Organize your field of being
Hoarding disorder
Hoarding disorder is an ongoing difficulty throwing away or parting with possessions because you believe that you need to save them. You may experience distress at the thought of getting rid of the items. You gradually keep or gather a huge number of items, regardless of their actual value.
Imagine you’re dealing with someone who’s hoarding. Now, people who are hoarding are often older or neurologically damaged or they have obsessive-compulsive disorder.
You walk into their house and there’s like 10,000 things in their house there’s maybe a hundred boxes and you open up a box and in the box there’s some pens and some old passports and some checks and their collection of silver dollars and some hypodermic needles and some dust and you know a dead mouse and there’s boxes and boxes and boxes like that in the house. it’s absolute chaos in there. not ordered - chaos.
The important question is, is that their house or is that their being, is that their mind? The answer is, there’s no difference.
If you want to organize your psyche, start by organizing your room
You are a more concrete person and you need something concrete to do.
So you go clean up under your bed and you make your bed and you organize the papers on your desk. Now you may ask, well, just exactly what am I organizing? Am I organizing the objective world or am I organizing my field of being - my field of total experience?
Carl Jung believed that - and there’s a Buddhist doctrine that’s sort of nested in there -
At the highest level of psychological integration, there’s no difference between you and what you experience.
You may think, well, I can’t control everything I experience. But that’s no objection because, you can’t control yourself anyways. So the mere fact that you can’t extend control over everything you experience is no argument against the idea that you should still treat that as an extension of yourself.
For example, let’s say you have a long-standing feud with your brother. Well, is that a psychological problem? Is that him? Is it a problem in the objective world or is is it a problem in your field of being?
It is very useful to think that way because, you might ask what could you do to improve yourself? Well, let’s take one step backwards.
The first question might be -
Why should you even bother improving yourself? The answer to that is - so you don’t suffer anymore stupidly than you have to. And, maybe so others don’t have to either.
There’s a real injunction at the bottom of it. It is not some casual self-help doctrine. It is that, if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you.
And you could say “Well, I don’t care about that”. But that’s actually not true. You actually do care about that - because, if you’re in pain, you will care about it. So you do care about it - even if it’s just that negative way. It is very rare that you can find someone who’s in excruciating pain who would ever say well it would be no better if I was out of this. Pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn’t exist along with it. It’s incontrovertible.
So, you get your act together so that there isn’t any more stupid pain around you than necessary. So then the next question might be - well, how would you go about getting your act together?
How would you go about getting your act together?
The answer to that - and this is a phenomenological idea too -
Look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it.
You can do this in a room. It is quite fun to do. Just when you’re sitting in a room, maybe your bedroom, you can sit there and just sort of meditate on it. Think, okay, if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? And you have to ask yourself that. It is not a command. It is a genuine question. And things will pop out in the room that you know. Like, there’s a stack of papers over there and that is kind of bugging you. And you know that may be a little order there would be a good thing. There is some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven’t attended to for like six months. The room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren’t all tangled up the same way.
If you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment there’ll be all sorts of things that’ll pop out in it that you could just fix.
Well, if you are coming to see me for psychotherapy, this easiest thing for us to do first. It would just be to get you to organize your room. You think, well, is that psychotherapy? The answer is - well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being. The important thing is, start where you can start. If something announces itself to you - it is in need of repair that you could repair, then, fix it. If you fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different.
Fix the things that you repeat every day.
Because, people tend to think of those as trivial. You get up, you brush your teeth, you have your breakfast, you have your routines that you go through every day. Well, those probably constitute 50% of your life. People think, well, they’re mundane. I don’t need to pay attention to them. No, no, that’s exactly wrong. The things you do every day, those are the most important things you do. Hands-down. All you have to do is do the arithmetic and you will figure it out right away.
A hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being and there’s a lot less rubbish around and a lot fewer traps for you to step into.
Once you’ve got your mind and your emotions together, and once you’re acting that out, then you can extend what you’re willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent.
It’s a very interesting thing to do. I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat. Go back to where you live and sit down and think, okay, I’m gonna make this place better for half an hour. What should I do? You have to ask and a lot of things will just pop up. It’s partly because,
your mind is a very strange thing. As soon as you give it an aim, a genuine aim, it’ll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. That’s actually how you see to begin with.
If you set it a task, especially, you have to be genuine about it, which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together, and then you have to get them in your body, so you’re acting consistently.
You have to be genuine about the aim. But once you aim, the world will reconfigure itself around that aim - which is very strange - and it’s technically true.
There is a very good example for that. You watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the Black team. And while you’re doing that, a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don’t see it. If you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it - because, what it shows you is that, you see what you aim at. If you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of all your learning, that would be a good one.
You see what you aim at.
One inference you might draw from that is,
Be careful what you aim at. What you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you.
So if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way, one thing to ask is, are you aiming at the right thing? I’m not trying to reduce everybody’s problems to an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons. They get sick, they have accidents, there’s a random element to being. Thats for sure. You don’t want to take anything too far, even that particular phrase. You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people. But it’s still a great thing to ask.
What does cleaning up your room actually mean?
Everyone laughs about it if you tell them that you take cleaning your room seriously. Everyone’s mother has told them that a thousand times. But look at this explanation. You have a bit of chaotic potential right in front of you. In some sense, it is infinite in potential. The domain in which you can manipulate that may be rather restricted - if they are restrictions that are part and parcel of your existence. But you have your room. You might have contempt for that because it is a catastrophy. But you don’t have to show contempt towards it. You can think that it is not a room and that it is a place of potential. As soon as you understand that, it is not just a room anymore. The room that you see is your preconception of the space that you inhabit. Whats there is, the low resolution consequence of your assumption, and lazy habit, and blindness.