Truth In Moments

The Story...

This story was relayed to me third person. The boy in the story was his mentor.

In the 1950’s, in a country in upheaval with war, a small boy of school age was cold. It was winter and in this country their winters could be brutal. He had pleaded with his father several times to purchase him a warmer coat and his father had simply replied “no”. In their culture, and in that time, the father-son relationship was very respectful and simple. If your father said “Jump!”, you asked quickly, “How high, sir?”, just to make sure you weren’t punished for insubordination.

On this particular day, it was bitterly cold, and being that cold motivated him to ask his father one last time for a new coat. His motivation of the moment overtook his common sense, a not uncommon occurrence in humans - and so he did. His father observed him soberly and simply responded, “Walk with me outside”, and so he did.

They walked to the water well outside where his father stopped, turned around and said, “Take off your clothes”. I can only imagine the fear this boy must have been feeling at this moment. But, being a dutiful son, he did as he was told. To his surprise, his father did the same.

When they were both completely naked, the father turned to the well and drew up a bucket of water, then turned to the boy and said “sit”, and so he did. The father brought the bucket over to the boy and poured some of the water over his head. Then he sat down just in front of the boy and poured the remainder of the water on his head. He then sat the bucket down beside him, put his arms on his legs and simply stared at the boy.

It didn’t take long, being as cold as it was, for both father and son to enter into uncontrolled shivering, the body attempting to force involuntary muscle contractions to produce heat. After what seemed like an eternity to the boy, his father simply said, through chattering teeth, “Now you are cold.” And in that moment, the boy’s acute frame of reference of what being "cold" could be - and his ever evolving world view - changed forever.

Let's Discuss...

Moments. In every single moment since we have been born, we have brought with us and used as a filter, a world view, the pre-situational frame of reference that is there before we perceive, and attend to and then think and act within those moments of life. That world view has changed, morphed, been modified by us and by “others” and can be changed acutely in a positive or negative way as new frames of reference are experienced. What we choose to experience, what we relent to the “others” to choose for us to experience is our life of moments - and this becomes who we truly are. Our moments are us.

Moments are not just linear time - the Greek chronos for the linear aspect of considering time - they are all of life, all at once. Small entities of life with height, depth and breadth, the Greek kairos of being an opportune time, with meaning and character all their own, but also moving forward, never backward. The mosaic of our moments of the past have interwoven and created our worldview that we bring to this moment at any one time and those moments of the past, and this moment now are already creating our future moments. Past, present and future are embedded in every moment. This is the Truth of Moments.

We can choose many paths at this juncture to consider our moments, to consider how we actually choose and live our moments. I will choose one and attribute it as I go.

I prefer to think of moments as our “daisen”, a German word meaning “existence”. It was used by Martin Heidegger in a particular context to describe the human being and their place in the world. He used dasein to refer to the mode of being that is unique to humans, and that humans are aware of and must confront issues like mortality, personhood, and the paradox of living in relationships with others while also being alone. Heidegger uses Dasein as a replacement for "consciousness" and "mind" to suggest that humans are in the world in a mode of "uncovering" that discloses other entities and themselves. 

Heidegger was a phenomenologist and existentialist, and without diving too deeply down those modes of inquiry at this juncture, I hope he would agree with this merging of thoughts from Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger - an oversimplified but I believe accurate description of our moments. 

In every moment, we bring our worldview with us - it is part of us - whether we are conscious of it at that moment or not. This worldview is a mosaic of all of our experiential moments, parsed for seeming irrelevance and then saved for importance. These are woven together and compressed into an unknowable “Us” and this “Us” is quite literally our world view. My thoughts here dovetail, obliquely, the Jungian concept of the unconscious.

As we encounter any moment, we endow that moment, consciously and unconsciously, with part of ourselves that lives within that world view and in doing so, the “other” of that moment, whether that be an object or a person, responds in kind to the endowment offered and discloses something back to us. What it brings to light, how much of its numinousness this particular phenomenon reveals, will be in direct response to what we have offered of ourselves. You might say that this “disclosure”, like human emotion, has a logic all its own. The interpretation for my life is that it can be summed up quite nicely in the phrase from Rumi, “What you seek is seeking you.” For me, this is foundational to my worldview.

This process happens - unfolding and folding continuously and infinitely - in every moment. It has happened in every moment, will happen in every moment, back and forth, integrating to create our experiential universe, whether we are conscious of all that is being revealed - or not being revealed - or not conscious of all or parts thereof. In my mind, there is no other place to converge and reduce life to. There is nothing less than this. This is the Truth of Moments.

Our lives are moments we have comprehended well, experienced and lived consciously, but also moments that have passed that could have had meaning for us, should have had meaning for us, that we did not perceive and so therefore did not attend to and thus, those moments slipped through our opaqueness, were lost in our vapidity like smoke through the trees. 

If we accept and understand this, then we can do the work to understand how to intentionally create our moments as we are simultaneously learning from the numinous unveiling of what each moment actually is. That from these moments, we can then diverge, expand our imaginations and create our moments in the present, and thus create and design our future moments. We do have a say in what our moments will be and thus, where we are steering the ship that is our lives.

Truth of moments is where I began my journey of self-transformation, where I began to seek out who I really was, what I really wanted and where I wanted to go. There have been many solid steps forward over the years - some tentative and some bold - and just as many missteps, but no matter. One of the many things I have learned is that you have to keep moving - no matter what. Every day, in all things: Head up - shoulders back - Move.

I’m simply offering to share the path I have taken so far, to explain to you why I did what I did, why I do what I do, why I read what I read, why I descended which rabbit holes and the matrix I found, why I climbed which trees and the things that I saw from other perspectives, but also to offer you many other options of exploration of the Self that might have more meaning to you. Hopefully you can share those explorations with me some time.

There is no one path, no one size fits all. But if you want to live an intentional life, with meaning and joy, within a constant state of confidence and empowered growth instead of wallowing in the pit of deficiency living simply accepting what the “other” has to give, you do have to choose a path, and you do have to move. And which path you take has always been up to you. You are your moments, and your moments are you. The Truth of your Moments are all there is.

If you have the courage to take the first step, let’s go.

The Story and Lessons

We experience our moments in frames of reference - we bring one with us. It's almost impossible not to. In those moments that evolve and beget other moments, within ourselves and with others, that frame of reference - particular to us - is the thing we measure against as we move through those moments, whether we are conscious of it or not. Depending on that frame of reference, that context of us, we take in information, react to it with our memories of past emotions and experiences and move through that lived moment - one way or the other.

If you live a life of comfort and convenience and always have, if you have no reference for being uncomfortable, for pain or for any level of suffering at all - everything that isn't completely comfortable or convenient is a negative and something to move away from. This is the life many people live now. Moving from moment to moment with the default frame of reference being always, what is the most comforable, convenient and painless option right now? It doens't matter what should be done, or needs to be done. Comfort is your King.

A little warm or chilly? Depending on your personal frame of reference based on the history of your life, you will either sprint to the thermostat or quickly change your clothing, or, you just note the change and move on with your moment at hand. How many times have I heard the phrase, "That's just the worst!". Is it? Are you sure? The thing that is happening right now in this moment is the worst? Compared to what?

Words have meaning. They descibe something that will be remembered with those words and those memories and how you describe them to yourself become who you are. In all the suffering I have endured, I know there is worse suffering, and because I know this, because I have lived my suffering, I know most of life is NOT suffering. Life isn't anywhere near as hard as we perceive it and process it.

It can always be worse. Have some courage, check yourself and your frames of reference. You will never change, never become more than you are, unless you are willing to relent and then embrace being uncomfortable in the pursuit of a passion. You will never discover and then pursue your life's calling unless you are willing to endure pain and suffering. You must suffer for your passions. A passion without suffering is not a passion, it's just a hedonic hobby, a quick and easy path to dopamine and stuck in mindless dopamine loops via social media does not a life make.

We live in a Culture of Comfort, driven by an increasingly insidious Culture of Convenience and attacked daily by a Culture of Conformity that has devolved into secular meaninglessness that has never been seen in the history of the human race. Is this the life you want? Just another brick in the wall?

Step Away - Rise Above - Move Beyond.

More to come....