by Volker Brendel
It occurred to me that life is quite repetitive. This is most evident in the springtime. We all look forward to that time. Here in Bloomington it’s been really the last week and a half that life forms have just burst forth abundantly. And so it is with many experiences: they tend to re-occur. Obviously, the seasons are related to our annual calendar, movement of the earth around the sun, and that physical constant in our experience has allowed us to see many things in terms of creative cycles; the cycles of vegetation being the obvious example in the springtime. But, in general, as with any endeavor, there is a creative cycle that starts with an element of truth, an idea, a thought; and if there is merit to the creative cycle, it fills with spirit: the idea fills out, we get confidence that this idea has merit, and the cycle then progresses into form, out of the realm of the mental and the spiritual. We create something in form, and a successful cycle comes to fruition, a harvest.
Many of these cycles then repeat. But there could be more to this picture. Imagine, instead of living on a planet, we were living on an asteroid. Granted this may be fanciful, but we are doing a thought experiment. Think about living on some sort of rock in space that, instead of circling around the sun, keeps going; flying through the universe. Our life experience would be very different. Instead of seasons, everything would be new. As we are hurtling through space, we would not be revisiting the past. We would be in the present moment wherever we are, and our little rock would soldier on to new horizons. Thus, this would be an example of a linear experience of life, going forward.
We could combine these two modes, and instead of thinking about linear motion or circular motion, maybe we should think of spherical motion, going in a spiral: going both around and going forward along an axis. Creative cycles become creative spirals. That model combines the comfort we derive from revisiting the known with the adventure of moving on to new horizons.
The recurring seasons are comforting. Our calendars are comforting. We look forward to celebrations that highlight certain parts of the cycles. For example, Easter and Passover are coming up again next week, and provide a time to remember, to reaffirm, and to celebrate all that is uplifting and comfortable. However, we also must acknowledge that the state of the world is rather unsatisfactory. I am not going to rehearse all the problems we are facing. We are well aware of them. And we are also aware that many of the problems are man-made; problems therefore that fall squarely into our domain of responsibility. If we keep going in circles, the same problems will be going with us.
Thus, there clearly is the need to explore, to move forward. I thought Bill Isaacs in his talk two weeks ago was very clear about this challenge. I’m going to paraphrase one of his thoughts with the statement: Our direct conscious participation in the multidimensional vastness of the present moment has been spotty at best.
Of course, underlying this statement is that we should consciously participate in the multidimensional vastness of the present moment, and our failure to participate fully is in part correlated with deceptions and distractions that we have imposed upon ourselves.
Given this challenge put before us and our agreement that we should do something about it, Bill also had this to say: “The challenges of character present now are just as intense as theyever have been.” In other words, we may be comfortable in our current lives, comfortable with our thought processes, where we are in life, and so forth; more comfortable than pioneers in the past who, we presume, overcame greater challenges. Never mind that assessment; Bill’s statement is: not so. If we accept it, our challenge is present right now, and it is as big a challenge as in other times.
The challenge of distraction and deception is present. If you live in a time when your life is in peril, there is probably just one path to follow to take care of that situation. If you are comfortable, you may think, “All is well. I can go on as usual.” And, of course, you can. Everybody has to make that decision for themselves. But to pick up the challenge Bill articulated, to be in the vanguard, means to take a square look at ourselves.
There is another part to this discussion that may be a little bit uncomfortable. Bill noted that patterns of deception and reaction re-emerge. What you think you may have dealt with a long time ago may come up again and needs to be met again (in part, because we are now in position to deal with it). Our attitude in such circumstances rightly is to see clearly and distinguish where we are and what our reactions are to such things that come around again. In other words, being clear about our identity.
It could be said that we all live in a bubble. That statement does not exclude anyone— “all” means you, and I, and everybody else! The statement may also be quite uncomfortable, because what do bubbles do—they burst!
In the Western world, the term bubbles and the notion of bubbles bursting is very familiar, as in what have been called financial bubbles. Most of us are old enough to remember the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble. In a financial bubble, people over time develop the perception and agreement of value in certain activities and financial enterprises, and if there is widespread agreement and hope for this to continue, then participation in these activities becomes more and more expensive. The bubble increases in size. If the bubble, in financial terms, is not backed up by solid substance, it will burst, and typically there are many people who will pay dearly for their belated participation in the scheme.
By no means are such scenarios restricted to financial investments, although market bubbles may not all be in the past. We could take two very different fields on the face of it and see the same pattern. One example would be the art world. There are many players involved in this: the artists, the art critics, gallery owners, museums, the public. How do you determine what kind of art is valuable? It is a multifaceted process, but there are many examples in which all the initial participants benefit from being in agreement. Certain art forms and groups of artists are viewed favorably. They are being exhibited widely. The works sell very well and thus increase in value. We can see how this whole scheme feeds on itself until the point when perception changes, in which case what was previously considered valuable might not be seen in that way any longer.
Even in my own field of science, that pantheon of logical thinking and pursuit of truth, we have bubbles. There are certain streams of investigation that become fashionable. As more people participate in them, it becomes easier to publish articles in the area, which makes it easier to get grants as funding agencies follow suit, and for a while the field might rise to prominence. But as experience shows, fashions come and go, and not necessarily because all the questions in that field have been answered, but it’s simply that something else takes over and other areas of science move to the forefront.
