Also by Hugh Prather
How to Live in the World and Still Be Happy
Love is Letting Go of Fear
The Little Book of Letting Go
Love and Courage
Notes to Myself
Spiritual Notes to Myself: Essential Wisdom for the 21st Century
I Will Never Leave You: How Couples Can Achieve the Power of Lasting Love
This edition first published in 2004 by Conari Press,
an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
York Beach, ME
With offices at:
368 Congress Street
Boston, MA 02210
Copyright © 1972, 2004 Hugh Prather
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from RedWheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 1972 as I Touch the Earth, and the Earth Touches Me by Doubleday, ISBN: 0-385-05063-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prather, Hugh.
Standing on my head : life lessons in contradictions / Hugh Prather.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-57324-918-1
1. Conduct of life. I. Title.
BF637.C5P82 2004
158.1—dc22
2003017998
Typeset in Berkeley Oldstyle
Printed in the United States
RRD
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Word about Words
I didn't sit down to write this book. It evolved from a notebook in which I recorded thoughts, problems, insights, difficulties—a practice I have found helpful much of my life. The entries I have selected are in chronological order, at least in terms of internal time. Taken as a whole I believe they exhibit a curious pattern: Every time I think I have learned something, my life seems to deliberately set about contradicting it. Yet the contradiction is never absolute. It is more a quarter turn than a whole. So I have left the contradictions side by side, because that's the way life is.
There are probably no absolute answers. Just alternatives. The best I can do is to trust my present experience and follow where it leads. And it has led me down some amazingly divergent paths, from Mary Baker Eddy to Fritz Perls, from Krishnamurti to A Course in Miracles . . . but somehow, at the time, each one worked, each one was needed, and, conversely, each became a cage when I clung to mere words in spite of my experience. This mistake was never the fault of the particular teaching. Once again, I had unplugged myself from my core.
So I want to remind you that every entry in this book is at best an asymptotic shot at life, and at my life, not at yours. If my words affirm you, then savor them for the moment. But if they tempt you to distrust your basic honesty, spit them out. We are the only authority on what is good for us. Once we see this, we feel an enormous peace and freedom.
soft the sky
fills
and softly
spills
soft the drop
drips
gently down
and soft my foot
falls
soft the ground
and down the ground
fills
gently down
There is a flat way of seeing that most of us live with every day. And there is a spiritual way of seeing that comes suddenly, and when it does that day is rare and beautiful. With this new vision we see the innocence woven through all beings and objects, as though a shaft of light had fallen across treasured possessions in a forgotten closet, and for the time we live with this vision, all things around us are transformed.
I associate this spiritual way of seeing with many causes: with music and poetry, with sunsets and seas, with friends who are friends, with love, and now and then with a book or a passage within a book. These things have at times inspired me to this broader vision, but rarely have I been able to return and use one of them to recapture it. If I try, the poem or song will have lost its magic, and I only receive an echo of my previous wonder.
Sometimes I doubt and sometimes I believe. I like not making myself believe when I am doubting and not making myself doubt when I am believing. Surely neither God nor accident needs my consistency.
When I paint I am influenced by the texture of the paper, the viscosity of the paint, the condition of the brush. I reach down to make a thin line and it comes out plump. Then the picture takes a new direction—I influencing it, it influencing me.
We start to do one thing and something happens to divert us. We resent the influence and try to go back to our original intention. But we are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs. We walk down a road and feel a sudden burst of warmth from the sun and stop to bask our eyes. We receive a letter from a loved one, a nibble from our puppy, a knowing look from a clerk in a store and are no longer the same. What we just were doesn't quite apply. What we just intended is in the past. This is not a lack of resolve; it is the way life flows. Always a new painting, always a new self.
Are we more mind than body, more body than feeling, more feeling than memory, more memory than future? Sometimes I am all anger and sometimes all peace. There are minutes I live for tomorrow and minutes I live for her. In last night's hot bed I was flesh and afterward soul. But most moments I am not just a body or a mind, and when I am at peace with this reality, and my intellect does not override my flesh, and here does not deny tomorrow. When emotions, memories, needs and all the et cetera of my being each have their own voice, I see that I am how everyone else is . . . and possibly even how everything is.
Cause and effect have no stopping point. Everything we do touches everything else. Since I have become more willing to acknowledge my displeasure, I notice that I have started crossing my Ts. And somehow this is related to the comment I recently made about Beulahs: “She liked me until I crossed her.” And all of this appears to accompany my new posture: I no longer hold my head down as much. I suspect there are a thousand other connections.
I do not see growth as a procedure that locates “the real me.” It