Pigeonholing Pigeonholes
Is it human nature to want to “pigeonhole” people? And is it necessary for us to be successful that we have to figure out our own pigeonhole?
Dear Dean,
Got to thinking about our conversation yesterday about pigeonholes. You said it’s human nature to want to pigeonhole people and to be successful we have to figure out my spiritual pigeonhole even if — as you put it so well — “it’s a bloody big pigeonhole.” Generally I agree with you and, believe me, I am not trying to be difficult. I’d love to be pigeonholed. I spent my professional career building companies by identifying their pigeonholes in the market and made a lot of money doing it.
My problem is that what is new and refreshing about me is that people sense I am trying to teach a whole new way of thinking. I am trying to teach a whole different “mode,” a whole new spiritual paradigm: a paradigm revealed ever so slightly in all the fuss about getting outside the box. Scientists are only just beginning to understand what the Zen Masters were saying millennia ago. What the Zen Masters mastered and applied to spirituality is what scientists and psychologists call lateral thinking, frame breaking thinking, getting outside the box, divergent thinking, controlled chaos, and creative destruction. What all these terms are trying to get at is the essentially paradoxical nature of the universe. Problem is, while most people have run up against these ideas they are far from internalizing them. Folks think they know what outside the box thinking is but 99.9% of human thinking is still woefully inside the box.
We are on the threshold of a whole new way of thinking that is being forced onto the Western mind by the paradoxes of physics and astronomy. But right now, to the extent it has filtered into the ambient atmosphere it is through a glass darkly. More felt than understood.
Let me explain. The Matrix and Truman’s World in The Truman Show movie are made out of illusory pigeonholes. Similarly, we spend our lives creating these elaborate “belief systems” made up of all our own illusory boxes and pigeonholes. We are frightened creatures who know we are mortal and all around us is a universe that we can’t understand and doesn’t seem to care a jot about us. It is only natural that we want to “nail things down” by creating “a place for everything with everything in its place.”
“Who am I?” we ask. “I’m an American, a husband, a brother, a salesman etc. etc.” We take comfort in these labels and millions like them because they give us the illusory notion that “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” We nail things down further by BELIEVING that if we just stick to the program we will be happy and die in peace. We desperately want to believe that life is fair, just, and that all will be well and all will be well.
But deep down we know that these silly belief structures don’t really represent the way the universe works. This is the splinter in our minds. Surprises keep hitting us. People die, friends betray, politicians lie, companies lay people off, and spouses cheat. As more and more of these truths rain down we become ever more frantic. We keep nailing things down and — especially as we reach middle age — the nails keep popping out. We thought we would live forever but the mirror says differently. We react to the horror by trying to nail things down and pigeonhole them even more. We insist on iron clad contracts and pre–nups and pay our doctor through the nose, but still the nails keep popping out. The earth is moving under our feet threatening to open up and swallow us — just as it does, eventually, in the grave.
So we turn to spirituality as a last hope. What do we want from spirituality? We want yet another pigeonhole, another way to “nail it all down,” to “make sense of it all,” to stop the world from moving under our feet, to give us security. And we want to do this all on the cheap by using “belief” once again. It never occurs to us that our need to believe, our desire to pigeonhole, our desire to nail it all down is causing all the problems in the first place.
Yes, it is natural for people to want to pigeonhole. But spirituality is not natural. It is both unnatural and supernatural. It is not natural, but as I say in my essay Brother John, it can become like reading, writing, or riding a bicycle: second nature. We have to get beyond what is natural if we want the answer to Zen’s riddle of life and death.
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