The World's Job
One of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world focused extensively on the need to understand and use your will. For the moment, put aside any debate or doubt about the existence of free will. Don’t over think it. Instead, test it.[1]
Decide something you want to experience today. Self-Love? Empathy? Patience? Let’s try patience.
Go into your day with the will to experience patience. Choose it at every moment you can remember to do so. Will yourself to remember. Every tiny little thing you encounter. Patience. Each thing another person says. Every news story. Every car on the road. Did someone take too long to do something. Did someone make a “stupid” remark? Did you make a “mistake”? Patience.
The world, thankfully, will give you the opportunity to prove that you have will. Imagine that is the world’s sole purpose. Each obstacle, each interaction, an opportunity for you to manifest your will. Are you using the world properly? Decide that you want to exercise your will more each day. The world will challenge you, until you convince yourself. Then the world will stop, or you won't notice the challenges anymore (same difference).
[1] “One cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.” Father Zosima. The Brothers Karamazov.
Reality is not what it seems.
As a species, we appear to be at the end of a relatively short interlude in history where mankind believed it had a full handle on reality with its collective intellect.
The most fundamental question about the nature of reality is whether form precedes consciousness, or whether consciousness precedes form. Is it a Darwinian form of randomness, or an intelligence behind creation? The relatively short period of human history where we decided it was the former, confident that reality could be understood by conducting a thorough physical examination of it, is coming to an end.
Newer scientific discoveries, if they are not pointing us directly toward consciousness, are at least pointing us away from form. Our mythologies, religions, mystical and spiritual traditions all tell us that spirit or consciousness is first, and that it “descends” into matter. If true, then science should lead us to the same place (some day). It has been more than 100 years since humanity’s brightest scientists told us that space, time, and matter as we understand them are not fundamental aspects of reality. For example, reality in the form of matter and space-time collapses in on itself at larger scales, into what we call black holes and singularities; the universe of space and time is expanding, but we don’t know into what substrate this expansion is occurring; and when scientists examine the smallest particles, they have no location at all. To be clear on this last point, it is not that the scientist cannot pinpoint the location, it is that, according to the understood equations, location is not a concept that has meaning to something in a quantum state. When those same quantum particles are sent through slits in a partition, one at a time (the “double slit experiment”), they don’t observe laws of time, space, or causality. Reality only seem to form our physical world under certain circumstances that man does not yet understand. Consciousness, in the form of an observer or recorder, could be said in nonscientific terms to create form as we know it. Whether these are accurate accountings of science or not, it is safe to say that as we learn more, reality gets more mysterious, not less. It defies our senses and common-sense understanding of cause and effect. In a literal way, it is nonsense.
In the natural intuitive insight, “I am therefore I am,” the first “I am” refers to the awareness of being, of thought, or consciousness, not to the material existence of the body. The awareness of consciousness is the proof of the thing. The reductionist world view, wrongly conflated with science, tried to challenge that intuition for several hundred years. People started building automata, and we have the theory of evolution suggesting a random, ground up, theory of consciousness, where consciousness magically appears from matter, given billions or millions of years of linear time. But even that theory of natural selection (which never seriously tried to address the "magically appears" part related to consciousness) is now being subjected to scrutiny: was there enough linear time for the required number of random mutations?
And consider that our consciousness must retreat, on a regular basis, to the nonsense world of sleep and dreams, or the body it inhabits will die. Why? There is no good theory for why evolution would select for an organism that must remain helpless and asleep one third of its day and life.
As a side note, one currently popular theory of consciousness—of this being a computer simulation—evades altogether the fundamental question (form or consciousness). It does so because it still relies on form being fundamental, on consciousness arising from matter, it just punts the question to a higher level of an imagined hierarchy. It tells us nothing about consciousness, because we still have no theory as to how the simulation creators became conscious. It’s like the sci fi novels where species are uplifted genetically by other species, but there is always a fabled progenitor species, the origin of whose spacefaring consciousness nobody knows. It is not unlike pointing to a god to answer questions about morality or free will. It just pushes the question out in the hierarchy. You don’t answer the fundamental question by pawning it off on someone else.
If you want answers about the nature of reality, you end up, eventually, looking inward—even if you are one of the special people capable of doing quantum-level math. There is simply nowhere else to go. Science moves too slowly. And the senses cannot be trusted to reach fundamental reality.
For this journey, there are guides. There are people from every tradition throughout history who have looked inward and reported back to us. And there are many of those individuals whose lives, as living examples, indicate their advice is worth listening to. They say, in essence, that if you can find a way to let go of this logical interface, the self in space-time, of form being primary, even for just a minute, it will be more than worth the effort.
There are many good guides
to meditation. Below is a simple introduction.
To begin, ensure you have time set aside, whether 10 minutes, or an hour, where it will be relatively quiet, and you will not be disturbed. Silence your phone and move it away from you.
[As with preparing your body, this is not meditation, but you will find that it helps.]
"My soul at once becomes recollected and I enter the
state of quiet or that of rapture, so that I can use none of my faculties and
senses. . . . Everything is stilled, and the soul is left in a state of great
quiet and deep satisfaction." St. Theresa of Avila.
“Meditation is really a form of emptying the mind of everything known. Without this, you cannot know the unknown.” J. Krishnamurti.
Our experiment is to see what might be if we can let go of the outer senses and the thoughts. To experience something new. The mind is so full, it must be emptied. Silence is not suppression of noise. It is the mind's natural state.
“Listen to silence. It has so much to say.” Rumi.
Try to carry some of the no thought into your day. If you have a profound experience, try to refrain from sharing it. By sharing, even with the most wonderful, well-intentioned friend, you reduce the experience to the words you and your friend settle on. You will often shrink it infinitely. Share an experience only when you truly own it and for a purpose.
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