Chapter 06 - Viagnostic

As imperfect beings, we have no choice but to accept that mistakes will occur. In order to live, we must learn, and in order to learn, we must scrutinize our own notions of the world and take corrective action. We rely on steady feedback from our environment to adapt and progress. Mistakes are an inevitable necessity of life, and they remain positive only if we learn from them and if we do not place ourselves and others needlessly at risk. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for many of us to have grown up in a culture or worked in a professional setting where errors are perceived as being mostly negative. As a society, we are generally taught that our relative performance defines our value, and many of us tend to avoid or hide our faults in order to present a comparatively unblemished record. But there is nothing inherently wrong with making mistakes. Even if we make the same mistake more than once, the goal is to recognize them whenever they are made so that we can prevent them from recurring or rectify them before their consequences become irreversible if possible. It is not a failing to make a mistake because learning begins with the awareness of our errors. However, it does reflect poorly on us when we continue to repeat the same blunders and never learn to correct them or demonstrate some degree of improvement. Hence, it is fair to say that a real problem can only be found in our deliberate neglect of a persistent issue.

It is difficult to judge if what we have done or might do constitutes a mistake or a solution. It is quite conceivable that the same actions that may have corrected or averted a perceived problem may also have inadvertently caused other unanticipated issues. This occurs because we never truly have a complete picture of the system in which we operate. We neither foresee all scenarios nor identify all associated impacts of our actions. Unless we live in a bubble protected from external forces, we cannot account for all variables that may shift the probability of events despite our best efforts to achieve specific outcomes. Undoubtedly, we can and do accomplish many things, but we should translate whatever misaligns with our expectations into future corrective action, which should include amending our expectations if they prove to be unrealistic. Since there are always things outside of our direct control or unknown to us, we need experience and more exposure to new information to update our knowledge and adjust our behaviour in accordance with reality.

The world can be seen as cycling through oscillating states of perceived order and chaos, constantly moving in and out of our awareness as we detect changing conditions within and outside of our bodies. These changes are represented by events etched across our space-time continuum, and they can range from cell division to a supernova and from a technological innovation to waste disposal. They can also be as instantaneous as turning on a ceiling light in a dark room or drag out longer like the full revolution of a planet around its sun. Our entire stories as well as the presence of life in any given part of our galaxy can be treated as events. But no matter how swift or gradual something may occur, some kind of progression takes place prior to reaching its eventual conclusion that we come to define or observe and there are underlying processes that map out every temporal trajectory to result in a change in state. Many of these processes intersect, but all of them end and typically restart all over again to instruct a notable measure of consistency to nature. They are rarely linear or straightforward, and while they are not as precisely repetitive as they might seem, they are reassuringly consistent. This is because each output or error produced is only slightly different from the next without deviating from what things are fundamentally designed to be or do within their parametric limits. But operating within their varying tolerances, we still see changing properties when those boundaries are crossed like molecular motion at different temperatures or like human conduct at discrete thresholds of pain or ratios of power. This is also true of complexity when it gives rise to a novel expression of nature because we understand this as potential waiting to be unleashed and perhaps unknowingly part of much larger cycle that we may never live long enough to ascertain.

Everything in our universe follows patterns like waves pulsing up and down, and back and forth, with the regularity and seeming irregularity of its altering forms. At the most elementary level, existence is really movement even when it appears to be still. It is always flowing and moving into alignment with these patterns, and it finds itself in alignment by purely trying to align. It does not rush to any state. It merely folds or unfolds into it while never being fixed in one particular spot or another. Nature functions in this manner in that things just keep happening in order to be. If we view a magnificent forest from a distance in the wilderness, it can appear to be so motionless and silent, but as we approach the trees and empty our minds to afford them our complete attention, we can see and hear their branches and leaves blowing with the wind as the earth tones blend into one impression. Stillness is what we are while we are sensing everything else, and everything else is in flux unconsciously dancing to a quantum rhythm. Everything simply works because every movement is a constant course correction.

THE CURRENT OF LIFE

There is a common tendency for many of us to promote the idea that we are masters of our destiny or that life is determined by our attitude towards it. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to our culturally held aphorisms, which encourage us to harness our influence over our own lives and to seize opportunities instead of brooding over our misfortunes. However, we likely need to embrace a much more fundamental reality before we entertain an inflated sense of control over our fate, and that is the necessity of aligning with reality itself. Our compulsion to fight nature ultimately if not immediately works against us, and at times we end up contributing to the same harm we claim to be deterring. While we may want to counteract the feeling that our stories are already written or that we are at the mercy of what the world has to offer, our stories generally compel us to follow roughly sketched paths that we can refine if we simply spent less time and energy resisting them. Whether we convince ourselves that we deliberately chose to lead these paths or that they were already designed for us to trace, our struggles direct us to an evolving set of compromising options or diverging trails that will progressively teach us about ourselves and about our place in the world.

