This is a further excerpt from The Mechanics of Happiness: Engineering A Positive Approach To Your Life -

©Peter Levine

As the human odyssey has unfolded we have conquered many of the perceived drudgeries of life. Automation has released us from toil, education has freed us from ignorance, medical science has made us healthier, and we are wealthier than ever before. Yet there is an undercurrent of lack of satisfaction, now life’s problems have been, to a large extent, solved we find that this is not how we imagined it would be. People are not happier, they are not more fulfilled, they do not feel a sense of purpose, despite their material abundance. After the resistance has been removed we are left with ourselves. The fundamental truth of our situation leaves us with a hunger that still needs satiating. This is where you are now.

This is the place you are in. Do you recognize it?

The human situation was often presented as a duality, the marriage of mind and body, a consciously aware animating principle encased within an animalistic or mechanical body. The new intellectual freedom brought about by the Age of Enlightenment
in Europe and America in the Eighteenth Century freed itself of the dogmatic and irrational ways that had hindered development in the Western World. This was like releasing a coiled spring and a huge outpouring of energy followed. Revolutions, social upheaval, intellectual debate, the redefining of the socio economic structure of the Western World and, by proxy, the whole world given that Western influence extended across the globe via its emerging geopolitical infrastructure. It continued like a tidal wave and sowed a cynical and mistrustful seed of doubt in the minds of people who could cite centuries of dogma and ignorance as the bitter fruit of blind faith and adhesion to a creed that was deemed too extraordinary for the mere mind of mortal man to comprehend. So we developed a tradition of duality, minds and bodies.

Meanwhile there were those who kept the faith, they could not explain it, did not understand it but felt secure in the fact of its existence. If there were a heaven and earth and there was a heavenly reward, a sort of other dimensional pay day then would it not be foolish to jeopardize that with radical thinking and heresy? There was also the weight of people untouched by Western developments who carried on with their own traditions and philosophical and religious practices never doubting or suspecting them of being artifice in a power struggle in the way that the new Enlightenment perceived them. They were not infected by the cynicism that the Age of Reason, understandably, ushered in.

This is where you are in relationship to the question “Who am I?” a product of bewildering complexity and heritage but with a third vector, a third aspect that the Western hegemony is uneasy about, the aspect that I have called the Infinite. It is possible to write extensively and to gather information on the first two aspects of this triumvirate, the Fixed and the Fluid, and become well
versed in the notion of dualism, or what Western philosophers actually call the Mind Body Problem.

There is no problem, there is no difficulty with it at all, absolutely none. It is difficult to approach intellectually for a post Enlightenment thinker, which you are, because of the paradoxes that have been created by spurious arguments.

Tune yourself into the problems that exist and, surprise, surprise, all you begin to see are problems. Look, one argument leads to another, like goes to like, these things attract one another. Have you noticed how the fighting drunks always seem to find each other by the end of the night? Why do you think that is? It’s because they resonate on a particular frequency and they broadcast that signal. Have you traveled to some remote spot on the planet and found yourself meeting someone from your city or county Why does that happen? And yet it is the same with all things, our thoughts, our actions, our fears and so on, you will attract those things to yourself that are like yourself, by frequency.

Part three of our triumvirate then, the Infinite. Mystics, visionaries, the illumined and the enlightened have alluded to this domain. By nature it is diffi cult to describe adequately because it is a somewhat ephemeral place. People can go all holy and a bit peculiar when it’s mentioned and really it isn’t like that but that is part of the baggage that comes with this territory and is only to be expected given the nonsense that has accumulated over the centuries regarding it. It’s pretty vast and people see different things. Remember our sages in the dark from earlier? Your scientific mind likes to know that all matter can be broken down to energy, your quantum theory loves the idea that an atom is like the gateway into another dimension whose electrical properties stretch the ability of our woolly headed thinking to their limits and beyond. So we have an animating principle, it is where the word animal comes from and this is the idea that something resides within the physical form that at the instance of death or the expiration of the physical body departs. Have you seen a lifeless body? Particularly of someone you knew and had
human exchanges with. If you have experienced this then you will know that something is gone, something is absent.

Let’s consider our post Enlightenment brain and its craving for rational empiricism. It knows that energy cannot be created, cannot be destroyed but just is and can only change its form. Where is the energy gone? Where has that life-force gone to and within the context of this study WHAT is the energy? Until the Age of Reason all mindful contemplation, all exercise of the human capacity to think and to consider the Universe came to the consistent conclusion that the human being was, in part, a spiritual entity. That something ‘other’ resided within the human form and that something was pretty damn important, even though its precise nature was a mystery, was a given, none of the great thinkers ever saw the benefit of presuming otherwise.

The Age of Reason allowed a rash of iconoclasm to assert itself upon the body politic of human reasoning and it was a much needed breath of fresh air. It extended itself to the point that it became arrogant and conceited and dismissed any consideration of a spiritual dimension to the human situation as being the by-product of imbecility and any contemplation of spiritual matters nothing more than mumbo jumbo. Paradoxically it became a delinquent dogma of its own dismissing any attempt at meaningful pursuit of the greater purpose of human existence as being symptomatic of some disease afflicting the enquirer. Th is new dogma used the evidence of centuries of blind faith as its authority for assuming the moral and intellectual high ground in matters pertaining to the human situation. It is the nature of things that something young – collectively the body of thinking the Age of Reason ushered in is, in the pantheon of ideas, young – assumes it is the first in everything, all teenage rebels believe they are the original teenage rebels. Let’s return to our theme. Suppose that spirit inside each human being were like a seed. Its requirements would be exactly the same as a seed that you might plant in the ground. Remember we live in a symmetrical Universe, all that is above is below and that which is below is reflected in the heavens. This was the mystery of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the wisdom of the ancients and the pinnacle of understanding for many of the world’s greatest institutions of learning. Taking the principle ‘as above, so below’ we see that given the right conditions the spirit may grow and develop into something magnificent of its own accord.

Here then is the rub. The conditions that the world places upon you do not necessarily promote the growth of your spirit, in fact it is quite the opposite. The human spirit goes into a state of hibernation, just like a bear in the northern climes spends the winter in its cave. You may have heard of the kundalini, the coiled serpent at the base of the spine, the sleeper within and other allusions to a latent energy within each of us.  This work, if you are open to it, will be like the first signs of spring. There is a possibility that the long dark winter will pass and that the bright days of spring will herald a new dawn for you personally. That is the deal, and that is what is on offer.

Remember the earlier introduction and the two mutually distrustful giants that may offer you guidance? This is not self help over promising, this is for real, this is about you becoming your personal emancipator and the liberator of your own life’s possibility. No one else can do that for you and by the same process no one else can ever take the credit from you. You will be a self made man or woman if that is what you choose, happiness will be a side effect as you step into a world that glistens and drips with vitality and proposition. If you want it. There are those who may assist and guide you, but you are the author of your own story, you write your own ticket and the best, my friend, is yet to come. “Who am I?” is a fundamental touchstone to this. If you are tangled in a net but don’t know it, it helps if there is someone on the outside who can say: “Wait. You’re tangled in a net, the more you struggle, the more entangled you become.” And they can then lend you a hand. You cannot do it alone, we all need help from each other in some way.

Here’s a real chiller. Growth is a Universal principle, a law, whatever is active in you will grow. That is why it is said only the good die young, because they have never had to deal with the consequences of watching those things inside them evolve unchecked and becoming ogres. This is the beginning of personal development, locate what fills you with passion, find out what you love, fill your life with that energy and you will become an unstoppable dynamo.