The rare people who are solid

Notes on congruence

1. Last year, I told my meditation teacher that I was feeling fine. “Uh-huh,” she said, clearly unconvinced by my bullshit. A few moments later, after she’d asked me some pointed questions about what was going on in my life, I found that I was shaking with rage. “I wanted to spare you this,” I said. “Don’t,” she said, “stay with it until it becomes clarity.” We sat together silently, until the anger transmuted from “urge to set the universe on fire” to “motivation to send a clearly worded email.” At the end of the call, I told her that I’d managed to hide my feelings from everyone else, but I couldn’t from her. “Isn’t that annoying?” she said.

2. How did she do this magic trick? I’d guess that she noticed a failure of congruence. Something in my words was half-hearted; energetically, I was divided, as if holding something behind my back. I was trying to be away from myself. Given that my teacher is extremely high on congruence, she spotted this immediately. This is one of the gifts of congruence: the more of it you have, the easier it is to spot it, or its absence, in others.

3. Congruence is a quality discussed by many psychologists—Carl Rogers popularized the word, saying that, among other things, it is a necessary trait in therapists. He defined it (roughly) as a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept, and your outward behavior. Which is to say: you aren’t pretending. I think this is a solid definition, but it’s likely to be misread. It can sound like living up to a scorecard—I said I would be an academic, now I’m tenure track. If that were the only requirement, congruence would be fairly common, when in fact highly congruent people are uncommon.

4. Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.

5. But must we define it? We know it when we see the genuine article in abundance. We can spot people who live in non-naive contentment, or unhurried action. Running into them is comforting if we seek integrity ourselves. Speaking to my teacher feels like drinking water from a lucky well, filled with life-restoring minerals. On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.

6. I have a synesthete friend who experiences people as colors, and detects failures of congruence as flickers of aberrant hue on the background. You likely experience something like this as well, without the visual overlay. If you haven’t trained up this innate ability, it’s likely because it’s often impolite to notice failures in congruence—others implicitly ask us to buy into their self-deception.

7. Incongruence is typically an important survival stage, as we take on the expectations of our parents and society, and hide the parts of us that aren’t supposed to appear in the classroom. The problem is that these splits are maintained much longer than they need to be. Others can, and should, live through being disappointed by you. Relatedly, the best relationships create space for congruence—really unconditional welcome allows you to bring material out of the dusty basement. Meanwhile, if you are motivated to remain estranged from yourself, a real relationship is intolerable, so you will avoid one, however much you might present yourself as wanting love.

8. There are a few varieties of fake congruence, strategically adopted by people who would like to adopt its advantageous qualities without the real search. Dead-eyed hippie warmth is the aspartame congruence of those who cut off the intellect, never daring to think unpleasant thoughts, trying to make life strictly about their enjoyment. Narcissistic charm is another variety of fake congruence—it takes careful listening to spot the cool, pinched quality of it, how it’s built on the avoidance of fear, and a terror of social status injury. And dissociation is porridge congruence, created by zoning out of everything that would disturb a temporary waking hibernation.

9. Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas. You’re liberated to be as you are—talking to them feels like entering open space. Their love isn’t grabby and manipulative, and they can say hard truths from a place of simple observation. They can deeply understand you without needing to suck up your essence, or merge with it. Being listened to in this way, by a person capable of it, is psychoactive; you hear yourself anew.

10. Imitating highly congruent people is a natural thing to want. However, imitation of another, while useful for gathering ideas about how to be, is ultimately self-denial if taken far enough. This is why disciples of a guru are rarely impressive. The program that generates wisdom is wandering through the wilderness, not trying to adopt the end state of a person who has wandered. Similarly, one potential consequence of congruence is “natural leadership,” but you can’t learn it from management books.

11. Interestingly, high congruence doesn’t always come off in recorded media. Many spiritual elders, recorded on video, seem a bit bland. Look them directly in the eye in person, however, and something entirely different happens.

12. Like any value, it’s limiting to maximize congruence at the expense of all else. Some amount of incongruence is a natural part of change. Something enters your environment that’s out of tune with your self-image, and either the intruding element has to go, or the image must be modified. The decision period is, inevitably, a state of disintegration. There is a balance to be struck between robustness and sensitivity; congruence is an ongoing process, not a box to tick once.

13. Seeking congruence can sound selfish. However, in practice, it rarely is. Given that our environments consist of others in pain, facing the totality of your experience and remaining self-serving requires being a real asshole. Most of us are less cruel than that, and capable of gradually moving towards increasingly skillful love for others. The highly congruent people I know tend to support everyone around them, in ways both obvious and not.

14. One reliable test to see whether you’re in a place of congruence is the existence of boredom. When you are in a state of congruence, at rest you don’t feel bored. Instead you feel peace. What needs to be done has been done or will be done, there is no need to flail against the silence.

15. I’ve heard from multiple sources that deathbed enlightenment is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: approaching death, many disintegrated and suffering people suddenly find acceptance. Congruence is coming after you; you can almost outrun it, if you try.