Why Just Being Alive is Just Not Enough
“You think you are alive because you breathe air? Shame on you, that you are alive in such a limited way. Don’t be without Love, so you won’t feel dead. Die in Love and stay alive forever.” ~ Rumi
Status Quo
Are you just kicking the can down Status Quo Lane? Just going through the motions of keeping your life secure, comfortable, and painless so as not to rock any boats or step on any toes, especially your own?
Is your song and dance glaringly void of both song and dance? Are you alive just in order to fulfill some preconceived lifestyle handed down to you by your forefathers? You exist, but do you live?
All rhetorical questions, except this one: If your answer to the aforementioned questions is “yes,” then are you willing to stop kicking the can, to risk security, comfort and pain, to rock the boat, to possibly step on toes, to discover a song and dance with both song and dance, and to seek a way of being in this world that may go against the spoon-feeding of your forefathers? If yes, proceed. If not, heed the following words of Ernest Becker, “Danger: the real probability of the awakening of terror and dread, from which there will be no turning back.”
Love & Adventure
“Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering.” ~ Rumi
The main reason why just being alive is not enough is love: authentic love, Agape-love, all-consuming love, the kind of love that subsumes fires and burns all vacillating moths. You simply cannot discover this kind of love by sitting on your preconditioned ass. Love is the cornerstone upon which all philosopher’s stones are built.
The keystone that opens up the locked door of all adventurous lifestyles. Throw yourself into love. Pick the lock! And adventure will not elude you. But, and here’s the rub, falling in love with life hurts. Adventure can be uncomfortable and painful. The path will not be gentle, but it will be worth it.
Being in love is a double-edged sword. Most of us know this, but too few of us feel this. We know that throwing ourselves into the hurricane of love is both a scary and fulfilling adventure. But we are reluctant to feel it, to live it, to actually give it a go, because we are afraid of the unknown. We’re afraid of the inevitable pain of the path. And have no illusions: the path of love is the most painful of all. Why? Precisely because we love beyond our own ego.
When we surrender to love, we surrender to life. Our ego surrenders to the soul. Such a sacred surrendering is painful because, in order to do it right, we must be vulnerable. Authentic vulnerability takes a particularly counterintuitive flavor of courage. It’s akin to jumping into a fire, but instead of just getting burned we transcend the burn and fall into glorious rapture with all things being one.
Silence & Solitude
“I never really understood the word ‘loneliness.’ As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature.” ~ Björk
Speaking of being one with all things, the best way to feel it is to melt into it through nature. And the best way to do that is through solitude. It will be within solitude, away from the things of a man, away from the clanking steel, where you will be able to transform the clanking steel of your thoughts into a language older than words.
This language is silent. This language is silence. It speaks through soul, through blood, through tears, through your heartbreaking against a mighty cosmos.
Love will be your Launchpad and adventure will be the reason for propelling yourself into the higher-than-self state of being-for-itself. Out there, within the Sacred Loneliness that dwarfs feeling alone. Where melting into the Great Mystery trumps your mystery-less home life. Where the voice of the infinite is free to speak to you, in you, through you.
The bullhorn of God’s voice box is out there waiting, calling for you to get off your ass and speak through it. Breakthrough your creature comfort zone. Shatter the spirit paradigm that has you locked into a state of hyper-security and hyper-comfort in a hyper-reality. Meditate in silence and solitude. Discover the voice box of God. Take it back with you and help trigger the throat chakras of others.
Stagnation & Devolution
“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Don’t cease to be mind, lest you cognitively stagnate. Transcend the cultural paradigm, lest we devolve. Don’t get locked into an idea. Use ideas to pick the locks on new ideas instead. Ideas have always had more utility as tools toward leveraging the mind further down the path; not as crutches to lean on like a cripple forsaking the path. The opinion that “just being alive is enough” is precisely the kind of crutch-like idea that cripples us into a fixed state and at the expense of discovering a freed state.
Don’t allow the world to atrophy around you. You exist, but are you just going through the motions of existing, or are you doing something about, and with, your one unique existence? There’s never been another you. And there never will be. As such, no other person will ever be capable of bringing forth to the world what you have the potential to bring forth.
That is more reason than any other to wake up, to stand up, to heed the call, to break the chains, and to walk through the door that has always been open but you were always too afraid to walk through. As Joseph Campbell said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Your “just living” lifestyle keeps you secure, sure, but at the expense of love, curiosity, and adventure. It keeps you comfortable, but at the expense of suffering from nature deprivation and seeing how far you can really go. It stunts your growth game. It blunts ego-soul expansion. It keeps you content, but at the expense of suppressing your shadow, and never even coming close to individuation and self-actualization.
Change your opinion
like a snake sheds its skin and the path will forever unfold before you. Harness your inner-Kundalini. Meditate. Spiral out. Crush out. Hold your heart fast to your chest like an existential pedal put to the metal of your existence-preceding-essence. Evoke progressive evolution by becoming a proactive revolution. This is your one true life, as far as you know. And, if nothing else, if everything I’ve written just sounds like new-age hogwash, “You are the product of 4 billion years of evolutionary success. Act like it!”
Source: Fractal Enlightenment
Words by Gary Z McGee