OK so I’ve hit upon another, may I say more comprehensive, motto to live by?  “We exist to: experience and create life.”  I’d like to tease out this motto because its content literally pulled me out of a deep depression that had arisen out of a week of existential angst.  The angst was ripe with the traditional material of existential teachings, i.e. the absurdity of what we have called “meaningful” over our collective course on earth.  I couldn’t just come to terms with this conclusion; just sort of peddle my bike through the meaninglessness, or the obviously patronizing meaning making I was experiencing on a daily basis.  I was blown over roadside, wounded at my core.

All through these past many hard-searching years I’ve always held that part of the meaning of life was that it even existed.  The “being-ness” that one experiences when you are present to nature.  It is a quiet “this is the way it is, this is what is” sort of all-rightness or alignment.  Along with this experience there has always been the accompanying sense of something spiritual.  My years of study had put substantive “proof” that this spiritual realm exists.  (To offer my “evidence” for spirit is beyond the scope of this writing, but I do have some.)  But because of this truth I held, the sitting-with-the-angst instructions of the existentialist seemed a defeatist approach.  Yet how was I to get back on my bike and ride forward?

So here I was with the keen, observant critic of culture and beliefs ready to scorch the readily-available kindling of vapid lifestyles and values along with my own cobbled approaches.  On the other side of the fulcrum lives a believer who has understood and even held to some pretty hefty and fairly flame-retardant ideas.  But even these more reflective concepts often would sift through my believing embrace in time, especially if they became marketplace mantras sold in best selling books.  (I always felt like the original insights offered by the writers of said books were so tenably communicated to the readers in these spiritual texts that we were left with way less than their original insights. Teachings along the lines of, “We are here to learn or grow,” “We are here to manifest the spark of the Divine or bring Consciousness into fruition,” can soon become trite.  They serve me slightly more effectively than the teachings of religions that have us construed to orientate our lives for God and His/Her dictates.1)  So when someone cruelly damages someone or something in the world I, in either mode of historic religious teachings or marketplace spiritual mantras, run off and repeat some dogma of how to be in the world with loftier aims, and as a result, a reconstructed view of the raw event, thus either side of the teeter-totter vulnerable to singeing critique.

I was searching for a more organic meaning-making, one that didn’t require so much re-script writing.  Meaning-making that could survive, even honor, the gritty-truth-flamethrower-existentialist in me.  So this is what followed.  We, along with everything else are here.  It all exists.  We all experience this existence no matter what our thoughts regarding it all may be.  This is for sure: things exist and things happen. But we know there are people who seem to miss so much because of agenda, for conquest, for vengeance, for healing, for mere survival, etc.  To me there is the possibility to experience the present moment more or less vividly, authentically if one can be clearer/cleaner regarding their psychological and cultural stuff.2 All of these “stories-we-make-of-it” rather than being present to life are well covered in the books, “Mandala of Being” and “The Power of Now”.

Subtly inherent to these “in the Now” approaches is the “something Spiritual” that accompanies such “living in the Now.”  Moreover, the suggestion is that, in tandem with this quality there emerges a moral way of approaching life.  There is energy there that is larger than us, there is an acceptance of reality and there is a sense of nurturing, even with life’s required losses.  With this “given” spiritual awareness and what accompanies it I take instruction to do likewise, namely to accept reality, to nurture, and to utilize the hopeful energy that abides in the present moment.  This too is likely to be more positive if I have been clear/clean regarding my psychology and enculturation.

So in addition to experiencing life, the “beingness” of the equation, I now desire and actually believe I am wired to create, to bring into existence, these qualities I experience in the Now of existence.  I wish to bring life-giving influence, not death or decay, to others and myself, including the planet upon which we live.  There is another aspect in addition to creating life that seems to equally rise out of my organic experiences:  life is always in flux, ever changing.  Life’s matrix is always recreating itself; nothing is, at its smallest aspects, ever the same.  Life creates and so shall I, sometimes with a purpose (such as survival), sometimes for exuberant display, and others just for play.  Some writers categorize this as a “becoming,” so that we have being and becoming3 as realities of the universe and our individual selves alike.  The task of being ever more clear of psychological and acculturated baggage is termed “awareness” by some teachers.

