How to Use the Only Tool You Will Ever Use
We live in a tool-driven culture that hides something unexpectedly profound in plain sight—not just profound, but radical and revolutionary in the truest and best sense. To see it, we have to see beyond our obsession with tools. That’s not easy.
The marketplace overflows with tools, and advertising in every form hums with enticements to try them. We couldn’t do what we do without all our fancy implements: Our laptops and the incredible array of software tools we employ with them, our phones and the many apps we rely on, our cars, cameras, and coffeemakers, our books and programs with their many “tools” for our “toolbox”.
The self-help-industrial complex floods us with tools—flow states, breathing tricks, success blueprints, client funnels, habit stacks, perfect morning routines—all manner of hacks, listicles, trainings, programs, and podcast snippets we can employ to feel better and get an edge. This includes a wide array of thought tools that supplement and complement the tools of thought we learn in school, thought tools like mindset hacking, “systems thinking,” arguing on the basis of counterfactuals, and so on.
This tool-orientation has even led some to think of humans as homo faber—the being who makes tools and employs them. That should evoke suspicion. Why would we ever consider forsaking the name homo sapiens, the being of wisdom?
Indeed, we find ignorance at work here. Our habitual relationship with tools covers over a simple fact that would change our lives and our world if we could fully come to terms with it: We can only ever use one tool—one tool to achieve success, to fulfill our potential, to experience love, to realize true peace, happiness, and wellbeing. What is that tool?
We think we know how to use our laptop and our favorite software installed there. We think we know how to use our phones, cars, cameras, and coffee makers. We think we know how to read books and apply what we learn in them. But how do we use the thing that itself uses all of those tools? In other words, How do we properly use ourselves? For we only ever use ourselves, and on that basis use every other tool and accomplish every single thing in our lives.
For instance, we don’t really use a laptop. Instead, we use our mind, fingers, wrists, arms, eyes, lungs, and so on in relation to our laptop, desk, gravity, co-workers, etc.
Understanding this has become both critical and urgent. Anyone who has had some training on how to use themselves can attest that it transforms our use of every other “thing,” and it can positively affect and even revolutionize everything we do. It’s the most powerful and empowering “performance enhancement” we will ever learn.
Moreover, though many of us realize it only too late, if we use an external tool well, but use ourselves poorly, we not only limit those external tools in subtle ways, but we degrade our minds and bodies over time, leading to burnout, bad backs, anxiety, depression, carpal tunnel, and so on. Not only that, but we degrade our world in the process.
Unfortunately, our education fails to address this most primal foundation of all learning and activity. For instance, from an early age, teachers and other adults command us to, “Pay attention.” And yet they never explain what attention is—what the mind is, and how to skillfully use it. What is the self—what is the heart-mind-body-world complex—and how do we optimally use it?
Education of that kind—training, coaching, mentoring, or any other form of education—education that answers this primordial question for us bears the same relationship to learning that learning itself bears to all our activity in life. There is nothing more essential, and it encompasses what we think of as ethics, aesthetics, creativity, knowledge, wisdom, love, passion, inspiration, and more.
How do we properly use ourselves? Since using ourselves involves psychophysical activity that blurs the barriers between mind and body, self and world, unity and multiplicity, we need direct, one-on-one education to learn how to use ourselves in the most skillful way.
In fact, in a crucial way, this sort of education goes beyond ordinary skill. It’s like the shift from flow to mastery—or, from mastery to mystery, the kind of mystery that gifts us things beyond our limited mind.
But the first step to more skillfully using the only tool we ever use involves something so simple and obvious that we might brush it off, in search of the next best hack we can find. However, our contemporary science has come into agreement with the wisdom traditions on the importance of this first step, and the data so far has only scratched the surface. We might wish for a hack that will give us the quick and dirty way to unlock the most skillful use of ourselves, but we have to use ourselves to hack ourselves. There’s no way of avoiding this central existential issue.
So let’s take a breath so we don’t dismiss this first step. It’s not even easy to describe it, because of its nuances and intimacy, but here we go: The first step to more skillfully using the only tool we have involves asking in the most naked and vulnerable way what we think we should use that tool for.
This has two aspects to it, which we could call wisdom and love, or, alternatively and a little more narrowly, vision, values, and ethics. These aspects or dimensions of experience arise totally interwoven.
In terms of vision and values, we have to reflect as sincerely and critically as we can about what we think the cosmos is, and what we think a human being is and is for. What’s the use of a human being in this world and in this wondrous cosmos? This kind of inquiry presents us with all manner of challenges, because the dominant culture infuses us with exceptionally bad philosophy, including a metaphysics that reduces everything to matter that doesn’t matter.
The famous philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once claimed that “man is a useless passion.” Indeed, he closes Being and Nothingness, perhaps his best-known work, with that oft-quoted line. It may sound like typical existentialist blather, but in fact it accords perfectly with the default metaphysics of both science and capitalism, and we need to come to terms with that.
With affectionate awareness, we can directly face the ways such a suggestion by Sartre, and the metaphysical views that accord with it, demonstrate the narrowness—and laziness—of what came to pass for philosophy in the dominant culture. That doesn’t mean something abstract. Philosophy is just “how we do things,” and it encompasses our basic view of the nature of self and world, and how we use them. The degraded state of philosophy affects every last one of us, and that degraded philosophy goes together with a degraded use of ourselves and our world.
The fact that the use of a human being doesn’t reveal itself on the basis of cogitation alone doesn’t mean we don’t have one. And if we don’t get really intimate with that use, then we will indeed become useless—useless to the world. We might become useless to the world in the process of becoming exceptionally useful to the patterns of insanity unfurling themselves all around us, wrapping the world in a bundle of ignorance and aggression.
To give a mundane example of our confusion, I recently saw someone online talking about how much they “love” sales, in a manner of clear identification with the identity of a salesperson. We can certainly rationalize the activity of sales in a hundred different ways. Moreover, I know exceptional salespeople whom I admire and love, and have certainly depended on salespeople countless times in my life. But do we really think the soul hungers for a sales job—or that we should deign to use the word “love” for such an activity? Does sales—and loving sales—seem like the best use of ourselves?
Or might it be that an unknown joy and passion in the soul, arising in this particular cultural context—and thus having no holistic way of revealing itself, no ground of wisdom, love, and beauty in which to germinate—gets channeled into the activity of sales, and even gets labelled as a “love” for sales? If the uses to which the culture tries to limit us fail to accord with spiritual and ecological realities, we will find ourselves caught up in tasks the soul finds useless, and which we must therefore rationalize.
This explains both the extraordinary level of disengagement, ambivalence, burnout, and so on that our population feels with their work, and the equally extraordinary rationalizations for work that we might objectively find questionable or even unethical.
Let’s be clear: “Rationalize” means, “I have the finest reasons for what I do. This is truth, not a way to talk myself into something. This is good and meaningful. This is the way for me to be happy, to fulfill myself, and to use my skills in order to succeed in life and make a contribution to society.” We experience a rationalized use as a truth about ourselves and the world. We don’t experience it as a rationalization.
When Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, said that bankers do “God’s work,” we can accept that he really meant it as fact—even as we recognize that God might disagree.
Let’s get further clarity: We needn’t reject sales or other jobs to ask the primordial questions we need to ask about ourselves and our world. We do need to see “sales” or “banking” as a totally inappropriate answer to these questions, even if, after answering them, we decide (without self-deception) that we will nevertheless keep our sales job. In other words, a sales person can properly use themselves even in the context of selling—and this will make them much more successful.
But none of that makes their use reducible to sales. Nor should we pretend that reflecting on these questions won’t lead us to discover an ethical imperative to find another job.
Since our culture may not offer trustworthy and skillful support for answering these questions, how do we get at what we think a human being is for? One way in involves thinking about dying. We have to get some real clarity about that, because we in the dominant culture suffer from a denial of death, and we can think rather intellectually about it.
If we can get exquisitely real about our mortality, we can think about the preciousness of this life and this world, and we can ask, “What really matters? When all is said and done, what do I want people to think I lived for? What do I most deeply long to live for, even if I sometimes don’t think I can, or I sometimes try to write it off as too idealistic?”
Few of us would say, “Well, what life is really about . . . is marketing.” We can replace “marketing” with just about any profession we can think of. Though we may hold justice as a precious value, we wouldn’t say life is about lawyering. Though we may hold love and compassion as precious values, we wouldn’t say life is about being a dating coach.
And if a lawyer or a dating coach thinks they have solved the whole problem because they value justice and love and do work that seems to support these values, we have only encountered further confusion. To say, “I value love,” and then to assume we are using ourselves well by working as a dating coach skirts the hard issues. Facing them can improve our life and our work in countless ways, but we have to practice a lot of honesty with ourselves.
We should note here that, if we do value love, for instance, we tend to value it not merely as a personal point of view. The values we hold most dear usually seem to us like an aspect of reality itself.
That’s why our most precious values consistently appear in the wisdom traditions of the world, and why some of the greatest mystical experiences of our lives seem to confirm those values. A person going on a spiritual retreat (or, perhaps, working with a psychedelic medicine) will often say something like, “It really is love. It’s all just love.” That’s a proper use for a human being.
Having begun to understand that proper use at a most basic level, we can begin to look at how we body that forth in our day-to-day use of ourselves, how we let love work through us, as us, moment-to-moment. That requires sophisticated yet surprisingly simple continuing education.
This resonance between our values and the nature of reality relates to vision, our most intimate sense of what a human being in general is, what we ourselves are in particular, and what the world we share and the cosmos itself really are. If we think the whole shebang is the very mystery and manifestation of love, we better get attuned to that—or else we risk using ourselves against the grain of reality. We could hardly find a greater misuse. In the game of “me” versus reality, reality always wins, and the consequences of fighting it create suffering not only for ourselves, but for countless others.
If we look at the world, we find, then, one basic problem: We don’t know how to use ourselves—certainly not in accord with our most precious values, and thus in accord with reality itself. That’s one way to sum up the whole catastrophe and the root cause of all our suffering.
We can think of understanding, let us even say wonderstanding, the true nature of self and world—Cosmos and Psyche—as wisdom. So we just need to recognize the absolute value of wisdom.
And then we get a big help: Wisdom, Love, and Beauty arise totally together. If we recognize the absolute value of wisdom, and recognize our own ignorance, then we can draw from love and beauty to help us on our way to getting increasingly skillful in the proper use of ourselves.
In practical terms, this means ethics. That’s a disappointing thing to hear. We have suggested that we only ever use one tool: ourselves. Then we suggested that learning how to use that tool could radically transform our lives and our world for the better. Then we suggested that such an education requires in-person training. Then we suggested that we can make a valuable—even priceless—first step. Now we arrive at saying the first step means thinking deeply and honestly about our highest values and the most basic ethical imperatives. Our urge for a good productivity hack or an easy-breezy listicle might resurface.
However, if we can manage just a little humility, we can experience unexpected healing from the careful and serious consideration of our highest values and the most foundational ethical imperatives shared by countless traditions of wisdom around the world. It takes humility because the ego can find it boring and even threatening. The ego wants to say, “Yeah, I get it: Don’t murder people. Do I look like a criminal? Just tell me the secret to using myself well, so I can become happy and successful.”
The ego dislikes nuance, and dislikes the kind of training we need to fulfill our greatest potential—not our potential as a “this” or “that,” but our greatest potential as the mystery we don’t yet understand. And nothing complicated helps us take the first real steps into that mystery. But if we can muster that humility and take the first real steps, we will find more happiness and success in our lives, often in fairly quick order.
The simple activities of reading such things as the Earth Charter and the Five Mindfulness Trainings on a regular basis can begin to germinate some of the best seeds in the soul, including seeds of peace, joy, passion, and inspiration. And such simple activities make for a nonoptional groundwork for the more advanced education we can get on the most skillful use of ourselves. Once we get clarity about—and naked intimacy with—what we’re really using ourselves for, we can then enter into the greater mysteries of how we can use ourselves and the world we share.
The good news: We don’t need another tool kit; we don’t need another tool; we don’t need another strategy or blueprint for “success;” we don’t need another hack or another measure of “evidence-based” confusion. The endless tools, sales pitches for tools, and application of tools perpetuates fragmentation and ignorance. Instead, we can focus on what will actually bring true happiness, peace, wellbeing, and fulfillment to ourselves and our world, by transforming the way we use the only tool we will ever use.