February 2026 TAT Forum

Art:

What’s an example of knowing where you are metaphysically, Colm?

Colm:

The context was more to do with recognising where you are really at and being honest with yourself about it. For example, say in someone’s heart of hearts their deepest desire is a white picket fence, a career and a loving family. In that case, starting with a map and compass to try and help them on a spiritual quest to Truth or Liberation (accepting of course there is no map and compass to Truth, but bear with the metaphor) is unlikely to be of value, as they are starting from the wrong place.

Similarly, if their heart’s deepest desire is Truth or Liberation, but they decide that a white picket fence, career and a loving family is the way to go, again, starting with a map and compass to try and navigate your way to a white picket fence, a career and a loving family is unlikely to give one what they truly seek as they are starting from the wrong place.

Therefore, the idea in the comment was that there is value in being honest about where you are at in terms of what you really want, even if the desire isn’t or doesn’t seem ‘spiritual’, as it is critical to the direction of how one should move forward, towards what they really want. It also should enable serious reflection on whether the journey one is about to set out upon in a different direction, will really provide what they are looking for. It all probably comes down a feeling that underlies the desire, be it love, fulfilment or whichever, will the new direction do the trick.

Brett:

Thank you for adding that, Colm.

I also took it another way: it may be helpful to be aware if I have clarity or not. For example, if I can get a view that I’m experiencing a low degree of clarity, then that might not be the moment to go in the direction the compass is pointing.

If I can get some verification by cross-checking (conversations with others, reading and relating to the words of spiritual teachers) that I may be in a period of relative clarity, then I might have relatively more confidence that I can follow the map I have in front of me at the moment.

Neither of those scenarios would be anything like certainty; I just liked the map and compass metaphor because it suggests I need to find ways to evaluate how much I can trust my tools (thinking, feeling).

Another way I do that is trying to imagine things “playing out” and see if it’s where I want to go. A few years ago a person who claimed to have had a Realization (Abbie) said that if I want to get from Ohio to California, a map of Maryland was not going to take me there no matter how diligently I followed it (I made-up the specific states in that example, but I think I am correctly remembering the gist of what she was saying to me). The idea being, as I take it, that it’s important to know where I really, really want to end up in order to know if I’m on my way there.

From my own lived experience, when I try to take advice or emulate the success of others, I fall flat on my face.   I also have a tendency for grand idealism, which creates games that look more impossible than winnable.  There’s something to be said for shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, but it can also be the case that the engineering feat for one doesn’t translate to making progress towards the other.  

Graham’s steps are superb.  Step 1 is to pick something you care about.  I totally agree, without interest, passion, and commitment, you won’t stay motivated to work through adversity, distraction, and the normal psychological ebbs and flows we go through.  Step 2 is to make the game yours, do it your way.  I totally agree, it has to match the way you move through the world, not how someone else moves through the world.  Step 3 is to play the game with people you admire.  This one is a lot more nuanced.  We can put people on pedestals and admire people who are not healthy for us to be around or emulate.  This takes really knowing people and the effects we have on each other to see who is worth entering into a deeper partnership with.  Step 4: Play Now.  Again, no qualms with this recommendation as long as the game we try to play isn’t bypassing an area of growth we need to work on.  Sometimes doubling down on a poorly thought-out or investigated trajectory can lead us down a cul-de-sac that we have to back out of. 

At least for me, there is a Step 0, which is to really know and understand my motivation behind the games I play.  Is there an unmet need or insecurity?  I’ve found that the games I try to set up for myself are colored by my subconscious.  In my 20s, I did a life review, which foregrounded core psychic wounds that had been playing out over the course of my life up to that point, and continued (continues?) to play out. (I’m 47 now.)  One was that I had an emotionally unavailable father whom I tried to impress through intellectual pursuits.  I wanted to prove that I was smart, thinking that would earn more of his attention, love, and affection.  Another was that I felt like I had an archetypal wound in female relationships and frequently felt unpartnered.  I would pick relationships with women who were also wounded and had low self-esteem.  I still wrestle with aspects of myself that present as codependent.  A third is that I am a bit of a Puer Aeternus.  When the going gets tough, my attention starts to shift to some other shiny object off on the horizon.  It wasn’t until my kids came into the picture that I started wrestling with my Puer nature and stuck with things to completion.  It took me 9 years to complete my PhD, and it was hell trying to stay focused and motivated once I became ABD [All But Dissertation – Ed.] while working in industry to put food on the table for the family.  

