Discomfort, Evolution & Actualisation

Discomfort, the Perennial Invitation

THIS IS A LONGER ARTICLE, BUT THE TRUE AND BEAUTIFUL SIMPLICITY WE SEEK IS SO OFTEN TO BE FOUND ONLY ON THE FAR SIDE OF SOME COMPLEXITY. WE HAVE TO BE INVOLVED INTIMATELY AND COURAGEOUSLY IN THAT REVERSE-ORIGAMI -TO UNFOLD THE TRUTH AND TO UNFOLD WHAT IS SMALL AND RIGID WITHIN OURSELVES. WITHIN THE TIGHT FOLDS OF OUR SMALLER NATURE LIES HID A MUCH MUCH GREATER NATURE.

THE LONG WAY AROUND, HERE WE FIND, TO BE THE STRAIGHTEST PATH.

THIS IS ONE OF SEVERAL ‘KEY CONCEPT’ ARTICLES THAT WILL FORM THE CORE OF THE CORPUS OF MY WORK HERE ON SUBSTACK. THESE ARTICLES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE SOME SENSE ON THEIR OWN, BUT THEIR FULLNESS OF CONTEXT ONLY BECOMES VISIBLE IN RELATION TO THE CONSTELLATION OF MEANING PROVIDED BY THE OTHER CORE ARTICLES WHICH WILL BE NOTICABLE BY THE ‘CONSTELLATION KEY’ ICON YOU SEE ABOVE.

---

Deep heartbreak, the kind that crumbles the fortress of our hearts, takes our promise from us, and steals our dreams away, is never simply when a blow is struck in anger, but in the way we collect an errant blow in a place inside us, where we had, out of an innocent faith, decided it was unnecessary to build defences.

The first casualty is our innocence, our belief in the nobility of the world, and of others. The loss that comes after, which seems on paper, the greater, is actually the lesser. And when we grieve later, we discover it is that loss of innocence and the dream we imagined, that broke our heart the most. We feel made fools of by the world. It is a high price we pay, to love; to risk ourselves in the hopes others will share the nobility of our dreams, only to discover, to our deep dismay, that they are more shallow and more callous, or simply perhaps more human, than we needed them to be.

We all arrive in this world innocent. We come here believing in the inherent goodness of the world. Sometimes that is explained to us as God or providence. Slowly, the more we awaken to the reality of human life, and the degree of suffering around us, we start to question the sense of goodness of everything.

"Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?"

Kahlil Gibran

There was a Greek philosopher called Epicurus, who was also the author of a famous thought experiment called the paradox of Epicurus or the Riddle of Epicurus, which has been revisited many times in our history through the lenses of theology, morality and philosophy, which we refer to as The Problem of Evil.

It is also called Epicurus' trilemma, because it is a problem with three heads. It is a syllogism that claims to deduce that God or gods cannot be all-good and all-powerful.  It goes like this:

Evil exists. 
Since evil exists, 
God either wishes to take away evil and is unable, or
is able but unwilling, or
is neither willing nor able.

The real problem of evil, is not as Epicurus mapped out in his paradox, but rather that in beginning with this fundamental and unchallenged assumption or belief, that Evil exists, creates the non-problem that we have been trying to solve with Theology and philosophy.   We failed to define what we attribute as or to Evil. 

We notice that harms and suffering exist, and from this narrow limited perspective of the blind-curve of experience we try and estimate the whole. We try from this limited vantage point both in space and time, to make assertions not just how we should live our lives and why, but also how others should live theirs. Through our confetti of wisdom and folly, of cleverness and ignorance, we are grasping for an answer about what is true, and about what is possible.

The real question, which many philosophers and seekers live with in their hearts, is simply the question of Meaning.

What is it that causes us to be so troubled in this life? What is it that causes so few to find great peace and gentleness, and others to be so tortured, even in their creation of beautiful works? This is such a persistent and nagging question that hangs over all of human life. How can it be true that this Universe is in fact Love, when so much suffering seems so meaningless?

To help us make sense of this, we have to resort to a working hypothesis.  We have to try an idea on, like a hat and really commit to the look. The idea we will be trying on is, that contrary to Epicurus’ foundational assertion, Evil does not exist.

Paranoia is the state of living in constant and what is believed to be prudent fear based on the belief that something or perhaps everything is conspiring to do you harm.

The opposite, is pronoia.  Pronoia is a term used to describe a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons, entities or forces are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires ultimately, to do them good.

