When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everyone else.

21 And he said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick? 22 For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad. 23 If any man have ears to hear, let him hear. – Gospels of Mark

I’d been thinking back to when in time was the last time I made any significant income stream (not counting living off savings account or 401K), or random spurts of underpaid freelance projects here or there. And the answer goes back ten years ago. I felt that re-examining that time period would yield some deep-seated conditioning (i.e. belief) that I’d overlooked, yet still was living out loud.

So what happened ten years ago briefly, names changed, and the gory drama edited out (sure make a good film, ala The Social Network): I got my dream handed to me–I was on the ground-floor founding team of an Internet start-up in 1999, something I’d been dreaming of for years (harder to pull off when I didn’t live in the Valley, at the time.) I had a wonderful experience at Open Market (once a start-up, but after its IPO the culture resembled a mature corporation). I wanted a new adventure in building something unprecedented.

The founding CEO, let’s call him Will (later he became chairperson, and hired a CEO) had us meet to discuss the book “The Wisdom of Teams,” weekly so that we could apply it within the company especially the management team.

Fast forward to the crux: you must remember that by end of 2000, the IPO market was shut and watching the NASDAQ dips was nauseating and thus, raising venture capital funding was getting tighter. We were working off a seed round, but would have to raise more money soon.

At some point, all the teamwork stuff became lip service, and self-preservation kicked in: “Every man to his own devices.” But even that wasn’t forthrightly said; the temperature dropped and you could tell viscerally we weren’t really a “team.” Unilateral decisions started to be made without discussing it with the rest of the management team.

I was rather emotionally immature at the time, yet gathered up the strength to ask Will, “Why did you fire Jason?”

That was our CFO.  “Well, we had to let someone go. Our burn rate…. and we need to conserve cash… and…”

I felt he was hedging around the question. I countered: “Jointly we might have come up with another solution. I know I would have taken a cut in pay. Maybe we all could have taken cuts so that no one is let go. Or, maybe there was another place we could cut.”

I didn’t know it at the time but the CFO was let go because of his integrity.

The entire fiasco only got worse over the next  three months.

The experience to this day has tarnished the entire notion of “teamwork.” I hadn’t really realized this was so distasteful to me until someone sent me an email recently asking me what my definition of “teamwork” was, and I bristled.

As Scott Peck accurately observed in The Different Drum, a marriage is a community of two. Not too long ago, I entered into a collaborative partnership with someone I love–and voila! the same thing magically seemed to happen. There came a sense of self-preservation where “me” asserted itself over the mutual needs of “we”, then communication lines closed, and finally the whole thing collapsed.

So, I realized, hmmmm….. I am the common element here.

On a walk today I realized self-preservation (in 2000, Will was trying to secure his capital investment–although he wasn’t the only investor, as well as his reputation as a hot-shot serial entrepreneur), and in the creative+romantic partnership it was an emotional “I don’t want to be hurt” (probably on both our sides?) type of self-preservation.

Self preservation is self-protection–a  fancy way of carting around an identity as at least there must be a self  existent if such a self needs protecting. For all the frustration I had at Will for lying time after time and not being forthright… Hello, I realized that lying is a single form of self-protection. So is staying silent and silencing our voice.

Staying mum, “fitting in,” “getting along to get along” is my kind of self-preservation.

“Thus, as a human being, we can’t have these childish ideas that enlightenment means “everybody loves me.” Maybe everyone will love you, but more likely some will and some won’t. But when you have given the whole world its freedom, then you have gone a long way toward finding your own freedom. They are tied inextricably, one to the other.” — Adyashanti, The End of Your World

After I got home from the walk tonight,  I saw that the very thing that irked me so much–”self-preservation at the expense of the welfare of the whole”–is when seen from another vantage point something I also do quite often myself.

I then got on the Internet and came across an article on a new treatment for lupus (wasn’t doing a thing related to diseases beforehand), and re-reminded that I had only heard of this disease this summer (I know it’s nothing “new”, but I am not a doctor so it never entered my vocabulary before). So this summer, in quick succession, I’d heard a friend of a friend’s daughter as diagnosed, and that my new housemate had lupus. So I looked up the symbolism yet again: “A giving up. Better to die than to stand up for oneself. Anger and punishment,” and the affirmation (I don’t really do affirmations, but one is revealing): “I speak up for myself freely and easily. I claim my own power. I love and approve of myself. I am free and safe.”

“We cannot be true as long as we are expecting or wanting others to agree with us. That will cause us to contract–maybe they won’t like what I say; maybe they won’t agree; maybe they won’t like me. When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everyone else. When we realize that we are the one and only Spirit that manifests as everything and everyone, in the very nature of that realization is total freedom for all. There is a certain fearlessness in this realization. People sometimes come to me and say, “Well, Adya, there’s still some inner place”–and, I find, it’s often a very early childhood place–”that’s afraid to just be what I know to be true.” And, of course, I say, “You have to look at it, to see how you, yourself, formed certain belief structures based on what happened in the past. You have to look into it and see if those belief structures are really true.” But also, we need to recognize that we have no way of knowing or predicting how the world will receive us.” — Adyashanti, The End of Your World

I find what Keith Ferrazzi says about a safe place to speak up and take risks to be very compelling. So often I am thinking I cannot speak up or even “be” myself because it’s not safe here. This is a completely new way of looking at it from view of first and foremost creating that safe place for others:

“Each is us is responsible for creating the safe place around us. I’m going to repeat that one more time because it is so important. Each of us is responsible for creating the safe place. It is a conscious choice that we make to create the environment that invites others in. It means putting the other person’s safety first and making your intentions clear.”

p.s. Not sure anything’s resolved. Too much reliance on resolution techniques only asserts separate self, I’ve found. Just realizing “aha! you spot it you got it” often is awareness enough. Awareness itself is Self-rectifying.

p.p.s. Oh, and a very cosmic joke thing, is I Googled Will–I hadn’t given him a second thought in perhaps eight years. He’s off starting a startup incubator of all things. Funny is because I’d been thinking of something  similar in terms of a laboratory/hunch incubator/think tank (no, not necessarily Internet startups–any kind of radical, edgy, innovative tinkerings and ideas), and writing about it on my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches.