A Meaningful Life

What I have found in recent weeks is when I take action in apsects of my life that I have been putting of I get rewarded with more happiness than I expected on completion than I had anticipated at the start. I think I have been tricking myself into thinking that the effort exceeds the reward but on almost every outcome this is not the case. As an example, Emma and I were very keen to get our pool finished by Xmas so the kids and other family/friends would have use of it over the holidays. It was a mad rush and a painful exercise doing it but the reward definitely exceeded the effort. I think the takeaway is that living means doing your dreams and goals not putting them off for an easier existence that may lead to a fairly average life. If your not up for a big full life then what’s it all for? Do you just exist until you die? p.s. Landmark Education has been coaching me in playing the game of life.

Sometimes I get very excited, almost euphoric about the business I’m involved in, Saasu.com but one big catch is that it’s like climbing mountains. The higher and harder the climb the more of a rush you get but the risk of falling increases.

At present we are pushing ahead on some crucial feature releases plus we have three strategic announcements so it is breeding anxiety and stress within me. Last night I realized how most of the anxiety and stress is in my mind. Fear and its symptoms stress and anxiety are created by the mind, they are not real. The only true and valid fear is the one that exists just before you are about to face a life threatening circumstance, something that might actually kill you (thanks to Landmark Education for this insight). All other fears are well overstated and over-rated.

A doco on the Hubble Space Program last night helped put my anxiety and fear into perspective. The Hubble had taken a picture of the end of the universe. Pictures taken by Hubble are very old because they are looking back in time, the vast amount of time taken for light to get to Hubble from the edge of the universe. When the universe was young it was made up of neat and tidy galaxies. Now the universe is older it’s gotten quite worn out and messy. A lot of the galaxies have mashed into each other (photo above care of hubblesite.org). Millions of galaxies out there have hundreds of thousand of stars, each of which might have their own planets. These most probably have their own life forms. These galaxies collide and decimate each other. Jeepers, whole galaxies are being created and destroyed. In context, my existence isn’t even a blink.

As an aside, if you believe we are alone in the universe you probably also don’t believe something until you see it, you think you will win lotto one day and you chose to refute basic mathematical principals around statistical probability. The maths that we are alone is: 1 planet out of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 known stars and associated planets in the universe.

So why get mentally worked up about such relatively small things in one persons life, my life. Release 5.0 of Saasu is hardly a Galactic Crush. Not even close to being a micro-second of universal existence. It really does highlight how inward humans can be if not slapped with an occasional reality check. It also highlights the selfishness of fear for ones problems and existence.

Fear is obviously an effective genetic defensive mechanism that is very difficult to suppress but going forward I’ll try save my anxiety and fear for my kids and wife.

For tips on overcoming fear the Buddhist faith has it covered… tibetonline.tv or try the odd discovery channel doco… discovery.com

Extract from Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”…. C A M P B E L L : There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life to the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved? In Hawaii some four or five years ago there was an extraordinary event that represents this problem. There is a place there called the Pali, where the trade winds from the north come rushing through a great ridge of mountains. People like to go up there to get their hair blown about or sometimes to commit suicide-you know, something like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. One day, two policemen were driving up the Pali road when they saw, just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man but caught him just as he jumped, and he was himself being pulled over when the second cop arrived in time and pulled the two of them back. Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off-his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life-all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die. Later, a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let go? You would have been killed.” And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.” How come? Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life. The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of realization of that truth. The concept of love your neighbor is to put you in tune with this fact. But whether you love your neighbor or not, when the realization grabs you, you may risk your life. That Hawaiian policeman didn’t know who the young man was to whom he had given himself. Schopenhauer declares that in small ways you can see this happening every day, all the time, moving life in the world, people doing selfless things to and for each other. M oY E R S : So when Jesus says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he is saying in effect, “Love thy neighbor because he is yourself.” CAMPBELL: There is a beautiful figure in the Oriental tradition, the bodhisattva, whose nature is boundless compassion, and from whose fingertips there is said to drip ambrosia down to the lowest depths of hell. M O Y E R S : And the meaning of that? CAMPBELL: At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image. The bodhisattva represents the principle of compassion, which is the healing principle that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva is one who has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That’s exactly the theme of Paul’s statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think Godhood something to be held to but took the form of a servant here on the earth, even to death on the cross.” That’s a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life.

And the legend said… “If you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there is anything you can do about it. If you can, there is no need to worry about it; if you cannot do anything, then there is also no need to worry.” The Dalai Lama