Wouldn’t it be nice to know where to look to find a solution to a problem, any problem, all of the time? Before I continue on about reverie and it’s deep significance to happiness, I want to introduce Dr. David R. Hawkins and his most recent book Transcending the Levels of Consciousness – The Stairway to Enlightenment.

Hawkins is a psychiatrist who, in the early 90’s, developed what he called a map of the levels of consciousness, based upon a calibration system that uses a measure of truth or falsehood adapted from kinesiology. The lowest level on the scale is shame (20) and the highest is enlightenment (1000).

Among the many valuable things that Hawkins teaches is that solutions to the problems of one level are to be found at a higher level. Taken both as a principle and a tool, this idea can move you quickly out of a problem into a solution. The trick is to be accurate in finding the next level. Hawkins’ map is very handy in this regard.

Stated in another way, this means moving from the specific to the more universal. At the vocational level, you can look for ways to migrate your skills upward to broader applications, for example going from labor to management. At the psychological level, this means moving from destructive emotions to generative emotions. At the economic level, this means moving from poverty to wealth.

It helps to know that there is a sequence involved. It also helps to remember that at lower levels the solutions are still very basic. For example, to tell a person who is stuck in shame to go meditate and get enlightened won’t compute. In the same way, a middle manager can’t become a functional CEO overnight. This process isn’t necessarily rigid and lock-step, but it does require that you look beyond your current circumstance for the appropriate next step.

This may not be as easy as it sounds. Lacking a certain amount of introspection and clarity, one is usually dependent upon outside sources for help. Fortunately, these sources are abundant. In my own experience, outside input has been absolutely necessary. I’ve also found that assistance comes your way almost as soon as you make up your mind to look for it.

Eventually, it becomes very productive to engage this process all of the time, not just when you feel stuck, bogged down or unhappy. I will regularly look at what I’m doing, the skills, the emotional background, the results and begin to contemplate how I can migrate these things to a higher level. Often I pull out Hawkins’ map of consciousness for guidance. Or talk with trusted friends. The conversation won’t be about what I’m doing wrong. It’s about what I’m doing right.

When you latch on to what you’re doing right, you can follow the path of least resistance. You can really only build on what you are, not what you haven’t been able to be. As you go to higher levels, you find that you have more in common with others, which leads to even more solutions - except the solutions are now called opportunities.

Here’s an example of how this works in the world of business: “the owners of a variety of ordinary businesses - a small chain of coffee shops or temporary help agencies, for example - manage to expand these family operations with the help of venture capital and private equity firms, eventually selling them or taking them public in a marketplace that rewards them with huge sums. John J. Moon, a managing director of Metalmark Capital, a private equity firm, explains how this process works. “Let’s say we buy a small pizza parlor chain from an entrepreneur for $10 million,” said Mr. Moon, who at 39, is already among the very rich. “We make it more efficient, we build it from 10 stores to 100 and we sell it to Domino’s for $50 million.” (N.Y. Times)

Note the direction here – expansion. I my view, as in Hawkins’, expansion is where consciousness, and we humans, want to go. We each play a part in this process. Each of us has a next higher level awaiting our arrival.

Reverie gets a bad rap, if it gets a rap at all. So often confused with dreams, and set aside in the shadows of the great dramas of life, reverie has little to show for itself in the annals of psychology. Bachelard took it upon himself to redeem reverie.

As soon as I started to read The Poetics of Reverie, I knew exactly what Bachelard was talking about. If you place yourself as a child, lying on a hill on a clear day, staring at the sky, then you have some sense of reverie.

If you understand life as an interplay of forces that expand against forces that contract, then you know that reverie expands, while reality contracts. Without Bachelard, reality wins. This is the Freudian idea. With Bachelard, reverie returns to regain its essential position of balancing reality. He calls it the irreality function.

As Bachelard was fond of saying, there is no future without imagination. Fortunately, most of us won’t accept a reality without a future. Cormac McCarthy’s recent novel The Road is the most eloquent testimony to this fact to come along in years. Read it and you will clearly understand the narrow difference between hopeless and hopeful.

Imagination situates itself in childhood for the simple reason that it is most redeemable there. Childhood is our eternal metaphor for innocent perception, for uncomplicated life, for happiness and a hopeful future. Childhood is the go-to place for our dreams. How often you hear it said: “When I was a child I wanted to be a ….”