Now you might say, “I don’t play financial markets. I have nothing to do with art and certainly nothing to do with science. So, I have nothing to do with bubbles.” But in the most fundamental sense there is no escaping that we all live in a bubble—and I mean by that the bubble of the atmosphere around our planet! I believe there are three people right now who are outside of that bubble. They are at the International Space Station, and obviously they live in their own bubble (a much smaller one; and even when they leave that place to take a spacewalk, they must enter another bubble—their space suit). So, there is no escape. Without the bubble around our planet, we couldn’t sustain life. And yet I’m saying that all bubbles burst, so that could be a little bit depressing! It is not completely inconceivable that this could happen in our lifetime. How could the earth’s bubble burst? Well, there certainly is the possibility of an asteroid piercing the bubble. I believe that did happen in the past. But the earth bubble could also burst from the inside, maybe due to a gigantic volcanic eruption, or possibly by entirely man-made causes like pollution-induced holes opening in the ozone level or by explosions of nuclear bombs.
Now, this meditation may not yet seem very practical. We can avoid certain bubbles; we cannot avoid others; and there are some time scales involved that are really large and outside of our realm of experience and direct responsibility. But it turns out that we live in many more bubbles, and it behooves us to take a look at this. For example, there is the bubble of our social networks. This very group conversing right now is characterized by an extensive common background, a fairly narrow age range, and use of sometimes peculiar language. In many ways it’s a bubble, appropriate for what we are doing, something that emerged quite naturally. We can and are making use of it, and yet we ought to take a look at what is beyond the bubble.
Interestingly, in a physical sense bubbles are always characterized by an inside and an outside. Take soap bubbles. The soap molecules have a hydrophilic head, a side of the molecules that is happy to be in contact with water, and a hydrophobic tail that goes to the inside, avoiding water. These molecules organize themselves nicely through the physical forces of likes and dislikes, if you will; there is the outside and the inside. And so it is with human beings: we like to be in bubbles of our own creation; we like to orient to the inside that is comfortable, but whether it is consciously or unconsciously, we like to exclude what is on the outside, what is different.
Some strive for the ultimate comfort level, their Shangri-La. You will recall the book and movie describing this: a place somewhere in the Himalayas, set apart from the rest of the world, where people live for a very long time and get along, and the troubles of the world as we know them are left behind. We might think that our task is to build such a bubble and invite everybody in. This is true to some extent, in the sense that part of our job might be described as building a framework in consciousness that is accurate to the nature of life, truth, and love. And that framework is inviting.
But there is the other issue that we discussed in the beginning of this hour of our increased participation in the vastness of the multidimensional present moment. It is multidimensional to the extent that it brings all kinds of surprises, joys as well as at times chaos. As long as we are here in form on earth the way the things are, there is no means of avoiding that participation, and moreover it would defeat our mission of being, as it has been named—“in the world and not of it.”
Now nothing that I am meditating upon here is actually new to us. Certainly, we have talked about concepts before, or containers, or sometimes we have talked about humanly conceived plans and how the best laid plans often come to naught. Bubbles burst; plans fail. Patterns that need clarification do come around. So, we use a slightly different language to address the problems in our mission, maybe in a new way. As we acknowledge these bubbles of our making, maybe occasionally the right thing to do is to poke a hole in one of them and step outside.
I mentioned my observation that our group this morning and those who subsequently read transcripts of our meditations are a fairly homogeneous bunch, in terms of background, age, and so forth. There are some differences among us of course, but relative to everybody out there in the world, all seven billion, we are relatively homogeneous. And yet, every one of these seven billion beings is bestowed with the same gift of life, and therefore our core experience of life is ultimately the same, and has been through the ages.
I recently reread Alan Hammond’s introduction to his fourth volume of Our Divine and Cosmic Identity the other day. In his introduction Alan writes that the meditations in his book cover the essences of all religions, and all philosophies, and all theories and practices of psychiatry, down through the ages. This may sound preposterous, but because the nature of life, one life expressing itself through all things, it is an absolute truth that our core experience is the same. Now we cannot help but modulate this experience through the particulars of our upbringing, particulars of our genetic components, particulars of accidental encounters in our lives that put us in this or that spot at a given time.
The challenge put before us is to transcend all these modulations, to be free to move from one bubble to the next, create some new ones, poke holes in some old ones, and move freely. It is this experience, which I like to call “authentic experience,” of the one life that we share with absolutely everyone. This is very practical. For example, I think the words that we’ve been using this morning are readily accessible to a very large number of people; as long as they have some basic language skills, what I said should be comprehensible. Now whether somebody resonates with it is a different story. Obviously, there are many religious groups, philosophical approaches and so forth, who would defend their own little bubble, insisting that this is what it is, and you either join or you are on your own. And there are also many people who are too busy for such matters, who have other priorities. And yet, as long as we are still alive, Spirit speaks to everyone and our authentic experience is in fact relevant to everyone— those we know and many others we don’t. And it can be the experience of many more who may not have thought about things in these terms.
As we let go of the many forms of distraction and deception in our lives, we find ourselves with what is left: is this scary? Maybe. But ultimately, completely safe and comfortable. Why? Because we are in the space where life originates. We are part of that, the one creation that keeps giving. So, this is really an adventure, and I think we can move forward in a spiral, with a direction, and still enjoy the comforts of the current patterns in which we live as they arise. Many joys, many challenges. We take them in stride as we move forward, and we fully enable the completion of these creative cycles and spirals, enjoy the fruits that emerge. To me this is a wonderful challenge and an enjoyable journey. I am grateful that there are some who by their living and by their intent are fellow travelers.