This is the first chapter from my book “On Human Being – Loving and Living Without Purpose.” I apologize for it’s length but hope you enjoy it in any case.
Earth life is a vacation from the cosmic train we all ride on through our infinite existence. It is a unique experience all of us who choose to visit get to enjoy, if we accept that the only reason we are here is to enjoy. It may seem erroneous to consider that we are here to experience three dimensional reality as a vacation or as something we should enjoy when we see so much pain, suffering and sorrow in the world. The reality of existence here on earth is that it is nothing in comparison to our existence in eternity. We are no less infinite on earth than we are in eternity.
While aboard the cosmic train, a few of us have gotten off here at earth and as we pass through the gates of birth, we enter a new kind of awareness that overwhelms everything else we once knew. The old awareness gets tucked away but is always there. We sense that there is more to us, but in the new earthly awareness, it is difficult to hold onto and pull it into this reality. Some do and we see them as mysterious and unique, but never allow that, we too, are just as they are. Earthly awareness is so tactile and sensory. The stimuli we take in through our earthly senses overwhelms us in a sea of experience and richness that is difficult to separate from the reality of who we truly are. So we are driven to find answers in this reality to that mysterious knowing we have about ourselves that is bigger than our means of communication can express. We look for meaning and purpose in terms of what we see and in the expressions we communicate, but even with all of that, we are sometimes left empty. The search continues. The purposes of life are explored and examined but the answers we seek lay hidden.
There really is no purpose in this life other than to experience reality as only humans can. Every aspect of life should be embraced and we should revel in every minute of it regardless of whether we judge the experience good or bad. Our purpose, if there is any purpose, is to live and live abundantly in the richness of sensory experiences our human existence allows. Our existence “is” the meaning of life! Living “it” is its only purpose. However, it is ours to choose how we let the sensory awareness of this life be measured. We can choose to embrace it and enjoy all its ups and downs, or we can be miserable as we slog our way through it to our death, or the entrance back on the cosmic train we disembarked from. We make it what it is and we can blame no one for our experience. Sure, our innate nature has been masked, but it is not unknowable. We live according to our awareness and that is as it should be. That is what we came here for; therefore, every minute of earthly awareness should be basked in for its wonderful and delicious sensory experience.
The search for a greater meaning or purpose to life is in some ways its own problem. It suggests that we cannot be here for any other reason than to embrace and enjoy everything about life. It leads us to question our lives and the experience we have as meaningful in ways that they are not meant to be. It adds seriousness to our existence that drives us to meanings that can only make sense in this reality but do not begin to address our own innate knowing that we are so much more than what we sense in this existence, or than what language will allow us to describe. That is a lot about what this existence is about – coming to grips with the limitations of awareness and communication we otherwise have as gods. There is no way we can describe our divine nature in the languages of humans, but we are not supposed to. Remember we are on vacation and compared to our divine nature, the pace here on earth is slowed down considerably. Our infinite state is a quickened state in which our awareness is of things incomprehensible in this life… earth life is seriously slowed down. In fact, our own human-ness slows us down even more.
For instance, it has been proven scientifically that our bodies, including what we call our physical senses, take in sensory input, several billion bits of information every second, and yet what we are capable of being conscious of is in the range of twenty to thirty bits per second. Something about this experience as humans filters out so much of what goes on that what we are conscious of is infinitesimal to what is really happening. When we consider our divine or spiritual natures, the information we receive is even greater than what we experience on the human level. In fact, our spiritual sensitivity is so finely tuned it is barely detectable and in most scientific circles, it is nonexistent simply because we do not have the three dimensional means to detect it. What is not detectable in this reality is usually left to speculation, theory or is just relegated as non-existent. Even though most of us at one time or another have felt something in ourselves that is more far-reaching than we can articulate, if we cannot define it, or measure it, it cannot be, or so says our science.
Human consciousness or sub consciousness is not the extent of our experience. We have built in conditions and filters that sift through the enormous amount of information, bombarding us every second, which screen out the majority of our experience. This is what I mean when I refer to life as an illusion in my book On Being God. What makes it into our conscious awareness is what we have been conditioned or programmed to know and accept. Most of us have heard that when the Spanish ships appeared on the horizon upon discovering the “New World”, the inhabitants could not see them. There was nothing in their conditioning that could explain what they saw and yet intuitively they saw something. Their programming simply could not identify it and nothing in their experience, other than clouds, could the ships on the horizon be compared to.
