Four and a half years ago Peter Fellows stuck his middle finger up at the man, packed up his jobs and his bags, started using the name ‘Nayaru Lovegood’ and went to find the free people of earth to learn about life.
Here I am again in some sort of full circle cliche. The likes you see only in the movies where returning to a mundane lifestyle is justified and realistic. Some people call it “growing up” which is a horrible thing to say to anyone at any time in their life. I’ve learned so much over this four and a half years adventuring. In some essence the adventuring hasn’t stopped it’s just that the format has taken the shape of choosing one particular lifestyle in one particular corner of the world.
You see, as much as anyone who hasn’t worked out what life is can try to believe – I have worked it out. I’ve worked out humanity. I’ve worked out why we’re here. The big question of “What is the meaning of life?” I have realised the answer but there’s almost no point in me telling you the answer. Until you’ve done your journey to discover it, or even on the way there, it won’t make sense to you. It’ll just seem like imaginary nonsense. And that’s fine. I don’t need you to understand that I know what life is. I don’t need you to understand that this is not a belief for me. It’s a knowing.
Regardless, I will be attempting to write the answer out here further down the line.
The truth is you may have found yourself here and reading this precisely because it lines up with where you are on your own journey of discovering what life is. I am not even totally sure why I’m writing this now, it wasn’t my intention, but here it is. It’s probably for you as much as it is for me.
Before I had these answers I used to believe that having the answers would make life a simple easy thing. In many ways it does, but finding the answers is just one step on the journey of life, albeit a monumental step. Implementing these answers into my being is the next big step and in many ways I feel like I have at least got one foot up there, there’s still a whole other leg to wrench up. It’ll take a while and it’ll be both painful and fun.
Knowing what life is doesn’t make pain and hardship vanish it just means that growing from that pain and hardship happens with greater speed and depth. Knowing doesn’t make you never make mistakes ever again. Part of the journey is rehashing over and over things we thought we’d learned. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we get distracted. Sometimes we let other peoples journeys affect ours so much that we lose where our path was for a while.
So here I am with a rented room and a 9 to 5 job. This is a way of living I previously decided was ridiculous and never something for me. The first difference being now is that I don’t feel trapped. Why don’t I feel trapped? Because I know I have a choice. I have chosen to do this as readily as I could choose to not have it anymore. I could give my extra stuff away, pack my bags and hitch hike south over the horizon to the sun and warm. Many don’t have that privilege. Many don’t feel they have a choice. Very few know that there is always a choice. Many look at the choices that are being made by everyone else and unknowingly limit themselves to having those same choices. Those that break this mold generally have the most interesting stories to tell. I always have a choice.
The second difference is that this is a new experience for me.
Over these last years I spent a lot of time following a “spiritual” path. It started off with the idea that “it would be nice if there was more to reality than what we see and touch” while at that time believing there was nothing else at all. On this journey I listened and listened and watched and played. I spent a lot of time with broke and broken hippies, spiritual teachers, other people on a spiritual journey and many people who have no interest in the idea of anything more at all. As my testing of spirituality developed I lapped up any and all teachings I could. But the thing is that there are so many people with different ideas and feelings and beliefs that actually using anyone else’s model without tempering it with your own experience can be as misleading as following a religion. You have to make your own mind up. You have to read your own experiences and not just take someone else’s word for it.
So at this point do I count myself as spiritual? No. Because for me this is just what life is and doesn’t need the extra label to describe it. But I occasionally call myself spiritual so as to relate to someone else’s life journey.
Like I say. I have the answers. But this does not mean my life has become a rigorous timetable of worship and ritual. These are not requirements for understanding what life is and why it is here. They are things you can do if you want to. There are a lot of teachings in the world that claim to be requirements, commandments, vows, self-sacrifice. But the truth is that the idea that anything at all is required for supposed “enlightenment” was created by people intending to create control or otherwise were living in fear. Fear of what? Fear that when they die there is somewhere bad their soul might go. But I can tell you with certainty that whether a vow or requirement or commandment or self-sacrifice these are things that anyone of good heart and mind will just do as part their being.
And what need do we have of a sacred day when every day is important? I don’t want to provoke a religion debate, although I guess in essence my entire post is on that subject.
There are a lot of teachings and teachers out there that preach about staying positive. Unfortunately these are teachings of repression. You can not learn from your negative feelings if you are always staying positive. Your negative feelings are there for you to learn from and what’s more is that they damage you further if you cover them up with staying positive. Staying positive is one of the most negative ideas being preached in our time. Of course it may not always be appropriate to act on your negative feelings at the time of experiencing them but you can always acknowledge them and then bring them up when it is safe to do so. That way they don’t stay with you.
