[Exploring Life] A goal that many of us hold secretly within is to live a long and healthy life, as free from pain and suffering as possible. It would be ideal if each of us were guaranteed to live a long, vibrant and healthy life, until we experience a sudden and painless decline far into the final stages of old age. And wouldn’t it be remarkable if we knew with absolute certainty what happens to us after death. However, we are all faced with the possibility of an interrupted life and uncertainty in terms of what lies beyond this reality. As we continue to age, we begin to realize that we are now farther away from our beginnings, and closer to the conclusion of life. As we move deeper into the experience of aging, we feel the movement of time differently.

Even if we have the good fortune not to experience a debilitating disease, we will all inexorably experience senescence – the natural and normal deterioration of the body as we get older. We begin to feel changes in our body quite gradually, while our minds quietly begin to devote more attention to these changes, and our spirits to ponder the sacred with a more inspired and authentic intensity. In using the word sacred I do not mean to imply a religious agenda; the presence of the sacred in not dependent upon religion. The sacred refers to the essence of being alive that animates us with awe, reverence, and wonder. In the absence of a meaningful spiritual practice for aging to help us navigate through the turbulent waters of growing older, we can feel immobilized by a lack meaning and purpose in life. The sacred is a sanctuary in which we discover our own sense meaning and purpose. As we age, the quest for meaning and purpose to anchor our experience becomes increasingly important to us, and this quest lies at the heart of a spirituality of aging.
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[Exploring Life] A dark night of the soul is an invitation to our own renaissance. The curse of seemingly inescapable psychological and spiritual burdens is a threshold that immerses us in a dark unrelenting entanglement with our own spiritual-renewal. It is deep within the midst of our most intense struggles in life that we are provided with the opportunity to cultivate resilience, self-reliance, and the recovery of our intimate and inexorable bond with nature. Escaping the shackles of habitual and conditioned responses in life leads to the recovery of our innate creativity, which allows us to offer ourselves more imaginatively to the world. When the source of our creativity is natural, the expression of our presence flows effortlessly into the world around us. It is not, unfortunately, possible to insulate ourselves from pain and suffering and attempting to do so will only serve to intensify our quiet agony, but we can choose to meet that which threatens us the most with imagination.

The intense psychological and spiritual burden imposed on our sensibilities in a dark night of the soul is immense and threatening. Life can take on the appearance of seemingly endless anxieties and dilemmas exacerbated by a painful unrelenting absence of simplicity, comprehension, and clarity. Perhaps the most profound and painful aspect of a dark night is the realization that we are completely and irrevocably alone in our journey. No one can travel with us downward into the roots of our own identity. We can read about the journey of others into the dark night, but ultimately we must escape from our entrenched habits, addictions, patterns and routines that have silently reduced any remaining creativity we might within our soul have to mere cultural fodder. Our primary resource in the midst of a dark night is a vibrant and expansive form of learning that lies in wait within each of us. It is now time to author our own unique narrative. This is the essence of the invitation and the essential creative endeavour shrouded within the mercurial depths of a dark night of the soul.
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We find ourselves today in the midst of an economic storm born in the shadowy underworld of corporate greed, want, superficiality, and narcissism that threatens the sustainability of our immediate lifestyle. And we stand together in the midst of an approaching environmental tsunami in which our attempts to own and commoditize the natural world will inevitably turn against us and threaten our very survival. Intensifying our sense of confrontation with the world around us are fundamentalist and extremist movements that embrace lunacy under the guise of religion. Economic, environmental, and religious virulence immerses each of us in a global confluence of angst, anxiety, and fear disguised as progress and development. The debt crisis is not limited to the realm of economics. The real debt crisis lies deep within the camouflaged and well protected realm of our own narcissism.

The description above is a vast and fragile generality. Not all of people suffer from these various forms of indebtedness. It is to say, however, that the general presence of these crises is real and each of us walks among them every day. For an empathetic spirit, the walk can become infectious and the vast surround of angst and fear can work its way into the presence of the sensitive person. An affective person is not a weak person; an affective person is an individual that feels and communicates their surroundings with emotional vibrancy and intuitive sensibilities. Equanimity, or the ability to remain physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritual “equal” or “balanced” in all circumstance is a fundamental spiritual quality. What does being “equal” or “balanced” really mean?
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[Exploring Life] When we receive an education we are placed into a system of prerequisites that have been determined by an amorphous agency. By definition, education is an experience that is predetermined, imposed, rigidly structured, and bound to a self-reinforcing system of evaluation. The essence of the education system originates in automation, mechanization, generalization, and abstraction. Education uniformly prepares us to successfully participate in the static cultural assumptions of the status quo. We gain familiarity with other people’s thoughts, ideas, theories, and stories, which we seem to adopt as if they were our own. This is, however, exactly what education needs to be since it is far better to be part of the machine than it is to be exiled and be forced to survive on the fringes of society. In this sense, education is cultural survival.

