I Have Arrived

As surely as I was born, I am here now.

Just as life’s goal for me then was to arrive, it is such now.

And just as the goal of that arrival was to live, it is such now.

And just as the goal of birth was to arrive at death, it is such now, too.

And thus, life’s goal is to be born, to live, and to perish.

The commonality among these is that the goal is to arrive.

One arrives at birth, here where one was before not here.

One arrives at life, present at a moment that was before not here.

One arrives at death, to life after life, to what was before not here.

But how can we arrive at the here and now, when perpetually reminded of all we lack?

How can we arrive when we anticipate where we will be, at every turn?

How can we arrive when we see some things as good and others as bad, and tend to aim for more of the good and less of the bad, perpetually.

How can we arrive when arrival is seen as no better than any other thing?

Let’s speak of the paths that lead away from arrival, of which there are many:

It is the idea of not having what someone else has. Then you are wishing and striving, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that you need to get somewhere by doing something. Then you are living a life of doing that leads to more doing, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that you must do one more thing, and then you will be done. Then you are doing one more thing, which leads to doing one more thing, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that a good person must do this or that, or have this or that. Then you have created a formula for living that has no end, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that you are the one who knows the right way to tell others and lead them to something. Then you presume to be a chosen one, and without you, the people will not know what to do, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that you must produce a certain amount to be worthy. Then, there will always be more to produce, or an unexpected problem or illness will make you feel worthless, and you have not arrived.

It is the idea that to fill your mind with certain ideas is a worthy path. Then, there will always be newer, more precise ideas to learn, making your old ones unworthy, and you have not arrived.

You may wonder, is there really a way to arrive?

That, I do not know.

I have not arrived, and I do not know who has. It may be your neighbor, schoolteacher, priest, or scholar, or it may be none.

But the paths outlined before us in this life do not lead us to arrive. The paths made available to us were created by those who never arrived. This is something to consider.

There never was a path to arrive at anything, not one that we were consciously going to locate and set out on, anyway.

In striving for anything, this is an acknowledgment that we have not arrived and probably never will. To strive is to aim to be where you are not, which shows you have not arrived.

To arrive would mean to have let go of the need to grasp or let go.

It would mean to let go of the need to advance or retreat.

It would mean to let go of the need to help or hinder.

It would mean to let go of the need to participate or spectate.

It would mean letting go of the need to create or preserve an image of yourself or the desire to abandon it.

It would mean to let go of the need for praise and be unconcerned with criticism.

It would mean to let go of the need for success and be unconcerned with failure.

To arrive would likely mean to find it in you not to be concerned with the idea of arrival, as it is just another idea. In striving for arrival, like anything else, you would just be proving the fact that you had not arrived.

Say to yourself, “I have arrived,” and see that you do not believe it and that it has not happened.

Or say to yourself, “I have arrived,” and see that you do believe it and that it has happened.

And upon arrival, if you see this as an accomplishment, you can see that you have not arrived. You will feel the need to meet that accomplishment, again and again, proving that you have not arrived. To pursue something is to prove that you do not have it.

I

HAVE

ARRIVED

Real Learning Comes Through Transformation

“Learning—real learning, wisdom—comes only when you are transformed. It is not an additive process—you cannot just go on adding knowledge to yourself. You will have to go through a transmutation that is hard.” – The Buddha Said… by Osho

I am only on the fifth chapter (out of 22) of The Buddha Said… and already I can see that this book carries great wisdom. It will be worth reading carefully, applying, and rereading, and reapplying. That is what I plan to do. The knowledge in this book could take time and effort to master, as it seems to guide us toward enlightenment.

The passage quoted above was insightful to me, yet it may appear quite obvious on its surface. I have found that most worthy wisdom is just that. It seems obvious and straightforward and often even easy to apply, yet very few of us do.

For example, I can tell you that getting impatient is bad. The next time someone is irritating you or provoking you, ignore it. Let it be. Take a breath and pay attention to something worthwhile in life.