When we feel the flow of existence and succumb to its force, it means that we have been swept into the current of life. The current signals our entry into the second phase of the viagnostic narrative. When we find ourselves in this phase, we do the things we think we need to do or at least what others tell us we need to do in order to get to where we think we want to be. We can experience this stage as one very long chapter in our lives or we pass through it briefly multiple times until we comprehend that we must undergo this process to realize that the meaning we seek has not yet been found. Some of us may live indefinitely in this phase of our narratives while others will try to avoid or bypass it altogether, but we are inevitably drawn into it regardless of what we want to do. This is no different from being pulled by the ocean current or pointlessly swimming against it. It does not care whether we try to follow it or fight it to no avail. The current is a force that places us in the obstacle course of life with varying windows of opportunity that open and shut along the way. Hence, our goal is to leverage its power to get to where we need to be before it carries us away from what we really are.

In this second phase, we are seeking to be in alignment, whether it is with the natural order of the cosmos or with our own nature. But as we try to bring one part into balance, another becomes unhinged as many of us commonly experience between our personal and professional lives. There are points where we feel everything coming into equilibrium and other times when everything is crashing or slipping into disarray. This sense of bringing things into alignment is the way of the universe. It is what makes the difference between persisting and ceasing to be, and things only cease to be when they stop aligning or trying to align. This is why we cannot ignore this cyclical part of the narrative. We must first learn the rules before we can break them, just as writers and painters do with their respective crafts.

This segment of our story is mainly instructive and predictable because it demands stability or the uniformity of familiar events, regardless of whether we judge them as favourable or unfortunate, or as fair or unjust. Our expectations come with instructions such as working hard will be rewarded or showing kindness will be reciprocated, and much of what we anticipate is as natural as expecting the sun to rise with light over the horizon and back into darkness after it has set. This additionally makes routine an integral part of the current since it is critical to our daily functioning. However, imposing consistency does not guarantee our preferred fate, and reality can easily come into sharp contrast with our expectations. Our minds scatter into confusion when things do not transpire as predicted or planned between our actions and their projected outcomes. Typically, the collision between what we believe or want to believe and what is true reveals a discrepancy that signals us to either question or reset our expectations. This is where we need to realize that what was once applicable no longer does or perhaps that it never did because we can only measure and build real confidence on validated expectations of alignment. Yet when we encounter any anomalies or flaws, we alternatively tend to airbrush our models of the world to appear as if they were one immaculate or indisputable design. This complements our other propensity for conveniently submitting to trends or norms that mask our unmanaged urges and tenuous commitments as classically exemplified by our dietary choices and alleged social values.

Regardless of our underlying inclinations, justified or not, we all sense that we are driven by conflicting forces, which explain our constant struggle and need to find refuge on any cultural vessel that promises to keep us mentally afloat through the great current. We understandably rely on what feels good or sounds right as generally being beneficial to us, but it is not always in our best interest, especially when its positive impression is immediate. We face a similar dilemma with suffering. Pain is often a warning of something being detrimental to us, and so it is normal for us to have difficulty with how it can be of any value except in the context of hard work. But sometimes a devastating loss leads to greater gain in our interpersonal or professional lives; for instance, the termination of a long-standing position can prompt a detour in our career or change in lifestyle that aligns more with who we are and what we need. Hence, when we consider all of the counterintuitive possibilities of what may be good or bad for us, they jointly lend credence to the notion that we can never absolutely know or decide on the correct or optimal approach. However, there is only ever one path at any given time through any number of roads once it is chosen and it remains so until another is selected. As we experience the cycles of streams and undercurrents that define reality and we watch them run their course multiple times, we come to see and understand the natural and unnatural ways of the world that portray our own disposition as well. While we cannot ignore nature, we should also not follow it mindlessly or place our faith in it beyond its consistency because this will guarantee a life that we will never own. Instead, we should harness its energy as it present us with both the risks and opportunities that will help us develop and shape our narratives.

Our function is to recognize our state of disorder and work towards alignment. When we are most misaligned, we see ourselves moving further away from our goals, no matter how intensely we try to achieve them, or we see events run contrary to our expectations. Not only are we discouraged or disappointed that we are failing to reach the point where we want to be, we also become so exhausted that we do not have the will to start again or to consider another method. It feels like we are trying to break the hardest stone with the soft bristles of a paintbrush. But this is because we have a common tendency to confuse process with purpose, and we often sacrifice process for purpose only to ultimately sacrifice purpose itself. This is what happens when we scurry or jump to the end of a story. We actually miss the point of the narrative. It is intended for us to live or relive rather than to finish it quickly as if we were racing to the end of a song. If we are to truly learn anything, we must go through the course of experience before we can arrive at its lesson. This is true of becoming an adult. The point is not for us as children to grow up as quickly as possible or to skip over childhood altogether. It is to undergo our own development. Otherwise, we will neither comprehend its outcome nor appreciate the value of its process. Having said that, this does not require us to always know where we are going, but we do need to understand how things flow even if we do not know why they do. The reason is simple. If we know how things work, along with its rewards and punishments, then our deliberate alignment or misalignment with reality will begin to inform us of who we really are; that is how we determine when and where to align, and when and where not to acquiesce.

CAUTIONARY SIGNS OF FALSE ALIGNMENT

We do not align to the world for the sake of alignment. We align because it serves us in some way, regardless of how accurate or distorted our perceptions may be. But if we find ourselves aligning with the current of life, it should be with the intention of adjusting to reality. We should only align when it brings us into closer contact with the truth, while we treat misalignment as a means of helping us find truth in the process of pursuing our interests. In addition, we do not necessarily know if our alignment is with reality or with one contrives for us to follow. Hence, here lies our challenge. How do we know what is real and not real? How do we know the current is leading us to our imagined deliverance or that our notions of salvation are authentic? We cannot know without inner honesty and the external evidence of our experience coming together, but we do know that our struggles with discovering who we really are influence when we should assimilate and when we should disturb the order of things.

It is undoubtedly a conundrum that, on one hand, we need to know ourselves in order to determine our paths and that, on the other, we have to choose our paths in order to know ourselves. This means that firstly we have to accept that we never really know. Yet the one thing we should bear in mind is that whatever we believe or whatever we are made to believe will lead to complete fulfilment or save us in the way that seems to most matter to us is unlikely true. It is because we are trying to impose our wishes onto reality and often letting others seduce us with our own fantasies. It is altogether a hoax, a prank and a trap that keep us thoughtlessly locked in a cycle of enchantment and dissatisfaction, even when we believe we are being mindful. It is an unconscious ruse to concurrently excite and suppress our desire to be free as we are continually lured back into cyclical addiction, and we keep shifting its form between our amusement and our labour to convince ourselves that we are without dependency. But regardless of the creative ways we find to hide our addictions, they are all diversions from our deepest dependency that is beyond the power that any drug or preoccupation can reveal because the emptiness that remains and the darkness we cannot escape is our own selves. Hence, there is no other way to abscond except to align with what we really are.

The universe is always sending us information that contains clues about our true nature, but this requires us to receive its signals. If we are receptive, we will recognize the recurring themes of our predicaments as well as omens of pending disorder when things are not what they appear to be. In those moments, our inner voice sings out of tune to bring these discordant sensations to the surface, and this is especially valuable when we are living the life we believe we are supposed to live in accordance with the person we think we are or on the way to becoming as we are granted some of our foretold rewards. If we are lucky, a foreshadowing comes to us through the people we meet and the dreams we have, and even through those disquieting fears whose sources we do not yet understand. Such forewarnings characterize the cautionary signs of false alignment that we tend to ignore when we find security in conforming to a common value system or a fashionable lifestyle shared by many others. While the idea that we cannot all be wrong may offer us unfounded comfort, an untainted part of us gently tugs at the garments that clothed the socially accepted beliefs of our fragile worldview to reveal that we are not presenting our true selves or performing the roles we want to play. This is because we subconsciously know we are aligning to adopted identities that we are conditioned to project.

Although the fiction we insert into our lives keeps our stories alive, it can often turn destructive on a personal or political level since many of us already enter into our narratives with deep physical or emotional scars that originate from divisive and derisive interactions we may experience relatively early in life. This can cause us to be petrified as we fall into the rapid flow of the current without any warning or training. We become vulnerable to the threats of an insensitive world where we see our unavoidably trivial follies callously used against us that can potentially reopen old wounds with memories we do not wish to revisit. It is in those moments that we may feel pressured to align further to the manufactured patterns of an unyielding society or to take our chances in uncharted waters where indifference and unknown dangers await. It is a decision that requires courage, but whichever path is taken also demands that we exercise caution. Prudence is the one thing we have to learn if we want to persevere in our own story because we cannot evade the associated hazards that come with our choices. We cannot afford to be either too carefree or too guarded. We have to weigh the risks of upholding our acquired beliefs alongside our awareness of our own inner nature, and that is how we decide when to march to the beat of the world and when to disrupt it in order to find and move to our own rhythm. Our chosen alignment is dependent on an evolving intuition of the universal truth that develops beyond the purely rational conventions of our scholarly knowledge without ignoring the safeguards of uncorrupted reason.