The most important implication of this working hypothesis that evil does not exist, is that if there is a natural order, whatever happens must be subject ultimately to Meaning.

The answer to this question, I believe, is the Perennial Invitation.

Jiddu Krishnamurti pointed out that “It is no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

This article is about a way to understand a wider context, where we can encounter meaning to suffering and striving, and even to loss. It is in essence about the great medicine of Understanding.

The more technical sections are necessary so TLDR sections have been added just to help anyone along who struggles to process all that.

Let’s digress:

Nature and Change.

Nature has one drive: To carry forward the seed of life.

It achieves this through variation and iteration. In one sense we can observe this as evolution. The full implication can be less obvious.

Although an exact timeline is not definitive, it is commonly understood that wolves began to develop social habits around 1-2 million years ago, a conclusion based on fossil evidence and genetic studies which suggest a timeline along which the ancestors of Canis Lupus likely started living in packs. To make the switch from solitary animal to social animal requires above all, compromise.

The benefits are more obvious than the trade-offs: The benefits are sharing of resources, safety in numbers, care for the young and the frail, which lead to the persistence and flourishing of the individual, but also the persistence and flourishing of the group, and the persistence and flourishing of the genetic strain, that is the success of the species.

The success and dominance of the group becomes a vehicle to support the success and dominance of the individual, which, based on hierarchical advantages, supports the success and dominance of the species. This is the heuristic by which evolution ensures multiple concurrent instances of a single species, favoring different genetic features and adaptations, to spread the bet, to ensure the continuation of life.

The existence of multiple species is an inevitable result of the same basic heuristic. Different form-factors and adaptations to the basic questions of obtaining fuel, survival and reproduction give us the explosion of plants, fungi, insects and animals we see in the world today. Nature achieves this through three basic principles:

• Spread the bets. Nature is a numbers game which is played through enabling numerous instances, each able arbitrarily to pursue different adaptations and selected for indiscriminately, based on success.

• Adapt and select through variation and iteration. The building blocks of RNA and DNA and the reproduction cycle of species allow for very small incremental changes, mutations which can in turn compound over many iterations resulting ultimately in infinite adaptability to every environment, climate, terrain and scale.

• Regeneration. Some organisms can regrow limbs, most can regrow tissue, and species can regenerate numbers, and repopulate an environment over time.

Getting back to our wolves, the compromises or trade-offs of the social adaptation are less obvious: In more challenging circumstances, some of the positives actually become negatives, such as sharing of resources and reproductive competition. In an effectively ‘closed system’, that is to say a strain on the limited hunting range, for any reason which produces a shortage of food, water, mates, etc. results in competition within the group. Another negative effect of social living is that any defective genetics or hereditary traits which are not best suited to survival would also be propagated within the pack. This last aspect also serves as natures way of terminating anything ‘less-than-optimal’ to carry forward the seed of life. Naturally for all social animals there is also a higher risk of disease transmission. Similarly through cultural entrainment there would be a persistence of traits and habits which may not serve the group.

Obviously the compromises would not be aspects the wolves were ever consciously aware of. Wolves do not weigh up the implications of a solitary life and then evaluate the complex calculus of effort expenditure and return, factoring in the discomfort they would have to accept to choose the social dynamics of the pack. The wolves just steadily evolved traits and dispositions and the ones that persisted as solitary creatures did not survive the long march of evolution that gave us the grey wolf, Canis Lupus, today.

When we relate this to humans, it becomes even more complex due to the added layer of cultural norms, ideologies, and behaviors, which have a significant influence on our species' survival. Add to that our democratised technologies, like AI, nuclear technology, and social media, which have great positives, but also levels of destructive potential and existential implications to humanity.

TL;DR: Nature has one drive: the continuation of life. It achieves this through variation, iteration, and occasionally, socialization - like the case of wolves. Wolves evolved to live in packs 1-2 million years ago, and this social behavior brought about benefits like shared resources and safety, contributing to the individual, group, and species' success. However, there are trade-offs, including competition within the group during resource shortages and the propagation of potentially harmful traits. The existence of different species and their various adaptations are the results of Nature's strategies: spreading the bet, allowing variation and iteration for selection, and regeneration. These principles, though not conscious decisions in animals, become much more complex in humans due to cultural norms, ideologies, behaviors, and technology, which can have both constructive and destructive impacts.

Outgrowing the Cradle.