Yet, for someone with the habit of impatience, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be lazy is bad. Do not waste this life. Go out and have the courage to find something that truly matters to you and that will make a difference in this world. Stop doing the bare minimum to get by and increase the standard you expect from yourself.

Yet, for someone with the habit of laziness, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be vengeful is bad. Stop wishing to get payback on all those that commit wrongs against you. In some cases, they are poisoned from having been wronged, making them want to wrong others. And in other cases, they don’t know the wrongs they commit and do so through a lack of awareness. Lastly, as we have all heard, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” so is this something we want to give energy to?

Yet, for someone with the habit of vengeance, will they listen and change?

As you may guess, I find it unlikely that the person with a habit of something will suddenly change their life from being exposed to mere words.

Despite that I work as a writer and earn my living this way, it is painful to admit that the words themselves are empty if they don’t cause personal transformation. The learning, the knowledge, the wisdom, the teachings—all of it is empty, useless, and fruitless if we do not change from within.

Yet I have seen, as you have seen, that most of us know the right things to do, to be, to say, and yet fail to do them. Perhaps we need to come to the awareness more deeply that the only worthwhile learning was not in the accumulation of knowledge, facts, or even the pursuit of higher understanding.

Rather, the only worthwhile learning was in whether we could become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions. Awareness is not enough—to be aware is to see that something is happening. But to see it and do nothing seems to be a massive failure, worse than not having seen it at all.

If you see a wall and walk into it, isn’t that somehow worse than someone who never saw the wall and walked into it accidentally?

We must become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions.

The point is to do something with all the accumulation of knowledge and facts. Otherwise, the learning was useless. This is not something we hear often.

I am a big believer in education and learning. But what we often forget is that as humans, what we learn should be causing some change within us. And that change within us should cause some change in the real world.

In a similar vein, Mahatma Gandhi said:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

If I read the tragic history of a people, and then I live my life normally, without my heart having grown, giving to charity, or learning more about their present-day struggles, then what have I truly learned?

If I “learn” by acquiring facts, and change nothing, then isn’t that a personal failing?

Yet, the point of this post is not to make us all feel guilty for anything we ever learned, where we failed to convert it into some positive action. The point is to see that we need to be brave and encourage these personal changes to happen.

I have seen many highly educated people increase their learning and awareness while failing to grow at all. I’ve been guilty of this too.

How much time do we spend reading the news versus actually doing something about the world's tragedies?

How much time do we spend educating our children about “the real world” while denying them the ability actually to participate in it?

And how much do we consume books or media while not producing something worthy in return?

Having written this post up to here, I believe you probably already knew everything I just stated. So if we already knew, why haven’t we committed to acquiring more helpful ideas and performing more actions that could help us change more profoundly?

The reason is that we fear change. Even for those who want progress, it still can feel scary or overwhelming to make a significant change.

But we don’t need to make massive changes in every area of our lives, suddenly.

We can decide on certain things that we find to be important and then invest ourselves into them.

I use the word invest because when you invest, you risk losing something. Your risk may be that you hope to help improve something, and in the end, you don’t make much of an impact. Then you may be let down or upset. But of course, we have to be willing to risk losing something to make our impact.

The outcomes we desire are never guaranteed. There is always a risk. We need to choose which risks are worth taking, where we can hope to gain a worthy experience that transforms us.

I think we fear changes because we tend to fear death. Change is the death of something old and the birth of something new. However, why should we fear it? We can guide the change in our lives by moving away from those things that do not work, which are not fruitful, and moving toward the ones that are.

We may find that the greatest life lessons come from the most significant changes within us or around us. Yet great changes imply some form of loss, which again is what we fear. We must become comfortable with the idea of losing something (or someone) if we ever wish to gain anything that truly matters.

We cling even to the things that don’t do us much good because they are familiar. They make us feel at home. But sometimes, that home is worth letting go of, to introduce something that compels us to grow.

In the end, we will lose our lives and everything we ever gained. All of that was temporary. But if we work on transforming ourselves, we will leave a permanent impact on the people around us and on the universe itself.

The universe is not static—it is ever-evolving and changing. Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The key lesson of the day is that we should continue to learn. But for that learning to be worth something, we should be ready and willing to change from within. This can mean seeing the world in a new way, feeling in a new way, and then deciding to stop doing something we used to do—and doing something in a way that we never did before.

We have not truly learned unless we have been transformed from the inside.

As a practical tip, after you read something or learn something, ask yourself:

What has truly changed?

If nothing, then ask:

What can I change, and should I change, given what I just learned?

Approaching Higher Levels of Consciousness

Our consciousness needs to be ready before we can expand ourselves into higher levels of seeing, being, and doing. There are so many problems most of us are dealing with in our personal lives and with our families that most of us do not have the mental bandwidth to seriously consider problems on a higher level than our current consciousness.

It is not practical to expect anyone to jump levels, from worrying about their survival, for example, to suddenly being concerned with world peace. How can anyone expect to influence world peace if they have not been able to accomplish their own personal peace?

One of the most fruitful things we may do in our lives is to identify what level of consciousness we are at. When you know your level of consciousness, you know what types of problems you are capable of tackling. It is also useful to be aware that certain goals or problems may be above your current level of consciousness.

Here is a brief summary of some levels of consciousness:

Survival Mode

At this level, you are mostly concerned with having some basic needs met, such as food, water, and shelter. Since your life itself is possibly under threat, you face the challenge of doing the right thing and living a humble, difficult life or doing the wrong thing and receiving quick benefits from it.

For those in survival mode, the primary goal is to move out of this phase. Unfortunately, some people may become desperate and get into drug dealing or other crimes, find themselves in prison, and then become unable to escape this mode of consciousness.

At this level, hard work may not be rewarded. In fact, it may be punished, as the people around you may view you as a threat when your diligence makes them look bad. Otherwise, a boss who knows you need your job may use this knowledge against you, refusing to give you a deserved raise.

Ironically, in order to escape this level of consciousness may require you to be an especially knowledgeable, conscious, organized person. But because you are at this stage, you may not have good models to help teach you this. Also, you may be at this stage because you lacked opportunities to acquire these qualities in the first place.

The Chase

Perhaps you know what it is like to be hungry or to be without your basic needs, and so now you have been given the opportunity to chase a better way of life and you are happy to do it. You may have just completed a certification program, or a degree, or been offered a job that seemed out your league. Now, you are ready to commit and work to get that dream life you wanted.

At this point, you may find that you are actually able to save money and build up your bank account gradually and work on making life improvements such as eating better or exercising. Alternatively, through seeking a better way of life and buying more things regularly, many people will find it hard to save money when they enter this phase of consciousness. Likely, you will have the goal of moving into a better home or community, getting a car (or upgrading it), or educating yourself to pursue a path that will help get you there.

Perhaps you have lived the hard life, and are eager to enjoy the little things in life. For example, you may wish to be able to turn on the AC in the summer without worrying about how much it costs.

At this stage, we find that our good and positive actions generally lead to good and positive results. You have reached a point where the harder you work, the more rewards you tend to gain from it.

Although you may not have attained it yet, you are generally on the path to achieving what you wanted.

The issue is that as long as you are on the chase for more money, more things, more people to network with, more sales to close, and so on, you may find yourself locked into this phase, always chasing, even after you have already surpassed your goals and dreams.

Keep in mind that for some people, the chase can be for something highly maladaptive, such as alcohol, drugs, or sex – and such forms of the chase are likely to keep one stuck in this form of consciousness, or possibly even lead you back into survival mode.

Self-Understanding and Growth

Here you will be focused on understanding who you are and how you can improve yourself, not just to meet goals like getting a job or a date. Rather, you want to grow as a person at this phase because you recognize this as an important goal on its own.

