The Seeker’s Manual

There are two kinds of happiness, and, for that matter, too kinds of sadness: big and little. The big kinds are existential; the little kinds are conditional. Small happiness over a good meal, ego-sadness over a failed opportunity – making ourselves feel good or bad depending on the circumstances of the moment. Existential happiness comes from a place beyond good and bad, a sense of being content with the overall perfection of balance, free from judgment. Existential sadness, like Satre’s “Nausea,” is really the ego or small personal self’s intellectual reaction to the proof of its own irrelevance. The emotional content is loneliness, in the void left as the imprint of the self-important vanishes. Is there another polarity between these larger forces of happiness and sadness with existence itself? Again, they are unequal forces to begin with, as the intrinsic state of perfection is happiness itself; while the affected sadness is but a remnant of the nostalgic ego, as it mourns its own passing. There remains a dual challenge, however: to disidentify both with the mournful ego looking for meaning or company, and the self-satisfied dweller in the Garden. It is a hidden secret of “The Secret” that if our desire to manifest our own happiness (or our success in doing so) leads us to feel proud and happy about our powers and good fortune, our opinion will change when our prayers go unanswered and our fortunes change; but the more genuine and lasting manifestation is neither a material prize nor a feeling of personal success. Rather it requires a humbler respect for the truer powers we may tap into once we let go of our conscious or unconscious agenda for social status and ego-gratification.

I learned something yesterday: I realized that instead of asking, “What can/did I do today,” I can ask, “What can/did I learn today?”  Or even more to the point, in present tense: “What am I learning today/right now?”

Interesting that my realization came yesterday on a day when one notable event (among others) was a vehicle accident that happened right in front of me, when a pickup passed going 70 MPH toward a red light the driver didn’t see until too late, so he couldn’t brake enough to avoid rear-ending the car stopped in the lane ahead.  ”Oh, sorry,” the geezer said to the distraught (but uninjured) young Hawaiian woman in the car he hit.

I guess the obvious lesson here (for all concerned) is, “Be careful.”  It could go deeper into, “Life is short, be happy,” or, a favorite saying of my mother’s, “There but for the grace of God go I.”  Indeed, “Everything is happening in perfect time” … but not for all of the people all of the time.  Or, to the follow the American theme, the event could signal the financial “crash” of an out-of-control empire in denial of the red light ahead.  Hmm, what’s that in my other browser window? “Don’t say we didn’t warn you this time — a new crash is dead ahead” (link from Michael Ruppert’s blog).

Maybe I caused the accident by my driving too slowly (only 5-10 MPH over the speed limit), or by dropping the avocado I bought just before getting into the car twenty minutes earlier.  In short, I’m still not sure what I learned about that accident.  It’s a kind of synchronicity, which Jung in coining the word claimed has meaning but not necessarily in any defined sense.  A sense of appreciation of essence.  In witnessing this accident, for instance, the scene went from fast motion to slow motion, to surreal … rather like the dreams I used to have about working at the airport taxiing planes and watching helplessly as they plowed into the terminal.

Life is like that sometimes.  Space-time bends as opposites collide in a flash of light, and into the vacuum moves life and death, marriage and birth, pain and grace, creation and destruction.

Of the all-abiding oneness we might say there are three primary divisions: Nature, Culture, and Spirit.

Spirit is the foundation.  Spirit brings us past the sensible form we are used to thinking of as “reality,” and into the hidden energetic realm within all forms and beyond all forms. Spirit is the essence of matter, of all things.  It is the ocean of vibration, the waves that continue despite our attempts to particularize, to define, to control and limit.  Our access to spirit comes most fully through the practice of meditation, as meditation trains us to go beyond habitual boundaries of thought, emotion, language and action; to taste oneness firsthand, and to dwell within it.

Nature is the sensible and material realm we live in, despite our persistent attempts to wall it out, to tame and exploit it for our private human benefit.  Though we have taught our kind to fear it, to escape it and to master it, Nature remains our constant home, our ever-forgiving Mother. Perhaps the chief characteristic of our true and sustainable relation to Nature is a sense of belonging.  Only with the attitude of belonging can we heal our dangerous split with Nature and begin to resurrect the symbiosis that all life shares, by practicing survival strategies grounded in respect and care of the Nature that sustains us.

Culture is the outer layer of skin on the earth, the sum of practices we bring to our biological and psychological survival.  Human culture, though in large measure it appears to have divorced itself from underlying Nature, is itself but a phenomenon of Nature.  The social animals, whether termites or lions, provide a clear example to us that to survive and flourish in a state of Nature requires cooperation and bonding within one’s own species.  Our practice of culture, whether “primitive” or “civilized,” entails the honing of craft … making arrows or learning piano scales.

To ground our scattered contemporary lives more fully in these essential realms – Spirit, Nature, and Culture – requires first of all seeing the necessity of all three in a healthy human life.  Lacking sufficient connection with either one results in the impoverishment of our health and quality of life. Yet we are programmed from birth (in modern Western society, at least), to discount spirit in favor of material values; to spurn Nature in favor of the clever works of man; to enjoy culture as passive consumers instead of creative participants.

To overturn these paradigms means replacing toxic body-memory with direct connection, expanding identity from self-concern to mindful presence and engagement with the whole, through all three of these primary channels and practices: Spirit, through meditation; Nature, through a sense of belonging; Culture, through our chosen craft.

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To apply these principles to my own life (by way of example), I might cultivate these practices as follows:

Meditation: daily routine, spontaneous awareness, journal writing, reading, music improvisation

Belonging: nurturing relationship, food strategy, outdoor time, exercise, sun, attention to natural health

Craft: writing, editing, music practice, composition, publishing, social sharing

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To go further in implementing these practices, I might follow a schedule such as:

Morning: meditation and yoga, music composition and practice, writing and publishing, editing and promotion

Afternoon: improvisation, food gathering and preparation, outdoors/sun, exercise, relationship

Evening: relationship, social sharing, music, journal, reading, relaxation

further reading: Eco-Culture