The following is an excerpt from Switching Off Autopilot: A Taoist Perspective on Mindfulness. It gives a tongue in cheek look at the Autopilot...
The book will be available in the next 6 months hopefully...
The Four Little Pigs
They were born long ago now, but the real story is that there were actually Four Little Piggies: two sets of twin piglets.
It was quite gruesome, unfortunately, but right after the four were born the Big Bad Wolf gobbled down both their parents. Life in the Neanderthal Time Fast Lane... The young ones scampered for their lives. Dom and Vicky were the older twins names. The younger pair chose even more unusual monikers. Bridge was thus third out of the four. The last little piggy’s name got lost in the scramble to escape the Wolf. It’s nickname soon became Sleepy.
No Pig Parents meant only minimal scraps of love to go around - this was right back at the beginning of Pig History, you see. Given their circumstances, they were in deep trouble from the get go. The fearsome Wolf soon started threatening to control their lives. Quite pertinent to our theme here, the young pigs had four different types of reactions.
1. Older by a few seconds than his twin sister, Dom figured out pretty quickly what to do - adrenaline would work... “I know how to fix his clock, I’ll beat him at his own game. Life with Wolfie around won’t be nice, it’s true. But his style works. All I have to do is Dominate all the other piggies and I’ll be fine. A nice 10,000 square foot home in brick, a Hummer each for me and the wifey and I’ll have him beat quite nicely!” Later he was heard to brag to his younger siblings: “It’s an easy choice, pardners. You’re either with us or agin us.”
2. Next, although she had the same close to human DNA and was born almost on Dom’s rump, Vicky had the reverse hormonal reaction. She wanted to run - yet shrank into herself and cried. She knew the wolf would come and beat down Any Door, Any House where she tried to live. Depressed, defeated and knowing she’d always be The Victim, she decided then and there to work as a servant at Dom’s house - or else for the Wolf whenever he required it.
She soon developed an excellent internal radar system. It worked perfectly. Set in place in her tummy, it constantly searched for Dom and Wolfie’s weapons of Mutually Assured Destruction. Not an easy life, but Vicky soon knew who she should serve when.
3. When Bridge had arrived, the active part of the second twin set, there’d been confusion as to her or his gender. The few minutes birthing delay did make a difference, though. It gave Bridge more Perspective to be sure. Looking around, she/ he could see partial merit to both the first twins types of reactions. All the same, the devastation from Dom seemed Really Crazy and Vicky’s answer didn’t appear much better. Earnest to set things right, Bridge searched for a whole Long, Pooh type Hour for a solution. It finally came, even before the genome was fully mapped: Compromise.
From that point on there was no stopping this Bridger. Messianic, using a vast array of Normalizing Beliefs, he/ she got to Work. Ignoring differences between Dom, Vick, Wolf and even his younger twin Sleepy, Bridge began to make a Superficially Okay World out of that previous chaos. Grace had to be molded from these circumstances, terrible as they were. The Search for the Good was On.
None of the others really understood, but Bridge KNEW what was right. All the other piggies and players on the surface of the planet would eventually get along nicely together. Bridge would make sure of it. They Had to All Get Along: there was No Other Solution. Meaning well - yet being delusional - certainly guilty, anxious, worried, somatizing all manner of ills, Bridge is still working hard in each of us all these years later.
4. Born last and passive on this prehuman scene, you can guess how Sleepy solved all this insanity, right? You got it. Sleepy knew what to do: Get drunk at that place down the street - The Pig Trough. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were soon required by Bridge, yes, but Sleepy just went to the next level of denial. “Piece of cake” as some far distant British ancestors would say...
Sleepy’s Problems were now soon All Resolved on Ativan, shopping or Reality TV addiction, Prozac, Caffeine (or some of that nice cake!) Stoned, asleep or addicted in some other happy way whenever the pain and craziness got too close, Sleepy knew Nirvana was Here, collected together in Dom's nice version of Consumerville. Those high rental rates were just the price you had to pay. Black Angry Humour R Us...
This was prehistory and all four pigs never got to hear of Plato’s cave, of course. They never imagined they might be living in such a place. Their world was Dualistic and that was an end to it.
That they live on in your body and awareness is not a problem, right? More Conscious? How could any of us in modern times accuse them within us of not being awake, each in their own way? Mindful, Hah! Even advanced by ten thousand years here, how can you possibly be mindful, balanced in any more basic way than the life stance choices they made so long ago?
In this Now moment, then, even as an up to date Human, you believe you only have those four options. Like formulaic Aspects to your awareness options, you fear that you can only Dominantly Enact, Victimly Avoid, Bridge or Sleep through Fear’s Wolfish Reality any day you spend on the planet.
Don’t these metascripts/ Aspects sound familiar? There are combo versions too: they cover for each other. How could there be other options? Ahhh, there’s the point of this book. We do know somewhere within us that balance and mindfulness are the answers. We may even have heard of the Tao. Aspects we’ve come to see as ‘who we are’ will perhaps have heard of such. The problem is in the application...