You may find that you didn’t know yourself as well as you thought. Perhaps you will question things you always took for granted. You may have been born surrounded by people of a certain political belief or religious belief and now find yourself questioning it all. Everyone thinks they are right, and every belief system thinks it is right. So do you believe what you do because you are following others, or have your personal reasons for believing?

This phase will be marked by many life questions that leave us feeling conflicted:

• Who am I?

• What do I value above all else?

• Have I done something good in this world?

• Were some of the things I always thought actually wrong?

• Am I in control or just being led by outside forces around me?

• Why am I here?

• Do I matter?

• What do I believe in?

• Were the goals I set for myself the right ones?

• How can I do better?

• What will be my legacy, or what will I leave behind when I’m gone?

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If you enjoy thinking through questions such as the ones above, you may be interested in reading a book I wrote with co-author Dave Edelstein: Question Yourself: 365 Questions to Explore Your Inner Self & Reveal Your True Nature

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We may go through periods of turmoil and unrest, feeling that we don’t even know ourselves. This can happen at any point in life. We may turn to others to help us figure out who we are, and find that all we hear are what they perceive us to be. Other people have their own beliefs about who we are, but all of that is based on their perceptions and prior interactions with us. While their perceptions may help guide us to understand ourselves, they will ultimately be limited in what they can reveal to us.

We will have to decide if we will be defined by who other people think we are, based on who we have always been. Will we be limited by others, and our past, or do we want something greater for ourselves?

As a final part of your self-growth and understanding, you may come to the realization that you get to define who you are, and you get to create who you are. These are powerful ideas that when fully realized, will aid you in being your best possible self.

Becoming Your True Self

We become our true self by actualizing our self-chosen highest values.

While in the prior mode of consciousness, you probably identified some of your highest values in your life. Perhaps you will even realize that you have not been properly living out your values. You may have gotten so caught up in The Chase mode of consciousness, that you forgot what really mattered to you. Or perhaps, you never properly thought through what truly mattered to you. You allowed others to guide you toward what they valued, rather than consciously thinking through your own values.

When you have identified your highest values, you will see that all that truly matters is living by them. To live against your values is to live in falseness, and to be a hypocrite, and to cause your psyche and soul to be in pain and disorder. Every time we go against our values, we are actually going against ourselves. This leads to the inhibition or even destruction of the better parts of ourselves, which is not the way to the fruitful life.

My primary life value is truth, and I think this should be on everyone’s list of primary values. This value is so important to me because it allows me to always have a voice. Many times in my life, I felt scared to say what I truly wanted to say. I assumed that it was not important or people wouldn’t care or they would ridicule me. Now, I see that anything that comes from my heart is always worth saying, because it is my truth. Truth is actually a part of my life’s quest. I am always on the search to learn something that will help me to understand our entire universe, and our place in it.

My highest values are Truth, Balance, Love, Knowledge, and Transference. This is what I aim to live by in every thought, word, and action.

When you know all of your primary values then you can aim to live your life congruently, where your thoughts, words, and actions, and your whole self becomes one with itself. You will be a harmonious person with a clear vision for who you are, living by it every day, and people around you will come to see this too. You will represent something worth representing and not be a person who trivially pursues his impulses and desires without being connected to a greater purpose.

A powerful realization you may have at this point is that your self is connected to everyone else in the world. Your thoughts, words, beliefs, and actions are not just your own, but they ripple throughout the rest of the world. When you are lazy and do nothing for a day, that is a day that the world suffered by not gaining the best from you. When you help an elder across the street, that is a day that you, one part of the universe, is helping the elder, another part of the universe across the street. We are all parts of the universe, and not outside of it. We are all therefore interrelated with everyone and everything else. So at this stage, you will feel a compelling motivation to think better and do better not just for you, but for as many people as you can.

Your self is not just your self. Every person who has ever spoken with you or engaged with you in any way has shaped you into becoming who you are, just as you have shaped them into becoming who they are. We are all an interplay on each other, and not separate and distinct islands on our own. With these thoughts, you cannot help but focus on improving the world (the next phase of consciousness).

