Alan Arkin - Out of My Mind

ASSUMPTIONS

B y the time I was about sixteen, I had a complete and impenetrable set of beliefs. I knew all about the world and how to deal with it and fix everybodys problems. These beliefs were mostly based on those of my parents, but at the time I was quite sure that they were my own.

Most of my parents beliefs werent too bad. They included deep feelings about social justice, peace in the world, the equality of the races, the need for more womens rights, the nobility of the working class, the importance of the arts and my parents thought the world would be made a lot better when everyone adopted their views. All you had to do to make people wake up was give them a couple of lectures and point them to the right books.

These ideas mostly made sense to me, the issues seemed good and worthwhile, and I embraced them with all my heart. For a time I even tried to join some organizations I thought might be on the right track, but I could never stand any of the people. Id leave after one meeting and never come back. I finally ended up confining my feelings about the nature of reality to passionate booze-filled, all-night discussions with like-minded friends or feeble arguments with schoolmates who were mostly in the same boat as I was incoherent advocates of their parents hashed-up ideas.

I had scorn for anyone who had religious feelings; I felt these pasty people to be weaklings incapable of facing the hard, cold facts about reality, and worse, tools of the powers that be. And after reading a book or two of philosophy I felt that too was a waste of timejustification for mediocrity from half-lived lives. I knew my logic was unassailable and I would have vigorously tried to change the whole rest of the world to my way of thinking.

By the time I was about thirty, all of this broke down. I still had some feeling for the old issues, but my emotional condition was so threadbare and fragile that I no longer had time or energy for thoughts of saving the world. My career was flourishing, I had achieved more than I ever hoped I was capable of, and yet when I was not actually engaged in my work, I might as well have been hung up in a closet. Nothing else in my life had been attended to, and as a result, nothing much else was working. Some inner compulsion plus the advice of a couple of concerned friends forced me to go into therapy, and the ideas I discovered in that process were so shocking and exciting that I soon gave up all of my earlier conceptions about how to fix everything and knew, finally and with all my heart, that each and every person in the world would be free and happy if they went into therapy and dealt with their complexes. I was so convinced of this, so passionate about my newfound discoveries, that I would have comfortably changed the whole rest of the world to my way of thinking. This lasted for at least five years.

By the time I was thirty-five, my sense of myself and the world had grown past what was contained in Freuds manifestos. I was occasionally starting to experience things that analysis had no understanding or interest in, and I became drawn to Eastern philosophy in order to find out what was happening to me and to finally get some concrete and tangible answers about the nature of things. Where I ended up in the next ten years was about 178 degrees away from all the prescriptions for the world that Id had in my teens. Its not as if I stopped caring about the issues I had initially felt needed addressing in the world, but my sense of who I was in relationship to them and the methodology involved in the process, and the timing and my emotional framework that lay beneath them had altered dramatically. Had I encountered my earlier self the unformed passionate youth of my teens and early twenties, I would have felt some compassion for him, and some compassion too for the slightly more sophisticated Freudian who was me at thirty, the young man with a couple of neuroses and complexes. I was so convinced of this new set of beliefs, so passionate about my newfound discoveries, that I would have comfortably tried to change the whole rest of the world to my way of thinking.

After a few years of this, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to stop believing in so many things. I looked back and realized that for the first half of my life Id been ready to change the world three times with three sets of beliefs, each one of which Id outgrown and discarded, so now it seemed a better idea to just shut up. I started to slowly let go of my needs for the rest of the world and began living more and more in my feelings and my intuitions and concentrating on the enormous faults within myself that needed addressing and correcting. As I did so, and it was a slow and painful process, I could see that whatever work I did on the inside was slowly taking root, making me saner, more patient, somewhat more compassionate and all of this began to effect a new view of the world which I tried hard not to concretize and make rules for. As a result, everything started to become more fluid, less frightening, and more surprising, both inside me and around me, and I started thinking maybe that was enough for a while. Belief systems, I started to realize, were wish lists. Things youd like to be true. They were not immutable laws. Most of the time no one knows whether their beliefs are real or not and yet most of us would, in fits of great passion, not only die to defend these beliefs but also sacrifice our wives, husbands, children, parents, and entire nations in the process. How many countless wars, riots, murders, insurrections, and revolutions have been based on passionately held beliefs? Wish lists. I wondered if anyone with a massive wish list had ever bothered to stop for a minute and asked, Hold on here... How do I know this really true? Am I absolutely sure about this? And what proof do I have? Maybe some of the madness could have stopped. So if I have a belief system left, it mostly revolves around stopping to breathe. Taking long slow breaths and asking myself at any given moment, Is any of this really true? Will it be still be true in half an hour? It saves me a lot of energy and wasted time and effort. In fact I sat at the computer a few years ago and decided to write a list of everything that I knew that was undeniably true. True without any possibility of doubt or controversy. I sat there for about an hour and a half. Finally, gingerly I came up with a two-word sentence. EVERYTHING CHANGES. I looked at it for a long while and couldnt find much issue with that idea. No way around it. It was a very short list. I sat for another half hour to see if anything could be added, to fill it out just a bit, and finally managed to come up with one more seemingly incontrovertible law. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH GARLIC. I put that one under the same scrutiny as I had the first one, and it too seemed to hold up. So those two items have pretty much remained my credo for the last several years. Id like to add to it, to flesh it out, but so far it hasnt seemed possible, or even necessary, and Im a hell of a lot happier person than I was when I had a lot of rules and knew how to fix the world. In fact, just the fact of my happiness seems to have done more good to me, my immediate surroundings, and the people Im in intimate contact with than all the laws I was living by in my earlier incarnations. My work with that thought is to keep it from turning into another law. What follows is not a manifesto, not a prescription for the worldinstead its just a few descriptions of some of what Ive experienced, seen, and heard that have moved me to continue in a path of what will hopefully be less and less dogma and greater and greater flexibility and surprise.

The events that follow are all true. There was no plan to turn them into a book. I began writing them down as part of an exercise given in a workshop I took in Santa Fe some years ago and they expanded almost by themselves. Im sure that stories like the ones that follow occur far more frequently than we know, but I think most people relegate them to an overactive fantasy life, or a momentary hallucination or simply dismiss them because they dont fit into a mundane and comfortable conception of the way things are. For me they represent a handhold into a connection we have with a reality that is deeper, broader, and more inspiring than anything we can possibly conceive. Trying to stay connected to the reality these stories hint at helps me to keep focused on the infinite majesty and endless possibilities that are always available to us. I hope they contribute in some small way to your own interior adventures.