Island of Pure Being

Island of Pure Being

Introduction

Today, we finally move to the Island of Pure Being. This will require that we face two questions.

1. Will you face up?

Will you take the world as you actually perceive it, or will you choose a world of your imagination?

The imaginary world is the one you build with stories. As we have seen, Ignarus, Vanitas and Rapax disintegrate these stories and send you to The Devil’s Playground to escape. The world, as humans perceive it, is hard to face.

We are lost (Ignarus). We are longing (Vanitas). We are lonely (Rapax). Lost, longing, and lonely. We cannot defeat the Specters. No wonder we run to The Devils Playground.

Today I will show the alternative. Facing up: a choice to live in the world you perceive rather than the one you imagine, choosing to live by daylight instead of gaslight.

The moment you Face up to the Specters, the story you built your life on crumbles, leaving you to face the Dark Night. This is such a terrifying prospect that many live and die without ever entering the Dark Night. It’s just easier to live an inauthentic life.

The name “Dark Night” is a little misleading because it implies the darkness is something you go through. But the Dark Night is not something you go through; it is a place you must accept as part of your existence. You must learn to live with it.

Facing the Specters will never end with you defeating them. Instead, you will learn to embrace them. The Specters are a vital piece in your humanity. They open the door to the third dimension of human existence: the Island of Pure Being.

Humans exist on three levels. First, we are animals who live on the Island of Desire. Second, we are authors who lives on Story Island. Third, we are angels who stand above and outside of our stories. Human beings. Authentic human existence takes place on all three planes: Desire, Story, and Being.

We saw that the connective tissue between the Island of Desire and Story Island is consciousness. Consciousness elevated you beyond pure animal desire and made you the author of a story. But when you moved to Story Island, desire did not cease. Your story harnessed desire. You can cross freely between the Island of Desire and Story Island.

In the same way, the Dark Night is the connective tissue between Story Island and the Island of Pure Being. Just as consciousness does not eradicate desire, so the Dark Night does not eradicate story. Rather, it gives you a new way to enter story. I will describe this next week. You will see how authentic humanity is not an escape to any one island, but a way to integrate all three.

So back to the first question: Will you face up? Will you face the Specters and go through the Dark Night? If you say, “Yes,” you will come to the second question.

2. Will you face up?

I know. It’s the same question But in this case, I mean “face up” as in “look up,” as in “choose life.” Will you lift up your eyes and say, “Yes! I’m in!” or will you drop your gaze and fall into nihilism, despair, and alienation, or perhaps flee back to the Devil’s Playground. 

The question on The Island of Pure Being is existential. It’s Hamlet’s question: “To be or not to be?” Your yes is not because of anything. There is no story. Yes is not a conclusion you come to. It is a starting place.

This may sound esoteric but it is as concrete as nature herself. Everything in nature, as far as I can tell, says yes to life. In the face of absurdities and hardships, nature chooses to live as much as it can for as long as it can. Nature faces up.

When I backpack in the Sierras, I sometimes see a tree growing from a sheer granite cliff. The unfortunate seed got blown over the edge and landed on a crack. It somehow wedged its roots into the crack and found nutrients. Rather than curse God and die, the seed says yes to live and grows to be all that it can be. I love those trees. If they can say yes to life in those circumstances, I can say yes to life in mine. 

A foundational yes makes you the master of story rather than the slave. Just as story gives you the power to harness desire, so an existential yes gives you the power to harness story. You don’t lose anything. You deepen and enrich all three dimensions of your existence.

The goal today is to face each Specters and say “Yes,” to choose life. I hope you will come to the end of this episode saying, “Yes in the face of Ignarus! Yes in the face of Vanitas! Yes in the face of Rapax! Yes! Yes! Yes! wherever the seed of my life is planted.” 

Yes in the Face of Ignarus: Wonder

As you know by now, Christianity was my foundational story. I dedicated my life to it. I consider losing my faith to be the greatest achievement of my life because there were so many reasons to cling to it. I built quite a castle on this story. I was a successful pastor and professor. I had a safe path to retirement.

What possessed me to walk away from all this? Ignarus. I give the details in The Story of My Fall, but suffice it to say that I eventually had to accept that my story, like all stories, was the product of human imagination, not human perception.

I fell into the Dark Night and came face to face with nihilism. Nothing mattered.

But to my surprise, there was a light in the darkness. I did not create this. It was there when I arrived. I felt it one morning while biking in the darkness and rain to a job at my brother-in-law’s hardware store. From somewhere deep inside came the children’s song,

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are

The light was wonder.

I had no answers, but I did have a choice. I could choose wonder. I could open my eyes wide and say, “Wow.”  This was not an escape from Ignarus; even less a defeat. Wonder was an embrace of Ignarus that left me awe.

And then it hit me: Ignarus hadn’t destroyed anything substantial. Everything I loved, everything that was real, was still here. The only thing missing was my story. When I lost my faith, what was left? Everything. Except now, the veil imagination was torn away and I could perceive it directly. I was in a bigger, not a smaller world.

