What is a meaningful life? How does one discover— and live—what is truly important? How do we manage to spend the time of our lives in a way that will finally seem worthwhile?

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THE UNSEEN ORDER

Life’s Ultimate Mystery

An inquiry concerning meaning, purpose, the goals of life and that sort of thing

 
Introduction

Revised February 2008

         I sit on my porch and look out at a mountain, a mountain that in spring is lush, radiant – a vibrant sea of green.  Although it is very close, sometimes it drapes itself so fully in a cloak of clouds that I cannot see the faintest hint of its outline.  Yet, I believe it is still there.

         What other realities are out there, hidden behind clouds in the mind, which I cannot see?

         As I sit on my porch, I ask myself, "What shall I do today"?  And as I ask, I realize once again that this is not an easy question.

         Good fortune has smiled on me in many ways. I have a beautiful house in the mountains, good health, close friends, a comfortable bank account.

         In my younger days, I was filled with ambition – for power, for fame, for wealth – for experiences, for knowledge, for passion.  I felt a burning desire to save the world from confusion, from pain, from suffering.

         I have ambition still.

         But I‘ve also had enough achievements in life to know that one more success – or a
dozen more – of the same variety will not quench my thirst.  If there is a really thirst-
quenching drink to be found, it must be mixed with a different set of ingredients.

         I can say this with some conviction, for all of my past accomplishments have not brought me peace, or happiness, or fulfillment.  Oh, there have been many great moments – those exhilarating bursts fueled by victory and success.  But such moments are amazingly short-lived.  And when they are over, there is usually a crash – followed by the growing urge for another rush, another shot of the adrenaline of challenge and achievement.   

         And, disconcertingly, the moments of elation following victory seem to shorten as the years beside my name begin to mount.

         There is another problem.  Each time I have set out to accomplish something, feelings of failure have often come along for the ride.   It happens like this:  I naively set off in pursuit of some goal.  And I immediately experience a series of failures in my attempt to achieve a quick and easy victory – failures at least in relation to my expectations.  If, however, I persevere; if I give increasing amounts of time and energy to the task; if I learn from my mistakes; if I modify the goals as I proceed; then, often there comes a moment of success.

          But by this time, the weeks, the months, the years have gone by.  Who I am now is different from who I was when I began.  Sometimes the "me" that committed to the goal has "gone fishing" when the modified goal is achieved.  Is this really victory?

         Perhaps if I could say, "I want this", and it could be instantly fulfilled, I would experience the pleasure anticipated with the thought.  But if time must flow between the wish and the fulfillment, who knows what the result will be?  I might no longer want that particular fruit.  Or the "me" that is present for the eating might even be repelled by the taste. 

         This is one of the most insidious problems of life – this problem of Time.  Even if I know clearly, certainly, that I want this particular thing right now, how do I know I will want the same thing if I only succeed sometime in the future?  Further, because of time – because nothing seems to happen instantaneously, because of the inevitable pause between the wish and the fulfillment, any moments of my life spent getting "this", cannot be spend getting "that".  Yet how do I know, when the moment of fulfillment comes, that I would not have preferred "that" to "this".        

         Well, maybe I'll get both.  If I work hard enough. 

         Perhaps that's true for you.  But my images and desires do not seem to be limited to two, or three, or ten.  I seem to have an unlimited number.  All of which will take time to achieve – if they can be achieved at all.  Usually a great deal more time than I anticipate at the beginning.  And many will not provide the fulfillment I imagined when I began.  Yet, I passed up the pursuit of "that" in order to achieve "this". 

         In a sense, our lives can be compared to a gambler in the casino of life.  In this casino, the "chips" are the minutes of our lives.  And the prizes are wealth, power, relationships, fame, wisdom, inner peace, love, joy.  We each have a bag of chips, but we are unable to look to see just how many we have left.  We walk around the casino, observing each game in progress, trying to decide where to place our bets.  Shall I enter this game?  Will it last 10 minutes – or ten years?  What if I have a great hand, I'm close to a victory – but someone raises the bet, I reach in my bag, and I'm out of chips! 

         Perhaps I should play several small games at once – trying to accumulate a number of small victories.  But what if something crucial happens in one game while I'm concentrating on another?  

         And I seem to notice that my bag of chips gets a little lighter with each passing day – whether I enter a game or not.   Is this a metaphor for the game of life we each are required to play?

         I sit on my porch and look out at the mountain.  A ruby-throated hummingbird, psychedelic neck glistening in the sun, perches on our feeder.  Those who study such things say in the fall, hummingbirds fly to the Yucatan Peninsula, crossing the Gulf of Mexico in one non-stop flight.  I tend to believe them.  I have a great deal of respect for hummingbirds.  Further, it is written in all the best scientific books.  Yet I have never seen one hummingbird do such a thing.  Moreover, if I read the history of science, it is composed mainly of facts that seem patently ridiculous today. 

