Indestructible You: Building a Self that Can't be Broken

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Chapter One

The life inside you

Find a moment in your life when you felt fully alive, energized and connected to everything around you. Perhaps you felt oneness with nature when you entered a rich green forest, or drew breath in the thin cold air on a mountaintop. Perhaps you raised your head in the dark desert and felt infinite galaxies streaming down upon you. You may have been surprised by spring flowers bursting with life and color, the birth of a baby, or an artist’s canvas that overwhelmed you with beauty. Most likely you have experienced such a moment through life’s most intense pleasures: sex, falling in love, having an adventure, or simply sharing a delicious meal with close friends.

For most people such moments are fleeting and all too rare. The purpose of this book is to share with you a way to deepen your sense of connection to life so that you can feel fully alive whenever you want. The method may surprise you. We want to strengthen your awareness of the most alive part in you, the driving life force at your core: your will.

Life is will. To be alive means to want, and to want means to be alive. Behind the seeming harmony of nature intense forces and urges are always at work. Not only the strongest and the fittest, but even the nicest living things intensely want. Songbirds sing to attract and impress mates and to proclaim territories; they sing loud and long to overcome the competing songs of other birds. It is not at all about singing hymns to God or expressing the harmonies of nature. The lovely spreading trees are really an evolutionary adaptation; by growing taller, trees are striving to outmaneuver each other to better reach the sunlight. The breathtaking colors of spring flowers are an intricate evolutionary scheme: they draw bees and other pollinators into service of the plants’ reproduction. When life creates beauty it is because it wants to reproduce. The act of procreation is simply the will to become more than what one already is. Life is never content with mere survival. Life forever wants to grow in power, to expand in numbers, to seize territories. For this reason, life rarely rests, and when it rests, it is to regain its power for this tireless activity.

The same is true for every person. To want is the most natural thing in life. To be human means to be driven by intense passions. Any birth of a child is the eruption of a willful creature, no matter how innocent and adorable that creature may appear. A toddler is never content with mere survival. A child wants to feel and touch, taste and experiment, grow and know, acquire and obtain. A child tirelessly seeks ways that could grant him or her a sense of fulfillment and realization, self-enhancement and self-expression. From birth onwards we humans are walking wills, wills with legs and hands and eyes. We are driven by the search for experiences of empowerment and growth, expansion and feelings of power. We are not different in this way than the rest of nature; we have only extended the will of life to new territories of feeling and thinking, relating and experiencing.

In life, no one just wants to be. It is never enough just to be. This is the great difference between being and becoming: to be means only to survive and breathe. Do you only want to breathe? Are you satisfied with your mere survival? Of course not. Even a plant stretches its leaves towards the sun and pushes its roots deeper into the soil. We, all of us, are in a feverish, incessant search for ways to grow, ways to fulfill and express ourselves more and more.

If you read this book, it means you want something. Most probably you want to gain more knowledge of yourself in order to become stronger, more present, more free and more in control. It is your will that has led you to read this book. If the book succeeds, and you start to feel your power grow, you will love it and read every page with excitement. If it fails, you will get rid of it, and search for something else. You like what makes you feel more powerful, more enhanced.

You can easily put this to the test right now with a brief thought experiment:

Try just to be without any purpose whatsoever. Simply sit and be and breathe. How long do you think this can go on without the interruption of thoughts or feelings? Put the book down now, and experiment with this.

Our guess is that for most of you this experiment will end in the blink of an eye, and not because there’s something wrong with you. The thoughts appear because there’s too much excitement inside you; there is a constant bubbling of urges to become more, more than one presently is. At the root of all thoughts lies the very energy of wanting.

You can examine this by yourself. Thoughts are made of plans for the future (unfulfilled experiences that excite us) and regrets about the past (wanting to correct some experiences to get a better present and future). They are also made of fantasies (imagining what we really want to do yet cannot do in reality) and efforts to control life through internal arguments with reality (our wishes to overpower life in order to get what we want). Of course that’s not a complete list of all our thoughts. But if you looked deeply into any thought, you would find that they all boil down to one inner force: wishes to gain some sort of power in the real world.

Some might say: But what about negative feelings and thoughts? They don’t seem to want. In fact they come over us as a depressed letting go of all wanting. We will explore why this is so later on. For now, to demonstrate how negative thoughts and feelings are also wanting, please think of one of your own negative thoughts that has plagued you. Turn that thought over like a rock. You will see on its underside that your thought is just a frustration – a frustration of will.

