On the spiritual level, the petty tyrant affords us the opportunity to confront the workings of our own minds, and the possibility to transcend our own pettiness. Castaneda goes so far as to say that if we are trying to grow spiritually, and we don’t have a petty tyrant, we should seek one out! The petty tyrant provides an opportunity like none other – he allows us to face and come to terms with ourselves. Working with the petty tyrant on a spiritual level does not mean that our reactivity and difficulties with him ever go away. Instead, it means that we learn to be steady in the face of our own reactivity; we learn to live in a way that we are not dominated by or at the effect of harsh external forces. –Confronting the Petty Tyrant by Mariana Caplan
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Pema says, “be grateful to everyone.” It’s one of the lojong card slogans with which I train.
The slogan “BE GRATEFUL TO EVERYONE” is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with the people we dislike. More to the point, being around people we dislike is often a catalyst for making friends with ourselves. Thus, “be grateful to everyone.”
…other people trigger the karma we haven’t worked out.
They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders.
“Be grateful to everyone” is a way of saying that we can learn from any situation, especially if we practice this slogan with awareness. The people and situations in our lives can remind us to catch neurosis as neurosis, to see when we’re in our room under the covers, to see when we’ve pulled the shades, locked the door, and are determined to stay there.
“Be grateful to everyone” is getting at a complete change of attitude. This slogan is not wishy-washy and naive. It does not mean that if you’re mugged on the street you should smile knowingly and say, “OH, I should be grateful for this, ” before losing consciousness. This slogan actually gets at the guts of how we perfect ignorance through avoidance, not knowing that we’re eating poison, not knowing that we’re putting another layer of protection over our heart, not seeing through the whole thing.
“Be grateful to everyone” means that all situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best. There may be a Juan or Juanita in your life, and Juan or Juanita is the one who gets you going. They’re the ones who don’t go away: your mother, your husband, your wife, your lover, your child, the person that you have to work with every single day, part of the situation you can’t escape.
These situations really teach you because there’s no pat solution to the problem. You’re continually meeting your match. You’re always coming into a challenge, coming up against your edge. There’s no way that someone else can tell you exactly what to do, because you’re the only one who knows where it’s torturing you, where your relationship with Juan or Juanita is getting into your guts. Others don’t know. They don’t know when you need to be more gentle, when you need to be more clear, when you need to be quiet, and when you need to speak.
…The main point of “Be grateful to everyone”–the “dig”–is that you want to get rid of the situations that drive you most crazy, the Juans and Juanitas. You don’t want to be grateful to them. You want to solve the problem and not hurt anymore. Juan is making you feel embarrassed, or degraded, or abused; there’s something about the way he treats you that makes you feel so bad that you just want out.
This slogan encourages you to realize that when you’ve met your match you’ve found a teacher. …
Something between repressing and acting out is what’s called for, but it is unique and different each time.
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Gurdjieff … knew the meaning of this slogan. He was living not too far from Paris in a big manor house with huge lawns. All of his students came there to study with him. One of his main teachings was to be awake to whatever process you’re going through. He liked to tighten the screws on his students. In fact, it’s said that he would make you take the job that you most didn’t want to take; if you though you shoul dbe a college professor, he would make you become a used car salesman.
There was a man in the community who was really bad tempered. …nobody could stand this guy because he was so prickly. Every little thing caused him to spin off into a tantrum. He complained constantly, so everyone felt the need to tiptoe around him because anything that might be said could cause him to explode. People just wished that he would go away.
Gurdjieff liked to make his students do things that were completely meaningless. One day there were about forty people out cutting up a lawn into little pieces and moving it to another place on the grounds. This was too much for this fellow; it was the last straw. He blew up, stormed out, got in his car, and drove off, whereupon there was a spontaneous celebration. People were thrilled, so happy he had gone. But when they told Gurdjieff what had happend, he said, “Oh no!” and went after him in his car.
Three days later they both came back. That night when Gurdjieff’s attendant was serving him his supper, he asked, “Sir, why did you bring him back?” Gurdjieff answered in a very low voice, “You’re not going to believe this, and this is just between you and me; you must tell no one. I pay him to stay here.”
