by Liz B | Jan 23, 2020 | Writing
I love night time walks in the woods…especially on a quiet, foggy night in a place where I feel safe. The smell of wood burning reminds me of late night campfires with friends. The sound of light rain is falling on the ground and I hear running water in the distance. It stills me internally and total clarity begins to take over my mental state. I fully embrace the respite away from cars and people. Faint memories begin to come up of the eleven consecutive years I spent going to a music festival spending all night wandering fields and playing music until the break of dawn. Or buying a whole gallon of ice cream and sharing them with friends I’d see only once per year on the campgrounds as we walked in the rain. Sometimes we’d brave more intense thunderstorms as we packed in a van and sang songs together or hid in one of the nearby buildings after salvaging as much as we could of our campsites.
It’s these moments where you learn reconnect to a deeper part of yourself — you become more grounded by re-establishing a close sense of community with no true need to go anywhere, do anything, impress anyone, etc. Just wandering freely and playing for days…every day brought a new adventure that we would make for ourselves, and at night we’d all fall asleep in our tents satisfied.
After a while you even lose your sense of time as you reconnect with nature and become the silence within that we so often lack, even if for a moment.
by Liz B | Jun 21, 2017 | Identity, Spirituality, Thoughts and Reflection
At times I question everything — I question everything I’ve understood to be real, all beliefs I’ve currently held based on personal experience here on Earth. Doing that ends up giving me a sense of groundlessness, a sense of not having any bearings here or understanding the purpose. Truly loosening the ideas we hold firmly about ourselves and our experience here begins to loosen the sense of self.
I have an understanding that the universe (and all that exists) contains some laws on a scale that we currently can’t comprehend.
I also have a belief that we are here on Earth as humans to experience and “gather data” (i.e. knowledge), so to speak, that we potentially couldn’t in other realms or forms. This is what I understand to be a general purpose of human life on a larger scale (aside from reproduction, of course).
I believe that upon death, our human form and ego is destroyed, but our energy is not destroyed and can exist in other ways, whatever those ways might be.
These premises lead me to question this: Say that we are here on Earth to experience things and gather knowledge that has some relevance to the after life or other form of existence, and does so only within a limited set of parameters (because life on Earth is limited to Earthly laws). For example, value judgments that only essentially apply to our being able to operate here, limited thought processes (we can only grasp so much), limited sense of time, and so on. What relevance then does gathering knowledge here on Earth have if in a nonphysical realm/after death, the laws of the universe and of our own beings as we know them are infinitely expanded upon, thus adding context and perhaps rendering the laws as we know them only valid for existing on Earth as a human?
It’s like a math problem with a specific set of limited parameters, and that math problem then changes once more data is added to the context. So then the original problem is either no longer a problem or the nature of it changes. Maybe that’s too linear of a way of thinking of it.
But perhaps there is no purpose of our lives aside from gathering data in one of the universe’s many realms and set of parameters. But then what would be the purpose of gathering knowledge? Is there an end goal?
Is it primarily a human thing to want to apply a purpose to something?
Can we even begin to comprehend the purpose of our existence at all when we can only evaluate our selves and our lives from our Earthly form and its laws/attributes?
Sense of Purpose as Continual Increase in Knowledge and Self-Awareness
My current understanding of human purpose was to continually refine our own relation to the universe. In other words, our experiences here on Earth lead an increase in self-awareness, to then hopefully continually raise in consciousness levels and at some point be able to exist primarily in a “higher” form. But, I am realizing that this may just be a very individualized ego-centric (not egotistical, but rather operating solely from within the frame of the individual sense of self) type of evaluation of existence. It may be that we ARE the universe already, just existing as a human within relatively limited parameters.
There may not be any universal, big-picture sense of progression that exists objectively outside of the meaning that we assign to our Earthly lives.
Our true form is existence and part of the universe itself. We are not separate from it now, regardless of our state of self-awareness. However, the more self-aware we are, the more profound and dense our Earthly experiences will be.
Letting Intuition Guide Purpose
I realize that this is my rational mind trying to interpret existence. I think the means to which we can truly understand existence at this point in time is not so much through interpretation and deduction, but intuition.
I always return back to the idea of letting go and letting intuition guide us, but it can be very difficult for the ego and rational mind to not want to assign interpretations to things our intuition might be telling us or our experiences here in general. It may just be that this yearning and craving for answers that may once again be uniquely human and have little relevance later.
All we truly can do is simply live the best way we know how, and not be too impatient for answers.
