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The Interior Life
by Kingsley L. Dennis, Guest | Waking Times
“We are dreaming a symbolic world, only briefly waking to what is real.” ~Arthur Deikman, M.D.
“He not busy being born, is busy dying.” ~Bob Dylan
Something is not quite right…you feel it…you may have experienced this feeling, this nagging, for a long time. So you most probably just try to ignore it and hope that it goes away; but sooner or later the persistent nagging finally brings an idea to your mind – there’s something very odd about the way the world is. Maybe you feel like you are at the cinema watching a film and yet you sense there must be something wrong about the film you are seeing. The images are all there, but there’s a feeling that something is out of sequence, or the frames are running out of ‘normal’ time. However, after a while you get used to the style of the film, and your senses adjust to its rhythm and you lose the sense of strangeness and you get pulled into the show and you go along with the ride…
…the film tells you that the world has no grand meaning, that human life is an accidental anomaly – but as you walk down the street, engage with friends, fall in love, follow your dreams, you experience meaning and significance…wait, there’s that glitch in the film again – something about its ‘randomness’ and ‘meaninglessness’ doesn’t make sense…your personal experience has shown you something different…and then there’s that nagging feeling again…somewhere – wasn’t there?
Life is life, and most people go through it with trial, joy, adventure, challenge, love, and all the rest. This is the same for all of us, yet it doesn’t always occur on the same playing field. There is a different perspective we can take – a different position vis-à-vis the world. We can see the world in which we live as solely an exterior phenomenon; or we can choose to view it as also an expression of our interior life.
I have come to regard the cosmos as not just the expression of mathematical equations, but as the play of lyrical forces that, like a living being, is intoxicated with love and wonder, and the joyful curiosity of adventure. And I often wonder what it would be like to live with the view that human life is the result of random, accidental forces; as a meaningless happening forced to live out its years on the back of a dead rock hurtling through a lifeless universe. I am reminded of the ‘Myth of Sisyphus,’ a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat for eternity the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again – and then to push it up again, ad infinitum. For me, this lifeless exterior view of life is truly absurd[i]. And yet the physical demands of a normal life compel us to focus our gaze continually on the external where our daily waking consciousness has to deal with all the impacts and noise coming from the outside – it is very physical work and can, and often does, occupy the whole consciousness and conscious awareness of a person. Yet for some people another gaze peers out onto the world – a gaze from within. I refer to this as the interior life, whereby a person deeply feels, intuitively knows, that there is another perspective upon life, one that is far richer, pervasive, subtle; and yet one that must be sought with effort.
Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk
Source: http://www.phoenixisrisen.co.uk/?p=11674
