Half-Alive Lives

By Josh Roberts (100% me, not AI :) It happened slowly and subtly, like the water boiled the frogs without them knowing it. The joy, enchantment, and vitality evaporated from our lives as we metamorphosed from kids into adults.

Our self-consciousness kicked in around Middle School time, and meta-consciousness (thinking about thinking) overrode the spontaneous consciousness that gave us initial life. That spark of zest flickered and then went out. 

Is there any going back? Not quite. It’s not going back, but it’s going forward and reclaiming what was lost in a new way.

As is often the case in life, zooming out helps. So let’s see how the disenchantment that happened on a small scale in our lives (the microcosm) has also played out in the big scale of human history (the macrocosm). Because it’s a cosmic shift that we need. And a big shift requires a big picture.

The word cosmos means order. And the order that our education system has arranged the cosmos in (our worldview) is out of whack. Problem is, it’s so deeply entrenched in how we see reality that we don’t even see it. Like the fish in the water doesn’t know it’s swimming in water. 

Our collective water began boiling slowly in the 17th century, as we discovered that math and science can predict and therefore control reality in a powerful way. Descartes’ “I think therefore I am,” moved us out of an enchanted, embodied reality, and into our heads. Into my head, a private sphere which is my domain. 

We took Descartes wrong. He never wanted to ditch God, and Newton who came after Descartes (and was bipolar by the way :) wrote more on theology than he did on science. But the flame of self was already lit, and the water we swum in began boiling.

The heat rose and began killing off the microorganisms of mystery in the water of our worldview. We didn’t flinch because we thought, “Ahhh, they’re so tiny and they were messing up our vision anyway. We wanna get rid of those things so we can see clearly enough to control moooore.” Only 3 centuries later did we realize that we are composed of those microorganisms, and that the 38 trillion bacteria living in us outnumber the 30 trillion human cells that “make us up!” Ooooh, so this mystery, this subconscious vitality, makes us up! 

Turns out we’re not as self-contained as we thought either, and “my” head isn’t that private of a sphere. Telepathy aside, humans are thoroughly porous beings, and the outer world flows into us, and we flow into the outer world, from the moment we are conceived. The South African expression of Ubuntu captures it: I am who I am through other people.

As we zoom out together now, we’re seeing that “self” wasn’t the answer. Us controlling things wasn’t the answer. The fruit in the Garden of Eden thrust us down a path of self-discovery, both the light and the shadow, that ultimately culminates in a putting aside of self.

Self-help isn’t the answer. You can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, and you can’t reach higher than your head. As the water has boiled all the vitality out of us, we find that it is condensing at a higher altitude, and raining a fresh enchantment of the world onto us in our meta-modern times. 

What’s the solution then? It’s not something new, it’s a rediscovery of what was always here, but buried right beneath our I’s. Let’s keep unearthing it together through these mutually-changing conversations.

An initial game-plan will take shape in coming posts as these characters keep emerging.