The imagined and real

What is your relationship with experience? To create ideas and theories around your ongoing stream of experiences? Or wait for an experience to validate your long-standing ideals and cherished beliefs? Many people go with the second option, believing in a collection of unproven abstractions for many years, but later feeling disillusioned by emerging discrepancies between expectation and reality.

Our lives are often like a tale of two worlds: the imagined and real.

Ineffable mysteries

“Things do not change; we change.”
~Henry David Thoreau

We have a long-standing habit of rewriting the mysteries of life into something more tangible or poetic, using language such as right, wrong, moral, immoral, sane, crazy, healthy, sick, beautiful, ugly, normal, abnormal, love, hate, God, Satan, fate, karma, etc. A form of language assisted mental trickery, creating a permanent rift between what we choose to believe and the ever present mysteries within and around us.

Despite 300,000+ years of intellectual gains and refinement as Homo sapiens, it is possible, if not probable, that we’ve not become any more conscious of the full breadth of inner and outer forces that create and direct human behavior and our surroundings. No doubt, we’ve become more skilled at articulating and interpreting old patterns through our literal and literary narratives—scientific, academic, poetic, or otherwise—and casting those off into the world as if they are accurate reflections of truth and reality. However, these may be little more than creative variations on ancient, obscure themes, rather than any gain in knowledge or awareness of whatever pulls the strings.

The archetypal trickster in myths, literature, psychology, politics, and religion tempts us to take one bite after another of the proverbial smart food, convincing us that we can be as knowledgeable and powerful as the gods who created us. However, the irony is that—in all likelihood—we will never fully grasp the ancient, ineffable mysteries that remain constant and resistant to full disclosure and our meddling.

Comfortable illusions

“I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.”
~ Albert Camus

Is life an absurd, meaningless mess, as Albert Camus once suggested?

There may be an underlying pattern to the “so-called” mess, but beyond our innate ability or willingness to fully understand it. Thus, we devise comfortable ideas to alleviate our fears of not knowing or knowing too much; using religion, scientific theories, political platforms, conspiracy theories, psychotherapy, Internet memes, or whatever else personally mitigates one’s discomfort with confusion, uncertainty, and reality.

The “possible” absurdity being that ten different people observing the same mess, may spend ten years devising ten different theories about the mess, despite their unacknowledged avoidance of knowing or accepting the naked truth. Maybe even more absurd, is when they agree to disagree, as if there is an agreed upon competition in progress, and that playing by the rules—political, social, economic, religious, and scientific—is more important than following the experiential path of truth, in whatever manner it presents itself.

The competition for being RIGHT, is often the goal for many so-called truth seekers; the actual truth taking a back seat to winning the prize for being declared as RIGHT and being in the know. Inflated egos at play within a comfort hungry world, transforming the inherently meaningful into the appearance of messiness and meaninglessness, only to re-simplify and substitute it with advantageous and profitable meanings, and providing the comfortable illusion of KNOWING and being RIGHT. This may be the ultimate absurdity: selling ourselves and the world on comfortable illusions.

Extinction

“And after the Earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it is burned to a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being—and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth”
~ Carl Sagan

A sobering thought is that humanity may not last as long as the earth. We may be another species that evolves for a period of time, but meets its end for one or more reasons, such as asteroid strikes, the eruption of super volcanoes that cloud over the earth, the rise of superviruses more deadly and infectious than Covid, or irreconcilable differences resulting in a nuclear holocaust.

As things stand, the likelihood of ever acquiring the technological means and worldwide cooperation to escape such disasters and migrate mass populations to other life sustaining planets, is slim at best. Humanity may be limited to its own version of a lifetime here on earth, and making the most of this lifetime may be our most noble endeavor, with the hope that the human experiment and experience has mattered in some way, even long after we are gone and the earth ceases to exist.

Disguised divinity

“Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass. Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves.”
~Carl Jung

There is a universal or divine force that animates all things, bringing them to life, in one form or another. Spirituality and sexuality are human manifestations of this force, among many other expressions of it.

As Carl Jung stated, we do not possess or create this force. To a limited degree, we possess our conscious response to it, but this never encompasses its full effect upon and within our lives, much of it remaining unconscious or showing up through experiences that disguise their underlying source—the universal/divine force.

Psychology and religion are an attempt to remove the disguise, to bring us into closer, conscious contact with this sacred energy or, as Jung described it, the daimons and gods that possess us. However, as with everything else, our imperfect humanity and vulnerabilities often add to the disguise.