Creation is not the way, understanding is
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.