At the highest levels of finding yourself, you may found your own personal philosophy (or your own interpretation of it), even if this is just a mixture of other philosophies. Strictly speaking, it may not be a philosophy, but rather a religion for some people. You may grow spiritually, attaining insights that are not easily put into words. Some people may take ideas from various philosophies, religions, or spiritual traditions, to come up with their own unique path.

Improving the world

After you have surpassed survival mode, made it through the chase, figured yourself out, and then become your true self, you will be ready to aid others fully with your consciousness. Do not misunderstand, you have probably been helping others since you were on The Chase. But perhaps, when you were on The Chase, you didn’t care if you helped others. You were mostly concerned with making sure that you benefited from everything you did.

In this stage of consciousness, you are deeply concerned with everyone and everything. In reality, this mode of consciousness may happen in stages. You may find yourself more concerned with your community, then your country, then your part of the world, then the whole world. That is fine, this mode of consciousness happens in different ways for different people. Importantly, this level of consciousness involves a deeper connection with larger communities. Most people are naturally concerned with their families and close friends, almost as an extension of themselves, and so those types of connections are intertwined with our earlier stages of consciousness.

When you arrive at this level of consciousness, you may learn about physics, and realize that this domain relates to biology, which relates to your heart, which connects to all hearts, which connects to all lives. You see that physics is fundamentally important.

Then you read about history, and you realize that these stories connect to patterns in all of human history, and that currently we just happen to be in our own part of the human history. All history interrelates and interconnects, and the same themes happen over and over. So when you know your history, you know the present day, and even the future.

At this stage, with everything you learn, you can extrapolate it to mean something greater than what it was intended to mean. Everything is an analogy or metaphor or pattern from which you can absorb more understanding than was intended. You observe a bird fly outside your window, and see that humans want to be the bird, free to go anywhere they want, and free from concern.

Your seeing that the world is acting on you, and you are acting on the world, motivates you to find ways to impact the world for the better. You may pick any kind of world problem and see what you can do to make it better. For example, hunger, domestic violence, income inequality, lack of literacy or education, racism, sexism, pollution, global warming, misinformation, overpopulation, endangered animals, or improving human consciousness. There is no shortage of big problems to work on. The challenge is choosing the most important ones and then committing to them. The most important ones for you will likely be based on your most important values.

Someone who values truth above all else may choose to focus on tackling misinformation, miscommunication, poor literacy and education, and helping people to identify common personal biases (e.g., logical fallacies and cognitive biases).

As far as actually making improvements, you may decide to do this in different ways. Your daily actions may work to improve some world problem. For example, you may work in a field that works on these problems, or you may volunteer in one, or you may simply choose to speak to people about these problems and raise awareness. Another option is to donate to different causes. There is no one path for all. You will get to choose how you wish to improve the world.

A challenge at this phase is to keep ourselves grounded and remember the fundamentals. We should stay true to our core values and continue to help the most important people in our lives such as family and close friends, even though we have now come to see the greater importance of everything and the world at large. Also, we may cause ourselves new sufferings, as we see that no matter how much we do, and how much we try to change things for the better, there are limits to what we will be capable of accomplishing alone. For that reason, many people will find it useful to join organizations that can work on a greater cause together.

There are even higher levels of consciousness, but those will need to be explored at a later time.

Think of Death to Live More Consciously

For someone who is 35 years old, I think of my own death quite often. I am very healthy, so poor health is not the reason for this. I am also not depressed, so please do not be concerned in that way either.

I also consider that for anyone important in my life, they may perish at any time. I don’t let this make me fearful, but I realize that this is the truth. Since much of my way of life is to pursue the truth, I think we need to acknowledge that life can be taken from us at any moment. We are not in control of when or how it will happen. We can eat well, exercise, and maintain our health to the best of our abilities, but this does not free us from the possibility of sudden illness, an accident, or senseless violence.

