We’re here.
As if we had a choice!
And we’re told or expected to get on with it.
But of course, there’s a significant amount of imprinting and conditioning that we’re asked or forced to accept which ensures the continuation of the moral order and a suppression of mystery.
At some point we, or at at least the people I’ve known, start to investigate the usual existential, anthropocentric themes, namely Why am I here?, What’s my purpose?, Who am I?
Rarely, if ever, do they come up with a satisfactory or life-affirming answer and are forced to accept that life is (mostly) a series of highs and lows and, likewise, it’s hard as hell to get out from the meatgrinder of work which dominates life.
And yet, given the human dimension, and save for those people who decide life’s not worth living, we go on…until the end.
None of this is or should be a surprise.
Imagine though if we discovered, not via some magical light, the words of a Guru or transcendent prayer that life is everything and nothing, it ebbs, it flows and absent our thinking mind — i.e. our over-developed consciousness — there’s just this.
Imagine it.
Not the Now as described by Eckhart Tolle or some meditative experience, but we were able to inhabit the super-abundant is-ness by dint of having a life-giving body, which includes our mind but this time we didn’t need to interpret it, understand it, pursue anything or any of those tropes that fill the existential airwaves.
More simply put, there was no cause and effect but simply cause.
By now I’m sure you think I’m lost in the woo-woo weeds, that or I’m drunk or high.
I wish.
All I’m inviting is for you to question if what you’re looking for — e.g. peace, equanimity, love — is right beneath your feet. And I don’t say that to be tendentious or childlike but to indicate that if we accepted that everything was in constant change, what we see is nothing more than what we’ve been told it is (I reminded of the quote by J. Krishnamurti: “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”) and absent our thinking there is just life, the world would be a very different place — or it might be.
You might ask why I’ve departed today from writing about the Anthropocene? Simply this. If I can’t influence the narrative that humans are the sole reason we’re in such a mess, perhaps it’s time to refloat my more spiritual writing in the hope (at least) of inviting a different conversation to the be all you be narrative that has come to signify all that’s wrong with the human race. And to be clear, what I mean by be all you can be is that we’re told — almost bludgeoned in some cases — to live up to our potential in order to live or have the ability to live a guilt-free, happy and hedonistic life.
And look where that’s got us.
Blessings and love.
— Julian