The freedom to choose our stance

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.— Hellen Keller

The soul is the “I” that dwells in the body and behaves through it. To many, the soul is like the power in a light bulb, the software in a computer, or a pilot in an airplane. Spiritually, the soul gives life to our body and makes our senses work — sight, hearing, tasting and smelling, ideas and speech, intelligence and feelings, motivations and wishes, character and individuality.

A pancake, on the other hand, is a flat cake, often thin, even and round, prepared from a starch-based batter and cooked on a hot surface such as a griddle or a frying pan. It may be served at any time with a variety of toppings or fillings. It’s typically considered to be a comfort food.

Put soul and pancake together and we’ve got Rainn Wilson’s bestseller, SoulPancake, a generous serving of creativity, spirituality, and as some readers say, lots of “chewing on life’s big questions.” The tome is meant to be a used as a tool for the creative and spiritual revolution that we are in the midst of. It likewise requires us to contemplate philosophical queries, to scribble our answers, and to have fun and full engagement in the process. Here are delicious and nutritious helpings from this popular performer (known as Dwight on TV’s The Office) in a visually appetizing and thought-provoking smorgasbord.

Our ability to manufacture fraud now exceeds our ability to detect it. This Viktor Taransky passage reminds us of the need to seek truth, know how it evolves and check the source and date of the information that hits us regularly to assess its quality. The book lets us in to do an exercise, which makes us sum up our personal philosophy on life, take some sidewalk chalk and break out our simulated inner vandal and scrawl our message for the world to see.

We are beings with free will. Ayn Rand added that each of us is potentially good or evil, and it’s up to us — through our reasoning mind — to decide which one we want to be. Our souls are exhausted by bad decisions, dreams unfulfilled, and negative thoughts and actions. They get rejuvenated by performing good deeds, realizing our goals and by positive reinforcements. To do a quick check on the state of our mind, we are invited to perform an exercise, where we “visualize our soul for a moment, then scribble, sketch or rip up old magazines lying around our room and create our take on what our soul ‘looks’ like.”

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be truly human. David Whyte’s musing came in tandem with what artist Georges Braque once stated: “Art is meant to disturb.” And it makes its way directly to our soul because of the beauty it brings. In the exercise “Art at Arm’s Reach,” we are urged to scavenge around our desk, bookshelf or sofas for anything handy — paper clips, staple wires, Post-it pads, junk mail, ballpoint pens with dried ink, and used envelopes. Create art from what we’ve found and bask in our imaginative radiance. Kahlil Gibran made sense of this activity when he declared, “Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shape.” One other recommended exercise is labeled  “Blackout Poet,” which instructs us to get hold of a black marker, and find a newspaper page or tear one from a favorite magazine or a book we wish we’d never read. Black out what doesn’t belong in the page. Take away a word at a time until we expose our poetic masterpiece. This is akin to “refrigerator poetry,” where we arrange and rearrange the magnetic words on a ref door to create a piece of literature.

Our intellect may be confused, but our emotions will never lie to us. Robert Ebert’s citation reminded us about the criticality of managing our emotions. Revenge may give us a good feeling, but the anger that goes with it can be deadly. As Emily Dickinson averred, “Anger as soon as fed is dead. It’s the starving that makes it fat.” And too much fat is bad to our emotional health. In traditional Chinese medicine, our physical condition is handled by dealing with the seven basic emotions: anger resides in the liver; worry in the spleen; pensiveness in the stomach; sadness in the lungs; fear in the kidneys; and joy and shock affect the heart.