When Human beings began their long and necessary pilgrimage from early hominids to homo sapiens, we steadily took the reins away from nature, and we started “choosing” for ourselves. I say “choosing” in inverted commas, because we were also, like the wolf, not always consciously aware of the trade-offs we were making while we made them.

Rebellion is always a necessary puberty of actualisation.

At some point in time, in our progression from nomadic bands to villages and towns, we exceeded Dunbar’s number. Dunbar's number refers to a theory proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who posited that the number of meaningful social relationships that a human can maintain is limited to approximately 150. The number has been challenged by sociologists and anthropologists but never compellingly more than doubled. That means that any social group of larger than 300 exceeds the human cognitive limit.

To keep wolves from tearing themselves and each other apart, to maintain some sort of social order, a pack leader establishes dominance and any wolf that does not align with that social order, is put back in line, violently if need be. Nature, that is natural diseases, the scarcity of resources, affected in turn by seasonality and competitor species, takes care of the rest. In this way, a harmony within the group is maintained and a harmony with their environment is maintained.

At some point we shifted from a nomadic lifestyle in a key anthropological milestone called the agrarian pivot. We did not do this all at once, different cultures and societies arrived at this over a period of time around 10,000 - 12,000 years ago. Once we did make the agrarian pivot, we began a journey of adaptation and innovation that had us by 3,000 BCE living in early city states and proto-empires in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley. These populations could reach tens of thousands in urban centers.

By the time we outgrew the cradle of nature, we also outgrew the mechanisms of social order and natural regulation that wolves enjoy. To take up the slack, we invented writing, arithmetic, laws, morality, religions and money. These were never perfect in their first iterations, and we have been steadily revising them, by the sword and the cudgel ever since then.

Just like the wolves, we were never aware, when we made collective unconscious moves towards new social conventions or innovations in civil organisation. We had no concept of what the long term implications of our unconscious choices might be. We were losing things all along and then we arrived in modern-day western society replete with all the modern marvels like running water, and the internet. No one quite understood how this also resulted in the dystopian buffoonery that gets us populations of adults hanging on the words of an aspergic billionaire with impulse control or electing a celebrity tycoon, repeatedly implicated in fraud, as president.

You Can Take the Primate Out of the Savanna…

Humans, outside of our narrow academic context, also never became aware of what they retained from their evolutionary biology. Our DNA and our nervous systems have been evolving for millions of years. You don’t just shake that off with a college degree.

As the saying goes, you can take the primate out of the jungle, but you cannot take the jungle out of the primate…

If we use as an analogy to represent the arc of human evolution the distance between Los Angeles and New York, it helps us contextualise the weight of bias that our evolutionary momentum represents. If we take the distance of 3,980 kilometers (2,472 miles) to represent the 1.8 Million years since the earliest evidence of our earliest hominid ancestors, it means we have brains and nervous systems adapted primarily for primitive and nomadic life. Over that distance Neanderthals disappeared as far back as a standard marathon. To be clear, the distance between Los Angeles and New York would accommodate 94 standard marathons. The arrival of Athenian democracy would have been as far back only as 59 football fields.

What this means is that we have a set of evolutionary traits, just below the surface of our civil veneers, that were developed for a harsher, more violent, more primitive form of life. Our brains, nervous systems, and senses developed to handle much simpler orders of complexity and input. And these traits live with us, unacknowledged and unrecognised, waiting to be triggered. One of the key traits is tribalism.

Tribalism is the impulse that selects for connection to optimise survival. In our state of overwhelm and discontent, it is getting us divisiveness that is guaranteed to ensure annihilation.

We fear not having enough to survive, because we both fear ending and ceasing to be. Nature put that in us. Therefore we fear something that comes to potentially deny us what we need, or taking what we have away.  Anything that is not explicitly for us, that is quarry, prey or ally, is potentially against us; predator or competition.  Therefore, by design, we fear the unknown. Only when the fear of stagnation overrides the fear of the unknown do we brave the unknown. This is the kernel of the operating system that nature gave us to survive, which is the basis of our addiction to binary thinking, which is now presenting itself as a bug, rather than a feature.

Furthermore, for animals, instinct provides both the impulse to have enough, and the definition of enough. For humans, we retained only the compulsion to have enough and we lost, as we became self-aware, the intuition around what was enough. 

As we became more socially complex and our relationship with the natural world became more complex, as our archetypes and concepts became more complex, our fears became more complex. The same basic fears became refracted through the consciousness and interacted with the complexity contained in our consciousness and now we have an expansive fractal array of fears and pains and discomforts which are alike and yet different.

