You Can’t Find Out Who You Are Until You Find Out Who You Are NOT

One of the moments I used (I don’t anymore!) to look back on with bitter disappointment was one Christmas when I was a teenager and wanted a telescope. My father and step-mother have a home on a hill overlooking the city of Los Angeles. Essentially, we had a 180 degree view of the city. It is really quite a gorgeous view. I loved to sit out in the backyard listening to Vin Scully and Ross Porter calling the play-by-play for Dodger baseball games on my pocket transistor radio while I peered through my dad’s binoculars at the lights surrounding Dodger Stadium about twelve miles off in the distance. I thought how cool it would be to get an even closer look at it, so I decided to ask for a telescope for Christmas – a powerful one.

Imagine my disappointment upon opening my last gift and finding that I’d been screwed. My father had bought me a book on astronomy. He told me if I showed enough interest in it, he would consider getting me a telescope. Astronomy?? I wanted to use it to look at Dodger Stadium! Maybe I would get lucky and have a chance to peer into a gorgeous model’s open bedroom window and catch her naked. Sigh… Astronomy…

I couldn’t believe that my father wouldn’t buy me a telescope. He’d bought me a TV, and a stereo, I got a decent allowance, after he would kick me out of my room at 5:00 P.M. on Sunday afternoon to go clean his car after I’d procrastinated on it all weekend. The nerve! Making me clean his car, can you believe it?

As you can probably tell, I lived in a pretty decent house, and I certainly had a better than average upbringing. In fact, it could be argued that I should have enjoyed my life the way it was, because I was certainly more privileged than probably 90% of the population. The thing was, I didn’t even realize it at the time. I truly thought that I was a pretty unlucky guy and here I had my own room, a television, a stereo. I shared a bathroom with my brother, and I thought my life was pretty stinky. Of course, I was a teenager. And, I didn’t have a point of reference.

I think I remember reading, a decade or so ago, from A Course In Miracles about having a point of reference. It went something like this: Imagine that you are in a room, you can’t see any walls, you are just in pure whiteness, that is it. You can’t even see yourself. How could you possible know who or what you are when you are only surrounded by whiteness. Now imagine you see a black dot. Now you have a point of reference. You can compare yourself to the black dot! You can think, the black dot cannot. Etc. Well, as teenagers, most of us are like the person surrounded by whiteness. All we know is what we are or have experienced. We don’t have a frame of reference. Those who are raised in rich families don’t know the value of their richness because they are only comparing to what they have already always known. It isn’t until later, or until some catastrophe happens, that we are able to see ourselves differently in reference to what we were before.

In Los Angeles, we mostly ate dinner at home, and every Friday night we were giving a couple of bucks and we were off to McDonalds for dinner. Mind you, we did occasionally go out to some nice restaurants down in Marina del Rey and in a now washed away favorite restaurant up the coast towards Topanga Canyon, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel the abundance that I didn’t realize I already had. When it comes right down to it, I was pretty lucky to have had the childhood that I had. But I couldn’t realize that until I found out what it was like living outside of that atmosphere.

One of the greatest gifts my parents gave me was the gift of forced independence. I am not going to lie, they all have certainly helped me out when I have been a pinch, but the over-riding message from them has always been, “You’re on your own, kid.” Honestly, I didn’t like it. This new-found “independence” meant that I had to make money for myself, now. I spent most of my twenties (and my thirties, for that matter) trying to find ways to make big money. I hated living from paycheck to paycheck. I wanted something more. I hated living in a room in my Mom’s house. I hated sharing an apartment with another person. So it was one big money-making scheme after another. And that is exactly what they were, schemes. I got sucked into all of them because I didn’t like being poor. After two unsatisfying stints as a teacher (junior high school and high school), I figured, “If life is going to be so boring, I might as well be making money.” I read a huge number of self help books related about making money quickly. I read a few that suggested a slower approach, but who has time to dilly dally?

Before I knew it, I’d hit forty years old, and a real estate venture I was struggling with went further south when I hit upon my biggest and most promising get rich scheme of them all – becoming a professional poker player! After a year of learning the game, I actually became a pretty decent poker player. In one six month period, I made over ten thousand dollars. I thought I was on my way to poker stardom. Then I hit an eight-month dry spell. After losing back half my winnings, I found myself floundering at rock bottom. It didn’t seem that it could get any worse, but it did. I lost my job; my only secure income.

