Pilgrimage ~ Day 3

"What are you wanting from life?"
"What are you hoping to experience through life?"
"What are you willing to give of yourself to life?"
"What lights your fire?"

It can be insightful to contemplate these motivations from time to time. They are dialogues within themselves, multi-faceted, complex, shrouded, holding a promise of some new revelation.

For many people, any sense of purpose of life and of their being is to engage with an experience of their own power and they interpret this through a show of force. There can be an admission or acceptance by one or more party that a consequence of this choice is that it infringes upon another person's quality of life or sense of value. It is somewhat parasitic in its nature and will undoubtedly arouse a difference of opinion as to its merits.

One question to contemplate and which can be insightful is "How well do we function, or rather, how much at ease are we with experiencing ourselves as an individual, as an autonomous being within a collective?"

Some cultures will welcome a stranger into their midst and readily offer them hospitality, even when their own material provisions are low. Others will encounter a stranger with unease, suspicion and in readiness for conflict. Perhaps before we can begin to contemplate and to be honest about how at ease we are with others, we have to be willing to explore how much at ease we are within our own being?

"Who are we and who are we trying to be?" reveals a knot of tension that has to do with the present moment and our perception of progress or improvement. We are exposed to much conditioning in a lifetime, well-meant and manipulative, but it can be challenging to navigate a pathway through such echoes, towards authenticity of self and ease of being in the moment. If we do not consciously look for authenticity of purpose and value, then it will undoubtedly be defined for us.

If we are uncomfortable within our own skin, it is likely that we will be uncomfortable and unforgiving around others, most especially when we detect any trace of hypocrisy and double standards. It is as if we are unsure of ourselves and of how we should be in this world and so we believe that we need and must seek some pathway or way shower of an ultimate state of perfection.

Coming from this state of neediness, authenticity and acceptance of being human aren't enough. It is our yearning for, as well as our discomfort when we are unable to sustain an image of perfection in another, which has kept us in a cycle of raising one another onto pedestals, making martyrs, saints, as well as being filled with contempt and hatred as we tear one another down and destroy.

It is not simply a matter of redemption or a state of perfection that we seek through one another, as the nature of energy that we harness on its behalf, is what can lead us to justify our intentions as we seek to manipulate the physical world around us, take pride in and protect what has been agreed by many (but not all) to be progress and accomplishments and is what excites us about technology. It is what drives us to preserve and to fight over landmarks and national relics and is at the root of our sense of what is sacred, whether this is ancient texts or other ideologies.

We can become so fixated upon our aspirations, our goals and ideals that we do not notice the nature of what we are leaving in our wake. This can be true despite our protestations of not needing for others to remind us that our actions have consequences.

Blind faith, stubbornness and hubris are powerful incentives for many to stick with a particular path or course of action, despite growing evidence that such a path is debilitating and toxic. This can be so despite Einstein's famous quote of "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" as there is an unwillingness to reason and so in its place an adherence to a nature of force that is summed up in the maxim that 'might is right'. 

Force has a distinctive expression in the world and we are familiar with it through the observance of Newton's Third Law of Motion that 'for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'. A force can be defined as a push or a pull that acts upon an object as a result of its interaction with another object. In everyday life, people will be familiar with a momentum of force when it takes the form of manipulation of one party upon another, how an interaction is experienced and of whether it is consensual.

Whilst it is possible for action and reaction to be measurable between objects, the nature of consciousness and its flux is such that interaction between people can fall beyond what is measurable through a time line. How are we able to measure the ramifications of a particular event which might take place in our childhood? In an immediate aftermath, it might be possible to observe particular effects and this in turn might be variable according to a person's cultural or social status, but it is still a mystery of consciousness as to how a particular experience will unfold and shape our character and destiny.