So, for what it’s worth, let me try to answer these questions as best I can with words: “What is life”? “Why is it here?”
These questions have two very distinct potential answers, the first one is the easiest to entertain and until four and a half years ago it’s the one I wholeheartedly entertained, while being disappointed and a bit angry about.
1) Everything in all of reality is a constant string of random accidental catastrophe’s leading to the existence of life. (Which can very easily be translated as: “Nothing matters.”)
or
2) Everything is connected in such an intricately complicated way that the bodies of humans do not have the ability or capacity to perceive or sense reality in a way that can easily be interpreted. The source of this is what makes up everything and is simultaneously in everything everywhere, including us. It does this so it can experience experiences through everything’s experience. It lets everything happen without interfering how it happens so it can experience the things happening. It lets everything be unconscious of this because it would skew the perception of the observer of the experience. Everything in existence is either living, loving, trying to work out how to live or love or is there to be a platform for life or love. The entire universe is infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Nothing anywhere will happen exactly the same way twice. Nothing created will be created exactly the same way twice. No one anywhere will experience the exact same horror as another. No one anywhere will experience the exact same joy as another. Absolutely everything that can happen, has happened, is happening or will happen. Life is happening just to experience what life and love is. (All of which can very easily be translated as: “Nothing matters.”)
So in essence the bottom line of life is that nothing matters. People who are anti-religious and anti-spiritual look to people who follow religions and think they are deluded. Many are – but you know I’ve learned something far more complex than that. Many people turn to religion because they have become aware that there is more to reality than what they see but they don’t have the tools to explain their experience where a particular religion they are exposed to can explain at least a little. So they turn to that for the rest of the answers.
Reality is a big scary place when you don’t know what it is. If someone or something can fill in the gaps for you making it feel safer to exist in, it can seem only logical to listen to them or it.
I really have no problem with accepting reality as I see it now. I am completely content with the idea that I am over the head deep in a romantic delusional fantasy of what life is. Because, you know what? It bloody works. It works so well that I’ll live in a fantasy for the rest of my life because even if I’m completely and utterly wrong (I’m not) it’s far more fun and productive than the version of me from five years ago and before who believed there was nothing more to life than what we see and when we’re dead we’re worms.
The biggest tragedy of life is that we are all part of the same power of creation that creates everything, but most people don’t know it. We all are constantly creating our realities but most of the time we have no idea we’re doing it. We don’t always choose our circumstances because we don’t often know what we need. We can always choose our actions even though sometimes our circumstances lead us to believe there is no choice. What happens in our lives is directly a result of what we need in order to grow even if we don’t know it. We are constantly choosing who we are and it never ever stops. Our fears present themselves to us so that we can learn to not be afraid anymore or learn how to take the right action. Life isn’t a big fluffy game of daydreams and illusions – but also it is. Things only matter as much as we make them matter – it’s a matter of matter mattering as much as we make it matter. But also… everything matters.
And don’t you worry your little head if you think you’re developing some sort of messiah complex. Everyone should go through this at some point in their life and then subsequently shut this thought process down because of the implication of it being a mental disorder that requires being locked up in a mental institution and fed drugs for. Because reality IS responding to your life, your thoughts, your actions. That’s what it does. The same things keep coming up in your life because there’s something you’re not learning or addressing. It’s very rarely anything ever that you can directly manipulate, as such. But if you’re paying attention, the flow of your life will make sense every step of the way. Every part of my life has been a completely required part for who I am now and who I will be. The abuse as a child. The self abuse as an “adult”. The calamity and desperate situations I’ve found myself in. All the friends and love and freedoms I’ve come to know in my life. I sometimes day dream about “what if ‘this’ happened instead” but frankly I wouldn’t take any of it back. I welcome the bad as much as I welcome the good because I know that if the bad comes it’s life telling me I’m doing something wrong like not paying attention or avoiding addressing something or learning something. I will feel low and I will feel elated, up and down for the rest of my life, all relative to my experience and growth. But with this wild knowing of reality I can face this powerfully with a “COME ON THEN! SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT!”.
Life really is a swirly whirly roller-coaster.
So why am I renting a room and taking a 9 to 5 job?
Because there are experiences here that are new to me, I’ve no idea what’s going to happen, I absolutely chose it as much as I can choose out of it at any time and I’m here to learn more about who I am and see life doing its thing through all of everything and everyone around me.
Life has become really quite exciting.
Nayaru's Ramblings 