Life, as we know, is fluid, emergent, immediate, and mysterious. We are all faced with these things called the inevitable in life including death, aging, the unexpected, and the unknown. Even though we may possess cultural security and safety in the form of a career and family, life is a far more powerful and numinous force than culture can ever hope to be. A dark night of the soul is a numinous force of life that initially shatters our cultural assumptions leaving us adrift in the foreboding tempestuous currents of not knowing, failing to understand, and debilitated awareness. We may stand on the pinnacle of cultural success, only to face the harsh reality that it is ultimately a house of cards. A dark night is a different form of education that is imposed from a mysterious source but in no way embraces prerequisites, automation, generalization, and abstraction. The reason for this is quite clear, when we enter into a dark night of the soul, we do not know where we are, why we are here, or how to proceed. That is to say, we are forced into the deepest mysteries of our being.
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[Exploring Life] An external presence means that we share some kind of proximity with other living force in our world. This kind of presence may be visible or invisible, readily perceptible to our senses or it may be intuited as a felt-presence that does not present itself as everyday sensation. The invisible tends to confound and confuse us. That is to say, if we cannot readily grasp a presence through our basic physical sensory apparatus, we have a tendency to conclude that it may not exist or at least in our imagination only. This is a strikingly crude and inert belief that misleads us into proceeding through life in a isolated and spiritless manner. When we invite and inhabit different forms of presence into our lives we expand our physical, mental, and spiritual horizons.

The Earth is the origin and basis for all life. Indigenous tribal cultures often maintain an intimate sense of connection with the natural world and believe that the Earth is a living presence. Modern cultures tends to use the Earth as if it can be “owned” and that whatever life is “present” on it can be manipulated and even destroyed at whim. Of course, this is an over-generalization, albeit with an unfortunate sense of accuracy about it. However, it is reasonable to generalize that the way indigenous tribal culture and modern culture perceives the presence of the Earth are remarkably different. The modern consciousness is delusional in that it tends to see the world as something that can be owned. Tribal consciousness lives close to the Earth, with the least amount of technological mediation, and tend to embrace a close affinity to their surroundings. They often believe that the Earth and everything it is alive and imbued with spirit, just as they are. Modern consciousness tends to perceive the Earth as an object of possession and commodification. To the modern consciousness, humanity is generally viewed as a superior life form.
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[Exploring Life] Fatalism is an insipid belief that the general order of things, including the experiences we have in life, are predetermined and that we are powerless to alter our destiny. Self-determination is an ostentatious belief that we have the power to make decisions without the interference of outside influences. There are even those that claim we have the ability to manifest any intention we desire if we truly believe in it. This of course is nothing more than new age nonsense. Both perspectives present extreme viewpoints that are hard to locate in our authentic experience of everyday life, and tend to amount to little more than fodder for philosophical meandering. Somewhere in between these two extremes it may be that our ability or “power” to influence the course of our life lies within our capacity to interact and form relationships with the world around us. The essential question is, “Does the Earth, or Universe for that matter, have a an underlying intelligence that we can communicate with.

In The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream, Paulo Coelho provides a vision of the Earth and Universe as a living and soulful entity that we learn to communicate with through a language he simply referred to as “The Language of the World.” The premise of the story originates in the idea that each of us has a specific purpose, or Personal Legend, and that by learning to interact with The Language of the World and the omens it provides we can pursue our dreams in life. There are magical qualities and moments in the story that are compelling. The story of a young boy’s quest for meaning and purpose in life is a journey toward fulfilment of bliss.
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[Exploring Life] The spiritual dimension is the space in which we journey into our most divine essence, as well as our darkest shadow. A spiritual quality is an intuitive source of inspiration we inhabit in order to orient ourselves to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The word presence embraces an essential spiritual quality and creative capacity. We are all artists within the confluence of our everyday lives. The greatest form of art is etched out of raw experience and creatively expressed through the quality of our presence in the world. Crafting our identity and the nature of our presence in the world is the most primordial and pristine art form. Exploring the nature of presence invites a journey into the realms of identity, sensibility, discernment, meaning and purpose.

