Initial Thoughts on What Life's About

Listening to David Zeitler talk about what integral theory is at the Integral Theory conference made me start jotting down some notes about what I want this human experience to be about, because it felt "clearer" there.

I want this life experience to be about emancipation, life lived fully**, life lived intimately***, in a vast communal web of life committed to growth (or maybe 'evolution'?) with people fully committed to lovingly calling each other on their shit.

*By "emancipation", I refer to a freedom of choices beyond the reactive conditioning that is the necessary experience of one born in time - necessary because there's a sense of needing to go through it, in order to understand it enough to then witness and untangle and eventually move beyond it.  In the book Action Inquiry by Bill Torbert and associates, there's a line that still brings me to tears - "who among us would voluntarily take on the continual suffering of witnessing the gaps among intentions, espoused values, actual practices, and outcomes in ourselves, in others, in organizations, and in larger social processes? Who struggles to transform such suffering, not into imprisoning neuroses or social victories at others' cost, but, rather into emancipating consciousness that graces each meeting afresh?"  That voluntarily taking-on links in with the notion of fully (see **). It's not just the suffering of witnessing, becasuse bodily, there's so much resonance when one person is in full contact with antoher.

**For the term "fully", I mean life lived feeling everything. When I was last doing Big Mind in Salt Lake, I was talking to Bruce Lambson about my experience of overflowing with tears whenever I touched Big Heart or Mahavairocana Buddha. He said something that named it well for me - the heart opens both ways. It doesn't just open to the blissful and loving part of meditation, but it opens as fully to the pain. How does one feel it all, bear it all? I was sitting with Bill and Denise Harris wondering aloud, "How can I bear it all?", and the answer that arose in this "us" space that we'd created together was that, "this 'I' can't", but the "I" that isn't just "I" can.  Then we can keep saying to the universe the Sufi prayer, "Shatter my heart to make room for limitless love".

**For the term "intimacy", there's implicit a reciprocity and a being seen and seeing derived from my understanding of David Abrams' work "Spell of the Sensuous" (see other blog posts).  My ideas of this are also drawn from David Deida's work on intimacy.

It was interesting to me awhile back that "happiness" is not what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for a happy life so much as a full one, and happiness as a dually intended and unintended consequence of life lived fully. (It's the funny paradox of knowing that by not choosing it as the intended consequences, my experience is that it is more likely to be an unintended one - except that sort of makes it an intended consequence again.)

The academic in me is amused that I have footnotes. I'm also regretting that I bought Doritos in a moment of craving, and have now eaten too many of them. What was that about suffering and the whole cycle of craving and aversion again...? :)

I was digging around for a translation of a Rilke poem when I came across this website about the Dark Night of the Soul - http://www.jeanniezandi.com/11.html

I'm struck by how common the body of poetry is that speaks to that Dark Night in a deep way. Rumi, Rilke, T.S. Elliot, Mary Oliver, David Wagoner's poem "Lost" - these names rise again and again when I look around for poetry that speaks to the times of transformation in our lives.

I'm capturing here the new ones I hadn't yet encountered for my own reference.

This first one by Rumi is just glorious.

The way of love is not a subtle argument.
   The door there is devastation.
   Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom.
   How do they learn it?
   They fall, and falling, they're given wings.

I also like this snippet of verse from Wendell Berry a great deal. It echoes Dante's "in a dark wood, where the straight way was lost".

 It may be when we no 
   longer know what to do, 
   we have come to our real work, 
   and that when we no longer know which way to go