We Dance With The Angels, We Waltz Through The Cosmos

We are born. We acquire a working model for getting on in this strange and different world. We go on to use what we have learned to acquire more and to use what we have acquired.

We do this all automatically. Too often it is not until the third and last phase of our life that we start evaluating our process and what we have done with it. Up until this point we are generally oblivious of the working of the process. All our time is necessarily taken up accumulating knowledge for living then executing that knowledge.

In this third stage we begin to understand the nature of what we have learned and why we have learned it. We begin to see its reason. It is this new process we start seeing what heretofore was not seen.

In the post that accompanies this essay, written and posted by me some time ago, re-written and posted in my Archive for this essay, the title of which is To Dance with the Angels. Click on the title to go there and read it.

In this re-post I look at how we acquire knowledge, what of it is retained as we learn it, how we store it by shortcutting it, all of which we do automatically without plan. We simply do it. So imbedded is this process in us I am drawn to concluding this has purpose beyond this life.  

It is in how we execute all we have learned, how we let go all we don’t need, that we dance with the angels, waltz through the cosmos. We start on our own learning the steps, learning them quite automatically without aforethought. To dance with the angels, to waltz through the cosmos, we need to know the steps. It is this life process that teaches those steps.

The awesome part of this is we have no present knowledge of what we are doing while we are doing it. In fact we get so intensely involved in the learning then the acquiring that we delude ourselves into believing that is all there is.

It comes as a shock to realize the reason for this process was not the process itself. The process was no more than the means to the end. The end is the evaluation and reflection we do when the process is completed and no longer necessary in our lives. If we are lucky enough in our reflection given  we see the process has taught us how to dance.

Dancing with the angels, waltzing in the cosmos, is our transcendent purpose being in this life. My characterization is of course metaphor. To dance, to waltz, is in fact to touch the cosmos, to begin to know God. It is that and all the collateral benefit that accompanies the contact with the ethereal that is included.

The collateral benefit is the enhancement of who we are as a consciousness or perhaps what we are. This is the purpose of being part of this life. It is the reward of having done it. It harkens back to the adage about the difference between man and beast. We are all beast but for one attribute. We can know God. More so we are in this life a beast in most ways to use yet able to rise above our nature and attain that nature that resembles the angels. When we die we leave the beast here and go on to embrace our higher selves.

The transcendent connection we are able to evoke living this life is the earmark of what this life is about. It is the wonder, the awesomeness of being alive. The limitations we have in this life are so contrary to what is essentially us. We are a beast who has become able to think, to make choices, to express beauty, to feel. These stark differences require a meaning a purpose in our acquiring then experiencing them.

That is another quality essential to us “That is More than Meets the Eye.” We have the capability to actualize this attribute. It is this that transforms the curse of our limitations into blessings to be used in living this life.

It is this that gives value to my having Dementia. Like all that preceded dementia in my life, the pit I floundered in paying the dues, earning my qualification to enter the AA program, was as necessary to my life as the recovery and sobriety that followed it. The gift of what I learned in AA and applied in my life, the many successes and failures I went through leading to Dementia, were no more that training sessions for what I would ultimately face with Dementia.

It is with Dementia that I finally learned my purpose for living. It was Dementia that forced me finally out of the material struggle I learned and applied in the first two stages of my life. It was the horror of Dementia that forced me into applying what I had already learned in dealing with catastrophe in life.

I turned it over to my higher power, I concentrated on coping with Dementia in the same way that I did with alcoholism. Accordingly, applying another old adage, I transformed this pig’s ear into a silk purse.

My silk purse has been found in giving myself to others. Trite as this may seem, something so basic we need to do, like all the demands of living, it is difficult to put others before yourself. Up to the time this force actuates the change it is part of our nature to concentrate on what we have learned and on what we are applying from what we have learned. Doing this we seem driven to concentrate on ourselves.

Continuing this concentration on ourselves at that stage where it is no longer required by our material consequence becomes counterproductive to our life. This is time of our lives that we are given the opportunity to reap its rewards. It is but another unseen attribute that is ours, that makes is who, what we are in this life, and where we go after this life.