In screen writing circles, writers tend to stick with a simple format for writing a screenplay which is the basis for most movies. It starts off with the introduction of the problem, then their is the suspense leading up to about the middle of the movie. Invariably every screenwriter needs to have what is called “The Dark Night of the Soul.” This is the point of the story where all seems lost. Blake Snyder details this step in his very popular book on screenwriting called Save the Cat.

Well, that was when I finally reached my first “dark night of the soul.” That’s right, my first one. You see, shortly after that moment, I was fortunate enough to obtain my dream job – I became an elementary school teacher. You can read more about that here. Shortly after becoming a substitute teacher, I was back to playing the game that had already hurt me twice. I was determined not to let it take my dream job away from me, however. It didn’t take my dream job away from me, I am happy to say, but it did make me less of a father than I could have been. I think I am a great father, don’t get me wrong, there were just times I would have been better if I hadn’t been playing poker.

I stopped playing poker for ten months. The last two were the most difficult because I still wanted to play. I finally acquiesced to my burning desires and started playing again. Once again, I ended up thriving in poker. I was making extra money to make up for in my mind, the standard measly teacher’s salary. While playing poker didn’t get me to a place of leisurely comfort, it certainly helped make things a bit easier – financially. But it was destroying so many other parts of my life. It was killing my spirit. My life was poker, poker, poker. Nothing else really mattered, even though I was doing a very good job as a teacher, and I was helping my kids succeed, the only thing that truly mattered was when was I going to be able to get back to the online poker tables?

One night, I was playing poker online and I was getting bad beat after bad beat. (A bad beat is when you go to show down with at least one other player and you have better odds of winning, but you lose anyway.) It wasn’t unlike any other night, but I just realized that each bad beat was killing me inside. Bad beats are a part of poker – they just have to be accepted. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d like to say that I had an epiphany in that moment, but I didn’t. I just sat there and stared at my computer screen trying to decide if I should play again or just withdraw all my money and call it quits. I had just about $700 in my online account, I can make $700 last for an eternity playing the way I normally play (I never put my money at great risk when I played). But I was beaten. I was soul-less. I felt defeated. I just didn’t see any purpose anymore. But I didn’t know what else I would do if I wasn’t playing poker. I’d like to say that the idea of taking my writing more seriously hit me right then. But it didn’t. The only thing that I knew for certain that night was that I was done playing poker. DONE. I withdrew my remaining funds and asked for a check to be sent to my home address, then closed my poker account. I’d finally hit rock bottom – at least as rock bottom as I was willing to go.

I knew that I was going to need to focus my energy in other areas. After all, I was playing poker 5-8 hours a night. On the weekend, when I didn’t have my son, I would put in 12-16 hour poker days. At first, I threw myself into my day job – school teacher. I planned, I studied, I worked on donation requests from family and friends, I planned some more, I worked hard to make my classroom as optimally prepared as I could make it. I really quite overdid it. I knew that if I focused only on one thing and that was it, I was bound to burn out. I decided I needed to do something else. So I started watching movies. I hadn’t watched much in the previous four years, so I had some catching up to do. It was just filling time. There is nothing spiritual about using your time to watch movies or to watch TV. I needed something meaningful. Something that was making me better as a person and that might just help other people. Writing and speaking have always been two passions of mine; passions which I had never fully explored because I was too busy trying to get rich quickly.

It took me everything that I had gone through to see that I had truly become someone I am NOT. The person I had become was a shell of a man. Outwardly, I looked fine to everyone – I think. I was a good teacher, and I worked hard to help my students learn. But that was all surface stuff. Deep down, I was truly a lost soul.

That soul has been reborn. The truth is that it hasn’t really been reborn; it was always there, but it was hiding behind the ego that I’d pumped up in importance so high that I didn’t even know I had a soul. There is a light shining within me again. I find myself following the things that I am passionate about – teaching, writing, speaking, and growing spiritually. Above all of those, I now realize, is growing spiritually. I am beginning to realize what that really means. I am in the early stages, but I finally know that I am moving in the right direction.

