The Big Miss

A pointer to the recovery of inner power

The common word meaning “to miss the mark”, which in ancient Greece meant to make a disappointing archery shot, was “to sin.”

In Spanish, the word sin means, “to be without.”

And so do I now wonder: what might be the original sin of our ancestors, for which we are all still atoning (by setting it right) in the present moment?

What have we all been going without for so long, in order for so many people to be reduced to living like this—in a state of near-constant anxiety, fear, mistrust, outrage, despair, frustration, and persistent lack?

We humans have, in the main, become hair-trigger wired resistors, filled with grievances aimed at the awesome capacitance of life itself—instead of relaxed and joyful contributors of love to this Wild Divine.

So why don’t we start this inquiry right there, with…

WONDER.

Now, I can’t speak for you, but wonder is a personal passion of mine that got pounded down to almost nothing during my childhood. It was replaced by buckets and reams and constant streams of externally flowing data, which all of the older, presumably wiser, people around me insisted that they, and their elders before them, had figured out already, for the benefit of us latecomers to the modern human condition. It seemed I had missed out on living in an era of wondering, so now I just needed to learn what other people already knew. My mission was simply to fit into the world and “get with the program.”

I was required for most of my formative years to pay attention to the outside world, and to do so with such exclusivity that I often got punished for daring to wander about in the spaciousness of my own curious mind. Nor was I permitted to explore my own body and wonder how it actually felt to be touched, or for it to touch others (though I definitely learned how the human body “worked!”)

My capacity to be intimate with the world, by first being on truly intimate terms with myself?

Wiped clean away.

And so it began—the countless socially imposed, violent, bullying, coercive and repressive methodologies for “instructing” me that began before I even entered school. And while I hasten to say here that none of this is anyone’s fault, and that I do not blame our society for being the way it now is, this relentless reshaping of the living miracle that I am into a conformist, Reader’s Digest version of an obedient social cog—all being achieved from the outside pushing ON—compressed my own formless sense of being into a brittle, manmade object that was told it needed to turn out well, or else it would get cast aside eternally as a bitter disappointment, and a tragic failure.

Yet THE most natural question in the world that any child can ever ponder (and feel free to ask any parent to confirm this for you) is “Why?”

I began asking “why” the instant my own, innate desire to realize started coming online. And immediately I was told “the answer” by others around me. And the answer was, so disappointingly often, “Because I said so”, or “Stop asking so many questions”, or “You just need to have more faith,” or “Go figure it out for yourself.”

Figure. Not wonder; go figure. Go off and objectify (figure) the entire universe, point by point, and then you will have the right answer! (Does this remind anyone of how modern science works? For it begins with an unexamined presumption that nothing at all was alive—until it was. And might that perhaps explain why “the science” is never enough for a wisely open, willingly wondering mind to cease its own wondering?)

I now treasure my own boundless capacities to wonder, until I realize. I love experiencing the gift of my own, inspired insightfulness in real time. I love to feel my heart literally explode with bliss and with boundless gratitude as new insights emerge, and to feel my every cell and sinew and fiber dancing in ecstasy within me, because I have REALIZED and have fallen in love with new wisdom that illumines something important to me in some beautifully novel way?

Fucking priceless.

Much of what now fuels these astonishing, fully body realizations that I have fairly regularly was reduced during my childhood, to a prepackaged system of everyone “learning about.” Memorize, repeat, pass the test, believe—and then go out and defend it all to the death against anyone who might take exception, or offer a contrast to all of that serious “knowing.”

Knowing only entrained me to fight an endless war against others over “What is false.” (Hint: that’s a huge amount of imaginal garbage for any group of minds to do battle against. And the huge loads of crap being flung into the river of human consciousness grow bigger and more intimidating daily—so good luck if you’re still committed to fighting that war!)

Realization, on the other hand, delivers to me both a relaxed and abiding sense of inner peace and compassionate goodwill toward the whole of life. And if you believe booze, heroin, sex, gambling, or any other entertaining or temporary thrill can generate a dopamine hit and trigger a welcome surge of aliveness within you, then you really ought to try on what realization can do for your system.

Talk about being addictive…! 😂

“Nature advances by close approximations, partial realizations, and temporary successes.” ~Sri Aurobindo

Wonder on that one, my friends. Please…wonder on that idea for a while, and then see how it feels as it comes alive inside you.

For most of us have been told, violently and repeatedly, that the Smart Ones among us already know exactly why we are, where we are, when we are, what we are, how we are, and even who we are. And we’ve been in-FORMED about that for a long time, and quite coercively. A few long dead people, we all hear, once uncovered everything that we need to know, so all we’re really doing today is filling in the last few puzzle pieces within a tightly woven frame that was built a couple of millennia ago. And so does our capacity to question “authority” get drowned in a bathtub of constant, inflowing data. From outside to inside, is how we are taught to perceive.

And so we learn to fear, mistrust, and even hate the experts, the authorities, and anyone in power, because they try to tell us what we all just need to believe. They serve as our handy scapegoats whenever we grow tired of judging and hating ourselves for not ever having enough, knowing enough, doing enough, or even being enough. It must be their fault, because we’ve done what they told us to do, yet we’re still not enough!

