Tony Robbins called it “passion.” Many people call it “purpose.” What we are all seeking in our lives is inspiration–to feel alive, energized, engaged in meaningful creative activity. What is inspiration, and where does it come from?
Many of us seek inspiration in inspiring quotes, motivational audio programs, passionate self-development books, and enthusiastic “breakthrough” weekend workshops. The very basis of the massive field of personal development could be seen as helping people find this inspiration, this passion, this purpose, in every aspect of life, and in an ongoing way. The gurus of personal development usually claim to have found inspiration nirvana–having once been in your shoes–and they alone can show you the path to wealth, health, and happiness.
Those who aren’t consumers of motivational materials often ask why people read book after book and attend seminar after seminar? Does the stuff not work? I myself spent thousands of dollars on personal development books, audio, video, and seminars. Often I’d buy books and only read the first few pages before buying another. Meanwhile I was in severe debt from college loans and credit cards, and could not find meaningful, inspiring work. I hoped that I could be like the stories in the beginning of each of those books: broke, lonely loser with meaningless life becomes mega-success, gets the babes, and obtains omnipotence…in 30 days.
I thought I was alone in my feeling the shame that came along with this pattern, but later I found that this is a typical picture of many consumers of personal development products. “The last product was good, but the effects faded. But THIS one will finally save me…” While I’ve stopped the irresponsible spending, the debt, career challenges, and desire for ongoing inspiration remain.
Why are we so desperately seeking inspiration? Could it be that we have lost it?
God is Dead
The dominant scientific worldview posits that the Universe was created from a random explosion and everything is just bits of meaningless matter bouncing around, selfish genes mutating and fighting for survival in a competitive deadly game, and rational actors maximizing their rational self-interest in a resource scarce economy. This belief system is so deeply entrenched, it is hard to imagine an alternative explanation of the universe ever existed or could exist.
There is no room in this explanation for God, spirit, or any subjective experience whatsoever. Until the cognitive turn in psychology, behaviorism denied that mind was more than a mere “epiphenomenon,” and current neuroscience is confident that someday, all subjective phenomena will be ultimately reducible to firing neurons and moving chemicals. This means that things like soul, spirit, beauty, and meaning don’t have any place in our modern understanding of things.
Nietzsche declared “God is dead” to describe this philosophical turn. We killed God as an explanation of the Universe and replaced Him with mere meaningless matter. In it’s place, the German philosopher anticipated the personal development movement by creating the idea of the ubermench (Uberman or Superman). Everyone is now their own personal superhero, beyond Good and Evil, pursuing their own happiness apart from everyone else and the religious institutions that used to collectively bind us together.
Some have decided to retreat from modern science and instead explain the universe in terms of a literal interpretation of a holy book, thus isolating themselves from and pitting themselves against the modern world. Others attend lifeless church services, where God is now an absent ethereal nothingness, totally irrelevant to daily life and not found anywhere in the physical world nor in subjective experience.
Enter personal development.
We intuit that our lives are meaningless, that our religions can’t answer the big questions, and we desperately seek something to fill the hole in our soul. Our jobs are tedious, our marriages loveless, our successes empty. We have no real community anymore, our families live in other towns, and our endless online “friends” never quite live up to the real thing despite the promises of our hyper-connected age. We constantly worry about survival, attempting to regain the feelings of safety and nourishment of nursing at our mother’s breast with the warm, sweet milk of a Starbucks. The caffeine drives us on to push, push, push harder to make sure that we stand out and therefore can survive as the winners in a zero-sum game.
We seek to become Ubermen and Uberwomen. Some of us succeed in developing super powers of personal achievement and excellence in our quests to attain liberation through accumulating personal wealth (for the benefit of others, we tell ourselves). Others of us fail and drop out completely, but there is nowhere to go, so we end up competing to be the most spiritual, the most environmentally friendly, the most 100% raw, conscious, limber, polyamorous, enlightened triathlete in all of Colorado, no, the world!
We accumulate online “friends,” blog subscribers, and Twitter followers like an addict, because indeed we are addicted, as we cannot truly get our needs met for connection, love, trust, touch, and affection in our culture of alienation, separateness, and meaninglessness. Or we connect intensely in dramatic weekend workshops, hugging and high-fiving, crying and laughing, sharing our deepest wounds with total strangers, promising to “stay in touch” only to feel so alone again when we return home.
The Geek word for soul is “psyche” as in psychology or psychotherapy. But there is no room for soul in a world of matter. Is it any wonder that there is an epidemic of new “diseases” such as ADHD, depression, OCD, autism, bipolar illness, etc.? Our souls are sick.
Pharmaceutical companies explain that all our unhappiness is due to “lack of drugs” since we are just brains in bodies. So we take Paxil, Prozac, Ibuprophen–anything to not feel the constant anxiety, the chronic pain of our soulless society. We feed amphetamines (Ritalin) to our kids who refuse to cooperate with the program of soul-sucking schooling so that they too can be well-prepared for a meaningless career of empty achievement. The sensitive among us develop chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or autoimmune disorders, a metaphor for the self-destruction our lives consist of in a civilization of runaway growth that is toxic to itself.
The Origins of Inspiration
The word “inspiration” comes from the same root as “respiration.” To inspire has a number of definitions related to breathing, creativity, influence, aliveness, and religious experience. From the etymology of the words inspire and inspiration, we see that inspire could mean “to bring in spirit” or “to bring in breath,” as breath and spirit come from the same word.
