I knew a strange case of a young woman who was inspired to have a grey life. Her family was loud. I remember going to her house, colors everywhere, but she felt that they made her stand out and it embarrassed her. So she aspired to have a dull life, be an accountant and have a husband who was all business. She became the women in the grey suit. But she found she did not belong there and has embraced the life she once despised.
True inspiration is akin to divine revelation, and is, in fact, not relativistic and subjective only in part. You do not exist of your own will. If you change your mind or begin to doubt you exist, you will not vanish like a figment of some fevered imagination, and no doing of your own sustains your reality. That’s sort of beyond your power. Even if you delve into thanatological considerations, you still don’t exist in the afterlife state of your own power. You arise in this world, and any world, by a process so vast as to seem a complete mystery at first glance. But that doesn’t mean we are meant to live in the dark, far from it.
Can you live a life without inspiration? The answer is no, because inspiration is your very life itself. It’s your spiritual fingerprint and the essence that has let you have any awareness at all, let alone take any actions or have any experiences. You didn’t create it, but you can distort it. This happens in a lot of ways, like the grey life story my friend shared.
We mistake fiction for spirit. People spend their whole lives trying to find the right way, trying to find the “real” truth. Your heart is the real truth. Your eye is the beauty which it beholds, and your purpose is contained in all that your being embraces and holds in awe. The profound to one can seem profane to another, but we lose our way when we give thought to anything but our own vision of the profound, or when we bend our knee to others judgements of our own perception of the profound, which can also be called the divine.
It’s been said in many ways that the divine has many faces. It does. So why spurn the face it shows you, because someone seems invested in convincing you it lacks worth? Why reject what your own eye sees and what your own heart apprehends for a dry, drab authority that doesn’t know you from Adam or Eve? Nor does it care. When you find a teacher, they actually teach you nothing. The true teachers only reflect a set of truths they have seen for themselves and that are equally present in you.
The purpose of spiritual practice is not to get better at anything. It’s what the Chinese refer to as “polishing the mirror”. It’s just dusting the bookshelves so the wisdom that is your personal gifts is easier to read. If you heed popular opinion, they won’t tell you to throw out your books. They don’t dare do that, as you would most certainly reject their influence. Instead, they insist on offering you jackets for your books. They offer you their judgements of your truths, and because we are more or less forcibly conditioned to embrace their conditions on our presence in their lives, and in life in general, we come to accept and define our truths by their covers.
If they told us to throw them out we would know clearly what to fight against and they can’t have that. Yes. If we saw clearly, they wouldn’t have the power to make us do anything. Logic is a remarkably obtuse discipline. It is a good starting point, but a horrible finish to genuine understanding. By a very clear process of logic, I could demonstrate that life is totally meaningless and that we should not let our lives continue. As orderly as the thought would be, it would be a blatant falsehood for no other reason that life does exist. It didn’t need our logical grasp of it to come into being, neither does your inspiration.
Suicide and terrorists are very logical. Oh, indeed. Their rationales are very coherent. They have been thought about for a long time and it’s what wears them down. But a criticism of logic is not my purpose today.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~