A New Day
But, what about me?
I had a conversation recently with a woman who told me about a novel she has been writing off and on for several years.
There was some comfort in the conversation, because I, too, have 150 pages of a novel that has been in the works for the better part of a decade.
I looked back at the first book I published, in 2009, and could barely recognize my own work.
This woman also spoke about the energies the universe has been sending us, that cause us to see that we don’t know how all the seeming chaos we’re undergoing, is going to play out.
Bad news and good news.
Bad, because it challenges our wish to design life so that it works for good, not bad purposes.
Good, because it challenges our wish to design life so that it works for good, not bad purposes.
Do you suppose the universe is telling us the human chapter that focuses on ego, has ripened and is ready to fall from its lofty, troublesome perch?
If so, what energies might emerge to take its place?
It may seem mystical, hopelessly unfocused, to try to make language about the energies the universe may be emitting, that shape our experience. But we have long understood that everything in our experience is energy.
We talk about how energy is not created or destroyed, but changes shape and form.
But we don’t talk much, aside from the Big Bang, about where those energies come from.
The reason for our inability to picture what may emerge, is that it means we understand we’re not in control of that.
Why is that good news?
Because it frees us to use our creative energies as if they are gifts for exploring. We need not twist ourselves into knots, thinking we can, or should, fashion the future.
What if the explanation for the malicious energies that seem to threaten, is the death throes of the ego era?
If the ego era is burning itself out, how to imagine will follow?
Our species, at least since the enlightenment, has grown used to assuming it is our energies, illuminated by ego, that determines the shape of history.
If you were another species, or visitors from another solar system, touched down on earth to take a look at how things have gone over the past few millenia, I suspect one of the last energies you would think had the most emblematic, lasting effect, would be the human ego.
One of the things that attracts me about Jesus’ teaching, is the inevitable surprises. He teaches in stories that come out in the least expected ways.
Maybe the best term for what is required to be a follower of Jesus, or the Buddha, the Dalia Lama, is surrender.
Surrender of the ego.
Who knows if our species is creative enough to allow ourselves to be embraced by energies that take us places we never imagined. Or, if we imagined, aroused our fear.
Would the diminishment of ego energy, so diminish our sense of ourselves (I don’t know how to speak of it without using ego words), that we would destroy ourselves rather than surrender?
Where I’m stuck in my novel is where my ego/imagination has exhausted itself. If the novel isn’t to simply die, some new energy/imagination will take center stage.
I’d love to think I’m evolved enough (if that’s an appropriate metaphor) that ego might step aside and allow other energies to take the novel someplace I can’t imagine.
I’d love to think the same thing about our species.
Whether that happens or not, there’s no doubt that whatever is ahead, is beyond human ego/imagination.