Liminalist # 239.5: What's Your Purpose?

Highlights from Liminalist live meet, with Suzie, Mari, Jeff, and Cedomir (Hugo left early) 

Think of Dave Oshana and me as the two hands of a clock, one for hours and one for minutes. Our movements are letting you know what time it is, but they aren’t creating time or causing it to move forward. The third hand, confusingly enough, is the second hand: it measures the basic unit of time. This hand is harder to follow and you may not even notice it at all. Yet without it, the other two hands do not move at all.

This third hand that is the second hand is neither Dave nor I but what happens: what the field says. You, the reader, can only refer to your field, that is, to everything going on around you that synchronizes, and synchronizes with, what these other hands (Dave and I) are telling you.

As the heavier, clunkier hour hand, I want to refer not only to Dave (the faster-moving minute hand) but to what happens in my field, which is the second hand, during the days, hours, and minutes preceding this blogpost. What information enters into my awareness during the week that seems to echo, and thus amplify, the signal coming downstream to me from the minute hand (Dave)?

Keep in mind, as you read this, that seconds, minutes, and hours do not exist anywhere outside of a (time-and-place-) specific cultural configuration of the human mind. The real flow of information—what happens—is not measurable as words or pictures, but only directly experienced through the senses, inner and outer, that are arising in your body, as you read these words and look at the pictures.

A photo of a clock cannot tell you what time it is; it can only tell you what time the photo was taken.

The subject of the last online Oshana event was accessing Heaven and uniting humanity. The two ideas may be synonymous. Both relate to discovering and living our purpose as human beings.

Like a tortoise with its shell, we are carrying our purpose with us wherever we go. We came into this life with it, but we soon lost it. What prevents us from living our purpose is ancestral: the fear of being burned at the stake or crucified for letting on who we really are. The emperor’s many minions affirmed the beauty of his new set of clothes because everyone around them was doing the same. Only a child—the pure fool—had the courage to point out the emperor was naked.

Peer pressure is relentless and mostly invisible, like water around a fish. As teenagers we take drugs to barricade ourselves against the world, in order not to come alive, to avoid the pain of being the odd one out. When we eat the right food and give our bodies what they want, on the other hand, our senses come alive. But there can be a terrifying social isolation in coming alive in the land of the dead.

The idea of Heaven is so strong that we will join any cult that comes along, in order to get a ticket in. None of them know the way to Heaven, any more than MDMA can get us to a state of ecstasy. We substitute a living connection to purpose for a sense of belonging in a group of peers who are all making the same mistakes. And because of the collective lack of sensitivity, and an ever-growing menu of misconceptions and preconceptions, we mistake the goal for the destination.

Then we say we are “on the path.”

But like the commenter who advised me to shun the light, this “path” has no correspondence with reality. Is this a path I see before me? Then I am walking in someone else’s footsteps.

We didn’t come here to get enlightened. We were supposed to be enlightened already,