I am a highly optimistic person, and so the last thing I want to do is make someone fear that death is coming for them and their loved ones any time soon. I want us to accept that it can happen and use this for our personal betterment, rather than as something to become anxious or depressed about. There is no reason to expect death to come soon for many of us. Yet, because there is no reason to expect this to happen, our lives are often out of balance. We may even live as if we will never die, which of course, is false.

Many people prioritize work, or money, or even things above their loved ones. Still, if we considered even for a moment that a loved one may not be there tomorrow, then surely we would be awakened to the true value of our relationships with family and close friends.

Sometimes I think today could be my last day alive. If this were the case, what would I do? As strange as it is, I often find myself figuring out that I would live my life as an ordinary person, fulfilling my ordinary obligations. I would pursue a good meal, spend time with my wife, write my Thought post (as I’m doing now), and reflect on my life and the nature of society and its problems, as I do regularly. I would also try to help whoever I could.

Surely, if I knew I was going to die today, I would probably feel the need to reflect on whether my life had been worth it – whether I accomplished what I wanted to. But what is the point in waiting for death to think of this? Think of it right now. Are you accomplishing what you had hoped? Are you on the path you had hoped? Are you living up to your own standards? Forget the standards of everyone else for a moment.

If we wait until death to think and reflect on our lives, we are perhaps waiting until death to think. Is this the reality we want for ourselves? If nothing else, we should reflect on what we find to be truly important during our lives. If it is love, we should be loving, rather than just wanting others to love us. If it is happiness, we should be spreading it rather than just wishing to feel it. If it is wisdom, we should be the student for many years and then spread our wisdom to life’s students. What value do we hold so strongly that we should be giving it to others happily, rather than just wishing to accumulate it for ourselves?

We must seriously consider our own death to live truly. Understand that your life is limited, the lives of your parents are limited, even the lives of your children are limited. All lives are limited. There is only so much time to do what we wanted, find love, express our love, accomplish something, make our small impact in this world in our own way, and stand up for whatever it is that we believe in. But if we never thought about what we believed or what we wanted, how would we truly pursue it? And how would we accomplish it?

We have to respect that death is ultimately coming for us all. When we have a conversation with anyone, we should sometimes think – this may be the last time I have the chance to speak with this person. Before we get another chance, that person may die, or I may die.

Such thoughts are not meant to traumatize us or make us fearful or agoraphobic. The point is to realize that many of us are living life trivially. We are not present. We see our loved ones as just background noise, as mouths to feed, as wanting to discuss their own boring lives with us, etc. We form barriers between us with our phones, televisions, and other screens. In time, we become strangers in the same house, or eventually, maybe strangers who live in different houses who realize they never really knew each other.

It seems that many of us are afraid to live. It’s easier to follow the lives and dramas in the news media and television shows than to discover and pursue our own truthful life path. We become obsessive about following fake lives on television screens, celebrities, and our friends’ lives rather than forming our own life worth living.

We live in an age when it is more possible to create the life you want to live than at any point in history, but this does not necessarily make it easy. Just as we have opened up so many fruitful paths, we have also opened up many harmful and counterproductive options. The path toward truth and meaning in our lives is one we must commit to, or there will be plenty of distractions along the way to take us off course.

So this is why I find it valuable, and I’m eternally grateful for the simple reminder that I’m going to die. Everyone I know is going to die. These are statements I view positively, as they always help me stay on the right track in my life.

This simple reminder forces me to value people first, always. This is the world I want to live in, where we put people first. Ultimately, every action you perform every day should represent the world you want to live in. I always keep in mind that whoever I am interacting with is a real person first, and second, they are whatever they appear to be.

For example, for any stranger you may see on the streets, think: This is a person first, that happens to be a successful businessperson. This is a person first that happens to be skating in the middle of the street. Or this is a person first, who happens to be homeless and asking for food. Our value comes from being a person first, not from our secondary characteristics. And this is the way it is with all life, actually. Life has value in itself, not because of what temporary qualities it appears to have (e.g., beauty, success, power).

