Episode 136 - Should Dissonance Be Avoided?

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[Music] our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story dissonance should be avoided so i had this roommate in college named jared and he was a catholic guy and i was an evangelical fervent missionary of all who were not evangelicals and he was my roommate and it was my first kind of close relationship really with anybody who wasn't an evangelical christian and we would talk about god and and i was always at the beginning especially it was kind of like always a little like but you know you're you're catholic or you're like worshiping idols right you pray to mary and you don't fully get the thing um but then the more we talked i would find out like he really loved jesus and i was like oh man i guess maybe he's a christian you know and um i had these experiences with and talking with him and it was starting to open me up but then it came to a head at this one point because he was telling me about his family who involved and they were all christian except for his dad and he had told me enough about his dad i knew his dad was a really loving great guy he was like a rocket scientist um brilliant mind good heart loved the family but he just wasn't interested in religion he was an atheist and i had this feeling i remember like these two incredibly strong impulses and beliefs internally one was i i knew that god was good and fair and kind and loving and loved all of his children and but then on the other hand i knew that the word of god was true and that salvation could only come to those who believe i had these two very strong complete beliefs um and then in this moment where he's talking to me about his dad and he goes you don't think my dad's gonna go to hell right i mean he's a loving man he he serves us isn't that what god is asking us to do and so whatever this thing kind of came to a head in me where these two very strong energies and beliefs were completely in contradiction and and it was it was a kind of this watershed like moment for me as i look back of really what am i gonna which one of these am i gonna lean into how how can these coexist how can these two separate contradictory pieces of dissonance um exist in the same space in my in my mind in my body and as i think back of that's just one story that came to my mind as i begin to think about this idea of living with dissonance and and not rejecting dissonance as something that is necessarily inherently bad or needing to be avoided um but it made me wonder like what do we do with dissonance when we recognize it in ourselves how do we think about it how do we approach it because i know for me those moments that have created dissonance where i find these apparently contradictory things either within myself or within community um in my experience there they've been an invitation to newness to grow to make more space for that dissonance to create something new but that's hard and it's uncomfortable and so that's i don't know there's a there's an introductory story to get the ball rolling uh what do you guys think how do you how have you experienced dissonance i i think dissonance is most pronounced uh during like spiritual deconstruction at least that's been my experience so kind of what you're talking about meeting your catholic roommate and then you know having to be forced to reconcile certain ideas that seem you know discordant like i felt the same way you know you know working in mega churches or traveling and seeing in churches it it there became a point where it felt like what i felt on the inside about who i believe got to be and how i viewed myself and others started to it was always to be honest there was always a bit of dissonance there especially growing up in the black church and then primarily my adult life working in white churches in terms of the cultural values that are there that are just different or the theological values that are different but i think there came a point in my own spiritual growth and evolution where the dissonance became like like it just rang so so loud and it was unavoidable and i feel like those are often tipping points into you know what we call spiritual deconstruction or or even like you know depression or it can cause like real trauma in people when the dissonance in their lives between who they are on the inside or and things they have to participate with on the outside uh or how they believe about the world you know when they come into conflict so dissonance i think to some level this is just my opinion but i think dissonance to some level can be okay and can actually be healthy and then i do think dissonance at some level can just bring chaos um and it just can be torturous and so you have to then make life decisions you have to make new theological assumptions you have to make you know new assumptions about reality you have to make um you have to either change your thoughts you know or you have to you have to you have to rationalize something like something always has to give otherwise i think there's a level of dissonance and maybe that's different for each person but there's a level of dissonance that uh i think is not okay to handle actually for for some of us for probably for all of us you can only take it for so long hmm you basically just gave an overview of festinger as a theory of dissonance well there you go so he there you go yeah he gave us this theory of cognitive dissonance in in the late 50s to describe that feeling that we get when when there are two things that are seemingly inconsistent or at odds with each other that we're holding at the same time or the other side of it too which is when we behave one way but actually believe a different thing and when we feel that dissonance in ourselves and we're like why am i doing that thing even though i believe this thing over here and essentially what what comes up for us is the need to resolve the dissonance because it's so intolerable for us it actually stirs up all sorts of activation and different neuroanatomical structures that are really create this sensation of intolerability and so we have some choices like what do we do when we notice that dissonance in us and like you said something has to change we can't we can't stay there we can expand or we can move into our defenses and reject it but it's it's meant to signal to us that these things are incongruent and i think as as beings to be whole we we long for congruence we long to feel like they are known and um in in a whole instead of at odds and so we have like you were saying the choice to expand what we believe to include the dissonant parts within a greater whole or we kind of shut ourselves down a bit there are these um ah what prompted you do it i wanna hear what you're gonna do no keep going