Can't Squander Life

All the spiritual traditions of the world agree that human life is infinitely precious. Therefore, we should not take the lives of others, nor injure, nor belittle, nor think we know what is the best way for others to live—but most of all, we ought not waste the life that we are living. It is difficult enough to find a planet like ours, that is capable of supporting such life as the human variety in the style and opulence we have grown accustomed to, and are just now in process of losing.

But for those of us who have the good karma to be still living in relatively healthy bodies in situations that are peaceful enough to permit inner development, and with the financial and spiritual resources to enable the successful achievement of the highest aims of life, the most important message delivered by all the sages is simply this: Do not squander your life in petty, superficial egoic strivings. Time is short. Take advantage of your opportunities. Realize your true Self. Open your mind and your heart and your soul to the blissful energies of the unlimited creative intelligence that wishes to flow through you and transmit blessings to all beings. Why settle for a life of limited happiness, benefit, and growth, when the infinite is waiting for your call? Follow your own desire, say the sages, don’t simply imitate others, but let it be the true desire of the heart, not the pretty pictures of a romanticized ideal that has no reality, nor the masturbatory fantasies of the lustful egoic mind. Follow the desire for that ultimate horizon, the all-encompassing loving presence that has been called by many names, including Nature, Buddha, Christ, the Self, and God.

We do not know the awesome extent of the potential of our inner powers until they have manifested. It is common to feel hopeless. We too easily lose sight of the distant horizon for which the heart yearns, the signposts are censored, our hearts soon get locked down in dungeons, and we lose our way in the grey hours of depression that the soul suffers in confusion. Most of us pass our time in superficial pleasures, in quiet desperation, watching television, shopping, gossiping, arguing over stupid matters, escaping from our inner being rather than seeking it. We prefer to be part of the herd, rather than to individuate and risk aloneness. So we follow along and do what the herd does, trying to be cool in the eyes of people we do not even like, and work on developing a style of hair and dress, of talking, of behavior that will make us seem to be different and unique. But the problem is that all that working on our image is just a seeming, a simulacrum of being with no substance behind it. Unless we build our lives upon the foundation of truth, we doom ourselves to the anxiety of feeling inadequate, fake, guilty, and shameful at our core. And we tend to compensate for this anxiety with pathological efforts to prove our omnipotence, ranging from garden-variety narcissism to psychotic delusions of hearing the voice of God. All these games continue ad nauseum, while the biological clock relentlessly ticks away, life energies slowly decline, possibilities fade, windows of opportunity close, and the precious gift of human existence ebbs away without having been truly explored or developed.

We tend to make of our lives a particular genre of movie. For some, life is an adventure film, for others a romance. For still others, life is only a porno flick. For the more refined egos, life is a tragicomedy. For the scientifically inclined, life is a documentary. But for a rare few, life cannot be categorized in any genre. Some of the greatest films have no linear narrative, are not centered on a single character, have no obvious message, yet speak powerfully to some force within that cannot be grasped. Such films make palpable the mystery of existence.

Once we begin to think outside the box, once we stop the game of compensating for an egoic sense of lack, then we can really begin to make use of the inherent potentialities of our living cinematic mindscreen. Then our lives will no longer be kitsch, but can attain the level of real art. Art in its purest form does not represent some formulaic airbrushed ersatz of reality but rather presents uncanny images that get under our skin and penetrate our eyes, rip away the mask of the ego and effect affects that explode our comfortable mental pictures of reality and confront us with the abyss that is the Real. True art does not waste its energies in screening the pseudo-encounters with horror and violence and sex that Hollywood spits into our optic chiasm, which in the end only confirms the ego in its paranoid-schizoid approach to life—but rather leads us into awe, into the sublime mystery of the timeless moment, in which all matter and movement are captured in unspeakable conception, auto-revealing the primordial powers of awareness and light in their eternal divine embrace, the radiance of which flows out in omnidirections as the cosmic ocean of becoming.

For the ultimate Real to be revealed, then, time must stop, and for that the mind must halt its hostile dependency upon language, image, music, mathematics—the full panoply of Logos that gives birth to the ten thousand things, as the Taoist texts remind us. When we break the outgrown bonds between stimulus and response, between mother and adult child, between past and future, between the Other and the I, between the mirror and the me, then consciousness can rest in its essential nature, and time is realized as pure intensity of creative power.

We are born of a power that belongs to no one. We mistake our parents for that power, but once it has done its work through them, it leaves them behind. Nor is it our own. One day, it leaves our ego behind as well. Once the power that cannot be named or limited to any form releases itself from all illusions, the obsolete egoic skin is shed forever and Existence flows beyond the bounds of individuality, liberated as pure Openness, sacred heart of healing, devourer of worlds, intoxicating libation of love and laughter, wrathful deity, death of death.

All sin is reducing oneself to a body ego, building a bastion against the world as if it were alien and not the Self, as if we were many and not one, to keeping out God and calling that religion, to identifying with a gang or group or nation and calling others enemies and infidels, and all the while watching as our world collapses beneath the weight of such delusions, and calling it our destiny. But the truth is different. In every moment, we are the freedom of divergence, of becoming differently, thinking more deeply, drawing different boundaries, or none. Once mother and child were one bounded being in two bodies. In some graced families, both parents and child were one in three bodies. There were times long ago when cultures thrived in which all members were one, egoless, and all beings one with the universe as an infinite whole. Such living unity can emerge again, for it is the essential nature of the urfield from which all particles emerge, all evolving forms and systems operating as a holon of a single absolute intelligence. To attain unity with all, we must first separate and realize our utter singularity. Only after the dissolution of the ego can anarchic non-oppressive forms of unity emerge as iterations of trust grounded in truth.

We cannot bring about such change in consciousness as an act of will, because the will that works in us is not our own. But the freedom of the flux that is the process of cosmic transformation itself will overtake us according to its subtle rhythms and its unthought reason, and will at the accurate instant dissolve us and re-create us as awesome images and wonderments. The ego is not in control of its fate. And to pretend that it is is the only defeat, and a squandering of life, a dissipation and evaporation, that will nonetheless be found to accord at last with the will of Heaven and form in further seasons into clouds of consciousness again, in the heavens of infinite possibility, and rain upon the mindful mountains of some new world as astonishing ideas and rush as rivers of delight in ages yet to be, among the angels and the butterflies whose forms are so beloved that they eternally return.

So we cannot really squander life—not even that is in our power. The law of the conservation of consciousness will not be overridden. As pitiful egoic systems, we are possessed by our impulses, merely playing out roles that our fantasies enforce, our imaginary mastery is but slavery to the sensual dimension—but a higher intelligence and will is still at work behind the scenes, and when we are impelled by pain to finally leap off the wheel of time, we shall find our way to the still and silent center without fail. Nothing is ever lost, nor did we ever exist, except in the sleeping mind of the unimaginable cosmic dreamer that we are.