Whenever someone calls me or emails me and needs to talk, I do my best to be there. If it’s family, I drop what I’m doing and do my best to help, or listen, or provide whatever it is they may need. If it’s one of my readers with a problem, I often do my best to help them see better pathways in their life. I never aim to tell someone what to do with their life. I hope to get them to see better pathways that they could explore.

At one point, I was so fixated on my business and my work that I put that first for many years. Now, I don’t. Now, I see that my work is meant to be just an extension of my whole life. My whole life’s work is about helping people. So doing that is important, and I aim to listen to people deeply and help them however I can. If it means setting aside my work for a few minutes, or in some cases longer, so be it.

What point is there in me trying to spread my thoughts if I am not living by them? This is another realization you may come to when keeping death in mind. Are you truly living by what you find to be most important? Are you telling your kid to tell the truth, then you lie to everyone all day at your work and to your spouse? Are you telling your friends to follow their passion but choosing money first in your life every time?

The biggest lie most of us face every day is that we don’t acknowledge the simple fact of our own mortality and the mortality of every person we will cross paths with today. Keep this in mind. If you see 100 people or more today, there is a fair chance at least one of those people you crossed paths with will not be alive in 365 days.

To pursue truth in our lives, we must acknowledge our mortality, and this will help us always to make sure we are on the path to valuing what is truly most valuable in our lives and being congruent with ourselves (being, thinking, saying, and doing in a way that is in alignment). This will also help us to be more present. If you keep in mind the temporariness of life, you will be motivated to get the most from every moment and not take any of it for granted.

The Cosmic Interrelatedness of Everything

I have come to have this feeling of cosmic interrelatedness with everything. This is the realization that none of us are who we think we are. Many of us think of ourselves as individuals, as having our own will, as having our own personality, and of course, this is a valid perception.

But just as it is valid, it is equally invalid.

We have such an elitist view of humans in this world, thinking that we are all that matters, and all other creatures, trees, and plants are just background scenery. We are the stars of the show, and ultimately all that matters – at least, this is how we conduct ourselves. Once long ago, we were the stars, literally the stars. We are made up of the same matter as stardust, and then once long ago, all we were was fungi, and then once long ago, all we were was aquatic animals, and then hominids, and then here we are. When we discriminate and cause harm to other species and treat them as irrelevant, we treat the very process of that which became us as irrelevant. We undermine our own evolutionary history and its importance when we undermine these living beings. Thus, we must engage the minds of ourselves and our young ones in activities that allow them to see the common thread that weaves all life together. We need to find ways to profit together collectively rather than profit off one another, ending up stuck in bringing a net increase for one and a net decrease for the other.

We are not an island to ourselves – we are interrelated with everyone who has ever touched our lives. Without every person in your life and the environment and the planet, along with the sun and universe that keeps our planet in its place, you could not be who you are now. So we are just one tiny piece of a larger puzzle piece, of a larger puzzle piece, of a larger puzzle piece. And without you, you certainly cannot exist. Yet without every other piece of the universe falling as it did, you could not exist either.

Keep this in mind. Your personality is not yours, but a fusion or collection of all the personalities around you, especially those you spend more time around. Your desires are not all your own but rather a fusion of all those desires you see around you. Your individuality is not all your own, but again, a fusion of all the individualities around you. Even if you are the rebellious type and rebelled against everything you ever saw, everything the people around you did and believed, then your being is still a reaction or a sort of output to the input that was the rest of the world acting on you.

Don Miguel Ruiz (author of The Four Agreements, one of my favorite books) says that we are domesticated through our upbringing. We learn that it is good to behave in this way and not in that way. Most of those teachings have some reasoning behind them, but some may be arbitrary, contradictory, or even poorly reasoned or based on faulty information. The teachings of domestication guide our lives and our neighbors' lives, so it is difficult to escape.