If we can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, we’re as good as dead. The main thing in this paraphrased Albert Einstein quote is for us to open our eyes and pay clear attention to everything we see. If we notice what no one else notices, we’ll know what no one else knows. Learning can also be made from the blunders we have committed. “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery,” James Joyce pronounced, and as a Columbia University study suggested, the guilt we often feel right after making “indulgent” choices or mistakes passes as quickly as it flares up, while regrets over missed opportunities rarely fade; in fact, they increase over time. One exercise we can do to dramatize the point is to ask the question: “What’s stopping us?” In this personal workshop, we’re made to list five risks we have not taken for whatever reason, and possibly discuss the worst that could happen if we take them.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life. “It’s the whole aim and end of human existence,” Aristotle asserted. It is beatitude, blessedness, bliss, cheer, cheerfulness, cheeriness, content, contentment, delectation, delight, delirium, ecstasy, elation, enchantment, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, exuberance, felicity, gaiety, geniality, gladness, glee, good humor, good spirits, hilarity, hopefulness, joviality, joy, jubilation, laughter, lightheartedness, merriment, mirth, optimism, paradise, peace of mind, playfulness, pleasure, prosperity, rejoicing, sanctity, seventh heaven, vivacity and well-being. What can you add to the list?

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated. Coretta Scott King, who uttered this powerful line, is exactly right. Hate affects our physical and spiritual wellbeing. We must know the best way to handle it, lest it weakens or makes us sick. To test our hate mindset, Wilson suggests that we carefully list five things we would literally chop off our little toe for. Can’t start with my own list. Can you?

Detachment is what we need to be serene and pure. Meister Eckhart urged us to purge. We’re all guilty of hoarding — closets, desks, and dashboards full of papers, and piles. It’s time to separate from our stuff, and not look back. Our mission is to get rid of something — or stacks of something — that we should have thrown out, resold, handed down or donated a long time ago. Repeat as necessary.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. Poet E.E. Cummings’ statement pushes us to make laughter part of our to-do list every single day.  “What passes for humor on the walls of public restrooms can leave us feeling like the human race needs its mouth washed out with soap. Let’s inject some fun into the filth,” the book ruminates, and suggests a “bathroom humor” play: Find a public restroom with paper towel dispensers, not those loud blow dryer contraptions; write or draw something on a paper towel to give the next person a good, clean laugh; and wash your hands twice after.

Properly understood and applied, prayer is the most potent instrument of action. Mahatma Gandhi advised that what we appeal, beseech, implore, invoke, petition, plea or request to a higher being must be accompanied with good deeds. Mr. Gruffydd looked at prayer as only another name for good, clean and direct thinking. What we supplicate is granted if it is communicated clearly and vigorously.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. This line from William Shakespeare’s Measure to Measure makes us wonder: Do we have to experience doubt before we can reach certainty? The “certainty effect,” as Econometrica reported, is one of the most important utility theories in the behavioral and social sciences. It holds that, given two options, we tend to select the safer choice — the one with a higher certainty of a good outcome — even though the other may be more rewarding. And for some added trivia, The Associated Content’s research indicated that more than 40 percent of brides have wedding anxiety.  Interestingly, the term “cold feet” originally meant “without means or resources,” referring to a 1605 play where a character was too poor to buy shoes. Today, the term has evolved to mean “anxiety and uncertainty about an undertaking to the point of withdrawing.” Which way do we go? Is there anything that should never be questioned?

If it keeps up, we will atrophy all our limbs but the push-button finger. Frank Lloyd Wright’s observation leads us to question what in our lives can’t be replaced by technology. Technology has enabled us not to do things. We don’t talk, we text. We don’t ask, we Google.  Technology has made things easier, faster, shorter, higher, cheaper and smaller. But our stories still need to address our core values. Our foundation is our heart and emotion. It’s not what technology does to us. It’s what we do with it. We should live great lives, enrich ourselves and share good values. In the end technology only follows where the human spirit wants to go.

Ours is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. And as Michael Fischer expressed, “Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But this canny, intelligent, prolific and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.” We’ve got to be stopped. We must plant trees, recycle, conserve water and electricity, use minimum fuel and teach our children the importance of taking care of our environment.

Everything can be emptied from us but one thing — our freedom to choose one’s stance in any given situation and with the choice, to decide the way we approach lie.

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Email bongosorio@yahoo.com. or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com. for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.