So how is experiencing and creating life enacted in daily living?  As mentioned above, I need to be aware of my psychological and cultural biases to be more present and more effective in creating.  Then there is how I view life and how I live life according to this spiritually philosophical understanding.  Everyone is experiencing life; I have no corner on it, no insider-elevated view.  We all are more or less present to the moments we are alive.  Some desire more clarity in how they live life.  (I believe this is an invitation from the Divine itself, a desire to be awakened, to be part of the Whole of existence.)  All of us are damaged goods via authenticating ourselves in utero and beyond.  And this pain can be a sizable deterrent to living in the raw present moment.  So I need empathy and compassion for others and myself.  In regards to the choices of how others and myself create (or become), I must also give a pass on judging its usefulness and/or beauty.  For who is to say what makes sense, when even we as individuals might look back on our choices and be less convinced of their grounding than when we originally adopted and employed them.  Jointly, when things are harmfully destructive, we as a collective need to hold us accountable to the greatest depth and breath of life-giving actions.4

So this is far from a passive life, but one that requires vigilance to clarity of motive and action.  It allows the possibility that others are doing their best within their complexities and that understanding needs to come before critique.  It encourages me to do what comes natural to me: to exist, to create, and to contribute, hopefully in a constructive way.  Not fulfilling some anxiously-held inscrutable dogma, but originating my life organically, moment to moment, as a being among beings, infused with Being itself, as all things are, I simply have more consciousness to be able to see more of the big picture than, say, the tree before me, or the bird in its branches.  There is something so liberating about this view and it invites such a feeling of belonging.  To be able to know this as reality, in and of itself, is a blessing.  To furthermore participate can be joyful, and for all of this I am grateful.

As has happened so many times in the past, when I’ve made some discovery for myself, or shifted out of some understanding and needed a new direction, something synchronistic shows up for me.  In this case two days after having the above (and saving) insights, a friend of mine gave me the latest copy of EnlightenmentNext magazine.  In it was a transcribed conversation between Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber regarding much of what I had written and that I’ve reproduced for you above.  I have kept their quotes out of the main text so that my insights didn’t seem to be built on their thoughts.  This is not to elevate my process, for these two men are giants in their fields, but to highlight the personalization of Spirit’s guidance in times of darkness, regarding the insight itself and the affirmation of having two spiritual teachers’ words reiterate what I’ve discovered.  The quotes below are from, The Guru & the Pandit Dialogue XXV, EnlightenmentNext, Spring/Summer 2010, Issue 46.

Notes:

1.  COHEN:  “In light of our good fortune, merely seeking religion or spirituality for a source of solace or our own personal healing no longer seems appropriate.  Finding a way to personally feel better about being ourselves just isn’t enough anymore.  p.43.”

2.  COHEN: “So expanding on the notion of what vertical ascent is all about beyond breaking through or transcending our personal and psychological conditioning, we also have to make the effort to see through our culturally conditioned way of relating to life, self, world, culture, and cosmos.  And we want to do this in order to see beyond it to a higher and yet unmanifest potential…  pp.36-37”

3.  WILBER: “…these two dimensions – being and becoming – really are reflective of two different growth sequences.  And one doesn’t give you information about the other.  You can sit in just one of these forever, and not even suspect the existence of the other one.  p. 40”  “If there was just the big bang of reality, “…if you didn’t also have becoming, then our universe would be nothing but quarks.  Fortunately for us, there is also Spirit-in-action, a super-abundance that is evolving and growing and transforming and bringing forward new visions and new transformations all the time. p. 40”  “That’s part of my essential makeup.  Like you said, there’s being, and then there is my becoming, and I have to master both.  p.40”

4.  WILBER: “The manifest domain is an imperfect and often unpleasant place, and it’s up to me to continue to awaken my intelligence and my awareness so that I can actually contribute something positive to this world.  p.42.”  Wilber further delves into the ethical approaches to life in his numerous works and the phrase “the most breadth and depth” consideration in these situations rings true for me.

Joel Jacobs, 2010, All Rights Reserved