Lay the bricks of your castle.
Field Notes 20260708 - Wednesday
I’ve never been a fan of building castles in your own countryside. The act of either erecting on the spot or moving into a new territory and putting up walls always felt subversive to your own community or an inherited one. I was naive; I didn’t understand why people or groups of people engage in this act. “I’m an open book” is what I’d proclaim while looking off into the distance as if recognizing some idealist paradise of genuine, naked, and open communication just over the horizon.
All good and well-meaning idealist frameworks succumb to the cruel reality of human collective unconsciousness. I’ve touched on this in my previous essays from the angle of what must happen in order to transmute collective unconsciousness into collective consciousness.
Dealing with strangers who may lash out at you, react in ugly and hurtful ways, or simply diminish your existence really isn’t that difficult. Odds are that you’ll never see those individuals again; this is when the task of nonreactivity is the easiest. You might work with people afflicted with “temporary Earth-bound insanity,” but at the end of the day, you just go home and disconnect from the situation. This situation is a little harder, but overall you can count on that space between interactions to be regular and sufficient to recharge.
There’s another kind that’s by far the most difficult to navigate: personal, close, familial, someone who you still love no matter what they do or say. This year I’ve experienced the cold and hard slap of what it really means to deal with unconsciousness delivered at the most personal level and from surprising places.
This is a good time to quote the prison Captain from Cool Hand Luke:
What we’ve got here… is failure… to communicate! Some men… you just can’t reach… So you get what we had here last week. Which is the way he wants it… Well, he gets it. And I don’t like it any more than you men.
This quote is good and fun, but when really sitting with it, especially the last part, you realize that it’s a commentary on unconsciousness reacting to unconsciousness. Misery spreading misery. It’s the kind of basic logic of FAFO that I, and many others, have encountered over and over again in grade school. There’s a better way, and it’s very difficult in the beginning, but over time, as with all things, it too becomes a reliable part of you.
Wouldn’t not reacting seem weak? When asking this question myself a few years ago, I realized that it was me who was asking and perceiving such non-action as weak, not others. Nonreaction is not weakness but strength. With recent events that I’m being delightfully vague and obscure about, I let myself get pulled in; the ego barked back. So, I once again return to one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books from one of my favorite philosophers of our era:
What about people who want to use me, manipulate or control me? Am I to surrender to them? They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt to get energy and power from you. It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated. If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn’t mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say “no” firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say “no” to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive “no,” a high-quality “no,” a “no” that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
The ones who try to use you are running on empty. Cut off from source, they siphon. Manipulation is an unconscious act — and it only lands on an unconscious target. Fight the unconsciousness in someone else and you drop to its frequency.
Surrender never meant handing yourself over. A firm “no” and complete inner nonresistance occupy the same moment without friction. The no comes from seeing: a clean read of what is right for you, now. No reaction in it. No charge. Nothing left over for suffering to grow from.
Wait, but what about the castle? Well, I’ve learned that when the source of unconscious misery is one of the closest people that you’ve known your entire life, you are simply and naturally compelled to put up strong and very tall boundaries.
Lay the bricks of your castle not in haste but with steadfast determination and resolve.
Today’s Field Notes illustration:
A Castle. A lone tower keep rising from its own small island, gray stone shouldering out of green turf with quiet water on every side. A single narrow stair climbs to a door set high above the ground — no drawbridge, no gate at the waterline, entry granted only by deliberate ascent. Beyond it, the far shore carries on with its hills and traffic, close enough to see, too far to intrude. The castle speaks to the boundary built from insight rather than fear: walls that don’t shout back at the world but simply stand, a firm “no” rendered in stone and inner nonresistance rendered in still water. In meditation, find the point where the stair meets the door — the one crossing you alone control — and rest there, sovereign and unhurried. Bricks laid in haste crumble; bricks laid in resolve hold.
