Always Being, Always Becoming — Evolving into an enlightened culture

The paradoxical truth

I can’t quite trace back the source of the quote “always being, always becoming” — but this is the paradoxical truth that we realize when we awaken to the truth of our being. The life that we live must be centred in being, stillness, rest, freedom while we must also learn to relate to the transient life from the truth of our being. The world that we see essentially has 2 poles. Firstly, we can see people busy creating structures or subscribing to structures to find a way to meet their needs — these structures include marriages, our jobs, education system and so on. Secondly, we can see people showing a renunciatory attitude towards these structures and paying more attention to stillness/being/eternal truth and so on. We can see people tending to one side of the pole ignoring the other or even considering it irrelevant and vice versa. So what is going on really? What are the energetic implications involved that the common eye can miss when we side with either of the poles? The truth of what we are may seem like a static discovery. But, it is not so, it has tremendous implications in the manifest world some of which has gotten rather ignored due to a number of reasons that I can’t clearly point to. This post is an attempt to explore some of these implications and potentially chart a rough road map for that exploration.

India and eastern mysticism

I have lived much of my life in India and like any other kid raised here; I was introduced to mystical principles very early on. It didn't take long for me to realize that India long ago had attempted to create an enlightened culture. Although, this statement can’t be generalized for until recently India was not really a country in the way in which it is today, but a composition of sub-cultures, some of the more evolved sub-cultures had progressed quite far in the attempt to create an enlightened society. It became apparent that most things here were designed for the human being to awaken to his eternal nature and to express it in action — the way food is eaten, the times at which it was eaten, the way people got married, the way people were educated and so on. However, without sustained and inspired leadership due to poor demarcation between these subcultures and inherited systems, somewhere down the line things got mixed up, diluted and what we see now might well be a poor inheritance of a rich culture. The reason I am making these claims is to not prove its factual accuracy but to introduce the reader into the world I perceived I was born into. It will become apparent towards the end of this post what this perception had to do with what is happening in my life right now. At some point in my life, I got quite interested in spirituality and quite naturally I turned my attention to some of the house hold mystical names that I was introduced to when I was young. One thing led to another and it led me on a path of self-discovery. I came across a number of teachers rooted in different traditions but mostly these were teachers rooted in the traditions of emptiness or non-duality. So I diligently followed the pointers and started to have some profound insights. It took some time for me to stabilize in these insights. Over time a lot of momentum gathered in stabilizing in this still space and it enabled me to become very quiet and address old emotional wounds, unconscious material and so on. To add to this I must mention that I don’t think anyone ever comes to the end of this process of stabilization but it seems like the stabilization becomes more and more subtle and potentially finds a route into the manifest world. Essentially while this was happening I tended to ignore my creative energy and structures needed to express it and focussed more on my inner space and development. Gradually, there seemed to be an energetic dissonance with the way my life was being lived and to address this some of deepest attachments to the spiritual teachings that I had come to follow and treasure as the truth were brought to question by life. I came to realize that much of these traditions that I associated with came from an eastern mystical lineage and this is where I noticed that the eastern mystical traditions hadn't quite updated themselves to the context the current world is operating in, or somehow we managed to inherit a slightly one-dimensional version of these traditions.

