Polyphasic sleep: Fundamental motivation and preparation, Day minus 7

I am starting a new blog specifically for my experiment in Polyphasic / Uberman’s sleep as I don’t want to overload the Marc’s life and travels list with long introspective posts and daily sleep logs.  I suspect most people on the “Marc’s life” list think I am insane already and I don’t want to give them further evidence of this unless they ask for it by clicking-through a link in an email.  This blog is unedited and I am making no particular effort to be concise either.  If you want some background on who I am and where I am coming from see Lifestyle Design School – About this site. If you like this site and/or feel a resonance with it, please subscribe via box on the left, either via email or RSS.

Fundamental motivation

As I am preparing to attempt this experiment – without a doubt the most radical lifestyle and consciousness experiment of my life – I am realizing my motivations are more complex than what I had expressed in my previous article, where I described my main short-term motivation as greater income.

My relationship to Time and Money

The truth is that I have had a tortured relationship to time and money as long as I can remember.

When I was a teenager, and had so much time on my hands (if only I had known then how precious time was…) I never could make myself do the things that I thought would give me the results I was seeking (ie. become “popular” or somehow remarkable and worthy of attention through study and self-improvement).  Which was probably a good thing, as I didn’t have a clue then what I really wanted or needed, and so getting the things that I thought I wanted may not have been helpful.  The seeds of my resistance to any kind of structure – internally or externally imposed – were laid in those years. Structure is only as useful as the underlying values and maturity that create it.  The Nazis had fabulous structure.

When I became a young adult, I was still trying to work this out, and for many years I worked only a few days a week, by choice.  Eventually, this didn’t quite do it for me either (I was lonely, unhappy and quite depressed for almost two decades), and so I started throwing myself obsessively into various business projects which were designed on the surface to give me financial independence, in the style of Joe Dominguez book Your Money or Your Life, which had a profound impact on me.  But in actual fact all these efforts were about giving me a sense of purpose and identity.  I wanted to be a successful entrepreneur, which is an identity.

Ultimately none of these projects worked out. In one case, I did manage to sock away about $100k over about 3 years, then promptly lost two-thirds of it on the stock market.  I understood eventually that I lacked the emotional maturity and self-awareness to do anything with that money. God caused me to lose it because I did not have a good use for it.

I continued in this way, alternately pursuing money and pursuing community (I couldn’t quite make up my mind), until my early forties when I met Rebekah and took on supporting a family.  All of a sudden my expenses doubled, and then they tripled. I went on another entrepreneurial kick (a web design business) that also failed, after having given it my “all” for 3 years. This was a bit over a year ago, and I’ve been recovering from that ever since, emotionally and financially.

At that point I made an important decision however, which is that I was not cut-out to be an “entrepreneur”, as I had no real interest in becoming wealthy (ie. I lacked the “definiteness of purpose and burning desire” of which Napoleon Hill speaks in “Think and Grow Rich”).  I also gave up on “financial independence” as an unnecessary, and perhaps even counter-productive step, to the attainment of happiness. This includes so-called “passive-income generating internet businesses” that have become the obsession of an entire generation of Americans, and of which less than 1% ever amount to anything – but don’t get me started on that, I wrote about it already in What is Lifestyle Design. I put “Entrepreneur” within quotes as it’s not really possible for me to “give it up” as it’s who I am – I am just not interested in “entrepreneurship” in the business sense, I am interested in entrepreneurship in the sense of a continuous exploration of the frontiers of consciousness.  That was my original error in creating all these businesses, in that to succeed at anything you must be passionate about it. These blogs are my passion. They will eventually monetize (generate income in some way), it’s unavoidable and karmically pre-ordained, but that may not happen for a while and there is no urgency about it.