My movement through the world is not linear.  It is very hard for me to set a goal and pursue it to completion.  It was the need to be stable to support a family that motivated me to tame the Puer.  The spiritual orientation I received during my time with TAT was far more valuable and effective in my life than my undergraduate education at CMU.  After completing the PhD, I worked towards climbing the technical ladder at the company I worked for.  While I was successful there, it was my enrollment in a transformational and transpersonal coaching program that inspired me to change my job to my current employer and incubate a vision for how I want to invest my life energy in this world.  The work on step 0 is continuous, and the trajectory of my life and the efforts of steps 1-4 continue to evolve, reflecting the shifts at step 0.  

By all objective measures, I’m a very successful software engineer.  And yet, I am not content with that being the totality of who I am or how I spend my time.  The trauma in my family of origin has shaped me. The trauma and chaos the world is going through affect me deeply.  The game I want to play is to help create the world I wish I were born into.  That’s not a very winnable game by my own efforts, and a truly Sisyphean feat if the current Social Media is the playing field.  The impossibility of that game is a mirror back to me.  What work do I need to do at Step 0 to unlock the capacity within myself to operate at steps 1-4? 

Does Graham Weaver’s advice to his students give me additional ideas about playing the Master Game? Before I answer that question, I have to admit to having some bias toward Weaver before I got to the part with his actual advice because he begins by describing what he has done for a living. Running a private equity firm is a version of what DeRopp called the Hog in Trough game (making money). It is not that I am against the goal of making money. My objection is the way in which some people make money. In my view, it is how you play any particular game that matters, not the goal. What I see in the financial “industries” is the promotion of legal gambling by manipulating information rather than by creating genuine wealth (food, clothing, housing, health care, science, art, psychological well-being). The financial industries have created grotesque resource inequalities in my country that undermine genuine wealth.

But I did not want my bias against financial industries to stop me from considering Weaver’s advice. In the end, he tells his students to (1) figure out a goal that excites you, (2) design a game that combines the pursuit of that goal with something the world needs, and (3) play the game with people who share your values and avoid those who do not. That is not bad advice, especially (2) and (3). However, I would modify the first step a little. I think that if we put too much emphasis on goals without considering the countless hours we will be spending on the behaviors we use to pursue these goals, we will disappointed.

So, rather than focus on goals that excite me, I have chosen to focus on the activities that excite me in pursuit of my goals. Activities that are so fulfilling in themselves that it doesn’t really matter if I end up achieving the original goal or if I end up with something else that I did not expect. I do scientific research, and it does not matter if I win a Nobel Prize. I like to write, but it does not matter if I end up publishing a best-selling book. I like to compose music, but it doesn’t matter if I ever have a hit song. I love to play basketball, and does not matter that I have never been the best player on the court. I like to meditate and practice yoga, and it doesn’t matter if I reach enlightenment.

It is true that games have goals. More importantly, games are about playing during every moment of the game. I have found that when I playfully attend to the present, good things will sometimes happen–and often those good things are nice surprises rather than the goals that I had set out to achieve.

To play the Master Game where Truth is what you are aiming for, commitment to play the game even when you may not have any hope of winning, or know what exactly ‘Truth’ is, is a prerequisite. The inspiration to play the game comes from Divine grace.

Going-within is the direction that people who have gone before you suggest. Find practices that show promise of helping with the direction. And then do these regularly with a good attitude. 

I found the path of Inquiry, where the subject itself is the object of investigation, to be the shortest, straight path. 

The game becomes a way of life if you really want to win. 

A real Guru cannot guarantee winning, but without one, I couldn’t have done this. 

For someone like me, who believes that capital-R Reality or capital-T Truth (or an equivalent) is possible for me, and who makes the pursuit of that my conscious goal, and actually prioritizes it, Graham’s advice seems more tactical than strategic. Here’s my attempt to translate his four “steps” into four questions a Spiritual Seeker like me can ask themselves:

1) Am I excited about my spiritual practices (however I define them)?

2) Am I working to develop a way of inner looking that seems tailored to me, or am I just following someone else’s playbook?

3) Am I working with other seekers, people that I either relate to, respect, look up to, empathize with, enjoy being around, and/or am interested in helping and listening to? And lastly,

4) how might I be holding back, and how can I go “all in”?