and i'll get to it okay that there are these there are these different ways of looking at cognitions within us and that's what we're thinking of as being the stuff that creates the dissonance there's this consonant relationship between thoughts or beliefs so um two beliefs or two actions or an action of belief are consistent with each other like i want to um i want to meditate daily and i am meditating daily so those are constant they're not intention and then there's the irrelevant relationship between things i want to meditate daily and i had curry for lunch these are not related or at odds with each other and then we have the dissonant relationship which is i want to i want to meditate daily and i'm not meditating daily or i value you know i value people who tell the truth but then i lie and that's where the the dissonance comes in is that we're seeing things that we link as being related to each other as being inconsistent and we have some choices about what we do with that there is you know we just change how we think i'm really just overviewing what you said already william like okay i'm let's just say the behavior that we want to change is that we're scrolling on our phone constantly and the belief that i hold is that being on my phone constantly is actually not so great for my my frontal lobe and my attachment my attention systems so what do i do when i feel that dissonance where i'm saying like oh i'm i don't want to be on my phone so much but here i am scrolling constantly yeah you change the thought right so we're just like okay you know what i'm just gonna stop scrolling on my phone i'm just gonna stop doing that um and we or we justify the behavior we say you know what i'm allowed to go on my phone once in a while as long as it's for a short amount of time so we come up with these rules that allow us to continue to do the thing or believe the thing we want to believe or we justify our behavior by adding in something new so we say like okay for every extra minute i'm mindlessly on my phone i'm going to spend an extra minute meditating or lastly we just totally deny the information that creates the conflict in the first place and we say it doesn't even matter that on my my phone who cares like i'm connecting to my friends and my family and actually you know what how about this i'm reading about mental health and i'm reading about attention systems while i'm on my phone so that's how i can justify it but the point is that when it comes up it like triggers this discomfort in us that's intolerable and so we have a few different ways of moving through it but something has to happen okay and it's it's meant to the dissonance is meant to signal to us something needs to change can i so can i ask so all the things that you mentioned in terms of you know your response or you know to the dissonance all the different types of responses is that necessarily are though any of those responses inherently in and of themselves bad because when i was listening to them i could easily see how i guess they can each of those things you know could be coping mechanisms or be bad or or not right like um is is in that theory is it giving an intrinsic value of like moral goodness or badness i guess to any of those types of uh rationalization so to speak no and i think that's such a such an important question because we have this tendency to create the hierarchy i think probably among our listenership these are people who like want to be healthy and want to be connected want to do do things that help them grow and so we can look at these different responses and assume somehow one is better than the other but i might contextualize it in light of what do we need in that moment what is helping us survive what is essential for our ability to endure and based on our hierarchy of needs we can pretty quickly override what would be ideal when we are safe just to adapt to get through like i think about for people who have experienced abuse at the hands of their parents one of the markers of this dissonance when a person is holding this belief like but my parents are supposed to take care of me and they're abusing me there is no way to keep being in a relationship with someone that's abusing you except in some ways to to move into this uh like denial of what's going on and to join with that person who's abusing you because it's going to cause even more distress even more violence to be at odds with them to say hey you can't treat me that way so in that situation like that's a pretty typical thing that we would see in therapy that a person who's been abused can't name what the abuse has been like if that person has also been a position of care for them so maybe it's more like what do i need to do to survive and if we feel like our ability to survive is tied to going along with one of these two opposing beliefs we're probably without even thinking about it going to choose that one because it would cost our nervous system way too much to do something else so even being in the space where we could confront the dissonance requires a level of we could say safety or security or privilege or the ability to know hey this isn't actually going to cost me everything but that i mean your point earlier william is so important because i think that's where it gets complicated for people who've done a deconstruction we've been told that holding these specific beliefs is how you survive for eternity and when you've been told that enough times you can't extract that from the survival instinct so we will like we'll protect that at all costs because we believe it's essential for our survival to believe that one story my um my sister yeah my sister told me a story recently that i actually forgot about my older sister and it to me it kind of talks about how to a level black people always have to live with a certain type of cognitive dissonance and the story was simple like i think i was probably uh seven or eight years old six or seven eight years old and we were at this uh museum and they were asking you know questions about history and they're like for little kids and so i went up to answer one of the questions and when the questions you know was who created the light bulb and then i said louis latimer who's a african-american inventor who yes created the first light bulb but i got the answer wrong because they said no it's thomas edison right and now to my little you know seven-year-old brain i'm like but no like it was louis latimer like you guys are wrong and and my sister said she remembers my parents had to like pull me aside because i was like kind of having like a bit of a traumatic experience of like no no like you guys are wrong you know and she said my parents had to like explain to me like hey there are people in the world that just don't value black history or they