In seeking to understand
ourselves there is a very useful analogy – that of water and its
container. What is the essence of who we are? It is raw consciousness
– the self-awareness of the life energy. Everywhere in nature this
life energy expresses itself, thrusting forward to take advantage of
all possibilities. Where there is fertile soil and water, life will
take root and flourish, and the earth swarms with animals driven on
by the life energy to feed and to mate. The life energy is an
unquenchable tide that flows through us at all times. Our rational
mind and our body provide the circumference of this energy. These
things give it shape and give us the ability to function as a
partially independent entity. We are only partially independent
because we need the web of life around us to sustain us, but we can
take independent action and exercise independent thought.
If we think of raw
conciousness or life energy as water and our body and conscious mind
or ego as the vessel which contains the water we can more easily
understand the nature of anxiety and courage, and also more
rationally assess the concept of life after death.
First, in looking at
anxiety, lets imagine that the conscious mind or ego is a dam holding
back the pressure of the water that is our life energy. We all need
to use our conscious mind to establish a practical level of order in
our lives. Universal consciousness can't tell us what groceries we
need to buy at the shop or how to wash our underpants. We need a
sense of ourselves as a separate entity and we need to be able to
accumulate and store the information necessary to perform the tasks
in our life. And we have to exercise self-discipline in our
interactions with others. We can't simply do whatever the life energy
which is our essence pushes us to do. And this tends to become more
true the more we exercise that self-discipline. It is natural for
life to push against the boundaries which frustrate and limit it and
it is natural for it to seek pleasure and opportunities to create
beyond itself, but there are times when, through our possession of a
rational mind, we come to believe, rightly or wrongly, that to act
directly on such impulses would be counter-productive. There are
times when we have to accept frustration. And if we have no
appropriate outlet for those feelings of frustration then we need to
build up a psychological structure of containment. This is our
armour. It is there to protect us against threats from without, but
it is also there to contain that which is within and meet the threat
that it poses.
The more water a dam has to
hold back the stronger and more inflexible it has to be and the
greater the danger if it were to collapse. And so it is with our
armour – our ego-structure (which may also express itself
physically through a stiffening of the musculature which aids the
holding in of powerful emotions). While, for most of us, the armour
is about holding things in, this is not always the case. Some do not
exercise much self-control. In the extreme case of a warlord who
might spend his time raping and pillaging and slaughtering we can see
that there isn't much holding back, but his behaviour is armoured
behaviour. The aim of the armour in this case it to protect against
open communication with others. It is only possible to mistreat
people if we are closed off to loving communication with them. What
would drive such a tyrant would still be the life force, which has no
discriminatory powers. How the life force expresses itself in action
is dependent on the thinking of the individual. Where we see
behaviour which is self-destructive or destructive of others it
generally it is the life force operating in the service of a lie. The
mind acts as a channel for the life force and the positive or
negative nature of the resulting behaviour depends on the mind's
capacity for truthfulness.
Sometimes we identify
ourselves more with the dam and sometimes more with the water that it
contains. When we feel anxiety we are identifying with the dam.
Anxiety is a feeling which alerts us to the possibility that we might
not be able to maintain that dam. We think that maybe the dam will
break and we will lose control of ourselves. Or we think that some
threat from outside will lead to the damaging or destruction of the
dam. In the extreme it may be death itself which we fear, which is
the final end of the dam. While the ultimate answer to anxiety may be
to learn to identify more with the water than with the dam, anything
which allows us to let more water out at the top of the dam decreases
our susceptibility to anxiety. Any cathartic release of pent-up
emotions eases the pressure on the dam and makes us less prone to
feelings of anxiety. We can be a dam that holds back the water or we
can be a swimmer in a peaceful ocean.
Anxiety is like pain, it is
a messenger that alerts us to threats. But it can, at times, exceed
its useful function. On the other hand there are individuals who show
remarkable courage in the face of over-whelming adversity. There are
martyrs who have gone calmly to their deaths. And there are many
examples of soldiers who completed their missions while facing almost
certain death. These are only the most commonly considered kinds of
courage. Courage takes many forms. But how can we explain such
extraordinary courage? I believe that the source of courage is the
realisation (on some intuitive level) that we are not merely alive.
We are life itself. Life, unlike our individual ego, is eternal and
unconquerable. When we are divided against ourselves, engaged in a
war to hold back aspects of our own nature, then we are weakened and
more prone to anxiety. But within us flows the unquenchable tide of
existence. We talk of enthusiasm. The word literally means “the God
within". When we are filled with enthusiasm for any activity we
forget to be afraid because we are in the grip of something bigger
and deeper than fear. Not that this may not be something destructive, as
in the example of the warlord. I'm sure that it is not only those whose
minds are characterised by wisdom who are, at least at times, capable
of identifying more with the life force itself than with the armour.
To learn to do so is not an alternative to learning to think
truthfully, but the two skills can work well together.
So what of life after death?
In contemplating this concept it is helpful to think not of a dam but
of a glass full of water. Our body and our conscious mind are the
glass and the life force of raw consciousness is the water which
fills it. The water is the same water which fills all other humans
and all other living things. What gives it its unique shape and
identity is the glass. So what happens at death? The glass is broken.
The water loses its unique identity, but it is, as it has always
been, something eternal. So the concept of a personal after-life for
the individual makes no sense, and yet we find our deepest meaning
and capacity for courage in an acknowledgement that this life is a
fleeting expression of something greater and eternal, a temporary
twig that grows out of a tree that lives forever.
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