‘Would you rather be right or happy?’

SUPER-VISION : ‘Would you rather be right or happy?’ speaks, in a simplified fashion of our lack of knowledge about ourselves. The shadow-self cares primarily about being right—right that we know, or right that we are not good enough, or right that we are too good, or right that we are a powerless victim, or right that we cannot trust life or love owing to previous experiences, and so on. Calcination is the process of beginning to get that part of our stubbornness, pride, and arrogance worn down. (This stubbornness, pride, or arrogance need not only express as an outwardly puffed up nature; indeed, more commonly it tends to disguise itself in shyness, self-doubt, or self-sabotage).

The sooner we understand the point that in most cases we are the architect of our own frustrations and failures, the better, because we can avoid years of unnecessary suffering. Ideally the recovery path is about hastening the process of calcination, rather than it being drawn out over the course of a whole life, only to realise in old age just how intransigent and controlling we have always been. The reason why this process is so essential is because the personality we cling to, the sense of personal identity, the ‘me’ that we invest so much energy in maintaining, is ultimately illusory, based as it is on identification (with body, form, history, borrowed knowledge, and so on). Ageing, and eventually death, will wear down and destroy this false self in time. Learning to let go of constructed mental positions, pride, excessive stubbornness, reactive blame of others, playing small owing to crippling self-doubt, and fear of confronting our falsehoods, will hasten the process and potentially give us more time to experience our deeper nature while still alive.