“Enthusiasm” similarly comes from the Greek enthousiasmos which means a range of things from “to be inspired by a god,” “to be filled with the Spirit,” and “to be possessed.” Secular psychology calls this “flow” or “creativity.” Christians call it “to be filled with the Holy Spirit.” The word “enthusiasm” has a fascinating history in the Christian church, from initially being a good thing when someone experienced the shaking, quaking, and shouting of joy and aliveness. Later “enthusiasm” was used pejoratively, meaning religious fanaticism, irrational craziness.
We have forgotten what joy looks like. Watch some kids playing–they make nonsense words, sing spontaneous songs, dance wildly, draw freely, laugh and scream and cry easily. By the time they are teenagers, we’ve sucked most of the soul out of them. Now they fall asleep in class, have no idea what they want to be when they grow up, and begin feeling the alienation and anxiety of modern meaninglessness. If an adult continues to express joy, playfulness, and creativity like a child, we either lock him up and give him “antipsychotics” or call him a creative genius.
Breath, aliveness, and spirit
Inspiration is the natural and automatic drawing in of spirited experience, just as inhalation is the natural drawing in of breath. You cannot force inspiration any more than you can force an inhale. Just as inhalation happens naturally as long as you don’t try to control it, inspiration also happens naturally and is just as near and easily available.
We all know that if you want to feel happy, you can simply smile and you’ll start to feel happy. But many of us also intuit that this is a rather superficial kind of happiness, and it would be a pretty depressing life if this was the only way you had to feel happy. This kind of physiological control is the basis of Tony Robbins’ “state management” which he adopted from the field of NLP. State management is another form of control, as if we need to do something to be inspired. I use Robbins as an example because his main shtick is “living with passion,” and because of this, he exemplifies the motivation industry’s approach to inspiration.
Robbins’ “passion” is equivalent to inspiration. He recommends discovering which you love to bring out this inspiration naturally, but also advocates forcing a “peak state” of passion through violent physical movements (”power moves”), breathing, shouting “YES!”, etc.
I was a Robbins devotee for several years and found that this method does indeed “work,” but not without severe short-term and especially long-term consequences. It is self-reinforcing and addictive in that once you pump adrenaline and serotonin through your body through forced inspiration, you temporarily feel good, but then you need continual maintenance to continue to feel good.
This is the very structure of the motivation industry–get you hyped, crash, get hyped again, etc. Hence why motivation is as popular as Starbucks.
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing - that’s why we recommend it daily.” ~ Zig Ziglar
Forced inspiration is more like caffeine than mental hygiene. It pumps you up for a time, then you crash. Natural inspiration is not like bathing either–it’s more like breathing! There is nothing you have to do except get out of the way and relax and your breath comes in naturally.
Forced inspiration doesn’t last because you aren’t addressing deeper needs that the pain of unhappiness is pointing towards. Meeting needs feels good, but usually not in a big, dramatic, forced way. Artificial inspiration has about as much aliveness in it as a Twinkie. Natural inspiration comes easily and automatically when you stop trying to control it and just allow it to come.
Robbins criticizes affirmations as not being effective by demonstrating what he sees people doing by saying “I’m happy, I’m happy, I’m happy” with a scowl on his face and an angry tone of voice. He encourages you to instead change your physiology so that what you say appears congruent. Usually he does this by shouting affirmations (what he calls “incantations”) with an angry intensity in his voice and a face like a warrior prepared to kill you if you get in the way of his goals. But being a better actor doesn’t mean one is congruent, it just means you are more skilled at forcefully dominating the parts of yourself that object to this superficial happiness.
Buddha said it first: life is suffering. But Buddhism is not a pessimistic philosophy. Accept suffering and you are free. Let go of forcing and controlling and you’ll breathe in spirit.
“What’s full of itself is not full of spirit” says psychotherapist and shaman Bradford Keeney. This is certainly the case with Mr. Robbins of the Anthony Robbins Companies, as well as James Arthur Ray of James Ray International and other motivation gurus who have penetrated their “personal brands” into the souls of inspiration seekers everywhere.
But not to pick on Mr. Robbins, he’s just made explicit what we do to ourselves all the time. “Put on a happy face,” “push yourself to succeed,” “you’ve got to put in 10,000 hours to master something.” All these and more are ways of forcing inspiration, as if we thought that since breathing in keeps us alive, if only we could breathe twice as much air in and never let it go! That way we’d always feel alive and healthy.
Wild, Mysterious Inspiration
Inspiration comes from the same place that dreams come from. It is a place beyond understanding, knowing, and controlling.
Inspiration is born of naturalness, of being, of attunement to spirit. When you stop controlling and start listening, inspiration naturally arises.
Inspiration is also wild, mysterious, and unknowable. Inspiration is the stuff of pure creativity. It cannot be measured, predicted, or controlled.
Our scientific paradigm rests on the assumption that everything real can be measured and explained with numbers, logic, and words, and that nothing “essential” is left out. But what is left out is of utmost importance to living an inspired, meaningful life.
Do not seek to force inspiration. Do not repress any part of your nature either. Appreciate everything. Seek to see the sacredness and beauty in all things, in all moments, in all feelings and experiences. Follow your bliss. Feel your pain. Sing the blues. Find hope not in blind faith but in the desperation that comes from fully feeling the weight of the world and the enormity of the crises we are facing.
Be wild. Stop making sense and start making nonsense. Allow your breath to come in as your life and the world again becomes soulful, inspired, full of mystery and beauty, awe and wonder. Allow your breath to go out as you let go of everything and die to each moment, so that the next moment may be fresh, entirely new and alive.