The Energetic dimension

Over time I became sensitive to the energetic aspects of life and I began to look at my recent past from an energetic perspective. It will be apparent by the end of the next paragraph why I am taking a detour in talking about the trajectory of destiny and energetic resonance. We all have a destiny and to combine ourselves with a certain activity, it is important we have a sense of energetic resonance with this activity to be able to co-create a shared destiny together. In other words my creative energies should be able to flow into the activity satisfactorily to create a feeling of resonance. It is impossible to have energetic resonance if in some way we don’t play a part in each other’s destiny. To give an example, I can write and play the guitar, but I am not very capable when it comes to painting. Not everyone can be an athlete, not everyone can be a painter and so on, and the examples are countless. So there needs to be certain sense of energetic resonance to be able to combine ourselves with an activity and to explore and co-create a joint destiny. This is the same with human beings too. We can’t just connect and have relationship with any other human being. For example, if I am to have some sort of a relationship with another human being, we must have some role to play in each other’s destiny and that might enable an energetic resonation. Now, with the case of human beings, energetic resonance plays even a bigger role since every human being is alive and their destiny has a strong sense of trajectory of its own. However, with an activity, say painting, as long as we have some energetic resonance, I have the empty canvas to create whatever I please — in that sense the canvas is a more inactive partner in the duet than a human being would have been and there is not much possibility of the canvas’ destiny clashing with mine.

Stillness and movement

So as I was saying earlier, as I focussed on stillness/emptiness more and more and ignored my manifest expression, I felt a deeper energetic dissonance within me — almost like pieces of a puzzle were not fitting. With a deeper exploration into this energetic dissonance, I came to realize that I had not created enough energetic conduits in the manifest world for my energies to flow. Quite simply, I hadn't taken the time or made the effort to create structures within my life through which I could express my creative energy. Where earlier the movement of creative energy through my being would have been blocked by getting short circuited due to old emotional wounds and unconscious habits, now it was available simply begging to be used but unfortunately there weren't enough structures that I had created that were willing to receive it. I began to feel I hadn't explored deeply enough my energetic resonance and destiny with activities or people as much as I probably should have or even wanted to. I realized that some of the teachings I had followed essentially didn't discuss these things either to keep the teaching simple or simply that the trajectory of destiny of the pioneers of these teachings was probably quite small. It made me pay attention to some of the subtler aspects. If for example I were to meet an awakened being whose destiny didn't have a wide trajectory or in this case a being that didn't have to traverse many different conduits to discover the truth of his being and let his creative energy express fully through, I probably wouldn't be helped by the experience of such a being so much due to the wide trajectory of my own destiny. Now, to be clear this does not make anyone more or less superior. What I am getting at is that we need to understand the role energetic resonance and trajectory of the destiny plays. In my own case because of my deep association with eastern mystical traditions and their principles I had developed a mild unconscious resistance towards movement in manifest world.

The evolution or lack thereof of eastern mystical principles

It got me to ponder, the eastern model of spiritual awakening in the ancient times operated under a society that was not industrially or technologically developed. But, things have progressed over the last couple of decades. The once glaring distinction between the developed world and the developing world is tending more towards a greyer distinction now. The spectrum of expression that a society like this can operate under is infinite and we will no longer be served if we only keep emphasizing stillness over movement or spiritual world over material world or renunciation over experience. The teachings must come to reflect this change in society and address more the destiny of the culture which is tending more towards expression rather than keeping up with the tradition. We must as a collective understand the energetic possibilities we have and create systems that allow the creative energy within us to flow. Yes, we can create systems rooted in stillness, gained through our spiritual practise and association with eastern mystical traditions. But, it won’t be obvious what shape this will take and it may even sometimes take the much less glamorised trial and error format and this is where I strongly feel the notion of an “enlightened being” from the east doesn't serve us. To complement this model rather than idealistic notions of “enlightened being”, we need normal human beings on the path that have qualities of inner integrity, honesty and authenticity and with the capacity to learn from mistakes. Eventually our work in the manifest world must reflect our spiritual understanding and we must be willing to take whatever route that is necessary to bring about this transition. We must strive to bring forth structures and systems that can be a conduit for our creative energies to flow. While, we create systems we must also keep in mind the evolutionary capacity of these systems and design them in a flexible way that allows easy transition from one form to another.

The way forward?

It is not a straight forward task but it is a requirement. May be there will always be human beings whose destiny will have a narrow spectrum but, we must strive to create systems that in a way has the capacity to be inclusive of the different major movements in consciousness. Only then can we as a collective grow and bring forth an evolution into enlightened society.