Psychological dysfunction, neurosis, psychic trauma, addiction, suffering – none of these offers a future to build on. As Bachelard puts it, “It is striking that the most favorable field for receiving the consciousness of freedom is none other than reverie. To grasp this liberty when it intervenes in a child’s reverie is paradoxical only if one forgets that we still dream of liberty as we dreamed of it when we were children. What other psychological freedom do we have than the freedom to dream? Psychologically speaking, it is in reverie that we are free beings.” (Poetics of Reverie)

This then is the task: if we wish to grow then we must redeem the dreams of childhood.

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher and phenomenologist who wrote and taught from the 1920’s until his death in 1962. The extent of the influence of his ideas is difficult to gauge and he is little known in the U.S., but in my mind he is essential to anyone who wishes to deeply understand human psychology and the power of imagination in life.

Bachelard wrote extensively about imagination and reverie. He uses these two words almost interchangeably and he treats imagination as a psychological foundation, much in the way Freud treated eros and death as foundations. The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie, and Fragments of A Poetics of Fire are among the several books in which he explores the imagination, by examining how poets imagine the subject at hand: space, fire, water, earth, reverie and so on.

Steeped as we have become in the ethos of psychoanalysis, self-help and psychotropic drug intervention, it is hard to conceive how radical Bachelard’s ideas about psychology really are. Bachelard uses two remarkable arguments to justify his positioning of the imagination as prior to the ego and more central to human nature than the fear of death.

The first is that the thing we ordinarily call the self is essentially unshaped. Says Bachelard, “ Life within us is neither an essence to be touched at will nor a containable entity. The human being is a swarm of beings. Human beings are never fixed in space or time as others think, and are not to be found even where they themselves tell others to inquire.” (Fragments of a Poetics of Fire)

It’s as if eros, sexuality, family, work, even death and grief are pieces of clay in the hands of imagination; they are passive and shapeless until brought under the power of imagination and given dimension.

I find this idea rather liberating. It has been invaluable to me on several occasions over the past five years, as I constructed new direction in my life out of divorce, the death of my father, a complete change of career and the relinquishment of my role as a parent, as my children have come of age.

Giving your life and your fate over to the power of your imagination has the remarkable effect of balancing your being. Living becomes an experience of satisfaction. I’ll come back to this in a later post, as I go into Bachelard’s second argument for the primacy of imagination.

Ever find yourself stuck in something, unable to let go of it? Stuck in a job? Stuck in a feud? Stuck In a miserable relationship? When I get stuck, I go look for the something else I’m really stuck on. It’s invariably an emotional loss of some kind. Being stuck, not letting go… it’s about a loss that hasn’t been grieved enough. At least, that’s what I discovered for myself.

Know anybody who cut’s bait way too soon, who never stays long enough to catch the big fish? A person who moves on without looking back? This is the other side of the coin, a refusal to acknowledge loss at all.

Why am I talking about this? Well, for starters it’s autumn and Halloween has just passed. The losers in the mid-term elections have publicly conceded their defeat. This is the season of passing on, the season of gray, cloudy days and melancholy. I’ve found myself cleaning the emotional closets, letting my dreams guide the way. Two nights in a row I dreamed about old jobs, old bosses, from decades ago. That got my attention!

Maybe there were some feelings left behind that needed attention. I spent some time just allowing the losses I experienced in those situations come to the surface. I let myself feel the sadness of the transition in each situation and mourn the loss I never quite felt at the time. When I finished, I felt clean and whole and renewed. Interesting. I really didn’t know what to expect. The next day I got going on a couple of projects that had languished. No coincidence I concluded.

This reminds me of a passage from “The Listener”, the autobiography by the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis.

“A human voice is one that bears the awareness of death – that once-only-once-and-never-again resonance. Sex and death, eternal antagonists, forever contending, forever overturning and contradicting each other. And beyond these difficult two, that impossible third, love, inextricably commingled.”

Recently I bought a new bike. I changed my context. In the world of bicycling, the change was fairly significant, from slow steel to fast carbon. But the most important changes for me personally came from the change of context. The new bike allowed me to enter a whole new world in terms of training and goals. This is the new context.

For starters, I can train longer and cover more distance. I can do specific types of training, such as hill climbing, more efficiently, thus increasing my riding strength. And I can keep pace with a stronger group of riders now, thus pushing me to improve my endurance and riding technique.

As to goals, I’ve got a bigger horizon now. I realize that I have much more work ahead before I plateau. This year is the second of a four year training plan I made for myself. Now I’m revising the plan. I’ve signed up to train on some mountain rides with my buddies Will, Rob & Chad in Oklahoma. And I’ll train next summer for more ambitious rides, 200K instead of 100K.

Out of this new context I’ve gotten some good results already. Above all is a greater sense of freedom. Simply put, I can do more than I could before. I also feel more confident, in part because my sense of purpose has been reinforced, as well as having greater longevity.

