Like the guy learned in Into The Wild, human experiences want to be shared, if they are to have any purpose or life in the world. It simply won’t do to only experience Spirit for yourself and never share the experience with others, though it is important to learn how to be ok with experiencing Spirit by yourself. This is because every time we overshare with others about it, especially without having been invited to do so by the intuitive feel of the moment or conversation, we butcher a little bit of Spirit with our mangle of words.
This all occurred to me at the Dr. Dog concert, when I was looking around and realizing that my favorite shows are the ones where the audience is all having a great time together, as one. It’s perfectly great to just dance and rock out within a bond that is mostly or even strictly between oneself and the band, but isn’t it always even better to share the experience with your neighbors? Like after a particularly righteous jam, you’re jumping up and down hollerin’ and shoutin’ “WOOOO!,” and you want to give your neighbor a fuckin high five and jump up and down with ‘em, not just by yourself. You want to turn to your friend that you came with and go, “wow these guys are killing it right now!” or even just give each other a look that implies that. Shake the head and roll the eyes like “oh my god are you kidding me this is amazing!” Same goes for appreciating anything magical: a heroic athletic feat, a great story, a great poem, a moment of divine synchronicity in the wilderness, a painting, a person who is in the zone, a breathtaking sunset. Same goes for participating in and creating something magical by allowing magic to come through oneself: telling a story, capturing a wondrous sunrise on canvas, portraying a story on stage, being part of a team, making music, singing, writing. And truly, it doesn’t even need to be things like those listed above, which we usually esteem so highly: the magic is within everything, mundane, profane, and tiny, if we choose to look deep enough for it. As the poet says, “The wind speaks not more sweetly to the giant oaks than to the least of all the blades of grass; / And he alone is great who turns the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by his own loving.” So while there is a place for experiencing things by oneself, part of the nature of raw experience is to eventually want to be shared, whether or not that sharing is in words, for there are so many ways for it to be shared in feeling as well. Sometimes it wants us to quiet down in simple and deep reverence, other times it asks us to ham it up and give ourselves to bombast. Most of the time it is way too big to begin to understand, but it sure feels good to listen to.
I think this is one of the ways, on an intuitive level, that we almost always bring our vision back to our people, whether we do it consciously or not. And everyone has a vision (roughly, a deep feeling of what we know to be true, as revealed to us intuitively by the divine within us) that is living and growing all the time, whether or not one has gone and quested for it in a formal ceremony or some other conscious undertaking, and whether or not they are conscious of its presence. For each one of us, our life experience up until now is informing our vision, which is informing everything we say and do, even if we never inquire about its nature or its whereabouts within us; even if we don’t know it exists. Having this vision is a necessary condition of existing, perhaps unfortunately. Many of us first-time vision questers, and many people at large, especially those who experience Truth deeply but haven’t learned to transcend the arbitrary restrictions of our very limited society-at-large, feel the urge to share our vision with our people so strongly that we blab about it with reckless abandon and do injury to it, by sharing it in contexts that aren’t ready for it, by planting its seed in arid clay soil that is not ready to receive it and nourish it. Better to keep that seed within us where we know the soil conditions, where we consciously nourish and tend for it as it sprouts into what will become of us. And of course, we do even that within the context of our people, and within the context of the human race, and within the context of this absurd and mysterious existence, because we are always here, always embodied, until we finally get to just join with the Mystery at death. No matter how much it might ever feel like it, on this Earth we are never alone. Our lives matter absolutely.
On a meta-level, the human urge to bring our vision forth on Earth exists so that we can bring a new, slightly more evolved version of ourselves to the world, and in so doing be of service by being ourselves. For me, if I live this way, it doesn’t so much guide the process of living my vision as much as it helps me recognize when I am in my own way, because I believe if I just listen to what is in my bones and my belly and my heart and follow what is revealed there in each moment, my vision will bring itself forward to my people, to my fellow humans, to this Mystery of an existence that we inhabit. This is at least partially contrary to having the mind direct the course of living the vision with plans and labels and boxes and images. True authenticity come through often looks like wildness, and certainly does not require predictability.
But the ability to live in this way more and more of the time takes cultivation and hard work, which seems to be getting more and more unpopular as people’s baser, and therefore easier, desires are more and more instantly gratified by technology, and consequently people’s frustration tolerance and resiliency decrease and decrease. However, I feel that there is a call to hard work inherent to our experience if our practice of listening is deep and consistent enough. Life will lead us to a new challenge and make it clear to us that it is the natural next step, either in the voices of mentors, elders, teachers, or neighbors, or in the strong voice inside our own mind, or the ache in our bones, or the gnawing in the pit of our belly, or the song in our heart, all of which refuse to die as long as the truth is ignored. We’ve all experienced this, and witnessed it in others, and we’ve all seen how easy it is for humans to try to shut these voices up, whether by fleeing from people who hold us accountable or fleeing from ourselves with all manner of distractions and numbing agents. We have become masters, especially in America, at inventing conventions, social habits, gluttonous behavior that mask and benumb the divine longings for growth that originate within the nature of our beings. Instead of getting rid of them we have only turned them into anxiety, a nagging sense of fear and heightened alert, paralyzing self-consciousness, and addiction to comfort, and then all the things that come from these persistent states of being, like violence, laziness, jealousy, depression, suicide, conditional love, comparison, etc.
That it is in our bones to be drawn by intuition toward the challenges that will grow us indicates that it is also in our bones to evolve, and violence and laziness and mindlessness are very devolved behaviors, on the lower end of what we are capable of as a species. Art, on the other hand, is on the higher end, unconditional love for all existence being at the highest. As we are naturally inclined toward evolution as a species, we as individuals are naturally inclined toward growing toward our own fruition, like the tree sending up its ever-expanding branches to catch the sun, in harmony with all the other different trees around it reaching for the same goal in different ways. How frequently we try to deny this inclination, even while thinking we are “doing something” that will make us grow! The tree doesn’t “think” about what it should “do,” it just is what it is, and it grows. Imagine what a tree would look like that refused to grow as it naturally was meant to: probably tangled, dense and confused. In one of my trainings I ran across the idea that humans are the only species on Earth capable of preventing their own blossoming.
Let us all pray to be ourselves enough that we answer the call when a fitting challenge is laid on our path for our growth. As the poet says, “the lute that brings forth beautiful music is of the same wood that was hollowed with knives”; there are times when we must be as the lute and let that Grandest of Luthiers hollow us with knives in his threshing hold, that we may bring forth even more beautiful music, for the furthered fruition of what we are capable of becoming as human, for our people, for the world, for this Existence. We may really just be here to propel the Melody forward, and who are we to get in its way?
