The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

Why am I different?
A conversation about growth

I feel so different from other people. Will I ever stop feeling shy and apart from the crowd?

You will — when you no longer need to. It has helped you avoid becoming corrupted with a lot of conventional behaviors that ordinary people learn. They become pale and inauthentic copies of the elders in their world. It's a scheme to avoid finding out who they really are and expressing that. You, on the other hand, are waiting in the wings until you know your song by heart. And when you finally walk on stage you're going to knock them out.

That is such a poetic way of stating it, but I'm so afraid I'll never know it by heart.

Find one or two good friends and practice with them. And you have time, after all. It's not like the New York Times was breathing down your neck for an interview. Live an unknown, anonymous life until you're ready to strike. Many famous people wish they had the luxury we do of being able to walk down the street unrecognized.

Where can one find out about this stuff?

I haven't said anything to you that you couldn't find in the books in your local library if you did enough reading. But, let's face it, most adults in our world don't have a clue as to what creative people go through. My parents certainly didn't when I was growing up. That's when I had to recognize the fact that they were profoundly unconscious.

But I don't want to recognize that about my parents. I love them so much. I want them to be conscious!

I know, but why not want them to be what THEY want to be? They don't complain to you about being unconscious, do they? Does your cat complain to you that she doesn't really understand why there are seasons? If you had a need to become conscious, that's a precious gift that you can use to help other people who also want to be conscious. If your parents aren't among these few, then you can still love them and give as much as you can to them — without exhausting yourself by trying to make them into what they're not.

How will I be able to help others that want to be conscious? I'm not exactly sure what it entails, at least not wholly.

That will take you many years to work out. And when you understand it, you'll be able to explain it to me much better than anything I can tell you today. For now, just realize that you're already giving the people around you everything they need from you by being civil, living up to basic standards of decency, not getting into trouble, and not making them worry about your unconventionality. They don't ask anything more of you, do they?

No, they don't. I always feel so ordinary around them! I've never realized that, but inside my mind, I've always felt extraordinary (which I suppose is how everyone feels about themselves) but I've always felt that my friends see me as ordinary. No one that unique.

Exactly, and you'd be doing them no favor by forcing your uniqueness down their throats, because it would only remind them how they had abandoned their own uniqueness — their own human potential — for the safety and security of being ordinary. Don't hate them for living quiet, mousy lives. There's room on this planet for all kinds of people. But you may be destined for some glorious future that no one can predict. Certainly not the moronic guidance counselors and shrinks of this world!

You have no idea how much I fear ending up living a 'quiet, mousy' life. It frightens me so much.

It should. It would be the death of you. You would loose your sense of wonder. You would stop reading poetry. You'd never look up at the stars. Instead, you'd wash diapers and read the news and worry about the stock market.

You have too much confidence in me.

There's nothing wrong about being ordinary, or even about being mousy, as long as it's in context and doesn't take over your life. Much of my life is quite ordinary, but that serves my purposes. If people are "creative" and "original" 90% of the day they suffer from what the American writer Paul Rosenfels called "creativity poisoning" and usually get quite depressed. Many "starving artists" are in this self-destructive cycle and don't know how to get out of it. Any time you need to rest psychologically by being ordinary and going to a movie, just go right ahead. It won't hurt you one bit.

What's wrong with you is that you're not a child anymore and you're begining to ask questions that have no easy answers. And that's causing you to face the fact that you don't know how to really think about things in a creative, independent way. All school has taught you is to accept anything written in a book. They never taught you how to question everything, how to analyze independently, or how to arive at insights all by yourself. And you mustn't try to learn everything at once or you'll loose the ability to enjoy your life. And without simple pleasure and enjoyment life becomes grim and,yes, depressing.

You know, lately, I feel that I'm sinking into a little miniature depression. I can't write, I can't read anything, I just feel like a drone. I don't know what's wrong with me. I grow so angry at the conventional way schools are taught! They've done that to everyone.

I know. But you'll get used to facing the fact that civilization is still half-complete. You can't be angry every waking moment at the fact that you're embedded in a historical process because that will make you crazy. Just focus on whatever you can do to improve the world. That's enough of a job for any one person. None of us can through anger wave a magic wand and make all the evil and stupidity in the world disappear. All we can do is make our small, quiet contribution and have faith that other men and women of good will are going to do the same thing in their lives. We're not alone. The world if full of thousands, maybe millions, of people who feel as we do. There is a vast, silent brotherhood of creative men and women working quietly but intensely to change the world for the better. Welcome to your true family.

With every new thing I'm learning, I feel like a person caught between sleep and wake. I feel that I have the potential to go back to sleep again, but desperately want to wake up. Does that make sense at all?

Absolutely. And there will be days when you wish you could go back to sleep again, at least for a little while, because being awake lets you see clearly the cruelty and degeneracy in the so-called normal world. But these are things that human beings can learn to bear, and should because the stakes are so high. Just think how proud you will be to live a life that will make a tangible contribution to the creation of a world that is really decent for people to live in. I have made many sacrifices in my life to live up to that ideal, and have never regreted a single day of my life.

I very much want to make a tangible difference.

One of the things that can come from reading and being aware of how different people throughout history had to struggle to become conscious of who they really were is to understand that you and I are not alone. Everyone wants to be conscious, but they're afraid. Afraid that people won't like them anymore, that they won't fit in, that they won't be popular. Thank heavens Gandhi and Martin Luther King didn't worry about whether THEY were going to be popular!

I only hope that I don't slip into a mundane life. I hope that I've stopped myself in time. I'm going to obsess about this now!

Don't! There's no reason at all to think that you will regress or degenerate into being conventional. The very fact that you hate the idea so much proves to me that it could NEVER happen to you.

[The above is an excerpt from a conversation that occured on the internet in 2000.]