don't know the truth of it and like and i had to like and my sister said like she reminded me of this very recently she's like i was crying and so there was like this introduction of dissonance to the world of like oh to survive in the world i have to answer the questions the way you say uh or the your answers have to be right even if they're not categorically right as you know far as we understand history but i i would say looking back at that experience having my sister recount that experience to me i could see how that could how that made an imprint on my brain of uh the world that i live in that i can't uniquely trust the world that i live in or that the world that i live in is more interested in its own mythology rather than actual truth and that's like you described that's a type of real trauma um of the physical discomfort that happens you know and then over time like the way that compounds and that that that narrative is is built i feel like i've been living with cognitive dissonance for all of my life like we all have but you know when you're a minority in a you know dominant system you just constantly are are always there's a stress there because you you are always the one being told you're either lesser than or you don't matter your history doesn't matter your family's history doesn't matter um yeah i i hear that moment of dissonance that must have happened for you as a kid right that distress of like how can these two things be true and how can i be wrong about something that i know isn't wrong yeah and then and then i think about what happened after in terms of your parents expanding your world view to say here's why those two things why that just happened and so here's this larger story yeah and i imagine for so many people who move out of dissonance to get an understanding the trauma isn't over because you're then seeing the injustice so now you're out of dissonance but you're not out of the pain state yeah because you're feeling you're feeling like that's wrong that there's a wrongness to the fact that those two things are allowed to happen side by side and then again the pain doesn't discontinue because you know that then we actually have to be in grief or anger and try and change the system but that moment specifically of dissonance really stands out to me of you being a kid and being how can like how can these two things be true at the same time yeah and that like when we think about cognitive dissonance from a from a psychological perspective that's the moment of like but these two things can't coexist and now i'm distressed wow this is why i need a therapy session [Laughter] if i did therapy with you william i would fuck you up i know you would that's why i refuse [Laughter] i'm like i'm not gonna let her destroy my ego [Music] it is it is like i think about it musically and how certain kinds of music will how they how they treat dissonance like certain kinds of music uh there's no room for dissonance like when you're singing kumbaya if we have like and then and somebody goes throws that in there it's an uh wrong wrong sorry mistake because that music doesn't have any room for that sort of dissonance and then i think about that chord that i just played is the chord from the right of spring which is a crazy chord because it's like an e major on the bottom [Music] and then um a e flat uh dominant on the top in the first inversion so to you know either of those by themselves can fit into most music there's plenty of room for that kind of dissonance like there's the e major chord it definitely has any dissonance the flat seven chord has like a little bit but not very much [Music] um but you put them together [Music] it does not work for most music um so you but what happens like musically then is rather than just being a passing thing that resolves very quickly stravinsky just like sits on it just like holds it there [Music] and eventually like you sit with it long enough and he just holds it there forever and eventually like those two competing things which most music you're gonna want to pick this one or this one and then repress the other one like get that out of here but by sitting with both it actually opens up like a new space that is that its own this new cord this new feeling that is it includes both but it transcends both somehow it's like there's more space that's opened up and it's incredibly for like the people that first heard it reportedly they were like freaked out in the in the audience and just hated it and people like old ladies hitting people with umbrellas and stories are crazy about this um what happened when it premiered but you there's something that happens when you just sit with dissonance and it can't it has to it has to go somewhere right and so you either have this idea like when you're when you're confronted with it it is an op it is an opportunity to either repress and pick and like you know hide some aspect of reality or what your experience is and just pick one of them like hillary's talking about or if you have the ability to be able to sit with it and allow whatever new space is created from just having to sit with it and not pushing aside either of the things either cord um it can create growth because it can create new it is literally like new space it's a bigger space there's more happening in the space um i think that's a cool way of feeling and when you experience dissonance in inviting you potentially into newness that sounds like the perfect metaphor for what happened with jared like you're you had this new like you're you using this analogy or this example musically sounds like it represents what what happened internally for you like more space opened up a space that was big enough to hold him and his beliefs and you and your beliefs and something that was so much wider and more loving and i think that any time i look through my life of any period of growth that's what it's been when i think about lucy being born and knowing we can't handle this like we can't our life was already crazy we were on the road all the time we don't have the ability to have a special need a child with special needs and we have a child with specialties yeah so now what now what are we gonna do um you have some sometimes that dissonance of life where you just know like this is not possible and also it's what's happening um now we have to figure out a new way to be because they both exist um it's any there's i could say story after story of times in my life where i feel like there was the most growth the most uh evolution in a good way and and the times of my life where i probably avoided it that were a chance for growth that i missed out on because i was i didn't have the space and i i do think what you brought up william moralizing this can actually i don't know have be counterproductive in a way like if you feel like you have to sit with the dissonance um that's just kind of oppressive and it doesn't actually allow the room that you might need to be able to really open your hands and your heart to what might need to be if it's being forced on you yeah so i would certainly wouldn't moralize this but if you have the opportunity to not repress if you have the opportunity to actually get some space and sit with some dissonance for a while it can be incredibly empowering and help you grow yeah i like i mean there's this language that's used often in charismatic prophetic christian world which i actually do think is is partially helpful maybe in something like this you know you know in those environments you always get told you know i just feel like the lord is inviting you into something right like if you ever got a prophetic word you've probably heard that um i also i think those things are invitations rather than commandments right like because yeah because ultimately where people are and how they're coping with what they're coping with um i don't think you can always force people into or or demand for them to be a quote-unquote good person then they must blah blah blah i think you know people are coping with how they're coping but i do think the invitation exists um and some of the pain in which you know people are in in their current silos might feel maybe parts of their pain are rationalized in the echo chamber they're in but then there's maybe another deeper longing or pain that is going you know unnoticed um that maybe an invitation to seeing the world a different way or sitting with dissonance in a different way you know could could help help them too but you're right moralizing it all i you know i think is very problematic and it it's also just not really helpful for the most part or for most people i believe and we if we flip it around we could see that that getting away from the dissonance by moving into like ignoring or denying information could also be really actually the most ideal response like if you let's just say somebody close to me or someone in my life like let's say one of you guys started calling me angela i would experience cognitive dissonance because it would interrupt my understanding of my reality both what our relationships have been like up into this time and the fact that you know that my name is hillary and the fact that everyone my entire life has called me hillary so i would experience some dissonance it would be so uncomfortable i would have to resolve it in some way and i could respond by saying i am going to try to correct you and i'm going to try and change your behavior or your belief or i could not interact with you anymore because i feel so unseen or so like what's happening here and so our dissonance doesn't necessarily tell us that we're wrong our dissonance tells us that there's some incongruence between our experience of reality up into that point and our expectation of what should happen moving forward but that's where we we can't have this conversation without also talking about ontology like what is what is real and sometimes our perceptions of reality we want to hold like i would like to hold that my name is hillary that that's inherently my name but there are other times when there is something that's been so real for me perhaps a belief about myself that if you confront that and challenge that i need to override the dissonance to adhere to actually what you're saying because it's more true about me than whatever i've believed about myself so we have to we have to think about dissonance not necessarily as being good or bad and what we do is being good or bad but how does it move us towards more of who we want to be or how is it supporting us to be well or helping us survive how is our response getting us something what is it getting us and perhaps what it's getting us is like more wholeness how we respond is getting us more wholeness and other times how we respond is keeping us feeling safe and i don't know if either of those are bad or good they just are well you guys can call me angela if you want and i would love to experience that dissonance as a possibility well how it shows up in therapy like that's a really kind of bizarre example but where it actually shows up for most of us is someone who has this deeply held belief like i'm bad and i'm broken and i sit across from them in a room and i say wow look at how good your defensive strategy is wow it's really helped you and they're like that wait a second how could any part of me be good how could this thing that i hate that i'm actually coming to treatment for be good i had someone this week um almost totally dissociate when i confronted their deeply held belief and said i see it differently because it was so overwhelming for them that it was kind of like there was no way to manage being in that moment which if i'm really bad i can't actually be in this moment if you're telling me i'm good it's so incomprehensible to me well i don't care what any of you all think i was being funny just about any blanket statement yeah i just realized like that's like you know there's a there's a part of this that's how i deal with cognitive dissonance sometimes i'm just like i don't care what you think like you know like and i like information like i'm a enneagram five you know i love in knowing and perceiving is how like i you know that makes me feel in control you know but then sometimes i'm just like nah and just and it's funny because i used to feel bad because i used to feel like i had to be accountable to everything i ever heard and i had to search it out to figure out if it was all true and i don't i don't feel that pressure anymore like i used to when i was younger to have to have it all figured out or have to you know i'm like that doesn't make if if it don't if it doesn't sit right with me or anything i hear it it doesn't matter who it is i'm either if you're telling me i'm either going to receive it i'm going to utterly reject it and or at best i'm going to put it on the shelf and say hmm i don't know about that let me just set that right there and then maybe if that thing keeps coming around or i keep hearing about it you know maybe i should look into that a little bit more but i'm also not afraid to reject certain ideas i'm also not afraid to say you know what whether that's coming from a place of just my brain rationalizing it or if you know or it's i mean i guess it's all a self-protection then right because you know i'm going hey that's a harmful idea i believe that's a harmful idea that's going to hurt me for whatever reason you know good bad in between um so no i reject that idea um but i also think may you know i've learned to just use that analogy of the shelf to help me navigate reality like okay i don't know