An Open Door

If there is one thing more frightening to us than death it is life without meaning. How do we know this is true? Just look around. People put themselves at risk every day in their efforts to find or hold on to something that gives meaning to their life. Some of these actions we see as noble, others are downright scary. And there are countless other acts that fall somewhere in between.

Then there are the suicides. People young and old alike take their lives every day because they have lost hope. And what was it that they had they hoped to find? They had hoped to find a meaningful life.

Furthermore, it appears to me that more than ninety percent of our actions are aimed at providing us with a sense of meaning. It is clearly as important to us as putting food on the table.

It was Albert Einstein who said, “to be religious is to have found the answer to the question, 'What is the meaning of Life?'” And I would certainly agree that it is the search to answer this ultimate question that fuels all spiritual quests.

But, my question is this; does religion define the answer? Or, is religion defined by the answer?

The author of Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl, tells us, that this ultimate question is not one that we pose for ourselves. Rather, he says, it is a question life is asking of us. And, we can only respond to life as life. That is to say our response is in our actions. To be religious then is not to hold to an abstract theory about life. It is to take concrete action as life, in life. But, what does this mean?

Here’s the way I see it. How I respond to any given set of circumstances reveals the meaning, or lack of meaning, I see in life at that moment. For example, if I react towards a perceived slight by striking out in anger, it is saying to Life that there is no meaning to Life greater than my own self image that must now be defended. But, if instead I seek to understand my part in this play of anger I am saying that the meaning of Life is to take personal responsibility for my relationship to Life as it is expressed in that moment. 

The aim of spirituality then cannot be something that is divorced from relationship, since all activity necessarily involves relationship. On the contrary, it seems the task should be discovering genuine relationship – relationship free of pretense and hypocrisy – so that we are better able to respond appropriately and provide a genuinely meaningful answer to the moment to moment question of Life.

What does discovering genuine relationship mean? And how does it affect our capacity to be responsible? I'll start with the second question.

It is the quality of relationship that determines our response in relationship. If we want to change our response we must change the quality of relationship. And, what determines the quality of relationship? The simple answer is our mind. By mind I am referring primarily to our thoughts and feelings. When we look closely at the working of our minds what do we find? We find confusion, and contradictions, competing goals, competing self images and competing ideas. In such a confused state is it any wonder that our responses to life are often shallow and muddled?

In integral terms discovering genuine relationship is about vastly improving our accuracy in translating or giving meaning to life events. You can think of it like computer software. If the translation program we have is not accurate the actions we take based on the information it provides is going to be less than satisfactory, to put it mildly.

How one goes about cleaning up their translations is a personal choice. But, in my opinion, the best modes first help us to realize that we are more than what we think we are. I consider this is a necessary step because without the direct experience that there is more to you than you think there is, you remain trapped by the limitations of your current thought and feelings.

The terminology for this aspect of human consciousness varies: Mind of Christ, Heart, Soul, Bodhichitta, Higher Self, Authentic Self, Atman, the Still Small Voice, to name just a few. But, Each of them point to a principle that serves as an intermediary between the conditioned and limited experience we have of our self and that mysterious “something/nothing” which is greater than us all.

 I call this principle Conscious Awareness. It is the capacity for Pure Awareness to know itself - as both form and emptiness. And, what I have discovered is that it is actually very easy to guide people toward the discovery of this ever present capacity of human consciousness. It is as simple as passing through an Open Door.

 Once discovered we can learn to get out of the way so that Conscious Awareness may attend to our feelings and thoughts in a manner that frees them to run their natural course. That is they can come and go without getting trapped in the closed circuits of our self imaginings. And false notions about who we are are obliterated in the light of truth. In this manner we clean up the errors that have crept into our translation program and this disempowers the automatic reactions associated with misinformation.