Now try just sitting and being again. Try sincerely to just be and to remain content with mere being. This time, as the thoughts and feelings bubble up, see if you can notice something that feels like a frantic search going on inside of you. We want so badly to get up and move around, to experience and get involved in the stream of life. If we force ourselves to sit motionless, our thoughts start doing it for us: they move around and get involved. Indeed, it is terribly difficult to sit quietly, both externally and internally, for too long.

Sometimes, when we become exhausted from this race of will, we desperately want to relax. To relax means not to want anything in particular for a certain period of time. But even while relaxing, we often yearn for some experience of pleasure that would enhance us and enrich our senses: good food, good sex, happy feelings, exciting adventures. Relaxation also serves our will. It is for the renewal of our energy. In other words, we relax only to acquire the sufficient energy to get back to the search for self-fulfillment.

Different schools of meditation have encouraged many millions in the Western world to aspire to this state of just being without wanting. From the point of view of such schools, to ceaselessly want is to be trapped in a state of suffering. Wanting, they say, is a state of restlessness which should be considered an existential neurosis that all humans share. The Buddha (and many gurus after him) taught that the state of human suffering could be ended by ceasing to desire – a process which required rigorous training through many lifetimes. Respectfully, we disagree.

The problem is that meditation, if understood as the complete quietude of the mind, is an unnatural state, while this restlessness is a natural state. We are like a flame of life that cannot extinguish itself. We are too excited because life’s excitement is what we are. Stopping our restlessness temporarily through meditation can help us smooth out the rough edges of our frenzied search for power. It can recharge our batteries. But negating suffering can’t be your life’s purpose.

Seeking quietude as an end in itself sets you up to resist life’s dynamic energy. It’s as if you are stuck on a roller coaster and all you are doing is trying to get off the ride. So you close your eyes and pretend you are not moving. We believe it’s better to keep your eyes wide open and do something constructive with the inescapable energy of life. The paradoxical situation of the genuinely devoted meditator is that he or she in practice is a very willful person: the path to meditative quietness requires a tremendous amount of desire, and a strong enough will to gather one’s entire concentration and energy, intention and ambition in order to achieve this goal of tranquility. Ironically, the great teachers of this path can be found ceaselessly lecturing, teaching, and energetically training disciples to spread their methods for letting go.

The simple truth is that we cannot stop wanting. Wanting is the tireless engine of life itself. Even the act of breathing is not a letting go; it is a grasping for life. Have you ever struggled for your breath underwater or during an asthma attack? You want your breath with all the will in you.

We may not like it, how much we want. We may fear that if we feel the full force of our desire it will be bad for us. Resistance to the idea of wanting as the core of our being is fueled by two major reasons: the first one is morality, and the second is our past emotional injuries.

Morality, as we have acquired it since early childhood, encourages us to adopt a self-image that we are good, loving, selfless, and moral. This self-image helps us to hide away our endless wanting; hide it away even from ourselves. Morality is like the famous fig leaves that Adam and Eve used to cover their genitals after they first sinned. But what morality really covers up is will, which is our true nature. It covers it up so well that our true nature never enters our self-image. If someone would come and say to you: You are a walking will, a seething cauldron of desire, you would most probably be offended!

It is not considered good to be willful. The good person doesn’t want, at least not too much. It is good to be satisfied with very little. Only the bad ones want without shame. The good, like us, live humbly with what they have already got and very gently wish for some improvement of our lot sometime in the future, or perhaps a reward in heaven. When we want, we make sure that it appears as almost not-wanting; as just getting a little something for ourselves in the world which belongs to the powerful.

The other reason one might resist the world of will is our past injuries and wounds. These wounds, inflicted by experiences of weakening and deep frustration, have taught us that wanting too much usually leads to painful disappointment. We learned early on that life and people can dramatically rob us of any sense of power and will and leave us feeling vulnerable and helplessly small. In fact, if you look deeply into your most difficult and humiliating experiences, you will find out that they always had something to do with the loss of your power. As walking wills, it is intolerable for us to remain so utterly powerless, with our wills and wishes defeated.

