A word is a symbolic tool created by human beings to indicate something we experience in reality. We generalize and say “All of these things we will call dog, all of those things we will call ball.” A word is a this-not-that categorization that provides a name, a shortcut for communication. It represents, in symbolic form, what we experience. But a word does not carry the fullness of that experience; it holds only narrow slivers of the context from which it was drawn. Each word is a limited, inflexible tool that excludes far more than it includes.

Ten years before this book, it seemed I was almost 100% lost in concepts. Although familiar with where concepts come from, I didn’t see them as a tool, I saw them as the only way to access reality. I believed all truth must be conceptual. If it couldn’t be put into words, with logic to support it, it wasn’t worth considering. But I began to notice that there were so many different versions of “The Truth” around me, and wondered why peoples’ truths could be so seemingly oppositional. As this tense, stressed adult I call “me” became aware of how lost he was, and of the limits of the words he used every day, my life opened up to a feeling of peace and a joyful flow of living that seemed new and wonderful.

Using Feel Good Now as a motto helped me develop the ability to stand back from my thoughts and watch them. When I caught myself feeling less good, I could shift attention from what was making me feel bad to something that felt just a little better. I began to see other people, myself, and life differently; and I started enjoying it all so much more.

I came to see and feel that viewing words as absolutes was keeping me stuck. Holding my words as absolutes more often led to destruction than to better living for all involved. I thought that there must be a better way. Coming to know words as limited, and as freeze-framed snapshots of the constant movement of life, I realized they are more like temporary placeholders than absolutistic truth-tellers. Most of my life, I had used words as posts in cement. Later I realized they are, at best, only posts in the sand.

As I experienced brief glimmers of the non-cognitive, I came to question the usefulness of “motivational” concepts such as goals, outcomes, results, structure, and discipline. Considering these as important, urgent, and crucial created a lot of tension inside me. But that tension was well hidden and I would have never noticed it without having opened up just enough to consider something more than logic, reason, and cognition; in other words, more than word-tools. Now I’ve seen that getting things done can flow with enjoyment and creativity, without any sign of the resistance caused by trying to make something happen by forcing it through these types of concepts.

This pop-in came to me as a severe shock. At first I thought it was a crazy thing to think, and yet, it stayed with me. As the days passed, I wondered “What about killing? How can I not believe in the wrongness of that? What about Hitler?” My previous reaction had always been “we need to kill these killers so they can’t do that again”. But as the shock and surprise of this pop-in dissipated, I began to realize that my previous reaction carried the same destructive energy as those I’m calling wrong, bad, or evil. I also began to realize that taking action to change situations that seem destructive, doesn’t require the negative energy of a judgment followed by a forceful counterattack. A punishment mindset is not required to stop destruction; simple non-reactive action works much better. Actually, it is a killer’s sense of being “right” that drives the killing. That “right” gets used as a word-tool cloaking device. If I then try to kill the killer because I’m “right”, the back and forth never ends. As I loosened my embrace of right/wrong good/bad, I began to sense a feeling of oneness with people and gratitude toward life. This would not have been possible if I’d continued holding the widely accepted view that judging right/wrong good/bad are good for life.

As I eased my way out of the me-vs-them outlook, I found a new feeling to replace it: delight in the process of giving without expecting a specific response. The this-not-that of word-tools had always supported a tit-for-tat process of me giving to another person, hooked to a soft expectation of getting something back. Once I began to sense the Connectivity I live within, which exposed the invalidity of my me-vs-them outlook, I also began to experience a pure outflow of good will. It has become enjoyable to sense this well-grounded benevolence because it no longer carries the barbed hook of thinking about what might come back.

Blaming and punishment have always been discouraging for me – they don’t lead to long-lasting change. By sensing the Connectivity that surrounds me I also became aware that we are far more connected than we are separate. This vast interconnectivity I have come to experience has helped me see there is another way to nurture change: allowing ourselves to “grow out of” our unconscious actions. Attempting to change my damaging unconscious actions through blaming and punishment doesn’t work, not long term. But allowing growth does. It ends the process of trying to stop destruction by using destruction.

In the tit-for-tat world I see around me, I uncovered something different that made me change my views about the importance of always getting something back for what I gave. Feeling alone after my second divorce helped. Coming out of my rigidly conceptual mindset also helped. As I began to give just because I enjoyed it, I found a new experience connected to letting love inside me flow. Sounds like a song doesn’t it? But, it didn’t come from a song, it came from me living life in a natural way rather than in the restrictive word-tooled way I was so accustomed to.