We know it took the shamans of those native people several days to come up with a description they could then convey to the rest of the people. Only then could they identify this new phenomenon and only then could they put this new description into their own language and make it part of their experience. Consider how much is going by us if in every second of life, billions and billions of images, sounds, smells, tastes, touches and any number of sensory inputs we can’t possibly remember get discarded by processes we barely understand. Life goes on around us at light speed but we only sense it at a snail’s pace. And the civilizing of ourselves, as we refer to it, is only slowing it down even more. Think about what is passing us by.
In the early 1990’s, I worked for a telecommunications company whose products helped optimize the available bandwidth of copper phone lines around the world. Cellular technology was in its infancy as was fiber optics, so maximizing the available telephone bandwidth was of major importance because there were only so many copper lines available to an ever increasing population of telephone users. The product we developed was a device that would convert an analog voice signal to a digital signal, remove any extraneous noise such as the static or ambient noise one often heard on a telephone land line, and then packetize the cleaned up digital signal into small packets that would be sent across the line to another device that would assemble the packets, convert the digital signal to an analog signal and, wonder of wonder, a voice was heard speaking just as on any phone call.
What was so unique about this product, for the time, was that in processing calls in such a way and by eliminating all the extraneous noise, we could put sixteen voice conversations across a telephone line that up to that time could only carry one, representing a huge savings to businesses who were paying for multiple lines at great cost as well as a serious improvement to the usage of the available bandwidth. One of the interesting facets of developing this technology was the idea that the extraneous noise in normal telephone conversations carried no useful information and could be removed without any affect to those speaking and those listening. Little did our developers know that the noise did provide one very important piece of information.
All of us who have used the old land line telephones always had a sense that our call was viable because we could hear the noise of the connection during breaks in the conversation. The information carried by the noise was that the call was still connected. Even though the noise adds nothing to the words spoken or heard, it did add to the assurance that in between words spoken and words heard the line was still connected. When we removed that assurance, sure enough, people who used the new technology complained that during the breaks in a conversation, the line went so silent they couldn’t tell if the connection was still intact. The familiar noise of land line conversations was a carrier of information that, like so much in our reality, is taken for granted but missed if it is gone.
We are missing more and more in our reality due to the stripping away of the noise of life that civilization, culture, and upbringing filters out, and the absence of it is causing us to be aware of less but to seek more. In other words, we are starving ourselves of the richness of life in all its forms and replacing it with the illusions of culture and civilization that have been drained of nutrients necessary to the soul. Our aloneness in the world stems not from the isolation we feel from our brothers and sisters. It stems from the filtering of life that has isolated us from our own god-ness and that of everyone else. That is what we seek in life – not human connection, but divine connection. Individually and societally, we are crying out more and more for something to fill our satiated souls, and more and more civilization devises empty stimulation to keep us in control – in check from venturing away from the illusion we know.
The illusion we live, like the processed foods we eat, have been stripped of those things that would enrich and nourish us and replaced with fillers and synthetic nutrients that satisfy temporarily but do not fill us. Our connections to nature have been replaced with television, radio, internet and other civilized forms of media that have been carefully engineered to play to an illusory beat we have all been taken in by. Like the packetizing of small pieces of digitized voice from a telephone call, information is carefully fed to us at a rate not to exceed our ability to pay attention. So much of the information is stripped away that we only get teased with what is really happening and before we have a chance to try to figure out what information has been stripped away, we are hit with another perfectly timed, perfectly sized packet of seriously reduced information.
The illusion is so complete that we, as participators in it, have accepted slogans such as “give them what they want” believing that what we want is what we are being given. Meanwhile, for those who search for greater awareness, getting outside of the illusion is extremely difficult and so they search in vain among the institutions of civilization for the soul nourishment they crave.
What was intended to be a stopping off point, a vacation from other awareness has now become a desperate struggle to somehow survive natural forces that, while once were so much a part of us, have now become the enemy. Our illusion of what this reality is has become so synthesized that we have replaced what was always intended – enjoyment, enrichment, tranquility and nourishment – with a struggle fraught with peril, tragedy and synthetic stimulation. Our cosmic vacation has become so empty, so stressful that we now look for ways to vacation from the vacation! And where do we go? To those places with as little civilization as possible. We go to those places where we can rest, soak up the sun, or be inspired by the beauty of a natural wonder such as a mountain, a river, the ocean or a canyon. We sometimes go to the civilized, manmade attractions but, while fun and stimulating; they often leave us empty and un-refreshed.