Our psychological, social and cultural operating systems are now so complex, that our vigilance is hyper-aroused and the binary nature of our thinking is being overtaxed.  This is because at this level of conscious expansion and complexity, the binary nature of the algorithms of Life we call dualism cannot cope with the multi-varied complexity and nuance we are trying to process.

There are so many complex dangers, and the playing field of psychological survival is so multi-dimensional that our vigilance has been aroused to a state of hyper-vigilance.

Vigilance once hyper-aroused is subject to a ratcheting effect; it does not de-escalate without venting or purging, and it does not auto-acquire only valid targets.  Hyper-vigilance breeds hypervigilance.

We can observe this from a neurological perspective in the human brain. When amygdala-hijack occurs, the fear response is sufficiently aroused, the moderating effect of the pre-frontal cortex, what we call our executive function, is rendered offline. In an environment of hyper-stimulation, it is not incentivised or designed to come online again of its own accord.

Systems fail when their inputs exceed their throughput. The more noise and overwhelm we have to contend with to have enough, qualify enough, discern fear apart from danger, is the reason we are suffering and causing suffering.

TL;DR: As humans evolved from early hominids to homo sapiens, we started making unconscious choices about our society's structure and order, moving from nomadic lifestyles to villages, towns, and eventually, urban centers. This shift, known as the agrarian pivot, led us to exceed Dunbar's number (the cognitive limit of meaningful social relationships), necessitating the creation of systems like writing, arithmetic, laws, religions, and money to maintain order. However, despite our civil progress, we have retained many evolutionary traits designed for a simpler, harsher, more violent life. Tribalism, one of these traits, is becoming detrimental in our complex world, leading to divisiveness and potential annihilation. We lost our innate understanding of what is enough to survive and thrive, leading to complex fears and discomforts. Our binary thinking is now overtaxed due to increased complexity and nuance in our lives, leading to a hyper-aroused state of vigilance that can result in fear responses and decision-making impairment.

A Profoundly Sick Society

There is a place in the human heart that can be aroused to a state of such sensitivity that it cannot even suffer the affront of consideration. And our moment in history is reduced down to the agitation of that raw nerve.

It is to this point, and all the attendant social ills we cause ourselves in not being able to discern what enough is, amplified by what our technological and political innovations lend to that raw impulse, electrified by our tribalism, that gives us the society that Jiddu Krishnamurti referred to. “It is no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

I have spoken and written extensively on this in the podcast and earlier substack articles respectively: The Cost of Our Allowing and You Wont Like This are two good places to explore this further.

What we have now, is a perfect storm of human weaknesses that are unnoticed and unmoderated in ourselves and everyone around us, various games of ‘democracy’, politics, capitalism and attention capture (including social media and news media) that is all terribly incentivised.  Politicians are incentivised to win elections not to serve the people, corporate companies are incentivised to control consumers and make profits, not to serve customers and add value to the world.  The value, if any exists, is incidental.  Journalism and Media are incentivised to capture and retain audiences through distraction, entertainment and emotional manipulation, not to inform the public and act like watchdogs of corrupt politicians or rapacious corporate interests.  Every system we rely on for society to function, every system we would rely on to co-operate and co-ordinate in the interests of solving problems, or rebuilding after a disaster, is terribly incentivised, and is thoroughly overwhelmed. 

You get what you incentivise. Systems fail when their inputs exceed their throughput. The inevitable result is disharmony and discomfort.

It is a bit of a mess, but the whole of a plan is always hardest to fathom when you are standing right in the middle of it. We aren’t at the end. In one way, we are just at the very beginning. The wider picture covers where we go from here as a species. That is where we uncover the perspective that reveals Meaning.

THIS IS ALSO THE MIDDLE OF THE ARTICLE.

KEEP GOING.

Fortunately for us, nature also baked in a solution, that lives with us wherever we wander. The question for us is whether we become aware of it and its implications in good time and lean into what better might look like, or we wait for Nature to help us with the reboot button, the hard way.

The Threshold

The cure for apathy is discomfort. The cure for extreme apathy, is extreme discomfort.

The human form is a result of some sophistication and complexity arrived at by millions of years of iterations. We live with some confusion around the wisdom of equanimity which Taoism and Stoicism teach us. Without the wish for something to be other than it was, human beings would still be living in caves eating raw meat. It was precisely our dissatisfaction with adversity that provided the impulse to change.