In church, people used to say how sad it must be for an unbeliever to look at a sunset and have no one to thank. But when I look at a sunset today, I am not distracted by an imaginary man in the sky. I drink in the glory unfiltered by by imagination.

This is not to make any pronouncement about the presence or absence of the Divine. It seems likely to me that there is some being or purpose beyond my perception. But I’ll take what I see. It is more than enough. I won’t weaken perception with imagination.

So, in the face of Ignarus, I can look at the ruins of my story and cry out in pain, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!” I can conclude that if my story is broken, that the world has been destroyed and life has no meaning. Or, I can set aside the world of my imagination and mainline the wonder right in front of my eyes. I can walk by sight, not by faith.

I choose wonder in the face of Ignarus, the first existential yes.   

Yes in the Face of Vanitas: Acceptance

Vanitas is the second Specter to face. It’s that sinking feeling when you realize every end is a dead end, that hope is a carrot on a stick, that you can’t get no satisfaction. I felt this as I came to the end of a long string of rainbows in my life. Each time, there was a brief sense of satisfaction but I had to move on.

There is no way to defeat Vanitas. But again, there is a choice. You can wallow in despair that “happy” is never the “ending” or you can choose Acceptance.

Life is change. Eternal sameness sounds awful when you think about it. Maybe Adam and Eve were not expelled from the Garden. Maybe they escaped. And the problem wasn’t the damn snake. It was the damn Garden. Who can take another day in Paradise forever?

The choice of acceptance freed me to play. Imagine two children at the beach, laughing and making a sand castle. A grownup approaches and scowls at them.

“You kids are wasting your time. In an hour the tide will wash away everything you have built. ”

He missed the the point. The children never assumed they were building an eternal fortress. They were enjoying the moment. Playing. They knew the moment wouldn’t last forever. Forever was in the moment.

The ebb and flow is what gives life richness. Acceptance is the embrace of the ups and downs of life, both joy and sadness. It doesn’t just sing the Halleluia Chorus. It also makes room for Barber’s Adagio for Strings. One is joyful. The other is sad. Both are unspeakably rich.

Acceptance doesn’t pretend to defeat Vanitas with an imaginary life after death. It says, “Behold, today is the day of salvation.” Maybe there is life beyond the grave. The universe has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. But one thing is sure: I won’t sit around dreaming of what I can’t see. I’ll live my life, not dream of an afterlife.

To the one who has learned acceptance, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity,” is not a cry of despair but of triumph. It is the cry of one who has broken the chains of the happy ending and learned to live today. The fact that the moment passes does rob it of meaning. Quite the contrary. The passing, flowing, up-and-down nature of life is the very thing that makes it worthwhile.

I choose acceptance in the face of Vanitas, the second existential yes.    

Yes in the Face of Rapax: Compassion

Rapax is the most fearsome of the specters. It destroys our most cherished illusion: that we are good and loving beings. If you want to know what we think of ourselves, just look at what we say about God: “God is good.” “God is love.”

But God is neither loving nor good. The first four Commandments are variations on “Me first!” That’s selfish. And the world God made is more like an episode of the Hunger Games than Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

Alienation is understandable in this dog-eat-dog world. I felt this intensely when my story crumbled. But again, there was light in the darkness. I had a choice. In the face of Rapax, I could choose compassion.

In The Hunger Games the rules are, kill or be killed. Katniss can’t escape the game but she can chooses compassion. She fights only in self-defense. She takes Rue under her wing and remains loyal to Peeta, even if it means she must die.

In a very real way, we live in the Hunger Games. Everything around you is cursed with teeth and appetite. But this common curse can be our deepest bond. We are all the same and we are in it together. There is no way to escape Rapax but when we choose compassion, we experience one of the deepest expressions of our humanity.

As for the Game-Maker, the thought of a God who would set the world up like this is too horrible to imagine. I want to kill him. Maybe that’s the appeal of Christianity. We get to kill our God and keep him too. But when it comes to God, I have decided the best thing I can say is nothing. Who am, with my limited human perception, to pronounce judgment? I simply don’t know enough. I do think it may be possible to touch the divine. I do this by the full and authentic embrace of my humanity, not by cooking something up in my imagination.

I would like to think my choice of compassion makes me a good person, but this is just more gaslight. I choose compassion, not because I am good, but because it is. I choose compassion because it is the most joyful feeling I can have. So when I choose compassion, it is not because I have overcome desire but because I have fully resigned to it. This is not the defeat of Rapax. It is the discovery of an existential yes that allows me to widen my universe by seeing all people and all things as part of it. When I choose compassion I discover my universal family.

I choose compassion in the face of Rapax, the third existential yes.     

Conclusion

As difficult as it is to go through the dark night, it is worth it. Back on Story Island, faith shrunk wonder to the limits of my imagination. Hope made acceptance an object in the distance. Love restricted compassion to my tribe.

But on the Island of Pure Being, I say Yes! Yes! Yes! I choose Wonder in the face of Ignarus, Acceptance in the face of Vanitas, and Compassion in the face of Rapax. These choices are existential. They are not the result of story but form the basis for a joyful voyage back to Story Island and the Island of Desire.

Join me for the journey next week.