The oldest among us recall fondly the quieter and less hectic times they grew up in and the freedoms they enjoyed then that are so distant now. The youngest of us cannot even conceive of these things they describe. The sterilizing manner of civilization removes the adventure and connectedness to the world whose intention it was all along to enrich us and enliven us from an infinite “other world” reality. Our souls came here for enrichment, not our bodies, and yet it is our bodies that our civilized world caters to. The experience of life has become a race, a competition to find purpose and meaning by indulging the senses in every possible way, such that the soul is lost completely to the gratification of the physical or three dimensional aspect of our lives. We hear the statement that “we are spiritual beings having a physical experience”. Yes, we are having a physical experience, but not to the extent that we completely overshadow our spiritual nature.
In the Old Testament, there is a story of the man Job whom most have heard of in some form or another. The story of Job is the story of a man who has everything this life can offer. He is a man of great wealth, influence and notable character. He is God-fearing and righteous and is blessed with a large family, creature comforts, as we call them and the respect of everyone in his country. Job’s story takes a bizarre twist as Satan convinces God to let him break Job and show God that if he were to lose all the things in life he possesses, that Job would lose his faith and curse God. God allows Satan to literally take everything from Job including his family, wealth, and good fortune. Satan is even allowed to cause great scourges and illness to come upon Job, but Job, while physically broken in every way, never forsakes his faith, nor does he turn against God. Job does, however, question why one as righteous as he, is treated so poorly by the God he worships. He even asks God to take his life and end his misery. Job suffers all that is thrown at him, but never accepts that he is evil or that God is punishing him for some act he has committed. Job does seek for answers to his suffering and requests to speak to God face to face. God grants Job’s request and appears to him as a whirlwind.
It is extremely interesting God’s response to Job and very relevant to our experience here in this life. Instead of speaking in any way to Job about his suffering, God directs Job to look all around and take in all the beauty and wonder he is surrounded by. God covers every aspect of creation and life on this earth and not once addresses Job as a sinful man or in a way Job desires. All manner of creatures are mentioned as well as the wind, rain, water, snow, hail and frost. It can be taken that God rules over everything and is greater than all things but it is as if God is trying to show Job that the things that are naturally here on earth are what is important in life. All of it is here for the good of our souls and yet our so called civilizing or taming of nature is not unlike that of Job questioning God why he is made to suffer.
How is it that we can suppose that the egoic cravings of humans can nourish our starving souls when any of it has no comparison, whatsoever, to the beauty, majesty and abundance of this earth? The treasures of life are not found in the creations of man. They are found in the raw creative beauty of which we are all a part. When we see that eagle soar high above and we gasp for breath as we watch, “we” are every bit as breath-taking and none of it is because we have created our cities, monuments, and wonders. It is because our souls, like the eagles, soar above everything we believe important and look down on something so vast and wonderful. Nothing in our creative imagining comes close to its splendor.
We are the recipients of this splendor. No act or outcome in this life will change the nature of our soul in the eternities. Nothing we do here matters, so all that we need do here is embrace everything that goes on, every experience, every accomplishment, and every aspect of the life we live should be embraced in every possible way as another part of our vacation. None of us should ever feel we are victims of circumstance when we step back on to that cosmic train. We should be refreshed, invigorated, uplifted and alive from a richness of experience we may never know again, and while in infinite terms the experience is a blip on the cosmic screen, every part of this experience should leave us absolutely vibrating. What a gift it is to be here and to experience the incredible highs and lows of humankind. We should relish every moment of it.
Too many can’t wait, like Job of old, to get out of life and back on board the train. Life has not been the pleasure trip it was meant to be, but that is only because in the egoic life we live and try to fit into, we lose sight of why we are here. As God spoke to Job and asked him to identify one thing in his experience that remotely compared to the splendor of this planet and everything on it, Job shrank before Him and could not. The reason is that there is no manmade thing that compares to anything on earth and in infinite terms, nothing on earth including earth itself compares to our lives in eternity.
In the last chapter of Job, the epitaph, Job is restored to his health, position, and stature that he knew before Satan physically broke him. In fact, it was greater than before. The story of Job is a metaphor for us here on earth living life that regardless of our circumstances or how we view our life experience, in the end we are restored to our unique and divine situation. If we learn to see this life, our experience, as God instructed Job to view it, nothing else matters. Nothing we do or accomplish in this life will ever surpass just being a part of life here on earth in whatever form it takes. The cosmic train leaves no one behind regardless of how the earth experience went for them. Like Job, we are all restored back to that infinite reality we all exist in. We won’t be looking back as in infinity, all things blend together into one big whole, and it is wondrous. All of it is wondrous!
Life and living are the only reason we are here and all of it is to be enjoyed, but only as you choose. We cannot fail at life! There really are no illusions, only the ones we choose to accept as our condition. We can change everything in our experience here in this life and we should because we get back onboard the cosmic train all too soon.