What is more, it was precisely our ability to be dissatisfied that provided the possibility for us to actualise.

Each human life is a packet of experimentation and persistence through which the intentionality of nature, specifically of the species, inches the hardware and the base operating system forward towards an actualisation of form and state, one iteration at a time.

Each human life, is also a packet of potential intentionality; One where we get to decide how to steer the course, perhaps not of the core hardware, but the debugging of the operating system, and the optimisation of the hardware. We also get to assume some stewardship of our natural environment commensurate with our capabilities.

These are the two aspects of nature, the ‘outer’ universe of limits, patterns and forces which impel our evolution, and the ‘inner’ universe of experience and response that impels the meandering actualisation of the individual and the species.

For the animal part of us, evolution is a meticulously intricate process managed wholly by Nature. This process ingeniously harnesses the inherent restrictions, recurrent patterns, and the boundless potentials nested within these patterns. Over an expansive trajectory of adaptive modifications, it manifests as a grand spectacle of life's curation, where change is the only constant, and harmonious survival, the ultimate art. Within all that seeming chaos and randomness of evolution is an elegant order.

Iteration & Variation: Photography: Alex Hyde

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

Carl G. Jung

This iterative process continuously explores and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, molding species over countless generations, demonstrating a complex and profound balancing act between the stringent laws of natural selection and the imaginative realm of evolutionary potential.

At some point we crossed the waterline of sentience where we could self-direct our arc of Becoming. It is this way within the scope of a single human life, as we move through adolescence into adulthood. It is also this way in the context of our entire species. And while it is happening, we are never aware what we are losing in the exchange or what bugs our overreach is activating.

In either case, the catalyst is always discomfort. All beings are moved, by the outer aspect of nature or the inner aspect of our human nature. Ironically, this duality itself is an innate source of inevitable and inescapable discomfort.

By the same principles, civilisation arrived at our current level of complexity and sophistication via successive iterations. As with natural evolution, the process is characterised by violence, struggle, death, rebirth, predation and calamity. Whatever harmony we have enjoyed has been relatively sporadic and short lived, or at best selective. That is to say, even in our state of relative peace, we have a modern world where human slavery is still practiced, and petabytes of child exploitation material is generated and traded. We still have extreme poverty, famine, war, happening right next door. The human organism is the only species that is both the parasite and the host; we self-predate.

We have a growing rift inequality of opportunity and means between people who can never have enough and people with no less of a wish for wholeness and fulfilment that we do. And it is all happening right under our noses.

“It is no sign of good health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society.”

All the discomfort we feel, as always, is an invitation to be better, to make it better and to ensure better for all. All discomfort ever is, is the necessary door to growth.

Man is the very crown of creation. Nature and circumstance, turned all the dials and rigged all the code in us, to get us to this threshold, this verge of actualisation. The reality is that nature cannot do it all. At some point in time, we have to take the step through the door. The gift nature programmed us with was Fear: Fear of dying, fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of inadequacy and unworthiness we call Shame.

All our efforts, conscious and unconscious, that led us to this impossible moment, was powered by that force. There is an alternative for growth and expansion: Love. The only challenge, all growth requires a difficult and vulnerable outgrowing of who we already are. All growth requires discomfort, chosen or otherwise. To align to Love as our impelling force, we have to Choose to face discomfort.

The only way to reach an impossible height without climbing, is growth.

There is a step yet to take
as the poet said;
- without feet,
through the door with no threshold.

An impossible height yet to reach,
made without climbing.

An excerpt of THE LEAP by Rocco Jarman

That step is a giant leap that changes everything, and it has several names: Self-Ownership, The Essence of Leadership, Maturity and Conscious Choice.

The reality we are invited to awaken to, which provides all the context of meaning our wounded hearts ever need is that: If there were no suffering there would be no respite. If there were no discomfort there would be no relief. And if there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.

TL;DR: Humans have evolved over millions of years, with dissatisfaction and adversity driving change and a degree of partially conscious ‘selfish actualization’. Each life contributes to this progression and has the potential to refine the 'operating system' of human nature. Both the external forces of nature and our internal experiences have shaped our evolution. However, we reached a point of sentience where we could start guiding our own evolution, a process that is again driven by discomfort and comes with its own challenges.