about that and i don't need to know right now so i'm just gonna put that on the shelf because that's interesting maybe there's some truth in that not sure it you go on the shelf but you know the rest of you i don't gotta listen to you so that sounds so coherent and self-caring to have that system to sort like sort your experiences and figure out how you want to respond yeah i it hard fought because like i said i used to yeah i used to have to take i used to feel like i have to take it all in like i had to receive it all like to to be a good person meant you had an open heart and you had to receive everything from everyone and i've just learned that that that just you can't live that way you can't base uh your life on fundamentally you know allowing people to toss you back and forth you know with every new bit of information or every like you just gotta like find your put dig your feet into the ground a little bit enough to be like all right i'm here here's where i am or this is how i perceive myself to be and then i get to choose how i'm filtering and letting you all in and out of that um and i don't know that's how i've survived some of the craziest situations of my life or the craziest environments where you know cognitive dissonance is everywhere you're just like you know what is going on here like you walk into spaces or you know work spaces or you just like if you're not rooted in that and that's why i think spirituality is important because what it does is ultimately reach you um so that way you walk into those spaces and you you you can process what's happening in a way that doesn't you know make you always spiral or always you know fall into a shame thing um i don't know if how you um if you meant this in this way but i when i think about like how spirituality roots you i agree with that um for me how it rooted me was actually in identifying not so strongly with those those things that are tossed back and forth it was so easy for me so much of my life living in my head to identify with the thoughts with the beliefs that they were part of my identity and so when they would get tossed back and forth i was being tossed back and forth what spirituality has invited me into is finding the ground under that that doesn't move finding the ocean under the waves that are the waves that not identifying just with the movement so that i can't be thrown anywhere i am that which is uh prior to movement of all of these ideas and um yeah so i don't know if that's how you meant it but that's how i'm yeah maybe maybe yes and no um you know so i i think i have a strong belief and i'll just it's a belief that you know the ego is is not simply you know because we always talk about the the ego or the false sense itself and it always has the negative connotation um but actually you know non-dual thinking would teach us that you know there are parts of the ego that are very good so what parts of my ego are good are helpful um and how can i stay rooted in that and not let information that's coming in um [Music] destroy my sense of self-worth and maybe again i it might just be my experience of like being black in a white world where it's like i actually find strength and comfort in the parts of my ego that are good like my whether it's my culture whether it's the cultural values that i that i come from um and those things feel very cemented and firm and solid with me like i i can intellectually articulate with you and say yeah sure that those are metaphors that's just language those are just cultural traditions passed down and you know and there's a real beyond that but uh you know in a strange way i feel that what actually helps ground me is the the appreciation of my inherent dignity but also the inherent dignity of the people who produced me and where where i come from and the good things about that like and being rooted in that sense of tradition and legacy um gives me a sense of like groundedness um and a sense of yeah i know who i am and i know where i come from and you can't tell me shit about it so because you don't know me and you don't know where i come from so you don't have the experiences that i have you don't have the family background that i have you don't have the spiritual spiritual background that i have and so i don't know i i see what you're saying it in one sense sure there is like you know the the real that's beyond all of our temporalness um but i think that the the good part of the ego so to speak just using maybe that's not a good word is is also in connection to that that thing that's real you know that's way beyond our understanding and way beyond our cultural metaphors um and the ways in which we unite with each other you know around you know religion or or ethnicity or any of those things so i i don't see them as disconnected or just i see them as intricately connected and in fact religion or or that sense of ground good ego and groundedness from where i come from and who i am if anything it can be a doorway to me to to the the cosmos the greater understanding that that we just don't have language for the thing that the real beyond the real if that makes sense i don't know if that makes sense at all but that's kind of i think in my head how i yeah how i connect those things yeah i certainly don't yeah i certainly don't dismiss the ego as a bad thing um the ego's a wonderful tool for keeping organisms like these alive and to me it's no less part of god than anything else um yeah so yeah how you can can tap into whatever you need to feel grounded and enjoy your life i'm certainly never going to put any shits on anybody else for me when i if i don't i just putting too much identity it's a banner of identity for me like um if i put too much identity in any of the ego things or really any ideas of separateness i just start suffering a lot and i've just become too weak to suffer apparently i don't know what were you going to say before hillary i'm just going to throw it back to you because i i noticed that difference too and you saying right off the top dissonance is this invitation and here we're also hearing mike williams say actually dissonance dissonance is something i have a few different responses to and it's a skill i've learned to be able to know when i'm not when i'm not opening myself up to what's dissonant yeah so i was just curious about the about that but i i i don't i'm sure there's people who've been thinking about this extensively and it's it's only new to me but i'm curious about the relationship between non-dual spirituality and identity politics yeah and whoa what it means to do non-do spiritual non-dual spirituality when when the justice movements that we're seeing are related to a reclaiming of identity that's been oppressed marginalized or silenced and how moving into further identification with identity