How Many Roads?

By Robinson Leary

Enlightenment is being able to have a great epiphany regarding your former ignorance of the truth of the world, and remembering that it won’t be the last time you’ll realise you were wrong. I’ve experienced a small part of enlightenment in my journey to understand the perfect society.

I’d lived my whole life in an engineered society.

People followed the rules, kept to schedules, sacrificed their desires, as society demanded.

I knew no other way to live, I thought it good. I saw all problems as engineering questions:

Surely, whatever the ill, some intervention could heal it.

I knew we were right, because we were rich, not just my family, the whole society was successful and prosperous.

Yet-I felt something wrong.

I felt a great lack of meaning in my life. Everything was material, though the churches were there, the way we lived meant any spirituality could be only surface level. It would be spirituality only in word, not deed.

I saw how many fell into despair. How life had no purpose, nothing to offer beyond cars, TVs, houses and holidays.

No deeper point to any of it. I saw everyone falling away to this emptiness, apathy and cynicism. There had to be a better way!

I tried, I tried living without society or modern ideas.

Living your life in a natural way is incomparably beautiful.

Waking when the sun rises, you are always well-rested and ready for the day.

Running through the dawn light, washing your face with the dew of lemon leaves, watching the golden sun crest over the distant hills: This is what it means to be alive.

When you live in such a way, no day is meaningless. You see the wonder of the new day: A new world! A new beginning with each and every dawn.

You feel as men did in the early times. There in the cool mists and shady trees lie the spirits of times past. They speak to you. Never in words, but the immortal sense of renewal of the dawn hour weaves its essence in your innermost self.

As the day begins, I follow no schedule. Schedules are not natural. I do whatever my curiosity and need drives me to. I eat when I am hungry. I read what and when I like. I try my hand at new crafts and forms of work, as they interest me. No two days are the same. Sometimes I fill my mind with quantum physics-sometimes with shamanistic ritual. I let things happen as they happen. Trusting in randomness and the invisible forces of nature to show the way. And it works. The less I intervene, the better things are. Looking back, I examined my health, my happiness, my mind. None of these needed to be engineered-engineering was the cause, not the cure of my problems. Processed foods, regular schedules, crowds, commutes-were these natural? Were these not the cause of illness of mind and body, of misery and monotony. What I had needed all along was to let go, to trust in the incomprehensible wisdom of nature.

Now I feel fantastic in my life. My health is perfect, my spirit and mind are flourishing.

I don’t talk to anyone for months. Other people expect you to shape your days for them. To do things for them, and to let them do things for you. I don’t miss them. Everything I need, I have.

This is what it means to live by nature!

I loved the natural philosophy. Look at all those engineered-people. Stressed, empty, popped full of drugs to keep functioning. Staring hollowly down the barrel of their own inevitable demise.

Thank heavens I have broken free. Have found the right way to live my life. If this is what it means to be ‘right’ then I’d hate to be anything else.

Sadly, I was to find the same spirit cloaked in a rather more monstrous form.

I travelled to an anarchic land. There people kept no promises, did nothing on time. Felt and thought only of themselves. The poor and the weak lay to die on shattered streets, while the rich and the strong drove by in German cars, predating on another through business and crime. When I say this country was poor, I mean poor. If you can name it, they didn’t have it.

I saw in horror what became of a society when things were allowed to be natural. For nothing that I saw was against nature, yet it was horrible.

So then, which way is the right way?

As much nature as possible, mixed with as much engineering as necessary. We don’t need offices, commutes, medications and therapists. We do need safety nets and limits on the excesses of the powerful. We don’t need to live by schedule all the time. We do need things to be ready when they are needed. There’s no simple answer to the right mingling of the two.

Ultimately, it’s easy to discover a new way of thinking and believing it to be the one true path.

I’m not the first person to realise the way they thought about the world was wrong. Maybe you have too. The great trick and challenge is not to believe you have the final understanding, but to remember how unexpected the last epiphany was, and assume the next one will be no less spontaneous.