marichiko

Just a couple of thoughts. "But thought is the very limitation you speak of..."
Hmmm... Cat, there's your irony. How could you possibly have arrived at your current conclusions other than through your thinking about this question? I would like to submit that it is not our thinking which is our limitation, but the MANNER in which our culture and own personal psychology has inclined, even impelled us to think.

A fox or a rabbit lives completely in the present. A fox simply IS. Does this mean the fox lives on some higher spiritual plane than man? Perhaps. You must ask the foxes, and so far they aren't giving away any secrets.

I am in complete agreement with you that our essence - our life force - is energy, and the laws of thermodynamics tell us that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Where does this leave us? Only with our hypotheses which may be turn out to proven true or not. Perhaps as Joe says, our collective essence is pressing us to learn more. Then again, our collective essence may be nothing more than the demands of a double helix of DNA which commands that its sequences of amino acids not only survive, but be handed down across the millenia. An argument can be made that the perfect, most advanced life form is the virus which bothers not at all with self awareness, but has stripped itself down to the most basic essentials - a single DNA strand wrapped in a protective protein coat.

I agree with Cat that we have no control over our lives, and I agree with Joe that we do. We have both far less and far more control over our lives than most of us will ever understand. "Man plans and God laughs," as one old Spanish saying goes. Things happen in our lives which we have no control over, just as we have no control over which parents we are born to and what society we are born into. However, it is by our THOUGHTS regarding our place in the world and the events which happen to us that we create meaning for our lives; the courage to go forward or the despair that causes us to become embittered and die. Life is what we make of it, despite the blows of ill chance or the luck of the draw.

I agree Cat, that in my truest sense I simply am. Yet it is by being in this present moment that I will become what I am in the moments which follow. If I live this very moment to the best of my ability, the moments which follow will take care of themselves. If I disregard this gift of the present and squander it with remorse over the past or undue worry of the future, I squander my days because I am not living IN them.

At heart I am nomadic, a gypsy. Never do I feel so fully alive as when I am traveling some back road far from home. Bruce Chatwin in his book, Songlines, puts forth the idea that man evolved to be nomadic - that in effect, to travel is the essence of the human spirit. Our language reflects this thought. I consult The American Heritage Dictionary: The word "journey" is derived from Middle English "journei", day, day's travel, and from the Latin "diurn ta", from Late Latin "diurnum", - day, from neuter of Latin "diurnus", - of a day, from "di" , - day. If you delve even more deeply into the meaning of the word, you come across this indo-european root: "dyeu" - to shine and in its many derivatives 'sky, heaven, god.' These derivatives also include 'divine' and 'journey'. And at the very beginning of the ancestry of the word "journey" you will find its ultimate parent, the sanskrit word "deva" or spirit. My journey is my spirit.

If I cease to "journey" and feel that I have arrived at some final destination called the "ultimate truth" then I have indeed shut down my essence. One day the actual truth will come knocking at my door with the light to dispel my illusions. I'll awake from my sleep and reply crankily, "Go away! I already know you!" and I'll go back in my room and pull my comfortable blanket of darkness over my ignorant eyes.

One of the greatest modern American poets, Mary Oliver, sums up my present understanding best in her poem "Roses, Late Summer." The poem ends with these lines:

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of swaying branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.