We cannot interpret a fraction of what we are being told we now need to know—or else we’re in trouble!—let alone find the time to wonder about what we’re perceiving, or even to start to explore how best to perceive.

Way too many of us find ourselves dealing with constant, barely repressed anxiety, or complex PTSD. Too many either fear or crave the relief of an impending catastrophe that will take down this system in its entirety. We struggle daily to override our own persistent sense of incompleteness, of not enough, which external messaging constantly reinforces. Many do intuit that humanity may have somehow left behind or be neglecting something of great value; we don’t realize we’ve been conditioned to live outside of our own present moment experience—cut off from the intimacy and sheer aliveness of our own power to wonder.

So we train ourselves to bite our own tongues, to harden our hearts, and to fearfully close our minds against the one teensy, nagging question that we know we cannot answer in a way that might bring comfort, or would invigorate our wilting, sputtering sense of raw aliveness. We don’t dare ask it, so we repress the burning question instead, and express fury whenever it’s tapped in some way by the whole of this living world, as it whispers, “Just be here now, my lovely. Be here now.”

Instead, our minds armor up and do furious battle within themselves to destroy our own, unasked question:

“What if I’m wrong?”

Oh, and doesn’t THAT question make the blood run cold, the body tense up, and cause everything within you to want to fight it? We have even invented a separated ego to head out into the big bad world to do battle against all of these other raging egos, on behalf of…the inexhaustible power of formless awareness, as it invites itself, through us, to eternally wonder! 😂

My friends, I definitely do not have “all the answers.” But what I do have, and what I likely draw upon more every day than the average person, is the perpetual power to wonder as I wander.

My own, inner pilot light of self-awareness is the power to wonder that burns inside of me. Stoke that fire inside of yourself, and I can assure you of only one thing: the human world will get upset and throw lots of water at you. Your increasingly brilliant light will annoy many others; mostly because once they see it, they cannot unsee it. And it stimulates in them a longing that they fear they cannot feed.

So quenching your light to quell that discomfort serves as the next best thing to admitting that their own light seems to be fading and flickering. It’s hard to admit that anxiety, fear, bitterness, and depression are regular houseguests in the human condition these days; or that we each have the power within ourselves to feed our own personal flame and restore our aliveness back to its natural, untamed state.

Nobody can ever steal another person’s light, because nobody else can dim the innate power to boundlessly wonder that burns inside of you...but you.

Heck, we can even wonder right up unto the point of our death, “What can I realize right here and now, by having this miraculous experience?” Or we can presume that we already know the answer to what death is and delivers “ahead of time”, only to fear as we lay dying that we might be wrong.

We get to decide how to be alive and aware, right here and right now. We can settle for the prepackaged answers we’re given coercively, or we can live as this self-aware moment, in openhearted wonder that it is.

We get to decide.

Yet here we are, fighting war after war after war after war over “knowings” and twisted ideas about “the truth.” Every new wannabe political, economic, or spiritual messiah has predetermined that all others must now “learn” what they assure us arrogantly they already know. And then, once every human being has conformed submissively to a singular human narrative that we will someday decree has at last won the war outright—in some absolute triumph of truth over falsehoods, good over evil, right over wrong (and there’s that pesky word again that we so want to make go away forevermore!)

Only then will all of our suffering disappear.

No more questions. Except for those we’re allowed to ask to land some short-term objective that merely distracts us from noticing all of the things we’re not wondering about. And then, our present day messiahs now tell us, we will all know peace, and prosperity, and feel joy, and can love one another and love being alive.

But we must love only the good ones. The ones who can pass the test of knowing.

And we simply cannot live peacefully and joyfully until all of the bad ones among us have been destroyed or locked away.

And so I ask you, my friends, why not begin to wonder about what’s happened to your own awesome power to wonder, just a teensy bit? Why not set yourself free from the limits imposed by all of this coerced learning “about?”

Wondering your own soul back to life is probably not the only, right, or perfect path for everyone alive. For the sudden freedom can feel unmooring, disorienting, unbalancing, upsetting, and even terrifyingly messy or dangerous once we dare to entertain it—at least at first. Because a mind remedially nurturing back to aliveness its own stunted power of wonder will indeed begin to wonder, but initially just long enough to latch onto the “next best thing to learn about.” And the fear of not knowing will drive the mind to grasp at the next, and the next, and the next human narrative that pushes in from the outside-on every wondering soul that is simply seeking to come alive as itself.

Until at last, this relentlessly conditioned habit of “learning about” reality itself is finally broken within our species, like a feverish nightmare, and the power of wonder again burns so bright within humanity that no flood or fire, no matter how great, can push inward on our souls to put that flame out.

And then, we might even come to realize that not even dying can quench the burning flame of aliveness itself. For it is the spark, the Big Bang, the inseminating motive that aliveness first felt to become aware of itself.

“What if…?”

Aliveness wonders; awareness realizes. Lather, rinse, and repeat…eternally.