Presence is everywhere: it weaves itself deep within the fabric of our essence and resonates in landscapes beyond the realm of awareness. There is immense flexibility in presence. It can refer us to something quite simple as attendance, that a person is physical present without making reference to the qualities of presence that are companion. This is a banal and unimaginative use of the word. In its most compelling sense, presence invites us to explore a landscape of vibrant attributes such as beauty, gratitude, and light, as well as the darker attributes of suffering, ignorance, and want. Presence easily travels across the sanctuaries of the soul as well as the hostile terrain of suffering; it is everywhere around us; it is everywhere within us.
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[Exploring Life] Ecopsychology embraces three vital concepts, relationship, interaction, and belonging. Psychology has had an incestuous history, one in which it constantly looked for solutions to the problems it was responsible for creating in the first place. In this sense, psychology created its own market by infecting people with false assumptions about behaviour, emotions, and feelings. In viewing the mind as both solution and problem, as a self-contained concept unto itself, it has degraded the human experience to mere claustrophobic ramblings hidden behind the pleasant disguise of intellectual insight. It is a nauseating form of rampant self-proclaimed expertism. The failure of psychology lies directly in its inability as a form of expertise to understand and embrace context.

Ecology is a biological science that focuses on exploring and understanding complex interactions and relationships between organisms and their environment, including how living organisms relate to each other. Unlike psychology, ecology is focused on context. Adding the modifier “eco” to psychology is an attempt to rescue psychology from its own demise. More specifically, the mind cannot be properly understood in isolation and the context, the total surround, that the mind functions within embraces ideas about relationship, interaction and belonging. These three qualities also have a vibrant and essential spiritual dimension. To explore the mind in the absence of the spiritual qualities of relationship, interaction and belonging is a harsh form of confinement, a concentration camp of the mind, that only serves to intensify mental degradation.
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[Exploring Life] We are immersed in a culture that confuses education with learning. More precisely, we ritually submit ourselves to courses that have been prepared by someone else and trust that the instructional delivery these courses will inspire learning. In a bizarre twist, we sometimes incorrectly think of education as being synonymous with learning. Learning is a phenomenon; education is a technology. This is one example of how we tend to denigrate human capacities and qualities to that of machine metaphors. Education is not a program for learning, it is in fact an assembly-line in which the design of the prerequisite prevails over our own individual and unique experiences in life. In the spiritual realm authentic learning, not education, is essential.

One of the addictions that emerges from our obsession with education is dependence. That is to say, we lose our self-reliance with respect to learning and instead broker it out to curricula, instructional design, degrees, courses, teachers, and inept forms of assessment and evaluation. We falsely believe that greater expertise lies beyond ourselves. More simply, we come to believe that the location of learning is exterior, or outside ourselves, and in the process lose our connection to the interior world. We desperately look to the exterior for solace and are constantly disappointed; we avoid the messy untamed interior world of our our mind and emotions where true discovery resides. This bias toward the exterior is a significant problem for those interested in expanding and deepening their spiritual presence on Earth. There is no form of education that can assist us in this journey; to embrace spirituality in life means to be absolutely self-reliant in learning.
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[Exploring Life] One important outcome of a dark night of the soul, if it is ever attained, is what St. John of the Cross refers to as spiritual purification. A basic premise in the dark night is that both our senses and our spirit must be cleansed in order to purify the soul, and therefore to walk out of the dark night itself. In order to accomplish, he states that we must surrender to contemplation – to stillness, silence and formlessness – so that our souls are no longer troubled by the labour and stress of thought, intellect, and ideas. This kind of approach, often referred to as meditation, has a universal resonance about it and is found in many cultures and many historical time periods. The dark night of the soul is an archetype or life experience that is pervasive throughout humanity.

A basic premise of St. John’s dark night is that both the sense and the soul must be “cleansed” or “purified.” What precisely is it that requires cleansing and purification? In the spiritual domain there is only one way in which we can identify truth, and that is through direct experience. Spirituality cannot proceed by merely reading books; we must investigate what is being said in an authentic and personal manner. If something needs to be cleansed or purified, then I expect there is something within that is causing pain, suffering, or some kind of lingering anxiety. He describes the first night, the purification of the senses, as bitter and devastating, and the second night, the purification of the spirit, as horrendous and terrifying. The reason for this is the presence of evil within.
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