Stepping Away

Breaking the Spell (Chapter Seven)

Seven

Stepping Away

The technique of stepping away involves a person being able to detach from situations that they may find distracting, noisy, or confusing. What this suggests is that a person should be able to move inward for a short time when they feel it necessary to have some space away from tensions, or events that are antagonistic or disruptive to one’s state. It is also about stepping away from using all of one’s physical faculties in order to conserve energy. For example, if you are sitting quietly you don’t need all your senses on full awareness. Sometimes it can be beneficial to drop oneself into a lower running gear, as if ticking-over. A person should learn when to not only step back from physical engagements, but also from emotional attachments and other involvements of the senses. This can be achieved through various moments throughout the day: five minutes here or there. It can be done on the underground/subway, in the car or on a bus. You don’t need to detach to the point that you are not aware of external circumstances – this can be particularly dangerous if you are in the car or on the street! It is about shifting your priorities of internal and external involvement.

A person can successfully insulate themselves from unnecessary external noises and impacts by a reasonable and calm organized withdrawal. There is no need to put cotton wool in the ears. This technique can be used whenever it is felt to be appropriate – there is no hard and fast rule. As in everything, it depends upon a person’s circumstances and their state of being. It also allows for a person to create moments throughout the day for quiet reflection; moments to halt the flow of chatter. These can be small moments to be enjoyed, and that refreshes one mentally and physically. In a sense, it is like taking a break; only that the break is often in the middle of everyday life.

For example, you are travelling on the underground (subway/metro), and the carriage is packed full of commuters all squeezed together with an armada of free newspapers. There is the screech of brakes, the hum of the train, the almost inaudible buzz of music seeping through earphones. The situation is both disturbing and stressful. Why should you always begin your day like this? So: step back within yourself. Pull your focus inward, turn down some of your senses, recollect some fond memories, or recite some words to yourself. Don’t allow the external impacts to affect you, or to enter into your inner space.

There is no need to leave the world behind: you still need to be relatively alert in case there is a madman loose in the carriage. You only need to step away from the bustle of external impacts and impressions. In effect you are suspending a part of your social involvement. You are conserving your ‘self’ and your energies. Involved in this is also a measured degree of restraint. Exercising restraint means imposing self-discipline in that you are avoiding conditioned reactions and sudden impulses. As in being vigilant a person can, after observation, decide to refrain from exercising conditioned responses. Such impulses, judgments, preconceived attitudes are put to one side. This is a halting, or stepping away, from indulging in particular social terms of reference. A person is thus learning to restrain themselves at specific moments when conditioned factors and references come into play. Yet this technique also suggests that at times a physical withdrawal is necessary.

Being able to step away requires a person to exercise patience. It also means that sometimes inaction is as valuable as action (depending on the circumstance, of course!). So patience can be used to assess the situation. Some situations may demand instantaneous action, whereas others may be better served by the person restraining from involvement. Of course, there needs to be a modicum of common sense. If there is a car hurtling towards you, you get yourself out of the way as quickly as possible. This is no time for exercising patience with the car driver by letting yourself get hit and squashed. No one will say – ‘What a shame, yet they did manifest the most admirable patience with that car driver.’ They will most likely say – ‘What an idiot!’

So stepping away infers exercising patience and restraint under the right conditions until a situation is better understood. The alternative may be an impulsive response based on layers of conditioning. So if you are not sure about how to act within a particular situation, pull back a little and show some personal restraint. By doing this you are in fact looking after yourself. You are learning how to detach from unnecessary baggage, whether mental or emotional. This also helps a person to refrain from acts of pettiness and unwarranted attachment. Forms of pettiness and attachment are traits that quickly drain personal energies, and in the end become something that a person is unable to let go of. There is an old dervish story about this:

There were two dervishes travelling together. One of them was old and the other was the younger student. They had travelled together for many years; all the time the younger student believing he was learning to be righteous in the shadow of his teacher. His own belief in value of his actions gave him faith along his Path. One day both travellers came to a river crossing. Yet the water had recently risen and was waist high. At the side of the river was a young attractive lady, sensual yet distressed. She was afraid of water and sought help in crossing.

The younger student immediately shunned her as he felt it was not right for him to touch such a lady who was clearly disreputable. Suddenly, without hesitation, the older dervish picked up the young lady, slung her on his back, and carried the young woman across the river. When he got to the other side he put her down and carried on walking. Not a word was spoken.

The young dervish hurried after his teacher, surprised and bewildered. He could not believe that his teacher, whom he had trusted and followed all these years, could act in such an immodest way. The young man was fuming. He wanted to confront the older man yet knew it best to keep quiet until a suitable moment. All day though the younger student trailed behind the older man, shaking his head and cursing himself for wasting so many years. The whole day went on like this. The younger man’s faith was in turmoil. Finally, they came to a place where the older dervish wanted to rest for the night. They sat in silence for a while.

Knowingly, the older dervish finally smiled and said to the younger one: ‘Now you can tell me what is on your mind.’

The younger man spilled his day’s frustrations and anger; his incredulity at the other’s ‘non-spiritual’ behavior. When he had finished ranting the older dervish quietly turned to the young man and said:

‘I picked that woman up and carried her across the river. When I got to the other side I put her down. But you are still carrying her.’[1]

That which we cannot refrain from becomes our extra baggage. We are, as in the ancient edict, our own worst enemies. We often get pulled into situations by our own desire for attention and self-esteem. Yet by ‘inflating’ our self for others we diminish our own being. We need to be aware of when to give attention and when to step away and refrain from giving attention. People rarely understand the fact that each one of us craves attention. It is like food for us; from our childhood, to adulthood, and even to the end of our days. So stepping away is another technique for working with one’s attention: when to be active and when to be inactive. This swing between the two poles of activity and inactivity also marks out the strong presence of polarity within human lives.