feels liberating and yet how i wonder if there's people who negotiate them both where there's also kind of like a letting go of identity in a way yeah that's that's really interesting i i think if anything that is the work of black liberation theology so think of it like james cohn who who uh is the founder of black liberation theology but you know there were precursors like howard thurman um i would say franz fernando not christian was very much influential in some of these thinkings for the civil rights and the black power movement but james cohen in particular being the kind of pinnacle of the revelation the thing that he constantly said was during the 60s was like um what happened in the 60s the cultural revolution was not just black people resisting and fighting for human rights but it was also an embrace of black humanity and black dignity and so let's let's call it black identity right and then from there you got the black power movement that emerges like right after in the form of black panthers malcolm x you know into the 70s um and you see this black empowerment like black becomes a good word it was almost like the reclaiming of what white supremacy was taking and saying no black is beautiful like malcolm x says like who taught you to hate the the shape of your nose who taught you to hate the color of your hair who taught you to hate you know the hue of your skin right like there was a sense of i'm black and i'm proud i'm okay so what james cohn with black liberation theology was holding in tandem the dissonance that james cohen was holding was how can i be i want to be black and proud and love who i am love my culture love my people love my identity but i'm also a christian i also identify with this idea of a crucified god or and what is how do those things do they go together because a lot of the black power struggle uh or the black power movements rejected christianity as simply you know a tool of oppression for the white man and so the i think in liberation theologies particularly i mean it's not just black liberation theology you have palestinian liberation theology i mean it started in south america you know in the liberation theology out of the preferential option of the poor i think uh i think that is actually the best the the beginning landscape for us to to begin to move in that direction of how do we love our bodies love our humanity love our culture and still open ourselves up to that which is transcendent and and bigger than any one cultural value or any one group can can own or attest to um and so i'm just speaking of this as a question i'm not providing any answers because i think we're all the living experiments of it and the justice movements that you're mentioning it's it's a living experiment it's not a result like a a concrete like we figured it out exactly right like i think people in right now here to this day lgbt people um um are trying to figure out how do i retain my identity that feels as real to me as everything i can taste smell and touch as well as with the call to transcendence or the call to service of humanity and giving up my life for another like how do i can i keep my life and save it i don't know maybe you can maybe you can uh i think i think that's my my question too and it's it's always to me a lifelong it's going to be my lifelong question probably i think that any non-dual teacher that teaches nonduality in a way that makes it feel like people should be experiencing non-duality as though people striving for their identities to reclaim identities or whatever if there's some sort of negative spin to that or moralization again of of that that people shouldn't be claiming their identities that's not true nonduality that's a that's a teacher who has been who's using non-dual language uh for his or her own ego purposes it's not actually non-duality so non-duality is basically it's not it would recognize that all of it belongs including the the the striving for identity to be reclaimed and and the power and the pride that comes with all of it the formation of ego is no less godly than the dissolution of it it's all part of what is it's all part of this it's all part of god and um and so i i hear what you're saying william in these in these great movements and these great thinkers and thought leaders and i'm inspired by it and i'm like wow it's beautiful i also think that any identification as a self comes with inherent suffering whether that self is rooted in like a larger collective self um there's a there is a like sort of a wound that happens existentially that separates one part of reality from another and i think that wound when it says okay i'm this part of reality and i'm not this part that wound is inherently it it includes suffering and that's heart like when we moralize suffering and we say you shouldn't be suffering then that sounds like bad things it can sound to the person identifying as a self like you shouldn't be identifying as a self and no that's not what non-duality would say at all um that's part of the beautiful aspect of what goddess is doing so is it it moves that dissonance that we're coming up here with is a is another chance here's here it is right in front of us here's a chance to say yes yes the here's all these identities striving for justice and equality and peace and love and wow isn't it beautiful isn't it perfect and and all of that is an illusory movement within the ocean of god yes um and to identify or not identify as a self there's no moralization for that to me there's no hierarchy of that there's no better or worse just for me personally like in this body the the holding on to what i feel as myself um comes with the amount of suffering that this body is not able to handle anymore it's just kind of like it died to be able to handle that amount of suffering and that's not a moral high ground at all at all so that's where i think where nonduality can get misinterpreted or mistaught is when it's moralized in some way or when it's it's taught as though you should be if you're really something then you'll get to this place where you're not a self anymore and that would be who else would say that but an ego well yeah sure i i just think what's hard about the non-dual conversation uh usually inside of justice movements is because there does seem to be this aesthetic of wanting to not suffer right that that often happens which you know you described as part of your experience of like um you know you're like hey i don't think i like suffering so maybe this is why i'm like attracted to these beliefs um but i think you know and i think justice people would argue and say yeah well the only reason why the self is suffering is because other self-proclaimed selves are saying myself should not exist right or myself shouldn't you know have access or power or