THE EPIC BATTLE FOR THE TRUTH

We all assume there is a universal truth, but we do not agree on whether or not we can absolutely define or understand it in its entirety. While we can embrace it as a whole, we only ever capture slices of it in our stories because it is far too vast and yet too simple for any of us as specimens of imperfection to grasp something fully that is essentially perfect. But none of this changes our base assumption that the truth is the footing of reality, and its mastery is perceived as our salvation. As we marvel at its mysterious governance, we endeavour to reduce the complexity we encounter in the world to its simplest explanatory form. Right or wrong, we collectively establish rules to follow as if they are written for us. They demonstrate their authority by our obedience to their instruction with the power to punish those who do not comply.

The current of the viagnostic narrative is where we all come to learn how to deal with reality, regardless of whether or not we understand it. And since we must face the wilderness of its diverse conditions together directly or indirectly, we negotiate our shared interpretations in order to function as a society of individuals trying to meet our own needs. However, these conditions must remain stable long enough for us to test our framing of the world. We rely on the consistent quality of the truth in order to advance through our existence, and any major deviation can be very costly to us. For this reason, our concern with the truth is tied primarily to its relevance to our circumstances, and hence, its representation is driven generally by serving our interests. When we accurately calculate the probabilities of events and correlate their occurrences, we can predict cyclical behaviour that allows us to effectively adapt to critical conditions and steer outcomes in our favour.

The truth expresses itself through action or process. Only change reveals the truth, and consequently, our momentary stillness is indispensable in noticing oscillating or transformative events within or around us. However, the constant movement of our reality suggests it is forever unsettled, and we are caught in its vibrant flow while attempting to encapsulate it without static boundaries to delineate it clearly from the outside. While it seems to elude us into perpetuity, the truth is nevertheless informative in that it tells us how the world works and informs existence how to behave. It conveys motivation by being functional in a way that it always serves something and we are ceaselessly utilizing it in order to function as living beings. But perhaps the most important aspect of the truth is that it is meaningful to us or that it must be meaningful to us to capture our attention.

Although the truth is both comprehensive in its completeness and expansive in its potential, its pure and indivisible nature limits our capacity to approach it solely by analytical methods because we can dissect it endlessly to no avail. It necessitates another manner in which to convey its meaning without the demand for absolute certitude or indisputable evidence. The viagnostic narrative metaphorically speaks to us through the fictional accounts of our lives that we write and perform freely as well as collaboratively. We encode and decipher our unfathomable inseparability from the greater truth of life through the subjective lens of our stories, which our objective instruments of measurement can neither confirm nor deny. The trails of personal experiences we leave behind are clues to and reminders of the meaning imprinted in our lives. The current forces us to have experiences, but it does not tell us what they mean. This is our own personal journey that unfolds concurrently and interactively with others as they explore their own stories, both deliberately and accidentally. But this requires us to balance the use of our rational and intuitive faculties, which together keep us sane and in touch with the inner and outer realms of the truth.

Our beliefs are the views we construct of the world and of ourselves, which come with solutions to apply and warnings to heed as we muddle our interpretations of our fears and desires. These beliefs are the rules we follow to regulate our behaviour. While some are instinctual, we acquire most of them over time without our awareness or thoughtful consideration. They form the mental defenses that protect our emotional stability and our own perceived sense of value that lines those defenses. Much, if not all, of what we believe hinges on our direct experience and an ancillary supply of evidence varying in confidence. Although our sources of validation can be entirely false or partly distorted, they are nonetheless used intentionally and subconsciously to underpin our stated convictions and persuasions. But regardless of the proof we allegedly hold, we actually function with an implicit understanding of ourselves and everything that makes up our environment. Most of our actual beliefs cannot be articulated or at least not easily verbalized, and they often differ from what we claim to believe. This is why we tend to rationalize our actions after the fact while implying prior deliberation, and perhaps why we have difficulty questioning our assumptions and attitudes, which occur so naturally that we presume they are true or justified. But indeed they are true insofar as they reflect what we think and how we feel despite being possibly based on our misperceptions or misinterpretations of events as well as on flawed and incoherent arguments.

