image: opo terser

Perhaps one of the strangest phenomena of the Internet is the idea of hooking up with people you’d otherwise be unlikely to meet. So to all of those who have added me to their friends list and the blog to their fave list, thanks, I appreciate it in some strange way and hope that somewhere in the blog there’s something for you.

I believe there is an interconnectedness between us all and that we each have some gift for each other. This works at many levels and it may be in a lesson, a look, even something as seemingly obtuse as brushing by one another in a crowd, but there are parts of us that remain open ended that need closure in order to form up into something greater than we currently are.

This is something that I consider to be at a spiritual level, not the faux fashionable find a guru stuff. The real grist to the mill of human existence and human purpose. We each have a destiny and each are the authors of our own portrait. The evidence argues strongly that we cannot do it - as in fulfil the design of that purpose - alone, we are beings that interact with the environment we discover ourselves to be a part of.

We are here to obtain knowledge and understanding of what we have previously never experienced. This is fundamental to the understanding of our situation which may only be developed and emancipated through intense study of self, via observation and self revelation.

The Universe is an arena of change, a place of metamorphosis. We shift between states  as we evolve as spiritual entities. Our lives are a never ending sequence of shifts and alterations that reposition us in relation to the core issues of our existence. We do not die, we are not born; we are agents of consciousness within the Macroverse, we begin as lost children and we end up as the product of what we have gathered and woven together. 

image: edward dullard

Development. Fulfilment. Happiness.

I used to wonder about the size of the Universe when I was a child. I lived in an urban sprawl, right in the middle of a seething city, where millions of people lived out their various hopes, fears and dramas. At night sometimes I would listen to the sound of industry working non-stop. The stockyards and the trains shunting goods wagons about the place, the sound of steam, the noises of the urban night, sounds that get lost in the day becoming amplified and points of focus for my attention.

At these times I would wander through the various models of the Universe that I had constructed, shapes, sizes, boundaries, edges. I could never build an adequate representation of the enormity that I felt before I drifted off into sleep. It seemed impossible to comprehend quite what I was in.

The greatest mystery of all for me was just what it was all for. What purpose did it serve, what was my place within it? What reason could I try to divine from the fact that I had consciousness and was able to put the thought process together that resulted in the asking of the question?

I never fully understood, and if truth be told I still don’t, my place within the scheme of it all. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to be, what were the fundamental principles of living a life, did such things exist?

My initial response was one of hedonism. I heard people say things like, “You’re here for a good time, not a long time,” and I thought that was great. But then I lived the hedonistic life and found that it did not fill the gap in my reasoning that demanded to know why and how.

I did many of the things that young and misguided people do. I experimented, went too far, fell flat on my face, became involved in underground scenes - they still existed then. I was left with the feeling of the shallowness of it all, like it was some role play game and I found myself skeptical of friends and acquaintances who raved about drug and alcohol induced states that produced some allegedly profound result.

People that I knew crashed and burned. They died prematurely, or at least they died young. Wasteful deaths, and survivors who parked themselves in the cul de sacs of life, watching as the Universe went by, soaked in their own excesses. Who am I to judge? they may have been right, they may have had a point.

Yet I spoke to people that I no longer recognised. Miserable and shadows of the bright young things they had been. Cynical, lost and desperate. Desperate to reconnect to the initial vigour that they had felt as children. Desperate to reconnect to the mystery wanderings that told them life was a great adventure, that there was magic to be experienced and that it was all around. It simply needed a key to unlock it.

Try to avoid the pitfalls, the mantraps in the jungle. The world we discovered ourselves to be in is so far removed from the place that it could be. A child would call it unfair. An adult would try to explain it to the uncomprehending child and realise they were making excuses for the inexcusable.

Blake said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” There is no need to create a system, the system exists, a system of interconnected universal laws that define our existence. Creation of a system is not the way, understanding the system that already exists is.

True sanctuary is found in the contemplation of such matters. They are the springboard to an elevated level of perception. Getting it is not difficult. What is difficult is recognising the need and being able to act upon that. 

image: fort photo

Two questions, among the many, that are huge.

 How can a person to know anything? And how should they try to live?

To the former there are several answers according to various traditions. The most compelling for me is the empirical one, that is according to one’s experience. The only things you can know with certainty are those things that you have personal experience of. The call then upon any of us is to seek out experiences and to refine our own appreciation of the things that we encounter. This is not hedonistic sloganeering. The object is not to experience things merely for the sake of experiencing them, but to take oneself upon a progressive journey, one that leads somewhere and has definite objectives.

To the latter there are also many answers. Here I have alluded to The Good Life. The idea of right thought, right action or right being and right doing. Right in this context meaning most appropriate according to the level of experience and development of the individual. Not a pejorative right as opposed to wrong.

With age comes wisdom and the follies of one’s youth become clearer with the passage of time. An interval needs to pass between the action and the perception of the action in order for the membrane of connectivity to become weaker and have less of a hold upon you. Doing the right thing is often difficult at the point of issue, so much of  the journey into conscious being is about shortening the gap until there is integrity between the act and the motive. The act being the action and the motive being the reason why.

We live in a setting that clearly makes huge allowance for us given our apparent inelegance. We seem to make a mess of things and I suppose that is consistent with where we as a species or a race are in terms of our collective development. We bicker and fight, conflict with one another and generally seem incapable of harmonious co-existence.

Vast fields of assumption are cultivated by our indifferent and irresponsible attitudes. Pinpricks of light shine through the small acts of being that we are privileged to enjoy yet these things are subject to the whim of fortune and we proceed in an ever more precarious way given the continued unfolding of what we know.

If I look to a God for answers I see that there is none. There is no God that fits the monotheistic archetype, there is no omniscient being whose wisdom is imparted to me through special communion. Our age is finely balanced between the opposite ends of a pendulum’s trajectory. On the one hand there is a self serving hedonistic attitude and on the other is genuine opportunity to break through the membrane of the chrysalis that the human race is in.

A God that provides templates of stone and words to the wise is no longer an option. That may have been appropriate for a human race in it’s collective infancy but the landscape we occupy now is vastly different from the theme park that the monotheistic traditions sprang forth from.

There is only oneself in the Universe and the implications that arise from that. There is absolute consistency in the Universe and that is the greatest clue of all. There is an unchanging, inviolate set f holding patterns or templates around which the chains of molecules that form the Universe and the environment that we recognise form up.

We know this, and we know too that from the development of a child into its maturity there are specific stages that it has to go through. Consider the human race as a singular entity, like one person composed from the many billions of us. Each of our experiences is a small contribution to the aggregate of what the human race is. Where do you think, extending the growing child analogy, we are?   

I return to the opening questions, how can a person know anything? And how should they to live? There are answers and you will come to your own, what are they?