Greater freedom. Strength of purpose. Longevity of effort. These breathe light into life.

Bill Clinton has got something figured out. But before we get to that, here’s a brainteaser: If you had an extra $3 or $4 billion to give away, what would you do?

This past week in New York, the 42nd President gathered a few of his most well-heeled acquaintances & friends for the Clinton Global Initiative, where Laura Bush, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and Hillary proposed a variety of ways for you to do something useful with your money. Not something useful for you personally, but something useful for humanity.

Ironically, that’s a big step in the gimme a (tax) break world of philanthropy. Perhaps an even bigger step is the amount of money committed at the CGI – 215 commitments totaling $7.3 billion, including a $3 billion chunk from Sir Richard Branson. This kind of money goes way beyond building a new library at the alma mater; this is Mergers & Acquisitions level!

And the names lighting up the marquee are worth noting, too. Bill & Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, and Michael Bloomberg head up an elite group—even in the billionaire’s club. Serious people making serious contributions. Clinton has made himself into a front man for this club and for good reasons that are not about politics, or even money.

He recognizes, as do the Gates and their friends, that global health and welfare initiatives cannot succeed on dollars alone. First-class talent is required for them to achieve success, and nothing attracts talent like money and names like Gates or Buffet or Clinton. These guys understand that the type of talent that succeeds in the world’s top corporations and financial institutions, turned toward solving the problems of AIDS, malaria, poverty, malnutrition, and chronic economic underdevelopment, will make all the difference in these battles.

It is these conditions that slow world economic (and human) development, and whether you feel it directly or not, they adversely affect every one of us.

So what has William Jefferson Clinton got figured out? He’s figured out that we are at a tipping point, where a relative few can influence the whole, for the better.

This leaves one final question: Lacking a $billion or two, what will I do to make a better world?

My friend Caroline and I were walking the other day. She’s a very busy mom. Two young girls, a great husband with a knack for being caught up in business and his consuming passion, triathlon, and an extended network of friends and family who all would like a little more of her time.

But before the deluge Caroline was a very successful creative professional in the advertising business. The day we were walking she reminisced about that former life and wondered aloud if, now that the girls are in school all day, she should return to the business world.

“The longer I stay out, the more I worry that my skills are eroding” she said. Not that she doesn’t love her vocation as a mother, but time moves quickly in the advertising world. How soon will the value of her college degree and her job experience diminish to the point she has to start from scratch?

At this stage, Caroline isn’t ready to make a move, it’s simply a matter of taking the issues out of her head and talking to someone about it. This is, however, an excellent time to make a serious review of the situation and to begin to develop some fresh thinking.

Here’s what I would recommend to Caroline:

1 – Don’t look back. In too many ways to enumerate, the old job is gone. Which is another way of saying that the old Caroline is gone.

2 – Expand yourself. By this I mean that it’s time to reinvent yourself using a more diverse palette, one which includes even more of your core talents than before.

3 – Seek self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment comes from putting as much of your talent and ability to work as possible, which means that you’ve got to dig hard to find the important stuff within. Self-fulfillment also comes when you work in accordance with your deepest, most cherished values. It is the merging of your core talents with your core values to produce benefit for all concerned.

Just before Caroline and I finished our walk, she began to tell me about her love of drawing and painting. As I suspected, she touched on the most important thing last. This signaled to me that she had begun to draw near to her home, so to speak. She was talking about the talent that matters to her most. This, it seemed to me, was where she would solve her dilemma.

Stereotypes are pretty powerful images for most of us; we tend to live them every day without even thinking about it. We like to dress a certain way, to look the part. We like to play in the same social arena year after year. At some point, conformity becomes a cross between a baby blanket and a straight jacket. Ever felt that way?

Easing out of a stereotype takes a little doing, but it will help get you into the ME niche. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Every two or three years my friend Billy has to shake off the old skin. He’ll kick his way through the office door and hit the road for a few weeks. Here’s his itinerary (unedited) for this year:

* Driving Dallas to Chicago first to area outside Oklahoma City (grandma visit 2 days) next to Tulsa 1-2 days (reputed hippest town in Oklahoma) thru Ozarks on to Springfield, Mo (visit HS buddy 1-2 days) hit the road to Chicago-haven’t figured out yet what’s b/w Mizzu & Chicago so there may be some stops. Chicago for 2-3 days (lake Michigan, museums, Cubs day game).