um whatever and so i don't know i think i think we have as long as we have on this life to live in the bodies that we have with the selves that we have whenever we we die whatever whatever happens in that we will we will be in the real we will be we will not be suffering when we die you know after we we pass on and so i've got i've got all this life to suffer and that's that kind of seems to be the point so i don't i sometimes struggle with the non-dual conversation because i'm like well yeah sure you can alleviate suffering in this life and that's helpful um because i think there's such thing as too much suffering i think there's over suffering i think certain groups of people experience more suffering than other people and it's unnecessary so i do there is an aspect of yes i want to alleviate suffering but i don't think i i think the idea of getting rid of identity yourself in order to not suffer just just feels like well that's gonna happen in the afterlife so and i only got this life to live right now so i'm gonna be yourself you be yourself and we're gonna figure this out and then once we're done yeah we could be we could be the we could be in the ether just like kicking it in peace not suffering and and we'll be like oh oh wow wonderful great i don't know what heaven is i don't know if there is a heaven i don't know if it's you know whatever this happens on the other end of that will be a piece so until then i'm like i am a self and i am here and i'm just trying to i can alleviate suffering as best as i can but i can't you know i can't remove it completely so um don't get in my way i wanted to say something but hillary you haven't spoken in a minute oh i just i could listen to this all day this is great i did have a thought that i can add later but it's to change change directions a little bit so let's keep going yeah okay so there was this one aspect like first of all william i love it i'm i legitimately delighted in your bravery to surf the suffering of the world as a participant and it's fantastic listen a lot of it's brought to me but okay yeah well but that's the part that's the part that i would disagree with is that i don't think that suffering is external when i'm talking about suffering i'm not talking about pain i'm talking about the mental suffering or the it's that which makes you know us we attach onto what we want and then we don't get it and then we suffer and so i i just heard this example from some teacher yesterday in a class there so he's saying that um he said if i promised to take care of everything that would possibly cause you any pain like i'm going to take care of i'm going to get you all the money that you need i'm going to get you your job like everything's taken your kids are taken care of you always have food everything that you possibly need i'm going to make sure it's all out there all the external stuff in your life is taken care of completely the only thing i need of you is i'm gonna lock you every time i come into the room to check you out you're just gonna be in this room here you need to be absolutely joyful that's the only condition so i'm gonna take care of everything else you just i'm just come in and every time i need you to be completely 100 full of joy uh and then the illustration it kind of reveals people are going to be miserable you can have everything in the world look at the people that have everything that they want yeah all the money in the world they're fucking miserable so there's there's just something inherent about a self that suffers it's not it's never enough it's the game of more like fred talked about on the podcast last week which you guys don't know about this because i'm it hasn't come out yet as we're saying this that will make sense to people in the future it doesn't make sense in this conversation um but the game of more that we're always playing um that no matter like if everything is taken care of we'll find a way to complain about it we'll find a way that well it could be a little nicer in here well listen you know what though a thousand pounds of gold but you know what though i i don't know that to be true i have not had that experience i have not been given everything ultimately then to feel like i'm just being miserable so how about y'all give that to me and then then we'll see we'll do a little test so just uh just give me all the money give me all the power and then uh we'll see maybe maybe you're right but maybe you're not okay but how about how about the times where you have gotten what you want the times where you like got that record deal when you've had that thing happen that you really wanted to happen and then did it sad did it like satisfy forever was it like wow it happened and now i'm just good i think i think it in in some moments yes like there's a contentment that comes like a real gratitude and a thankfulness that you can have now i think any new opportunity just naturally presents new problems so so with the record deal example like when i got my record deal i was really content really satisfied like i've been working my whole life to get this like i had always dreamt for like 15 years to get a record deal and you know what that moment felt good i got you know i had i posted about it i got to stunt on the haters that said i'd never do nothing be nowhere like i felt good it felt good so that's why i'm like what are y'all talking about like miserable like that that shit feels good when that happens now you're right there is a tendency from for like the ego wants like well then now i want this or i want more and you know like that but those are just new opportunities based on on that right but like i think you can experience like people say money doesn't bring happiness i'm like well it depends on how much money you have because i'm like like if if i have a private yacht where i can you know uh go you know uh riding on on the on the little jet skis all the time i'm gonna be happy but i just will like money money can actually bring some happiness but i mean ultimately i guess in one century right like there because life is ever evolving like there will always be a sense of i want more because we're living moment by moment day to day like so the sense for more yes can be a type of tyranny it can be a type of greed um but also i think folks can really experience contentment even you know in those types of scenarios where you're just thankful for for what you have you're thankful because you know you grew up poor and you you know like i'm thankful that that i mean i grew up working class in my poor like i'm thankful that i make more money now than my parents you know like there's a real contentment i have with that um i don't know i could be wrong i'm just i'm just sure and there are poor but there are also poor people there are poor people