I started this blog in order to explore what it means to have (or be) an integrated life. Where I once thought of it as a goal, I’ve come to see it as a process. A life is never static, and as it evolves there are always new aspects to be integrated into whatever one thinks of as one’s self.
Recently, though, I have been thinking of a slightly different perspective on all this. There are not only the countless aspects and possibilities of this life, there is that other dimension of reality which is absolute. I haven’t addressed that, because the two dimensions, being totally different, cannot be compared. Language, being analytical and objective, cannot describe what is none of this. It can only point, as in myth or poetry. (The Tao which can be named is not the true Tao.)
But since my mother’s death last Spring, I have had a need to find for myself some meaning for life faced with death (always there, but we don’t always think about it). I have meditated more on what I experience as changeless behind the unending changes of sensory data, and I have come to see that this is the ultimate integration: to really understand, in mind and body, that the unchanging, absolute dimension of reality and the temporal ever-changing phenomena are the same reality. My body will die, but the unchanging dimension of who I am never dies, is never born, it just is.
I have long believed this, but my task now is to integrate this knowledge fully, so that I live with it. Just as I need to embrace shadow elements I haven’t owned, even more must I embrace this dimension of myself, which I cannot objectively know, but which I can intuit and experience.
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