Pursuing my passion, and the resolution of my relationship to money

The strange thing is that as soon as I gave up on my obsession around financial survival and just started living my life as best I could, doing the things that I had to do and the things that turned me on, I became happy all the time.  This started happening about 5 months ago and it happened largely through a virtual “explosion” in my writing, through the blogs Adventures in Relationship and Community and Lifestyle Design School.  When I got happy, all of a sudden money seemed much less important than it did before – even though I was as challenged as I had ever been in my life before.

Nowadays, I believe that money is about 10% of the problem of happiness. Authentic happiness is the same problem as, and has been variously referred to, as self-actualization (Maslow), integration of the personality (Jung), personal power (Shirley Luthman and others), the “Hero’s Journey” (Joseph Campbell) and learning how to love and be loved (Jesus Christ, Jerry Jud and Shalom Mountain, and many others).  This is the fundamental problem of being human, which underlies all other problems including ecology and sustainability, hunger, poverty, abuses in the international economic system, and loneliness.  It does not supercede all these problems (they still need to be adressed) but it underlies them.  Without love there is nothing, and with love all other problems either lose their importance or they resolve.  “Love bears all things” says Joseph Campbell.

But regarding my position on money (that it is really quite unimportant), you may think that I am an unusual case, that I have resources and skills that will ensure that it’s unlikely that I will ever go hungry or lose my home, etc., but this is not the same for an unemployed auto-worker or a waitress.  I don’t think that this is true.  I think that any reasonably intelligent person living in this culture of abundance (and even in a deep recession we’re still ten times better off than the rest of the world) could figure out how to be happy and thrive within whatever financial constraints they find themselves in – either by increasing their income or changing their lifestyle.  I have no desire to change my lifestyle as it’s a very rich and fulfilling way to live for me.  It also costs me a lot (at least in the short-term, until the commune business takes off) but this is a price I am prepared to pay.  The desire to live as cheaply as possible, which is a desire I had for many years and is very common in the “green” and “voluntary simplicity” crowd, is not always the best thing for one’s development.  Don’t get me wrong, I am all in favor of voluntary simplicity – but not as an obsession.  I draw the line at dividing Kleenex to make it last longer, as suggested in “Your Money or Your Life”.

I still have conflict about Time, however

But even as my relationship to money started resolving, I still had a huge conflict in my relationship to time.  As I took on a 40-hour office job, and learned that I could survive in it and even thrive, I got a freedom that I had never before experienced in my life, largely, as I explained above, through the development of my writing- which is my passion and, I believe, the reason that I was born.  However, my battle with time continued, and between my work and my writing I had very little time left to pursue interests and tasks such as inspirational reading, taking care of people in my community and my family, doing household chores and home maintenance, managing my paperwork and keeping up on my email.  There is nothing inherently unpleasurable in all these things – in fact these are all things that have been intensely enjoyable for me at different times in my life.  But I found that when I came home from a day in the office, finished cooking and cleaning and walking the dog and taking care of urgent household tasks, that I had about two hours to myself all day.  Weekends were spent resting and recovering.  Obviously this was an unsustainble lifestyle for someone of my temperament and ambitions.  It was nothing but a rat-race, and we weren’t even getting ahead on our debts despite the fact that I was working full-time.

What I finally realized was that my resentment around these daily tasks, and my work, which under “normal” circumstances might have been quite pleasurable, was directly related to the pressure I was putting on myself to do more, which simply wasn’t possible under the circumstances, and provoked an emotional backlash which was reminiscent of the problem of my adolescence and young adulthood (trying to force myself to do things that I did not want to do and which didn’t truly inspire me). This never works in the long term.

Einstein once said something like “a problem can only be solved by shifting the context that created it”. What I needed was a complete change in context, and discovering Polyphasic sleep through Steve Pavlina’s blog was that shift.  I also was “fortunate” enough to lose my job at about this time, which pretty well forced the issue. Steve Pavlina, incidentally, is my hero, his lifestyle has almost everything that I desire for myself, and I hope to meet him in person sometime.

The next article in this series (short story of my life) in Definiteness of purpose and a burning desire.