Word-tools narrow the focus as they zero in on the one generalized grouping that excludes all else. In order to function as shortcuts for actual experience of what’s real, they leave out uniqueness and Connectivity. These communication shorthands expand our lives when we are aware of the limitations. But when we forget the limitations, and pay no attention to the underlying, ultimate purpose of coming in contact with reality, words become tools of distortion and destruction.

Haunted all my life by the demands of an “ideal self”, I began to uncover another way to live. As I broke through my judgments of other people, to see that there was more than just their surface characteristics, I began to do the same for me inside myself. I broke through many judgments of myself, and took them less seriously as I began to see a deeper self cradled in a sense of peaceful well-being. My relentless and critical shoulds dissipated to the point where I noticed entire days without beating myself down.

In this movie, we see people living life based on excluding and restricting – two functions that are embedded in our basic form of communication, our word-tools. Then we see the people loosen-up on clinging to their rigid beliefs and allowing life to flow in. Without explicitly stating it, the movie Chocolat shows people who come to see that life comes first, and that holding word-tools as absolutes restricts life and denies the Connectivity inherent in it.

Word-tools support my desire to make things happen, to force a preconceived outcome, to control life directly. But life continues to show that I don’t have direct control; my control is indirect. If I step back for a wider than word-tool view, I see that growth happens as a process of nature, not an outcome from an instruction book. I sense that I am like a seed through which my life grows. If I stay in tune with my environment, aware of the multitude of interconnections it holds, I then have a beneficial influence on what happens. But if I try to force my growth, through some form of “single-caused”, direct control, then I diminish my awareness of Connectivity and of the quality of what happens in my life.

Guessing what others think of me began as a child when I worried that my mom was angry or sad or happy because of something I did. But these thought-circles depend on holding-tight to a view of separateness. If she is separate and has authority, then it makes sense I’d be worried. As a child, I didn’t know about Connectivity. I had zero awareness that all of us breathe the same air and that we are ultimately more alike than different.

Most goals I’ve experienced are fueled by a threat, either of not receiving a reward or of receiving a punishment. Can a goal be fueled by something else? Can I allow my own growth without threatening myself with some negative consequence such as withdrawal of approval? I sense it can be done, but not through strict adherence to a word-tool way of viewing the world. It requires looking beyond our limited tools of communication and bringing back the reality of life that the tools give names to but can never fully represent.

In seeing everything only through conceptual filters, what mattered most was the differences between the groupings of concepts. Good versus bad, earners versus moochers, lazy versus hard-working – all are forms of one grouping against another. And I discovered that all are prejudices I didn’t want to admit to. I was unaware of what was actually important to me when I used concepts to put myself above others and above reality itself. Discovering the this-not-that nature of word-tools, along with a feeling of Connectivity with people and the rest of reality, shined a light on what was important to me deep down: it was the core goodness, the Being, and all the uniqueness I had been blinded to. Instead of using my conceptual groupings as tools, I had allowed them to use me.

I get so easily trapped in the should of making sure I make the right choice or the most all-encompassing assessment of a situation. It boils down to me feeling pressed to check every possible option or variable. I feel I must make sure I don’t miss something important. It’s a form of perfection I call comprehensiveness. Caught in the swirling flux of all the fabricated stuff around me contributes to my confusion. I forget that the pieces we put together to create fabricated stuff pulls my attention away from the source of it all: nature. I forget that nature is moving and growing, and I forget that it is not the result of a manufacturing process. Realizing this has helped me acknowledge and trust the wholes of nature as I acknowledge and trust the vastness of what I don’t know.

I thought I was unique in viewing myself as “quietly rebellious” and “intellectual”. Identifying with these traits, I thought of myself as different from and better than others. I realized with surprise that I was actually the same as most people because the process of identifying is what most people do. Identifying is not only trapping myself into a view that is constricted by the very word-tools I use, it is also a form of following the crowd.

There is a delicate interaction that I had no sense of when I was completely lost in concepts. It is a subtle, gentle partnership that I can sense only when I abandon my will to make things happen. When I experience Arm-in-Arm, it comes out of an open allowing of me in recognition and gratitude for all that surrounds me. It is a fragile kind of coming together, me with the whole of life. When I turn on a light switch, light somehow shines on what was before engulfed in darkness. When I relax my Being, quiet my mind, and allow for the unknown, I somehow open a channel to a partnership that flows in ease with what was before engulfed in the stressful tension of hardship. I don’t know how electricity works to bring the light. And I don’t know how an “allowing awareness of Being” works to bring a sense of Arm-in-Arm. I know only that they happen, and that they flow without resistance to bring whole-life experiences we can enjoy.