You probably eat with a fork and knife, chopsticks, or some instrument in your culture. Well, some cultures eat primarily with their hands. To you, it may seem strange and off-putting to eat with your hands, yet to them, it may seem just as strange and off-putting to eat with an instrument. Your surroundings, context, and environment helped make you who you are. We all know this, but we tend to give too much credit to who we are as unique individual beings. Just keep in mind that who you are as a unique, individual being cannot be examined as something separate from the society that has helped create who you are.

Sometimes I feel that I am directly connected to some great individuals throughout history, many who are well known and respected by most people. Perhaps this is not as crazy as it seems. Such great individuals and many others have shaped this world so much that their ideas have personally impacted what we see and the people we interact with. And so it makes sense in a way that I can see these individuals in others, in the life around me, and even in myself. I respect and revere such individuals highly, and I learn about them and live by the best of their words and actions, and so in some ways, I am them. I aspire to be them, I dream of them, and in a way, I am these great individuals and more. As a simple example, I often draw on their words and quotes, and I consider what they would have done when I have to make a decision. Then, I aim to do just that.

If one day anyone ever looks to me and asks what I would have done and tries to emulate that in their lives, I would say that they have succeeded in drawing on my life energy and that I have become a part of them.

Think of this. There is a limited amount of water on the planet. There is a limited amount of oxygen. Yet, these compounds, or at least the atoms that make them up, will circulate on this planet over and over and over. Thus, on the atomic level, any of us at any given point have the same matter in us that anyone in history may have had – from powerful or famous individuals to plants, to animals already extinct (e.g., the dinosaurs), and so on.

At the material level, all of consciousness is relying on the same elements – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, etc. At the material level, we are all literally interrelated. We forget this because at any point in time, I am me, and you are you. But at another point in time, the matter that was in you may have cycled on to other lifeforms, and the matter of other lifeforms may have cycled on to become you. If you need a bit more elaboration, remember that we eat and go to the restroom every day – the matter that makes us up is not static.

Here is a quick story. The other day, I was arriving home after a walk, and I saw a small rock on the sidewalk. I just walked past it and went on home. Then I began to reflect on what I had done. I was operating on the assumption that this rock didn’t have much importance to me during my day. That was true, as this rock was never going to cause me any problems. I am still on the young side and healthy, and even if I tripped on it, I would probably be fine. Then I began to think of the interrelatedness of everything, and I realized that this small rock on the sidewalk could cause an older person to trip, fall, and fracture their hip. I realized that this small rock was connected to everything. Just as I’m connected to everything, so was the rock. Nothing escapes the nature of interrelatedness.

If someone yells at me without reason, calls me names, and tells me I’m good for nothing, this might affect my whole day. I might be put in a bad mood, which might ripple into spreading more bad moods to the people around me. That, in effect, may ripple out further and further in ways that are difficult to calculate.

Let’s go back to the rock. If I trip on that rock and fall and break my wrist, that may have all kinds of unwanted aftereffects. I may choose to drive even with a broken wrist, and then I may get into an accident and injure someone else. You see, one small rock can cause big, big problems.

Incidentally, on the universal scale, Earth is just a small rock.

The point is, we should remember that the little things matter, too. There is no such thing as a small rock. The rock is small in size but has the power to change lives, for better or worse.

If the rock stays out of the sidewalk, it is perfect. It is ornamental, it looks beautiful among all the other little rocks, it helps to delineate where the sidewalk ends and begins, and everyone is happy.

Don’t worry. The next time I left the house, I saw the same little rock at the same spot I had left it, and I put it out of the way.

We are all interrelated, affecting each other’s lives. Everything that impacts me ripples out and affects everyone near me, and then near them, and then near them. Everything that impacts even a small rock ripples out and affects everything near it, and then near it, and then near it.

Because we live in the internet and social media age, where information can impact people across the globe in seconds, there is great power in even the smallest of actions to ripple out and affect us all.

Sending a positive thought or comment to one person or doing something good can ripple out quite far. You may not see all those aftereffects of your thoughts or actions. But you have to imagine that they are happening because they are.

Live more consciously through all your actions and see that they affect all that is around you.