You see, I have done some spiritual growth in my past, but I have always postponed such growth at one point or another. I had things that I felt took precedence over my spiritual growth. Like finding a girlfriend, or making lots of money in a new venture. One thing I have noticed about spiritual growth is that it is very much like riding the proverbial bicycle. If you have done it before, it is pretty easy to get yourself “centered” again. You can begin the journey anew from where you last ended it. I understand now that it is not possible to grow as a spiritual being without growing spiritually! It is the key component. I can teach, but how am I going to teach? I can’t teach like an automaton, I will lose the interest of my students. I can’t write stuff, but for it to be meaningful, I have to come from a deeper place. I can’t just stand in front of a group and say words, their has to be passion in what I say. I cannot accomplish any of this without growing and understanding my own spiritual self. This I know for certain.

I would like to be able to say that everyone should just learn from my mistakes and avoid them. But I believe that reaching “the dark night of the soul” is essential to finding out who you really are. It is like seeing the dot surrounded by the whiteness. Now you have a reference point.

I’ve taken a lot of risks in my life, no doubt. Some of my risks were just plain stupid. But I needed to take them. If I just ambled along in life without trying to do something, I would never have gotten to the point I am at right now. It is because I reached those depths of darkness that I will now be able to climb to the light with a bit more of a skip in my walk. I truly believe that. Why? Because I understand something now. I understand that it is not about money. It is about LOVE. Money just doesn’t matter to me anymore because I can see that it cannot buy me happiness. Money – happiness = worthless. Happiness is what I strive for. In fact, BLISS is what I strive for. I know that we cannot live in a constant state of bliss, at least not in our present form of consciousness, but we can choose to experience it more and more. (Food for thought: What fun would bliss be if we didn’t also experience its opposite?) If money comes along for the ride, I am happy to receive it! But I will only receive it because I am doing something I love.

Have you had your dark night of the soul? Have you reached your deepest depths? Some people need to literally hit rock bottom in a physical sense to do this – they let their addictions over power them to the point that they have no choice but to become deeply in debt and homeless. Is that completely necessary? Absolutely not! It better not be at least, because I’ll never hit that!

In all seriousness, “dark night of the soul” does not have to mean you hit rock bottom, it can mean that you are ready to have a conversation with yourself. That is what I did with myself that night at my computer screen looking at my last virtual poker table. I came to a realization that what I was doing was not working AND that it never would – maybe, if I stuck with it, I would have made some money, but I knew one thing for certain, playing poker was never going to make me happy. That is the definition of a dark night of the soul. It is truly a beginning.

You see, in the movies, at least the ones that I like to watch, it doesn’t end with the dark night of the soul. It certainly builds up to that. But then a solution is found. The hero saves the day. Now, I am not for a minute trying to get you to think that our lives should be like a movie screenplay, they most certainly should not. However, there is one area where those of us who want to grow spiritually need to move. For too many people, the story ends with the dark night of the soul. Not only have they hit rock bottom, but they give up.

Don’t do that!

Just be completely honest with yourself now. What is it that makes you happy? Aren’t you better off doing what makes you happy and being poor than doing what makes you money and upsets or drains you? Aren’t you? That is what I have discovered. And that does not mean that I have accepted for myself a life of being poor. That is not necessary either. It just makes logical sense when you think about it – this is not just a quote – it is a tried and true statement:

Do what you love, and the money will follow.

“But, Dave, how do you know this? You haven’t experienced it,” you ask. True, I haven’t – yet. I might. I think I will. But I am not going to do it with thoughts of money first. I am going to do it with thoughts of love. This is my passion – this blog. I am writing it because I think I have learned a thing or two. I am writing it because I think I can effectively make a point. I am writing it because I believe it will help people to hear from someone like themselves being honest about the trials and tribulations of life. I am 44 years old. I could tell you that I have thrown away a decade or two getting to this point. But I don’t think that is true. I think everything I have experienced up to this point has a purpose. I am feeling the purpose as I write. I’d like to say that I struggled so that you might not have to. But I don’t believe that. I believe that we all need to struggle. We all need to be who we are not for at least a little while in our lives before we can be who we really are. My struggles are not over. I will write about them here. Join me on the Journey of a Spiritual Realist.