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Perfectionism and people pleasing are two of my boogie monsters. How much money have I (and my mother, and insurance companies) sunk into therapy of all kinds in this lifetime?
How devoted am I to this path of shining the light in my shadowy corners, facing the things in my blind spots, growing as a person, evolving spiritually?
Very devoted.
And if I had all the time and resources and connections in the world and were able to go to the teacher most suited of all the teachers on the planet to helping me with this journey… if I were blessed enough to get to spend time letting this most amazing and coveted of all teachers in the world get to know me inside and out…
And if that teacher in turn had all the resources at his or her disposal to help me where s/he saw I was most stuck…
Well.
My training ground would be none other than the situation I am in right now at work.
And so on the days when I am wise enough to see it, I pull into the driveway and look up at the building and say I little prayer of thanks to my master, wherever s/he is, for erecting this building just for me. Just for this lesson that will break me or will take me to the next level in my evolution.
You can’t imagine how valuable this situation is to my spiritual journey. It’s incredible.
From the day perfectionism grabbed hold of me, I’ve been the shining star. What a safe place that is! In astronomy class, the score I got on the midterm exam was exempted from the curve so as to be more fair to the rest of the students. There were Fs, Ds, Cs, Bs, As, A+s and my score, which he called “supernova.”
At my bookstore office management job, I came upon such a mess that it took several months of staying until 8:00 or 9:00 at night organizing, filing, cataloging, dusting, whipping the place into shape. I think I got four raises in the first five months. Supernova.
At my first job in Canada I remember my team leader, whom I adored, saying to the rest of the team when she saw me go at it, “ladies, I believe we have ourselves a keener.”
From my last job I have saved the emails I received from my clients across Canada, the ones they sent me when they learned I was moving on. One was begging me to change my mind and stay. “What will we do without you?” “It won’t be the same level of service,” they said.
And do you know what this safe cocoon of adoration has done for me? It has made me more judgmental, less compassionate and more obnoxious.
No seriously.
My little brother used to tell me tales, as did some friends, of being stuck under a boss who was a jerk, and I remember not really having a lot of sympathy. I assumed to some extent that the person must be a wee bit lazy or a wee bit incompetent. After all, I had never had any difficulty with a boss in my life. Surely it just took hard work! Right?
I even had a rather perfectionistic boss early on, but a softspoken one. She very politely asked me to draft the memo again, put her red marks all over it, had me draft it again, put more red marks on it, had me draft it again… I learned a lot from her. I learned not to take it personally. I learned to let her do her little perfectionist dance, no skin off my nose. We got a along once I adapted to her style. Bless her heart, she also knew how to say, “good job” and “well done” and, eventually, “what on earth am I going to do without you?”
But now?
The current situation is miraculous.
No matter how hard I work, no matter if I come in 1.5 hours early and leave an hour late… no matter if my error rate is between 3% and 0% from one audit to the next, no matter if my customers think I hung the moon…
it’s never enough. Criticism is peppered around hour by hour and praise is next to non-existent.
The stress is at times almost unbearable. My stomach hurts. My shoulders are drawn up to my ears. Every time she calls me to her desk, my body clenches as I think, what this time?
You may think the thing to do is talk…either to this person or to someone else in the company. But a few of us have met to discuss this and all of us agree that this might not be wise at this time, a) because of the personality and fragile ego we’re dealing with and b) because there is nobody we trust short of one of the owners. In the meantime the majority of us are looking elsewhere, as am I.
But for now I am face to face with my green man…reliance on external validation.
Boy is it HUMBLING to finally be in a situation where my old song and dance has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER. I cannot be the supernova no matter what. I cannot even rise much above mediocre, dispensible.
I am growing more compassionate by the day. And less obnoxious (ask my brother)!
I don’t know where this is going, but I know that every day that doesn’t end in a psychotic break is one more day I would easily have paid a master of masters to design this situation just for my edification.
This morning it occurred to me that stress is the result of something being pulled in two directions at once. I know what is pulling on that end, the question becomes what am I doing with my end? I can let this taut rope be pulled and pulled and pulled until I snap.
Or, as Rick so aptly put it, I can learn what it means to let go of the rope.
