The Way It Really Is:

(I apologize to the reader. This is long, too long. I could not break it down and stay on message.  For this reason I did not want to break it up. Therefore as you read it if you don't feel like reading the whole essay at one time you might want to do so in segments) 

Human beings are part of a whole, called by us the “Universe.” Our part is limited in time and space. It is a part of a “Greater Existence” not readily apparent to us because we are limited by the same limitations that limit our “Universe.”  Persons here experience themself, their thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of their consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task here must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

I cannot claim the foregoing as mine. I cannot find the source but qualify it as someone else unknown to me. Although the writer is unknown the context fits the theme of this series of essays, there is more that the eye can see. My object in this series is to propound the idea that the primary object of our lives is to live it in such a way that at some point we are moved to look, to see and to act on what we see unfold. What unfolds is a view into the “Greater Eexistence” referred to in the foregoing quote.

What there is to look for is what is aptly described by Sogyal, Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher who said as the reading for March 9, in a book I read daily entitled, Glimpse after Glimpse: 

Sometimes we have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind. These can be inspired by an exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature, or by the most ordinary everyday situation. They can arise simply while watching snow slowly drifting down, or seeing the sun rising behind a mountain, or watching a shaft of light falling into a room in a mysteriously moving way. Such moments of illumination, peace, and bliss happen to us all and stay strangely with us.

I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses. But then, modern culture gives us no context or framework in which to comprehend them.  Worse still, rather than encouraging us to explore them more deeply and discover where they spring from, we are told in both obvious and subtle ways to shut them out. We know that no one will take us seriously if we try to share them. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization—its ignorance and repression of who we really are.

(It is most important to note the meaning of the phrase “the nature of mind” as used in the foregoing. Nature of Mind as I understand it is the consciousness that we access through our brain but is not part of our brain. It is part of something far larger, far more comprehensive which I call Cosmos [all of creation]. The nature of mind is our consciousness in that mix accessing and communicating with the Cosmos of which it is quite capable of doing. While in the limitations of this time limited dimension we are too distracted by all the bells and whistles, all the intrigue we encounter here, that attract us then distract us from reality.)

The ideas and concepts propounded by the foregoing I first encountered in the AA program. “Turn it over, step out of its way as you let your Higher Power take care of your addiction problem,” they said. I saw it again studying Judaism, the religion I chose to follow half way into my life. Martin Buber said it best in his book I and Thou. I then found it codified in Buddhism. It is there the product of the Mysticism of the Orient.

Putting it into simplistic language it might be said this way: Life is actually good for us, the bad of life included. The determination produced by the tensions of the good and the bad, the purposeful and non-purposeful and all of the situations forcing our decisions, the experience of all of them are what we need to be able to ultimately see what we are supposed to see. That view is of the “Greater Existence” our life is meant to direct us to so we can act on it to our benefit having lived.

My manner of discovery went like this:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) prompted my introduction to what I have come to believe are the ways and means to learn what it is all about. This is the way it really is!

I arrived at knowledge of what my life has been all about by putting it together into memoir then stepping back and looking at it. In the memoir I wrote:

We Have a Plan

We seem to follow a plan as we live. Whose plan, what plan, where did we get it?  I honestly do not know other than I know the plan is not mine. I know this because there are too many things in my life I would not have done, would not have planned to do, and am totally surprised by having done them. 

I arrive at this conclusion in this way: I look at the results of this plan as I have lived it. I am pleased. I would not change the result in any way. At best, at each juncture of the plan, each event I encountered following it, I had the choice of accepting the direction in which I was urged or refusing to take that course. The times I have followed the plan I obtained the best result.

What I learned applied in the context of this topic is that my life included more than myself in the living of it. There was a hand other than my own helping to live my life. This is seen in the decisions I made, why I made them, and the purpose that revealed by where these decisions took me. The end result was to my benefit, and in many ways was in spite of me were the choice to have been mine.

This discovery of mine is significant in this respect. A purposeful bias accompanies me in the exercise of my conscious interaction in my life. It seems the bias is the exercise of a power the source of which is not in me. This power seems active in all of us, guiding, directing and challenging us.

The significance of this as it regards the topic of this series of essays has to do with recognizing a bias going on in the process of our conscious interacting in our world which is not singularly ours. It is as if there is a power active within us, patterning so much of what we are doing.

It is the presence of this power that can be seen in the way we think, the way we develop our powers of cognition and the how we interface our world using it.

We have the power to learn, the power to share, the power to make more of what we have in this process we use in confronting the world, interacting with it and with each other.

It seems like we are all programmed in the same way from birth to death in the use of our capacity for sentience and cognition. We use it in a practical way, in different ways through stages of our lives, and use it to survive within this strange framework of time and space in which we find ourselves.

I have discussed this process and proclivity in a number of blog posts previously. One of my first posts was ESSAY:LIMITS BY DEFINITION January 14, 2009. Click on it to read it.

In this essay I speak of reality and interacting in what we sense reality to be. Centering on how we interact using the marvelous machine we know as our brain. We learn with our brain, store what we learn in our brain, make short cuts to remember what we learned and extrapolate the data assembled into a more meaningful whole from which we go on learning.

It is fascinating looking at the pragmatic way we use this power that is ours, use it for our purposes and expedite the process doing so.

What the essays discusses fits so well into the theme of this series of essays. It is as though we follow a predetermined path. This path brings us into this world naked, without a clue of how to get along in it. We are however equipped with a great tool box starting with those looking out for us, the nurturing they give us. Next in the tool box is the talent, the intellect, the wonder and the inclination to learn and become familiar with everything about us. Next we use the talent we have to build on all that we have learned to learn even more.

Through all of this we find ourselves first inquiring and then planning what will I be when I get big? We complete the training and the education to get to where we become whatever that is to be. We then enter the middle period of our time here being what it is we became. That includes serving all of the operating plans for the one or many things we have become, from spouse to job and all in between.

During this time we all do what is to be done almost automatically. Not a great deal if any thought goes into it. The process does get us to the point of having done all that seemed expected and now we have time. It is this time that is given to either holding on to what has been acquired, on to who or what we have become wishing only to continue that.

If we are lucky, or blessed, or whatever, we lose that urge to be, to acquire and all that goes with it. We enter that field named “Why.” It is here in this field our needs have slipped away and we want to know the meaning of all of this. Why am I here? What is this time/space we occupy? Is that all or is there more? Has there been purpose in being here? The questions are endless.

What happens to us is this: No longer in need, no longer part of that war, we look above our foxhole to see what is really out there. The many of us blessed, able to raise our heads up and look, and ask, arrive at this point from many different paths.

My path has been all of my life, finally losing all to disease, and finding as result all that is there to be had which far exceeds in value anything in this life that had distracted me from it.

My point is: I am the jackass led to water but I knew not to drink. My master hit me over the head with a hammer whereupon I figured it out all too quickly put my head down and drank!