A winnable game for me, as a Spiritual Seeker, is one where I am always Whole and Complete.

Finally, Graham shared his experience with positive affirmations: “As I wrote ‘I am an Olympian’ in my little green notebook, a funny thing happened: A part of me started to assume the identity of someone who had already achieved that goal. I started to believe it.” That inspired me to write down, “I am Self-Realized.” We’ll see how it goes.

I don’t say that in a demeaning way against trying your best, but all you can hope for is that when you look back, that you can soundly feel that you have done your best. Life is just a survival game, survival of the flesh and it all goes eventually to the compost heap to help to begin another round of organic life. Spirituality to me is to find that which is beyond the compost heap, something tangibly real that pulls it all together and makes the robot flesh sentient.

Whatever game(s) I’m playing, I’m reaching end point with the spiritual game. Everything that I’ve been doing really irritates me now, to hear myself talk about some teaching now is irksome to me, I can’t do it anymore, at least not for a while now.

I feel I’ve had a lot of growth in the work I’ve done and groups I’ve participated in but now I need to take a break from my usual routines. I plan to take a hiatus from spiritual groupwork for 5 years, with the aim of pressing a reset button and as a possible way to try to trigger some spiritual latency. I don’t know whether I’ll kick on again after the 5 years, I’ll review the situation then, January 2031.

I see (for the most part) it’s not a net gain, yet I have to muster the energy / stamina / willingness to look at whatever arises. This part doesn’t seem like it’s all about oneness or open heartedness!  Conditioning has taught me to value the intellect, to have faith in things those who have played the game before me say about the game but a side effect is I doubt myself. If this kind of knowledge produces doubt can the intellect really be what I thought it to be? What is its origin or what is thought made of?

I stumbled upon another way to know, not by content. Emotion seems like a whole different ball game! I can see that I can linger in certain energetic landscapes for some time, rationalizing my distractions and escapes or avoidance patterns. What do I want, what am I avoiding? Considering the pros and cons of a certain avoidance pattern may help me decide that a certain mechanism is too energetically costly to continue to maintain.

It seems I have to unlearn many ideas I had about the game but ultimately it’s not up to me to decide to not play this game anymore.

For several years in my late 20s and early 30s I experienced immense frustration several times each year. I had all the things that should have made me happy, but there was something missing. I’d scan the horizon for what it might be but couldn’t find a clue. I don’t know why I thought of those frustrations as identity crises, but it turned out to be exactly was they were. Behind all my ups and downs I was unwittingly searching for my real identity.

When I met Richard Rose at age 33, something he was talking about rang a gong in me that I didn’t even know was there. The words that came to my mind were: “This man’s telling the Truth; I’ve never heard it before, but something in my recognizes it!” It produced a euphoria I’d never experienced before. The following day I was wondering what it was that rang my bell, and it was “the answers are within.” That was a completely different direction than I’d ever considered.

That conversation had taken place in a meeting of a group that had formed several years earlier after Rose had given a public talk at Ohio State U. about seeking truth. The first time I later heard Rose giving a public talk there, I heard him recommend meditating one hour a day for serious seekers. That made sense to me, and I started doing that. Sometime later during my daily meditation practice I “saw” what I really wanted most from my life. It didn’t come in words or pictures, but it hit my attention in some way I understood.

My reaction was to search my mind to see if I could find any holdouts that might be prioritized if push came to shove. I didn’t see any, and somehow that created a commitment and a vector for effort. A short time later I came across a phrase in something Rose had written that nailed what I’d seen I wanted most: “to become the Truth.” That commitment stuck for nearly 26 years until a breakthrough occurred in May 2004.

Sometime after that, a friend asked how I could commit to such an abstraction as becoming the absolute truth without even knowing if it was possible. I thought about that, and concluded that I had been touched by the love of truth. Not sure when that occurred, but from the time I was a child I had decided to tell the truth because it was easier than trying to keep track of lies; I had also loved detective fiction from early years, which was based on finding the truth about a mystery; and I loved Math in high school since it had solvable problems—hypotheses that could be proved.

I suspect that if we’re playing the Master Game—becoming the Truth of what we are at the core of our being—we may need to be, or have been, touched by the love of truth and for our intuition to conclude that becoming our absolute ideal is not impossible.