The Struggle to Evolve
Each day that goes by we take advantage of or lose the opportunity to evolve. This can also be reduced to each moment. Every waking moment is the chance to investigate the totality of our being in that moment, and to evaluate from among the endless choices we could make the one choice that will perfectly fit and perfectly complete that moment for its effortless transition into the next. This is the perfect existential choice: make it or break it; it’s up to you.
Don’t think this is so? Then what is happening? What are you making of your life if you’re not making it? Isn’t it just unconsciously unfolding then? The rock doesn’t determine itself, as far as we know; neither does the cat or the bird. They obey their nature without thought. We are the creatures who can question that nature, or, rather, our own. This is our power, and this is also our burden; from it we have crawled from the magma and primal soup to claim self-consciousness. Now, can we move beyond that self-consciousness to the NEXT consciousness? Which is?
That we don’t know, but how can it be accessed, attained, “created,” or allowed into our field of experience? Whence will it come? Where will it proceed and lead us? Will it open new faculties to this point unknown, or will it simply augment the experience of those we already possess? This is the last frontier, the new challenge, the next step. And it is as close as our own breath. How come, then, we don’t more readily recognize, accept, and undertake the challenge of change? Is it fear? Is it ignorance, not knowing its possibly or it being right in front of our face to do? Or, is it laziness? Maybe a combination of all of the above. Yes, “the banality of evil.”
We don’t question as much as we could. We accept, and then live out the nightmare we have tacitly allowed to overtake us in our sleep-state, our "eternal slumber." It will not end until we make our stand, and our stand awaits our learning and our willingness to overcome our ignorance. And let me tell you this also: “IT” requires the sacred other, loving something, someone, or some conscious force more than the very limited, very small quantity of “self.” Love opens the vastness. Love settles the petty quarrels. Love of the other annihilates the self in that greater Self, or “beyond self.” We don’t know that sacrifice much at all. We require the most absurd perfection for the most ridiculous reasons and then miss the point that was there all along. It only takes some time in the deep wilderness to understand this: “And the wilderness and solitary place will be a comfort to them.” What else did the prophet say? “And my house shall be a house of prayer for all people.” Put the two together and you have the reconciliation of very extreme opposites.
We need stillness. We need silence. We need time alone. But, we also need time with others. It will all coalesce with the right intention into a meaningful life lived in spite of the meaninglessness that surrounds us. Work is what is necessary, and this work will only bear the right fruit if we are willing to attach ourselves to an intelligence that is beyond us and beyond the confines of our rational four-walled jail cell that we live so complacently in until we die.
What is necessary is the death before actually dying, which might awaken us to a greater life. It is the creation that comes about only through destruction. It is the absolute negation that reveals the essence of the positive, obliquely, suggestively, and through the subtlest of implications.
Don’t think this is so? Then what is happening? What are you making of your life if you’re not making it? Isn’t it just unconsciously unfolding then? The rock doesn’t determine itself, as far as we know; neither does the cat or the bird. They obey their nature without thought. We are the creatures who can question that nature, or, rather, our own. This is our power, and this is also our burden; from it we have crawled from the magma and primal soup to claim self-consciousness. Now, can we move beyond that self-consciousness to the NEXT consciousness? Which is?
That we don’t know, but how can it be accessed, attained, “created,” or allowed into our field of experience? Whence will it come? Where will it proceed and lead us? Will it open new faculties to this point unknown, or will it simply augment the experience of those we already possess? This is the last frontier, the new challenge, the next step. And it is as close as our own breath. How come, then, we don’t more readily recognize, accept, and undertake the challenge of change? Is it fear? Is it ignorance, not knowing its possibly or it being right in front of our face to do? Or, is it laziness? Maybe a combination of all of the above. Yes, “the banality of evil.”
We don’t question as much as we could. We accept, and then live out the nightmare we have tacitly allowed to overtake us in our sleep-state, our "eternal slumber." It will not end until we make our stand, and our stand awaits our learning and our willingness to overcome our ignorance. And let me tell you this also: “IT” requires the sacred other, loving something, someone, or some conscious force more than the very limited, very small quantity of “self.” Love opens the vastness. Love settles the petty quarrels. Love of the other annihilates the self in that greater Self, or “beyond self.” We don’t know that sacrifice much at all. We require the most absurd perfection for the most ridiculous reasons and then miss the point that was there all along. It only takes some time in the deep wilderness to understand this: “And the wilderness and solitary place will be a comfort to them.” What else did the prophet say? “And my house shall be a house of prayer for all people.” Put the two together and you have the reconciliation of very extreme opposites.
We need stillness. We need silence. We need time alone. But, we also need time with others. It will all coalesce with the right intention into a meaningful life lived in spite of the meaninglessness that surrounds us. Work is what is necessary, and this work will only bear the right fruit if we are willing to attach ourselves to an intelligence that is beyond us and beyond the confines of our rational four-walled jail cell that we live so complacently in until we die.
What is necessary is the death before actually dying, which might awaken us to a greater life. It is the creation that comes about only through destruction. It is the absolute negation that reveals the essence of the positive, obliquely, suggestively, and through the subtlest of implications.
posted by The Unknown Seeker at 10:27 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home