When the unconditional finds expression, competition evaporates. When we feel compassion, we will not strive mightily to make someone else lose, to "beat" someone. We can run as fast as we wish, and a score keeper can say we have won, but we ran for the sake of running not for the sake of the winning. When we return to the unconditional within us, we find that our desire to dominate also transforms. It returns to a personal power that we use creatively and extensively, and we do so for the sake of the doing within the moral sphere rather than to violate the moral sphere through domination. Our identity and ego take on a balanced perspective toward themselves and toward the world. We still want and need an identity we present to the world as an agent of discourse and intercourse, and it too, enters into becoming where it never fears a loss through becoming and transformation. It experiences the joy of feeling more that it has ever felt of itself while knowing that it has never been less.[107] In this state, our ego still defends our identity so it can assert itself relatively safely in the world, but it doesn't feel the need to act aggressively against anyone. It knows how to maintain the proper limits with others without acting out of fear, defensiveness, or aggression. This form of transformation leaves our identity intact yet allows us an emancipation into becoming and into being that opens our scope of thought, choice, and action and reduces the power of limitations. Any level of transformative learning in one area of our lives can open us to critically reflecting on other meaning perspectives in our lives. Frankly, it feels very good to think and write about this consummation devoutly to be wished.
T.S. Elliot wondered, if it would have served him better to be "a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." It may seem to many of us that the simplest way to avoid suffering comes by abandoning the self-consciousness of our being and becoming self, the consciousness that can seem burdened by our awareness of the weight of time and memory, the pain that we derive from that awareness. In that way, we can hope, we avoid the damaging blows that come to us each day. To live completely in the Now, in some ways, means to live without such awareness, no history to remember, no future to consider, and no trembling before the valley of the shadow of death. In such a state, we hope to keep all suffering at bay.
We can make another choice which continues to ask for a full awareness of our lives and selves and allows us to deal with suffering in another way. We can find or make meaning out of our suffering. Once we have accomplished that, we find we can bear the suffering of life and allow that life to become more meaningful. That's the choice that Frankl made after his years in concentration camps. He made meaning out of the experience, and he chose optimism in response. It's a tragic optimism, but optimism in any case.[108]
Frankl says that our defiant human spirit exists whole, healthy, and complete no matter the bad choices that we have made and have done us harm or what the world has done that has done us harm. That human spirit defies that harm and remains undamaged and healthily even as we experience the harm and its pain. In our terms here, the defiant human spirit forms an integral element of the becoming self.
We don't need to extinguish our conscious self to become free of damage. We can choose to embrace the undamaged self even while experiencing our own slings and arrows and the slings and arrows of others. When we embrace and become whole with the undamaged and undamageable becoming self, we continue to experience suffering, and we continue to learn from the pain that causes, find meaning in it. Immediately and ultimately our essential, becoming self, remains completely whole and healthy, undamaged by the depredations of daily life.
The stronger our relationship to our undamaged and becoming self, our defiant human spirit, the more fully we can feel and show compassion to others and ourselves.
A friend told us a story about moment of transformational learning she experienced. She didn't call it that. She didn't give a name, but it was transformational learning nonetheless. She decided as a child she would never do to her children what her mother did to her. Most of us make such a decision as children because we really feel hurt by what happens to us at the hands of our parents at the service of some higher purpose no one understands. However, like most of us, she found herself acting just like her mother in her role as a mother.[109] She didn't like what she was doing. It motivated very bad feelings, but she still felt she had to do it. Her unquestioned meaning perspective told her so.
On a visit from her mother, the grandson, a "picky eater," would not eat the food in front of him: a hamburger. The grandmother took over, and insisted the boy eat every bite before he left the table. After a very long time, the grandmother got fed up with the boy refusing to eat, and she quit the scene. This became a critical moment of our friend. She spontaneously, critically reflected on this scene, and saw what the grandmother did as sheer acts of cruelty and rejection with no higher purpose in sight. Our friend went beyond "No" at that moment. Freed to think for herself, she went to work on developing actions toward the developing son that communicated her unconditional positive regard for him. That led her to critically examine other areas in her life, including the ones she had with the parental figure that treated her in the way she finally, clearly observed. The meaning perspective imbued in her by the mother disappeared leaving a clear sense of the nature of her own experience as a child. It hurt, but it liberated in many ways. She chose to see her own childhood suffering as meaningful and used that meaning to ameliorate the suffering of the child in her care.