Hudson Valley Astrologer

My day starts as it does most mornings, by writing a little something. Before going to sleep I am sure to select “no alarm” on my phone which is set for 5:00 a.m., but here I am at 5:00 a.m. anyway, writing. The writing thing started as a little game, just to see if I could keep a streak for a year. Most days when I wake up I open my app to noodle something down while it’s still early, before sunrise, and it feels good to get the task behind me. But then the real work begins, and I realize that the writing is never done.

The book I am writing and the classes I am taking are demanding in their own right, but the office still beckons and indeed has beckoned for the better part of thirty years, give or take. There was a time when, like a hunter, I’d be out the door reading footprints, or clues, signs in nature of any nearby prey. We gotta eat, right? And feed the family! But the drudgery of the hunt became taxing. Gradually, I felt more like the hunted, imprisoned perhaps, or keeping on theme, caught up in the taxidermic atmosphere of “real” corporate life.

Writing brings the life back to the stuffed and mounted spirit where somedays one might feel skinned alive in the day to day banality of it all. Surely there is more to this incarnation, this existence. Or are we just fodder in a rat race? Or, as tech junkies like to argue, we are in what Nick Bostrom called a simulation? But consciousness is “substrate independent” according to neuroscientist Anil Seth who wrote the book Being You, which is more tenable an idea life merely being some elaborate Sims Game.

I don’t run out the door with my travel mug filled to the brim with coffee anymore. That to me was a waste of time. Chasing my tail to win a prize. A stuffed rat? No, it’s a new day and time to get the dog out. Then I’ll head to the great room, open my laptop and get to another kind of work altogether, which is to peck away at the book I’m writing, finish up an assignment, and drink that cup of coffee that my wife usually brings me. She’s simply got the coffee ritual dialed in, and an important part of the ritual is of course to drink it up, like life itself.

None of this is a waste of time, however. Even wasting time seems to have purpose. Yesterday I shared a quote with a friend that resonated with me. It’s from a book that was published last year. The author, who just turned 90, share a copy of it with me twenty years ago. The book is called The Sacred Fullness, and would be worth your while:

“I have come to the conclusion that for the human being the most difficult thing to give up is “suffering and pain“. This is due to the fact that, like it or not, the human species is a species of ignorance. I use this term in its cosmic significance. That is, as a formula of the process of creation, or manifestation, if you will. Some religions caught hold of this truth, but only partially, and due to the fact that all religions are crystallizers of fragments of truth, we end up with the static dogma of original sin, cut off from the real and integral understanding that this is merely an aspect of the Divine Consciousness, or rather a result of its manifestation in material creation. These are simply the waves thrown up. The present human species is an outcome of this great wave that produces clouds, veils that dims the Light, which obscure our origin in the Divine. Out of this comes all the operations we know, of every sort. Suffering and pain are thus handmaidens of it all.”

HVA

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