Life is for living
A life has to be lived. It can only be lived by you; nobody can live your life for you.
We live in the age when there is nothing else that can be done to help save ourselves but live a life for yourself.
I would even go so far as to posit that it is futile to go around thinking you ought to be trying to save Africa, or Gambia, or a Gambian in the Mediterranean sea, or a Gambian picking peppers in Ceuta Spain, or not buying such a picked pepper. Don’t worry, there will be plently of you still helping a Gambian, and making sensible food choices, but this will be part of your necessary self-realisation. By all means get on with what you are doing anyway. I’m only saying there is little point thinking about it. Therefore there may be as little point in spreading your thoughts about what we ought to be doing…. All that tends to do is make people think about it....
The world is starting to dry out a bit from all our thinking.
If you are panicked, now, by my casual batting away a greater moral obligation we owe society and the entire globe, and argue then there can be no mobilisation of mankind to save the dolphins, please don’t be, and read me more carefully. I never said, pretend you are perfect, ignore the microplastic in your cucumber, stop counting the declining number of fish. Only, that if you stay close to home you will be very efficiently promoting higher consciousness aswell.
Quintessential doing
Ask yourself what really MUST be done with any single life, for it to be a life well lived? Is there some general rule of thumb from which all else self-evidently flows? Not a doctrine one adopts, a theory one explores, advice one applies, behaviour one has learned; but something utterly original and purely sprung out of the divine spark that is your life?
Interconnectivity
Total freedom (democracy doesn’t go very far in my book, and anarchy strands even sooner) is an individual affair. Awareness has to dawn within each and every one from deep within. Keeping it very simple and short, I feel I can therefore say, a life is lived for yourself alone. Often we do “other stuff” to escape that very challenge. We are sneaky like that; and subsequently end up with a life worn out, quite tatty, even wasted.
Look closely and see, goodness will flow from a life you live for yourself. Let us leave the seriously mentally ill to one side for a moment and discover a trust that exudes with which to harmonise all else from a self that is being true to its real self.
Don’t worry that your own life lived well equals self-absorption. All things selfish must not be confused with a responsibility you also owe to yourself.
There is no contradicting that if you have found a harmonious way of living, you’ve already prioritised the greater good, the evolution of Consciousness. You will have understood perfecting your life in all honesty, is about becoming concentrated and consolidated and committed to that self that is only true in a mutually beneficial or communal Whole. There comes a point in time when your self only makes sense as something we all share in common; you find you live your life as if it was all there is, and all there is is your life. The truth is we are interlinked on so many subtle levels, linking up to one link starts to become almost impossible unless you it keep it very close to home.
Self-development = the expansion of consciousness
There is much in the west exclusively designed for the process of individualisation. Dictators or social (nanny state) innovation cannot curb this. Only automated and robotic systems, or oppressors we buy into will. How to avoid that? Believe only in yourself. This is the ultimate test of trust. We tend to think, our greatest flaw is that we are mistrustful of others, but we are only so much so in response to a fundamental mistrust of ourselves. This is a mistrust that reaches down to a very cellular level and is therefore very hard to eradicate without self-destructive methods.
Yet, remember always to be kind to yourself (in hurting yourself you hurt a part of the precious all).
If our education is already geared into self-realisation, so it should be. However much I roll my eyes at the Human Potential movement or the culture of sculpting one's self-image, natural and holistic self-realisation is something else. The point - if you want to make any with your life - is to live the best life you can; a life that makes you a better person year on year. There will be ceilings and bumps along the way, even falls down pits so deep there may be no retrieval possible; missed opportunities, persistent undermining, relentless animosity, and still each and every one of us can live their life to the best of their ability. There is no escaping that and no alternative. Here is how.
Methodless
There are three core activities to perfect in this life, if it is to be a life of self-improvement. The verbs one should understand and master are, in no particular order, and preferably synchronically: eat, sit and make love.
Try to imagine how to perfect these activities without trendy guidelines or bookish-knowledge. Use only wisdom and living imagination. Discover the intuition and inspiration that becomes available to you when you only think of the verbs, the action, the doing. In the doing lies the future. The will that has not yet become (dead thought, or automatic response). Experience the unconditionality, the selflessness, the inextricable relationships, the cosmic dance in how you eat, sit and make love.
Be amazed at the abundance you find; be humbled by the grace in sitting; discover the excess in the love you make and how this carries over into eternity;
Believe in the living of life
Clearly, or if not so clear let me clearly add, these acts can only be properly and wisely understood esoterically. That is to say, with a living imagination, inspiration and intuition. Life itself is a path of initiation, in that respect.
Nothing new under the sun
Tao and Yoga have tried to teach us this. In eating, sitting and making love we do what needs to be done. No more or less. We lead clean lives; the evolution of consciousness needs nothing more. Elaborate on this all you like, or try to leave one of the verbs out (an inedian† most certainly will) but I promise you, a wise individual is very likely to return to the mantra of eat, sit, make love.
There is no method to life. No single programme, only billions of interpretations of the Truth, which appears differently, in variations (and Jawlensky knew this like no other) to all men in all its myriad maya-forms (illusions we need to believe in). In the ever fleeting flow of time we can only live truthfully; never expose the Truth an sich. We may intimate it in beauty, approximate it with prophecy, learn from the past; but mistake none of this for a true and fast method to get you from alpha to omega. The only way to travel is to live your life.
† aka breatharians; people whose diet consists of “prana” or universal, cosmic energy (i.e. they consume no solids nor moisture). Famous inedians: Jericho Sunfire, Judith von Halle, Jasmuheen, Therese Neumann.