         Is this the first age in the eons of human history that has gotten the facts right?   Or, perhaps there are scientific facts accepted today that will seem ridiculous to those who come after.  If history teaches that this is the most likely situation, which facts shall be the bedrock of my reality?  On which facts shall I rely, as I decide how to spend the remaining "chips", the remaining minutes of my days?

         So I sit on my porch in the mountains and ask, "What shall I do today? There is no "necessity" for me to get up from my porch to hunt for food, to seek shelter, to protect myself or my loved ones from prey.   (Except perhaps the occasional developer, who in these hills can at times be fairly predatory – I know, I've been one myself.)

         The blessings of my life are indeed many.   I live in a time and a place where it is not necessary to take up arms (or build walls or moats) to protect my family.  I am not called to war to defend my country – one of the blessings of age. 

         Don't get me wrong.  I still have a number of strong urges.  For instance, I find in myself a significant desire for power, for wealth, for recognition, for fame.  But not too much.  Or perhaps not enough.  For although I feel these urges, they are not strong enough to propel me off the porch into the thick of the battle with the numerous gladiators already signed up for the next tournament.   Having signed up many times in the past, today the prizes don't seem quite so alluring.  And other prizes – some that might be incompatible with those games – seem equally important.  Or more so.

         "Such As?" someone defiantly asks.   Well, perhaps friendship, love, wisdom, joy, inner peace, wholeness, salvation, enlightenment.   A connection to the source of things, an experience of the ground of being. 

         Not easily deterred, my inquisitor persists: "Well, perhaps wealth, and power, and fame will bring you all these other goods – will bring them along in their wake." 

         Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  This is part of the wager we are each forced to make.  But the report of many of those who seemed to embody joy, wisdom, love, and inner peace seems to be that wealth, power, and fame can be hindrances in achieving these other aims.  "Who said that?" my inquisitor demands. Well, Christ, and Socrates, and Buddha – and Henry David Thoreau.  Gandhi, Moses, Lao Tzu, Rumi – and Hildegard of Bingen. Then there is Hillel, Dogen, Ramakrishna, and Immanuel Kant, as well as Shankara, Francis of Assisi, Theresa of Avila, and Tolstoy – and many, many more.  But you get the point.  Now, I don't necessarily have to take their word for it.  But their instruction does give pause in rushing to a quick and easy decision.    

         I have now been sitting on this porch for a long time, and there's a chill in the air.  Perhaps I'll go inside and write my thoughts about the destination of this journey on which we are all embarked, drawing a map of the terrain as I see it.  Yet realizing that this map may someday be as much out of date as those old maps found in musty shops that depict America as a turtle  – or connected to China.  But perhaps this doesn't matter.  Perhaps, as T.S. Eliot said, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

         But where to begin? Do I start with religion, or psychology, or mythology?  With art, or sociology, or economics.  You see, "What will I do today" is finally a question about life.  What it is.  What it's about.  And the living experience of life cannot be broken down into categories. In the living, the categories run together and overlap endlessly as they weave the tapestry of a life. 

         What I sense is that this individual "me" can only experience life as an interconnected web of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that intertwine, intermesh, and interact to form one seamless bolt of cloth.  And this whole cloth of "me" is not separable into individual threads.  If the cloth were unwound into its threads, there would be no "me".  I am the whole intertwined, interwoven cloth.  When I try to look outside, at whatever reality really is, at whatever is "out there" separate from "me", it can only be dealt with, thought about, experienced, from this nexus of me. From this "magnet" that I am, all the metal filings of my reality align themselves into patterns flowing out from this point – patterns which then become "my" experience. The assumptions of my mind form an energy field that rush out continuously in streams to mold and shape the patterns that will become my experience.

         To put it less poetically, each one of us sees and experiences life through a lens, a set of assumptions enculturated in us as we grew up – then modified by decisions we gradually made for ourselves about where we would focus our attention, who we would spend our time with, and what we would believe – and choose not to believe. This lens is our worldview, the way we understand who we are and what life is about. It is our foundation for living – as well as our prison. It is the underlying framework within which we make our decisions and understand the events of our lives, and it is a prison in that it predisposes us to see things in a particular way, while inclining us away from seeing and knowing ourselves – and our world – in a different, and perhaps better and truer way.

         This book, then, will consider the most fundamental questions: What am I doing here – in this life, on this earth? Is there a meaning to my life? What can I learn from the wisdom of the past? What will I do with the remaining minutes of my days? How does my worldview aid my journey – and how does it hinder? How can I intelligently use my worldview in creating a fulfilled, happy, and meaningful life – yet escape its imprisoning effects? How do I deal with worldviews that conflict with mine – out there among all those “others”, and even within myself? And finally, given the incredible differences in worldviews in the world, is there any solid ground on which to stand in answering these fundamental questions?