- Clinton Callahan
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love is an extremely personal work. It was personal for me to write, and I am hearing from others that it is extremely personal to read. Fierce clarity forced the words into order, driven by a red-hot rage about the utter lack of this knowledge in our culture. Tears often rolled down my cheeks while writing. And many ideas were nearly too frightening for me to risk saying.
I think extremely personal work is required now, a direct and honest confrontation with the state of our inability to relate, to communicate, to listen, and to be with each other. Without an unflinching laser examination of what we presently create in our relationships, how can we hope to create anything different?
Each idea in this book was hard earned, through first-hand experience, with many failures and mistakes. Some of you reading this book were there in those moments when a piece of clarity was distilled. I thank you for your collaboration. Being in those moments with you, discovering how things work and what does not work, these are highpoints in my life.
I’ll tell you one story, the night I discovered the first Hidden Purpose of my irresponsible self (my Gremlin). It may not seem like a highpoint in the telling, but it was a step that needed to be taken if I was to provide people with anything of value. And it was an integral part of my personal rite of passage.
I was living in France, co-managing a spiritual retreat center with my wife at the time. It was Sunday night, about nine-thirty, early winter, December, 1998, a chilly drizzly night. Ordinarily it was time for bed, but I received some feedback just then about an aspect of my behavior that had not changed even after repeated revelations. It struck me suddenly that change was absolutely hopeless so long as I remained ignorant of the root cause of my behavior.
My ignorance was driving me crazy. I was so frustrated I could not stay inside the old French farmhouse. So I grabbed my jacket and a sleeping bag and thought I would sleep out in the barn, but even there I could not stop moving. I dropped the sleeping bag and kept walking, out the long stony driveway in the moonless night, then up the winding paved road past little farmhouses, cold drizzle dripping from the leafless trees and hitting my face.
Some invisible purpose had been at work all my life producing results from behind a curtain I could not open, and I needed it open. Until I could make that purpose conscious I could not be accountable for my actions. The conflict was that opening that curtain would destroy a part of my life, a part that was heretofore functioning unconsciously. I could never return to my ordinary life if I gained that knowledge, but I vowed not to end this hike without it. I would rather spend the rest of my days begging in some far away French village, nameless and penniless, than to continue being a marionette buffoon.
A furnace churned inside me, pumping my legs onward. Most of the night passed while I trudged furiously, wet, cold and thirsty, with huge blisters on my heels. My hips ached and each step became torturous. Village after village passed by, until I finally sat down on a guard rail at a fork in the road unable to decide which way to continue, completely drained. I lapsed into absolutely futility. Then the curtain parted. I saw in this moment, exhausted, alone in the dark night, that I was fulfilling the very purpose that I had been searching for. The unconscious machinations of this purpose had been relentlessly twisting my every action into fulfilling its specifications, because this was the one purpose that was normal for me, ever since I was one year old, and left alone in my crib, I thought, to die.
I had screamed and screamed and nobody came, nobody cared. If I was to survive past that moment in the crib, then many subtle systems had to shut down. I had to abandon softer wishes, needs for abundance of heart and nearness of soul. If I was to survive that moment in the crib, then it would only be by exerting my own efforts alone. Surviving became the underlying purpose of my life, the thing that I could do, the thing that secretly defined my standard of normal, the outcome of my every effort. I intended to stay forever in a mode of survival. I became a survival hero. This was my Hidden Purpose. My life was about surviving. Anything different from being in survival could not be my life.
- Clinton Callahan
I slowly rose back onto my feet and hobbled towards the nearer village, a few kilometers further on. In the back of a monastery I found a small building that housed a heating furnace. Mercifully the door was unlocked. I let myself in and by the light of the furnace collapsed onto the dusty cement floor. An hour or so later the sun lightened the grey sky enough that I could call my friend Thomas to come pick me up.
It took months to digest that experience. I could not explain to anyone what had happened. I could not figure it out in any linear fashion. But through this fierce internal underworld struggle I was able to distinguish between low drama and high drama, to define Gremlin and its Hidden Purpose, to reveal the entire Map of Possibility – the central map of Possibility Management, and to experientially and intellectually distinguish ordinary, extraordinary and archetypal relationship, the basis of the book Radiant Joy Brilliant Love.