create, I also happened upon the solution ‘requested’ by Mr. Meier.
David: So how come there is no great and famous book written by one stately and noble Professor-Custodian Walton Masters? You could be elsewhere, in a much finer place, doing much finer work that cleaning floors, pews, windows, and restrooms.
Walton: Your first major mistake there, sonny boy, is to think that what we do here is not already the noblest and most important of all work available. Only those with a deep sense of arrogant snobbery would claim something like that. I do hope you are not a card-carrying member of those who live in the world of elitist swinery.
However, to address your inquiry: If I were to choose someday to create the insanity that surrounds taking on a doctoral project, I would turn my little paradigm into an expanded description of what this unified theory would look like, how it would be used to simplify and unify the behavioral science fields, and how it could assist in the analysis, prediction, and modification of every aspect of human behavior. And yet, at the same time, Keep. It. Simple! “Simplicity, simplicity.” That is the core element to this whole project of mine, and now I am possibly going to be “Thoreau-ing” it off to you!
David: And for that, kind sir, I am “Emer-so” grateful for being the possible target of that humble privilege.
Walton: Like Occam’s Razor, the simplest descriptions of something can very often be the most accurate.
But, as you might guess, this little project had a very unexpected outcome on me. The more I practiced my own exercises, the more I realized the quite paradoxical uselessness of doing any more work on it. Especially not wasting any more time on a loose-caboose train track trail through the air-headed aspirations of the academia elite. The processes led me further away from formal studies, and proofs, and collected beliefs. I got closer to a sense of peaceful emptiness rather than stressful fullness. I had discovered a gentle mental enema!!
David: Gross again. And to think that I might soon inherit this beautiful blessing from your benevolent backsides!
Walton: It is a super-pooper scooper indeed! Butt…. Getting back to the scholarly book idea, and where that would likely have taken me: when it comes to writing papers for the ivory tower world, the most important part of every dissertation was not the possibly imaginative content in the front and middle, but rather the bibliography, or works cited, section at the end. And here was another unique problem that faced me at this point: every single book written about human existence would theoretically have to be included as a reference text for any project composed by me, because this paradigm we are about to explore together does, indeed, include every aspect of human behavior and philosophy. I’ve tested it critically over the last several decades, both at college and in daily life, and it has easily withstood the test of consistency in all areas of human behavioral analysis and instruction: developmental, cognitive, cultural, affective, testing and measurements, educational, occupational, psychotherapeutic — every field that I encountered while obtaining my now useless early college degrees. So can you imagine a “works cited” section of infinite length?
David: So you are just a brainy renegade!! A rebel without a cause to give himself pause. A dharmic bum!
Walton: It was during that time period when I figured out that my eventual goal with this material was not to deal with the educated and academic audience as much as it is to target the everyday, searching souls who struggle with self-help groups, or no-help-at-all groups, as they grasp for solutions to the problems and challenges in their lives. People like you. The trance-ants who might be ready to wake up, become more aware of the vital life and vibrant energy that surrounds them. Fellow seekers of the “Simple Solution.”
David: And so, on behalf of the current trance-ants of this planet, I thank you in adv-ance for this great gift. The gift of giving up our ant-ness, a chance to become, what did you call it…?
Walton: Trance-end-ant.
David: Yes, the end of the trance for all courageous ants.
Walton: It is time for more humans, or the trance-ants, to face up to a greater level of personal response-ability, including the personal condition of their hearts and minds, whatever those may be. To that end, I now hereby officially present to you a truly unique opportunity, my special little guinea pig, the initial version of my “Personal Transcendtentional Program,” and the paradigm that underlies it. You can call it PTP. I am going to.
David: PTP, huh? What does that other word mean, the word that is like Transcendentalism, but not really.
Walton: Transcendtentional? If you break down each section of the word, it most closely means “to stretch one’s intention above and beyond oneself to climb across one’s current state of limitations.” Obviously, I had to invent the word in order to be as accurate and comprehensive as possible. I do that a lot, as needed.
So, are you up for learning something over your holiday vacation time that no one else in the world knows anything about? Or are you going to insist on getting plenty of badly-needed beauty rest for a few weeks?
David: I am that I am. No, that’s not it. I think, therefore I am going to. No, still not quite there. I don’t want to put “des-cartes” before the horse! Let’s see, one more try: I am here now that I may become more here, now. Once again, I officially declare: “Here am I. Send me!”
Walton: Well said, my good and faithful mystic wannabe. From Isaiah’s mouth to your ears! That is sufficient enough for me. For now, unless you got a hot date or something, let’s meet during the daytime for a week or two. If we run long, then that is what we do. I have a very specific list of topics to cover. We will do it this way: I will start with some terms, and a general explanation of what they mean in the world of PTP. Then we will discuss examples of those terms. Then I have a few exercises hidden away for each term, for you to practice. Finally, we will wrap up each session with some kind of very direct experiences or events, to make sure that the topic is fairly firmly ingrained in your straining brain. No pain!
Explanations, Examples, Exercises, and Experiences.
David: How do I get access to these terms, and such?
Walton: Fortunately for you, I have already anticipated your request. I have created a blog-type web site for only you to access. Even though you will find the overall assignments posted there, which include the complete PTP paradigm, I request and suggest that you read only the appropriate chapter I assign you before each session. It will do no good for you to read ahead of each day’s lesson. I suspect, that, like a typical trance-ant, if you try to digest it all ahead of time, perhaps out of curiosity, that act would very likely confuse, overwhelm, and possibly disillusion you, David. Eat too fast, get too full, input words, output bull!
To address the matter of general availability to the PTP materials, I have created this web site on a cul-de-sac located on the furthest outskirts of the Internet. It is not likely to be found through any type of search engine. For now it is our little secret stash hidden in the boondocks of WebWorld. Here is what you type in, in order to access it. {Walton passes a small slip of paper to David.}
For tomorrow’s lesson, please read only the first chapter, titled “The Purpose of PTP”. And, in that little journal I gave you recently, jot down any questions, ideas, or insights your trance-fixed mind may encounter. Above all, as we advance throughout this project, focus on finding the Simple Path. Come up with at least one statement that considers how that night’s reading assignment could lead you to something Simpler than what you have, and are, now.
David: Got it. A-okay. Keeping it Simple, like Simon the Rhymin’ Pie-Man!
Walton: You may leave the temple now, grasshopper. Or worm. Or ant……
And, with that awkward benediction, David wandered away, once again, wondering just what he was getting himself into. Or, as Walton might suggest, out of. Either way, he anticipated the eventual release of his inner trance-ant-ness for a further, farther future.
*****