As civilization has developed, the ‘progress’ has been characterized by both struggle and growth, with sporadic periods of harmony. Despite advances, significant societal issues like poverty, war, and inequality persist. Discomfort is viewed as an invitation to improve, a cure for apathy and a door to growth. While fear has been a major motivating force throughout our evolution, love could serve as an alternative for growth and expansion. This requires confronting discomfort and making conscious choices - a step that represents a significant leap in our evolution.

The Perennial Invitation.

Perfection is a false ideal; a mirage you will cross deserts for and never reach. The pursuit of perfection is designed to ensure your unhappiness. Your unhappiness is designed to ensure your discomfort. Your discomfort is designed to awaken you.

The way we are playing the game at the moment, unconscious, with our fear of fear telling us we will never have enough, that we will never be enough, ends only one way: Regret.

Everything we fear, everything we covet, everything we hate, everything we avoid, everything we pursue, controls us.

The fact that we are uncomfortable is not a sentence, it is an invitation to healing and growth. Often healing is nothing more that the sense of adaption to the unfamiliar, the arrival at a transcendent perspective which puts our discomforts into context, a process we call maturation. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations. The fact that there is so much suffering in this world, is not an invitation to deeper despair, it is an invitation to leadership. To outgrow who we are as individuals and as a species, to lay the kinds of foundations within us and around us that can stem the flow of generational trauma, that can debug the broken software, is to be the change we long for. There was a time, when men and women planted trees, in whose shade they would never rest and whose fruit they might never get to eat in their lifetimes.

To assume a stance of self-ownership in your own life today, is to create in you a wellspring of future gratitude your past self will have for the courage and leadership you show today. To assume that same stance of stewardship over the plight of our children and the future human, those yet to open their eyes to the world, is nothing less than to inherit our greatness, through the only way we ever can: via Legacy.

What nobler life of greater meaning and purpose could possibly exist than to be part of the generation who created, through sacrifice and compassion, the launchpad from which our entire species could outgrow our current troubling limits?

The Future will be bright, only if the better versions of ourselves can get there.

We can find that certainty we long for, that this is the right thing because it is aligned so thoroughly with the golden rule, and the only question we need to live with is, “What would I want?”

People do not lack morals, they lack Understanding. People are not evil, their wiring is faulty. We do not let them harm themselves or others but we do not treat them like monsters, we treat them like children or like patients.

The child needs shelter and guidance.
The lonely need seen.
Young men need leadership and initiation.
Young women need self-acceptance and true empowerment.
Women need to be cherished.
Men need the means to provide.
The violent need healing and safety.
The angry need heard, and freedom.
Our leaders need permission to fail.
The addicts need connection.
The depressed need vitality.
The anxious need self-awareness and clarity.
The narcissists need reconditioning and redirection.
The sexual predators need outlets and restraint.
The woke need an invitation to adulthood.
The homeless need refuge.

The tide that raises all boats: Maturity and Conscious awareness.

The wind that fills all sails: Aligned and Mutual Actualisation 

This is the way we close that loop of unrequitedness and bring meaning, to the project of our lives and to the ocean of suffering our human brothers and sisters have endured in the million stepping stones it took to get us here. We can become the fulfillment of their prayers for meaning. What we do with our time here, gives meaning to the contribution of life force and longing they gave in their years on this earth.

The end game is that there is no end game.

This never needs to end.

We get to aim upwards and outwards (and inwards) and in every way that promotes and sustains True Actualisation. The path of probability is already laid out and the garden of potentiality is waiting to be cultivated. 

The Perennial Invitation is Maturity, and maturity requires the better version of us surviving the journey.

Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte

The requirements of the job, are to submit ourselves to voluntary, chosen discomfort, to arrive at stillness, to be able to look at things we don’t want to look at, like our shadow, our vulnerability, and reconcile those within ourselves without guilt, shame or blame, so that we may lift our gaze from the low horizon to an incredible future.

We have to realise that we actually want the best version of everyone around us, not the most empowered selfish version or the most virtuous conservative version. We want to be and be amongst, the kind of people that really understand sustainability, pragmatism, leadership, and who really get it. We want to belong to a tribe of like intent, each pursuing their own actualisation through the opportunity offered by mutual and stable actualisation.  ‘Being more me without asking you to be less you - Everyone or no one.’

To reach, beautifully, means both to strive towards something beyond ourselves, and our arrival there.

Artwork credit: Sculptor Ian Edwards

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Thank you for your staying power. Just like our own long meandering journeys to be here now, very much necessary, and the inevitable price of Meaning.