Because you must...

Over the past few years, there has been a literary explosion of new consciousness exploration books.  Everything from self-help, self-improvement, and consciousness exploration books have rapidly gained acceptance and have met with a population longing for meaning of any type.  Let's face it, life without meaning has no life to it.


Let me ask the question of you and me both, why change at all? 
Because you must... that is the only answer.  From my own life, I can safely say that there is no impetus to change other than the must.  At some point, life becomes a matter literally of life or death.  It becomes a choice at the very basic level of existence.  Change or die.  Life is constantly sending us signals, and we can either ignore the signals or accept the signals for what they are and allow the impetus for change to break through.  

Life is always a choice.  Life is always a decision.  I judge no impetus as good or bad, although I might thing that the way it is interpreted might be a bit silly.  I remember my deceased wife and I perusing the spiritual marketplace and happening upon several books that we derided as being misguided.  Were they?  I have no clue.  How can anything be misguided in an intention oriented Universe?  There is always a reason for everything it seems to be... unless there isn't any reason at all.

I can attest to the power of intention in my own life, but the stories are largely anecdotal and wouldn't really serve to provide anyone reading this with any insight into their own life.  Miracles are perceived by the giver and receiver of those miracles.  To others they simply become nice stories without the profound psychological and emotional impact that they provided the actual participants in the miracle.  Miracles, in other words, are personal.  They hold great meaning to those involved in the miracle, and they can always be dismissed by the general public, the scientific community, and family and friends as being mere coincidences.  As A Course in Miracles states, the use of miracles as spectacles to induce belief is a misunderstanding of their purpose.   

Epiphany, for me, is the miracle and produces miracles.  Which brings me back to the topic at hand.  What is the purpose of change?  Why are you reading this blog?  Why am I writing this blog?  Why do we search for meaning at all?  Why does one venture beyond the confines of one's past thinking into a different world of the unknown at all, and why would one even ask the question to begin with?  You can't eat meaning; you can't have sex with it.  You can't compare your meaning to that of your friends, although religions have tried this for centuries.  One meaning isn't any better than another meaning.  But meaning itself is critical to us... to us as humans.  Why?  

I remember a conversation with my very intelligent, verified genius-level, brother on the topic of spirituality.  He does not see the purpose in exploring what he views as the unanswerable questions in life.  He may see some use in directed activity or intentional living, but he does not go beyond this at all.  He is comfortable, more or less, with a level of purpose that does not transcend the material at all.  I told him simply that he would become interested when he became interested.  It is not my place to judge him for his apparent comfort with materially-based meaning.  He does have some meaning in his life, or else he would seriously be considering suicide daily, as I have done.

None of this spiritual shit matters until it matters to you.  There is no outside entity which could induce the level of commitment that this takes until you are ready to take the step.  It is all because you must.  My impetus... my wife dying.  Other impetuses... anything that deprives someone of meaning in their life.  It might be "bad luck", loss, deprivation of some sort, inner depression of a non-specific variety, or wanting to understand how they could be so blissful at a certain point... maybe direct revelation... I don't know.  I do know that some people simply embark on the journey because they want more stuff... bigger stuff... they see benefit in the material.  Is it still spirituality?  Of course.  Why judge where the impetus comes from?  For those who begin on this path from that standpoint, I would simply caution that eventually your play with these forces will invoke some serious shit.  As Nietzsche said, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."  


In other words, when you begin accepting the truth and dealing with the truth, it is going to set you free, because ultimately, the realm of the senses is simply too confining for our spirits.  Yes, the "good" or blissful can also rob us of our sense of meaning.  The entire point of this and other writings is that the seemingly material is ultimately what needs to be discarded so that our awareness can grow.  This is easier said than done.  We are attached at every level to our current conception or misconception of purpose.  Most of it is attached to the body (see Maslow's hierarchy of need... there is something rather ominous about that huge base of his pyramid).  The body's attachment to the material and our attachment to the body provide huge steel cables of attachment to all that the body entails.  Pleasure, pain, the senses, everything that supposedly gives us feedback about our world make up the sum of that which needs dropping in order for us to experience the world in a different way.


By far, the majority of those people who have found their true inner reality have had to go through some massive reorganization of their lives.  Look at Buddha, talk about a riches to rags story.  The price of ultimate happiness can look rather steep from this side of the mountain.  So if you are looking for a bigger house or a better metal box to ride to work in, if you are looking for more money or resources or a killer relationship, use the technology available to you at your own risk.  Eventually, you have to pay the piper... not that you'll mind paying the price once you are done paying it, but getting there can be a bitch.

As U.G. Krishnamurti said, "How can you be interested in this stuff?  How can you be interested in liquidating yourself?"  The very thing that is "interested" in it is the same thing that will not survive where the interest takes you.  Paradoxical, yes... but better to get used to that too.