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Ezine Editorial - September 2008 Print E-mail
In today’s world of instant gratification, instant access to information on the internet and instant just about anything else, one thing that remains beyond the instantaneous is the process of life itself. Trees grow in their own time, crops may be harvested only when ripe, seasons, though rendered chaotic by climate change, remain seasonal. So too with us. There’s nothing on this earth that can hurry the coming to fruition of the self. You can have many and varied experiences, and at best you will be very experienced – but that’s no guarantee that you will be ‘ripe’ in your being. In fact, forcing the pace as far as self-development goes, tends to produce brattish, precocious children, obnoxious know-it-all adolescents and 20-somethings or 30-somethings who’ve done it all, seen it all and are suffering from advanced ennui. For those who don’t know what ennui is (a French word pronounced arn-wee), you probably know someone suffering with it – find the person who most embodies that post-modern, super-cynical, ultra-sarcastic, hyper-ironic, don’t-give-a-damn attitude, and who finds no satisfaction, apparently, in anything, and you have a working example. Avoiding this condition and its nihilistic, self-destructive world-view is well worth the effort. And effort is the key. All growth is natural, and we grow as people naturally as well, using our experience as the food to fuel the process, as long as we are prepared to make the effort to integrate what we have experienced into something we know, and then put a bit more effort into turning what we know into who we are. It’s like painting: you may have plenty of natural talent, or merely enjoy putting colour on paper, but only effort and working on your inspiration will ultimately produce something worth the time it took to make. We are creations no less than any painting, except that it is ourselves we are creating. If we go about that process unconsciously, we are not likely to make ourselves any more conscious – though the experience so brought forth may, in the end and through the discomfort and contradiction inherent in the unconscious creation, force us to begin the process of ‘waking up’. So many great teachers, even whole religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, speak of living life unconsciously as if we were in a waking dream where things are not as they appear and all we take as real is little more than grand illusion. Mystics, sages and those who’ve made a little effort (maybe playwrights like Shakespeare, authors like Dante, artists like Van Gough and poets like Keats, to give a few examples) have penetrated the veil, only to find themselves hardly able to speak sensibly to the rest of us. Reverting to symbolism and imagery helps, but a language can only really be understood by beginning at its visceral roots of experience. The language of awakening, then, is almost impossible to comprehend by those who aren’t awakening or who are actively in denial of the process. So these words go out to those who can hear them and will, almost certainly, pass by those who cannot. So be it. The image accompanying these words says it all: it is not that we must be like the Medieval alchemist, but we must all, sooner or later, realise that there is a veil of perception, and then make our efforts to find our way through it to what lies beyond. To those on this great adventure, we pray strength to your efforts; to those not, the day will come. Is it not glorious and miraculous how the universe unfolds? As that great piece of writing, Desiderata, puts it: ‘You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.’ (Max Ehrmann, 1927).
 
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