Inadequate

What that stops most people from achieving a life filled with the satisfaction of every goal being fulfilled is a mixture of two things. For those goals where they never quite achieved ‘success’, it is their own sense of being inadequate to the task. They stop trying. For the rest, it’s the achievement itself that seems inadequate. Each success opens a new challenge, like a never-ending Matryoshka doll. Eventually, they may decide they have ‘enough’, but that, too, is a form of giving up.

This isn’t going to be a diatribe about how all humanity is ultimately weak and useless. Even super-villains find that defeating their arch-nemesis and completing their evil plan without distraction is somehow dissatisfying. “Alas, Mister Bond, I thought you’d be more interesting.” And with that kind of statement, we start to reveal the true issue: what we think of as our goals are really just the cunning plans of our Intellectual centre. Each such plan has a reward attached to it, but achieving each reward merely shows the Intellectual centre glimpses of other rewards. And when it can’t see a path to a given reward, it is shown to be inadequate at what it sees as its primary task: cooking up those cunning plans.

But that’s not the ‘proper’ work of the Intellectual centre. Its proper work is comprehending the workings of the universe. It gets drawn ‘off course’ because the Emotional centre pulls it. And that centre, in turn, is pulled by the Instinctive centre and Sex centre, to fulfil the needs of the cells making up the physical body. For those cells, a humdrum life punctuated by occasional sex is a sparkling success. But should we really be serving – even enslaved to – such a low purpose? Are we to be just a smart slime-mould?

“Aha! But haven’t we got technology? Haven’t we got science and engineering? Haven’t we got religions? Aren’t we God’s chosen: the peak of evolution?”

Technology is nothing; it’s mere service to the lower. Even a hamster can use a smart-phone; and whilst it might not use it to dial a number or buy lottery tickets, that’s because it hasn’t conceived those needs. And most humans who use technology don’t understand how it works. They merely understand the use: the cunning plans that it facilitates.

Pure science is a little different, but even that depends on ‘funding’, which in turn depends on the science producing favourable technology or attracting students. And if you make promises but can’t show ‘results’ then the funding gets moved elsewhere. In the end, even pure science is enslaved to the cells of the body – give or take a lie or two. [Scientists get very adept at presenting a positive business case for the value of their work, and rich business-people sometimes just indulge in philanthropic gestures.]

And as for being “God’s chosen”, don’t get me started. Well, ok, I started this myself, but it remains that one can only hold that belief if one closes one’s mind to the sheer scale of the universe and adopts a ‘flat Earth’ mentality. We do, indeed, have religion, and when one gets past the “God’s chosen” ego-trip, what one finds is pure science. Not the science of sub-nuclear physics, of course, but the more subtle science of transcendental psychology. However, even religion ends up serving the lower – enslaved to the cells of the body.

Some do get drawn to the study of pure science or pure religion: not for the purpose of ‘control’ but simply for the understanding. This is not an accident, but ‘natural process’. These people are on the path to enlightenment, even if they never realise that possibility because their interest is only a partial crystallisation. To reach enlightenment, you need to be willing to give up enslavement to the cells of the body. The “I” that has made being that slave its whole raison d’être must be willing to die: to give up control. This is not the same as giving up because a goal can’t be achieved; it is rather the birth of choice.

Next time you feel frustrated because you “can’t” – or because you “can” but the task seems never-ending – spare a thought for choosing not to ‘do’. Spare a thought for choosing just to ‘be’. Spare a thought for getting to understand the universe, including yourself, just for the sake of experiencing an ever wider ‘being’. Spare a thought for putting the demands of the cells ‘on pause’. You have a wider destiny than serving those cells, but it depends on you being able to choose. And choice has no relationship to ‘adequacy’.