The experience of weakening happens when our feeling of power dramatically diminishes. We can reach a minimal state in which our wills are shattered, often due to the overpowering of stronger forces with a greater will: abused by a parent, bullied in school, fired from a job, rejected by a lover. Such experiences make us seek alternative, internal and secret solutions that alleviate and compensate for our position of weakness. They make us quietly retreat from the game of life, be cautious with our wanting, and careful not to reveal our true desires. The experience of weakening makes us turn our heads away from the will that burns at the core of our being, and focus instead on the miserable we, the forlorn victims of life.

Since we often don’t deal properly with our experiences of weakening, they gradually erode our connection to life as will. Add to that the moral self-image, and you’ll grasp why we cannot get in touch with our true nature. This book will guide you back to it, to who you really are. The first step is for you to acknowledge the will to grow and expand as your life’s driving force.

It is amazing how merely acknowledging this driving force can strengthen you at once. It’s like getting you on your feet, as your real self, connected to the flame of life at the core of your being. This self-recognition is a key to unlocking a constant inner state of power, a power that cannot diminish. This is what we call True Inner Power. On your way towards this inner power, identifying yourself as a continuum of will serves as a highly effective way to master your mental and emotional distresses. All your memories of weakening, and all your present experiences of weakening, can be dealt with differently if you begin by affirming your life’s basic wish for power.

In reality, we are already connected to a tremendous power: the biological power of life and the physical power of the cosmos. Each one of us embodies this power. This is not a metaphor. Every particle in your being came from the Big Bang. That explosion of energy, that drive to expand, still throbs in us. It is us. We are the ripples of the Big Bang in human form. We can realize that right away if we only acknowledge the pounding will that drove us to become alive in the first place. Close your eyes for a second: can you feel that pulse of life within you, that electricity, that thing that wants to be alive?

Our ability to feel that thing is only hindered by moral limitations and wounded memories. Both restrain and blur this innate, natural power. A power that is yours, because it is you.

Connecting with this power can be exhilarating, and it is important to realize at the start that unleashing your inner power is something fundamentally different than a toddler’s furious demand that the world give her everything she wants. This is not a book about the immediate satisfaction of your every desire. It’s more akin to the guiding theme of the Spiderman movies: With great power comes great responsibility. This book will guide you how to initiate a conscious communication with this great natural power inside you, stop denying it and start using it to better cope with the phenomenon of life. You only need true knowledge of the real life, your life and the life of the cosmos, and that knowledge will powerfully reshape the reality of your psyche.

It might sound strange, but this is not just a book for reading. It is also a tool for thinking clearly and feeling deeply. To this end, you will find exercises and thought experiments in text boxes within each chapter. Please stop reading and do them as you come across them. You will also find practices for you to do after you have read each chapter. These are valuable tools to enable you to test out and integrate these new ideas into your daily life.

Shai Tubali

Tim Ward

Chapter Two

The root of all negative emotions

Really, I’m a walking will? you might respond to Chapter One. "But I only occasionally feel that I really want something, and even when I do, I often don’t express it, let alone act aggressively to get what I want."

So in Chapter Two let’s look for convincing evidence for your will. We will find it where you might least expect: in your negative emotions. In Chapter One we said your negative emotions were like a rock, and if you turned it over and looked beneath, you would find your will hidden there. Your negative emotions are the reflectors of your inner reality. They arise from the frustration of your will. As long as your life is going along smoothly, things are working out as you desire, and you are getting what you want, you don’t notice your will. It’s when you encounter an obstacle and your will is blocked that it reveals itself. Think of your negative emotions as like branches on a tree. Frustration forms the trunk of that tree – the common factor that upholds all these negative feelings. And the roots that nourish and support trunk and branches are your willful being.

You can follow a very simple and powerful method for discovering for yourself how frustrated will lies behind every negative emotion:

Think of a recent time when you felt a powerful negative emotion. What exactly frustrated you in that situation? Can you identify a will behind that frustration? Let’s say, for example, that you felt insulted by something that a close friend said to you. What will hides behind this insult? Most likely you want this friend’s appreciation. Perhaps this friend appreciates you for the most part, but you want more. You want that friend to appreciate you all the time, to respect and encourage you without reservation. If you look even more deeply – perhaps you wanted the appreciation of everyone around you all the time. When this friend hurt and disregarded you, you might have felt that your status was