Fly Chicago to Phila or Boston for 1-2 days walking one of these towns. Take a train to NYC. Plan on staying for 5-7 days at friends’ places. Maybe Hamptons Labor Day weekend if buddy w/house up there comes up. If still time fly to N. Carolina 1-2 days in Ashville then off to the mountains to visit another HS buddy who’s camp director for children’s Summer Christian camp. Fly back to Dallas. *

You can see that Billy has a mix of scripting and serendipity woven into this trip. Before he left, he told me he was a little anxious about how it would go, but that he was willing to gamble on a little adventure cropping up and to do that he had to leave the plan open ended.

The cool thing about this is that Billy is doing what I call Innertuition – he’s teaching himself about his ME niche by allowing the unplanned, unscripted, non-conforming stuff a place in his life. He’s been to Argentina, Cuba and Mexico using this same mix of scripted and unscripted travel – without fail something interesting happens. He returns with a new perspective on life and a new skin.

The ME niche really starts to really make sense as you let go of some of your stereotypes and face life using more and more of your inner resources. The trick is to start at a place where you don’t stir up huge amounts of anxiety and risk – rather you stir up feelings of challenge, engagement and learning. Be smart about it and honest with yourself. Weigh your feelings – is the challenge and interest worth the anxiety and fear you may feel? Come up with something that keeps a sense of balance, without being too tame.

So…. if you were to take your Innertuition for a trip, where would YOU go?

How to choose which option to work on first, once you’ve made your list of things you want to change? There are several ways to accomplish this. I will eventually cover a couple of methods, but I’ll start first with the “bubble sort”, a method that is both logical and simple to use.

(Warning! For those of you who hate all things logical, and love intuitive, non-linear process, the bubble sort may not be for you! But hang in; we’ll get to your way in an upcoming post.)

Here’s how a bubble sort works: take your list of changes and organize it as shown below. Compare the first option in each line to the others.

Option 1 to 2,3,4,5
Option 2 to 3,4,5
Option 3 to 4,5
Option 4 to 5

Circle the option you prefer most in each sort. Remember that you are making the comparison to the first option in each line. Say, for example, these are the results: 2,4,3,5. Now, based on the first round, re-sort these four options.

2 < 4
3 > 4, 5

Since you prefer 4 to 2, and 3 to both 4 & 5, option 3 is thus the most preferred option.

You may then sort again, eliminating the most preferred option each time, until you have arrived at a hierarchy of all five options, from most to least preferred.

Try the bubble sort with paint chips or swatches of fabric to get a feel for what a wonderful tool this is for making comparisons. (If you’ve ever looked a group of paint chips, you know how frustrating it is to choose the color you like best.)

Here’s a good real-world example of using a bubble sort. One of my lawyer friends uses the bubble sort to present evidence in trial, organizing each piece of evidence from most to least compelling. He finds it a very effective tool, because juries tend to focus on the first three or four pieces of evidence presented and after that they begin to lose track.

Once you’ve tried the bubble sort on your list of things you’d like to change in your life, take a look at your most preferred option. You are now ready to find the stepping stones you need to make that change!

What’s Dot2Dot? It’s about the how-to’s of making a change in your life - like crossing across a river by stepping from rock to rock. Dot2Dot works like that, moving from one good step to the next.

How do you know what step to take? We’ll get to that later, but first you’ve got to decide to cross the river – how does that happen?

First, there are life traumas: addictions, divorce, death of a loved one, termination from a job, serious illness, accidents, getting caught up in some bad behavior. These are all connected in some way to pain and suffering, to a life malfunctioning. If you’ve had enough, you’ll be ready to change. Yet remember - the rewards for recovery from these situations are among the greatest a person can receive - this is a fact.

There are also less obvious paths to change - an example would be a person who stays bolted to the same job year after year, in spite of feeling completely dissatisfied and alienated by the work. The tail end of this scenario is burnout and spiritual exhaustion. Come the point of exhaustion and again the upside is that you are ripe and ready to change.

And there are people who change simply because they want to – they are functioning well, but know they can do even more. They want to expand, to take on more responsibility, to grow their business, use more than one talent, to sample more of the fruit of life. But first, they need to get past a few roadblocks.

Wherever you are on this spectrum, Dot2Dot will give you some idea of what you need to learn in order to cross the river and to know which rocks are slippery and which are safe. This can save you a lot of time.

If you’d like to try the first stone to step onto, here’s one I like to use: make a list of the five most important changes you would like to make in your life. Rank the list in terms of priority and be explicit about what system of priority you are using. Then examine your priority system closely and be certain it is the one you want to use. Once completed, this exercise will give you a pretty clear picture of where to begin making changes.

The next entry will contain some suggestions for the second step.