who are very content being poor yeah exactly yeah there are i'm just not i just told myself i never be one of them so they can do that but and if and if i am and if life brings me there okay we'll we'll figure it out we'll make do but like [Music] you know this is uh one of my favorite existentialists and philosophers merlot ponte talking about the the four slices of existence um temporality corpora reality relationality and spatiality and so i'm just listening to what you're saying as they intersect with each of those dimensions of existence yeah and i was thinking about how we are beings over time that's the temporality piece and how time naturally introduces new elements and we adapt to them and i imagine there are and sometimes resist them i was just thinking about how i intersect with these ideas and hunger being one of them like what it's like to want more of let's say delicious dessert that i don't i don't actually need more of but taste good and is there anything wrong with wanting that more and then how our our corporality and temporality intersect to remind us that even if we eat now that is never enough to sustain us for forever we always need more tomorrow or tonight to remind us and that hunger emerges to remind us that it's okay to need more and that what we have in one instant shouldn't suffice for forever and our bodies are constantly changing and needing more and there's nothing wrong with that yeah so that was just the thought that i have like yeah there's nothing wrong with it there's not absolutely nothing wrong with it i'm really into like tantra these days which is it so you could frame that in tantric terms as far as like the goddess is that movement that always is more that of the universe that is always moving towards that's why life is suffering there is this inherent this is not enough let's eat again let's like i want to survive i want to keep doing this that more is kind of built in baked into the universe but then there's also so that's the goddess that's the shakti and then there's the shiva which is the stillness underneath that the stillness the space in which that movement happens so what that's the non-dual thing is to say yes to all of it is to say yes to this give me more of that dessert and the experience of the stillness that's under there that doesn't need anything that always just is because in this moment in the very moment that we're in there isn't that you get close enough into the moment and there isn't any movement it's just stillness even as i'm looking at the more oh what is that desire for more and i go into it deep enough closely enough eventually it goes [Music] and it's just the stillness um so both of it both the movement the more the suffering the non-suffering i think it's just all part of the dance and the music of what is as you were talking i felt curious about how much you think dissonance is a product of suffering or is an invitation out of suffering hmm could it be both yeah i was going to say both too so like i mean i've quoted this a few times on the podcast but maharaji um i love suffering it brings me so close to god what a funny like it's like being close to god is in some way like the lack of suffering right you're being you're at home but suffering is what brings you there that that dissonance is so beautiful to me so to say yes there's this suffering that's causing all of this dissonance and if you want if you want to or need to avoid it press away and use all your coping mechanisms fantastic that's part that's part of it too um and sometimes you'll get the space to go wow that those two notes that i hated being together created this other warble with themselves that now became this like new reality it's not just the two notes anymore now there's like a third space of the interaction of those two notes the dissonance can actually create a third oh look at that it's kind of a trinitarian thing right father-son spirit like there's not just the two it doesn't just get caught on this um linear static thing but the present it creates this third space dynamism dynamism yeah this has gotten obscure for a conversation okay good it's confronting what how i think about the work that i do because it some people think about therapy and psychology as being not only understanding human behavior but changing it so that we we can yeah suffer less be more well be more fully ourselves but ultimately at the heart of that is this this idea of change and it's really hard to support somebody i'm i'm feeling my connection to what i do as being inherently about change and how the complexity of that coming through often being able to say to someone you are so good as you are even if you don't change but in doing that i'm i'm trying to remind them of something that can rehabilitate a view of themselves which helps them change yeah dissonance built into that it's amazing yeah and to [Music] i mean i think about our emerging theories of psychopathology like what is going on when people have mental health issues and the role of emotional dysregulation behind that not knowing how to be with feelings move them through us stay with them long enough manage them in ways that are appropriate to the context and how cognitive dissonance is the name or the explanation for why we feel that uncomfortable feeling inside but if we don't know how to be with that feeling that's when we start to get away from things that might maybe not need to be avoided or might get in the way of us resisting things that we do need to resist so as i'm hearing you say all of this i'm thinking about it in light of my work and what it would be like to for us to build the capacity to tolerate that discomfort long enough that we could stay with it in that process where it becomes the dynamism instead of like we fold or or we resist and and what it's like to hang out in that space and that being an inherent process of change yeah i don't have anything else to say i'm just curious girl i don't know i don't know i don't know it's a you know it's a step it's a step in a direction from i don't care what you guys think [Music] well thanks for listening to the podcast everybody this is not the end of this conversation we'd love to invite you to the sunday thing this sunday to join us for letting this kind of settle into the community and talking about dissonance together the sunday thing is a weekly zoom meeting that we do with liturgist community you can check out more about that and all the other things going on the liturgist community meditations and other podcasts and all kinds of stuff at theliturgists.com we'd like to thank our patrons for making this episode and everything that we do here at the liturgists possible your hosts have been william matthews dr hillary mcbride and me michael gunger thanks for listening everybody