Everyday life in the human world can be likened to a polarity game; a pendulum swing between opposites. We only know what is ‘hot’ because we understand what is ‘cold’; we under- stand there is ‘darkness’ because we have the experience of ‘light’. Things in the physical world are known by their opposition: forces that are active and passive exert themselves upon human lives. Everything and everybody manifests its own polarity. Spirit and matter are extreme degrees of the same essence. Hermetic teachings state that:

Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half- truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.[2]

Polarities trick us into the illusion of taking sides, such as choosing which is the ‘winning’ side and which the ‘losing’. Yet to emotionally feel victorious, or defeated, is an energetic state of our choosing; and one that will demand much from a person. A person pays for taking emotional sides. People spend considerable energies dividing the world into people who are good or evil, rich or poor, intelligent or stupid, important or insignificant. Often standards of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ depend upon individual or group criteria, usually handed down through social processes, and are not objective fact.

And all too often people spend much of their lives categorizing what they ‘like’ and what they ‘dislike’. A person ‘likes’ these clothes, this style, at this time; then ‘dislikes’ them at a later time. A person ‘likes’ this person at this time, then ‘dislikes’ them a moment later. This is an easy trap to fall into, a continuing cycle of likes/dislikes that force a person to make mental and emotional attachments that distract the attention and drain personal energies. Within such polarities a person is forced to make judgments. Sometimes it is better if a person refrains from judging. It is harder to find contentment and happiness within a world of continual judgments. Remember the words of the New Testament: ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?’ (Matthew 7:3). Too much external distraction takes the attention away from the real source within a person. And there are forces too in the physical world that deliberately create strongly polarized energies (fear, stress, tension) in order to disrupt the formation of balanced polarities.

So we should refrain from too easily jumping into the polarity game: step away and view the processes more objectively. In truth, it is not about our likes or dislikes. This is an emotional seesaw that sways a person from one encounter to the next. A person who moves between likes and dislikes will find it more difficult to achieve harmony in their life. Hakim Sanai, an 11th century Persian poet, wrote that:

‘Good’ and ‘evil’ have no meaning in the world of the Word: they are names, coined in the world of ‘me’ and ‘you’.[3]

Getting tied into polarities, between ‘beliefs and ‘non-beliefs’, is itself a subjective entanglement supplied by the physical world. After all, belief in ‘non-belief’ is still a belief. Polarity then is a way of fixing one’s attention onto externalities: we are generous or mean; we indulge or deny; we do ‘good’ or ‘bad’. However, it is often the case that by following attachment to a particular polarity a person is in fact indulging more. For example, the urge in some people to do ‘good’ (the ‘do-gooders’) is often a need to feel self-gratification, which is an internal reward. It is a form of greed. Yet greed to be generous is still greed; to indulge in our denial is still indulgence. Often, the ‘desire’ to be this or that is in fact a need to indulge our desires. There is no simple and pure act as long as a person exists through polarity. It is an illusion we rarely see and thus it draws a person in almost completely.

Polarity makes a person see events and challenges as a blessing or a curse. We rarely see them as simply events; moreover, events that we are asked to respond to. Being influenced by the swing of the pendulum that is polarity can create challenges and stress. It can be a struggle to try to find ‘one’s place’ within the contradictory nature of active and passive forces. By stepping away a person can practice a form of patience that allows them to have a more objective understanding of events and influences. We may not be able to escape the effects of polarity completely, yet we can shift ourselves to a more harmonious position. Physical life will ensure that the pendulum will continue to swing; only that with awareness and restraint we may escape being carried along with it:

Perhaps it is only by standing back, emotionally, and testing our assumptions that we can become more the masters of ourselves and correspondingly less the slaves of circumstance.[4]

Responsibility to oneself involves taking the opportunities to act properly, whether this means through action or inaction. A degree of restraint – and patience – can enable this capacity to function more effectively. To step away thus involves an awareness of physical and emotional participation within circumstances, events, experiences, and beliefs.

Stepping away also involves an inward move (or ‘shift’) for a short time when a person feels it necessary to detach from noisy or distracting situations. It is about being aware of how to conserve one’s personal energies. In a modern world that, for most, is an amplified ‘Attention Distracter’ (AD), this is a useful and functional technique. After all, as we walk our individual paths we need to preserve the clarity of our perceptions.

A TALE TO FINISH: Two Men

Two men who were unjustly imprisoned for a long time shared a cell together where they received all sorts of abuse and humiliation at the hands of the prison guards. Finally they were both freed and, after many years, ran into each other one day in the street. One of them asked the other:

‘Do you ever remember the guards and how they treated us?’

‘No, thank God, I’ve forgotten everything’, said the other. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ve continued hating them with all my strength’ he replied. His friend looked at him a moment, then said:

‘I feel for you. If so, it means you are still imprisoned.’

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Taken from the book ‘Breaking the Spell’ (published 2013/2020)

[1] Shah, I. (1982) Tales of the Dervishes. London: Octagon Press

[2] Three Initiates (2008) The Kybalion. London: Tarcher

[3] Sanai, H. (1974) The Walled Garden of Truth. London: Octagon Press

[4] Winn, D. (1983) The Manipulated Mind. London: Octagon Press