PURPOSE

If you know the why, you can live any how...

Years ago, lying in bed one night waiting to fall asleep, it came to me that I had made a crucial turning in my life, the most crucial one: I had had a spiritual awakening.  I had seen there was a power greater than myself in the world, a power greater than my own self-will and all the views and opinions of my own judgmental ego. I could have no idea what life had in store for me, but I knew that whatever it was, I would experience it and come to understand it in the context of my deepening spiritual connection. I realized I had developed faith, that as long as I saw my life as grist for the mill of spiritual expansion, I would be all right no matter what.
    My faith in what I understood that night has only deepened over the years. When I become willing to let go of all the noise in my head, the doubts and fears and resentments, the fantasies and expectations, when holding on becomes more painful than taking the risk of letting go, I find myself in the calm center of possibilities. I become able to ask, what is the purpose of my experience, what does it have to teach me? I no longer want to run from discomfort, pain, and suffering., but rather to embrace them, bring them inside so I can digest them and find whatever bits of nourishment they have to offer. I want to learn from them and in that learning feel myself expand.

PEELING THE EGG

Every morning, I make myself two hard boiled eggs. When I peel the shell, I see a thin membrane and if I catch that membrane the shell peels off easily.  If I don't catch it, the egg winds up with gouges and they're in the white which I particularly like.
     There are some people who seem to always catch the membrane.  Their lives, at least from the outside, look smooth.  They have success, money, a solid, long term relationship, children; they look like they've done everything right and been very lucky.
     There are other people and I'm one of the one.  Sometimes I catch the membrane and things go very right; sometimes I make a mess of things and things go very wrong. But, despite appearances, I don't think anyone gets out of this life without some gouges and bruises, without some suffering, loss and regrets. It's the way of the world, part of the human condition.
     All I can do is be careful and pay attention.  I can let the eggs cool enough for the membrane to contract. I can crack the shell at the bottom, where there's an air pocket, and with just enough force to avoid the shell itself digging into the eggs. Then I can take care when I begin peeling so that I don't use too much pressure. If I do all that, the shell comes off easily and I get to enjoy the egg.
     Catching the membrane isn't rocket science.  It just takes reminding myself to pay attention, focus and have patience.

ONLY BEGIN

I take it as a given that it is we humans who confer meaning and value to our experience.  We don't discover a meaning and value out beyond our consciousness. Experience comes to us through our senses and we interpret it, we give it meaning, we assess its truth.  When Victor Frankl says that no matter what our experience is, we are always free to change our attitude, to create new meaning, he is pointing to the greatest freedom we have, the great gift consciousness confers, which is the ability to interpret, to choose, what our experience means.

We may suffer but out of our consciousness and our spirit we are able to find a larger context for that suffering, a framework to discover the deeper meaning and purpose of our experience.  That search for context, for the deeper meaning, is what I intend to write about here.  I especially intend to write about the freedom that search confers.