It is perhaps reasonable to argue that what we believe or perceive adds to the truth without changing or expanding it, or that our knowledge can represent unlimited versions of the truth as long as it is never confused with the truth itself, which is independent of what we believe or learn. It is not constrained by our limited perception or any interpretation of reality that we may have, but it also does not bend to our desires or adjust to our fears. The truth sits outside of our dominion and does not deviate from its principles. It is its own authority. Hence, it is only our own beliefs that change with experience, and our knowledge can be described as a constant expansion and conceptual refinement of the events we expect to occur and what we postulate has already happened.

Although we are always experiencing reality, it remains unclear what is real since we cannot experience the world in complete and meticulous detail. But in order to protect our sanity, we have to believe that our experience is real and the world exists, and in order to make the world that is already whole appear whole, our perception must construct patterns to cover the gaps in our senses. It is as if we assume that the contents of a jigsaw puzzle box will replicate a particular picture once they are all assembled while never realizing that many of the pieces have been removed. We do not notice their absence because we can imagine what they look like based on seeing a photocopy of the original image in its entirety. In a very fundamental way, this is how we live life. Nature instills inexplicit prototypes in us biologically and culturally, which we spend our lives trying to illuminate or reproduce without knowing in absolutely certain terms the authenticity of its form. Nonetheless, we subsume our current versions of the truth at all times under its ideal, which we continue to pursue until we are satisfied with its closely representative depiction.

This does not preclude the risks we might associate with sustaining some psychosocial or biocultural order at the expense of the truth. Maintaining personal and societal harmony often means that we suppress, alter or ignore information that challenges our favourable renditions of the truth. And since it would take too much time and effort to collect the necessary facts to substantiate every belief we hold and to endorse any decision we make, we can justifiably minimize our concern with veracity and gently blend it with fiction to project a palatable reality. Consequently, there are innumerable ways to trick ourselves into accepting our preferred accounts of existence, which include many beliefs that we can conveniently neither prove nor disprove. Although we individually and collectively set the threshold for adequate evidence, we cannot indefinitely overlook enduring anomalies in our thinking and our observations that weaken our constructs of the world and make us more susceptible to profound misalignment, which we dangerously hide through its distorted conversion into a fabricated sense of alignment expressed as personal and shared delusions.

Few of us willingly admit that the epic battle for the truth is one of persuasion in belief or coercion in practice. We convince ourselves of our sincerity in both its knowledge and its pursuit, but it is own fears and desires that instruct what we truly believe. We do not know how deal with our inescapable uncertainty in a sociocultural structure of declared absolutes and how to scrutinize our indispensable intuition that informs us more clearly of our own experiential truth than the less palpably universal truth. It is a delicately cyclical balance of attachment and detachment, which recurrently runs its natural course from a misaligned experience to an aligned reality if we let it. However, we instead substitute for the truth with delusional ideals that range in appearance from the most instinctual to the most rationalized, but are all reflections of our implicit motives, which we cannot access because they are personally unconscious and/or socially intolerable.

Our inner and outer politics are part of the cover stories and overarching narratives that we put into play to spread fashionable beliefs or popularize repressed attitudes sufficiently to convince one another and ourselves that these digestible notions of existence can be used to justify our actions and excuse our favourable and unfavourable circumstances. As individuals, we are the source of our deception, but collectively, we promote the mendacity of our thoughts and strengthen their defenses by their ubiquitous repetition. Unfortunately, once we proclaim our views and congregate around the stances we make, we become blind to the deeper manipulation that operates beneath our self-assured awareness of the world where good and evil are neatly defined. Nevertheless, we need to be prepared to question our accepted frameworks for guiding our behaviour and interpreting our experience if we are ever going to break out of the habitual cycles in our normalized thinking and conduct that confine who we really are by restricting us to the arena in which we can perform.

The current only represents what is, and not what ought to be or can be. We can think of it as the base part of life that we always confront and that keeps us in motion, but it comes with underlying realities that we eventually have to face if we are ever going to develop our stories beyond their predictable trajectories. Nothing important ever changes If do not recognize the existential flaws in our beliefs and dispel with our false assumptions that constrain our capacity to cross the boundaries necessary to manifest the potential of life and eloquently convey its significance through our narratives. The truth passes through the stories of our lives so that we may intimate its meaning from all of its versions we conceive, but this rests on our hope that there is something worth expressing.

REAL MEANING IN EVERLASTING HOPE

There is no passion for life without hope. Hope is the one precious resource none of us can afford to lose, and many of us understand how devastating it can be to experience such a loss at a very early period in our lives. We do not want to be dispirited before expressing something meaningful that has yet to be envisaged. To begin our journey and live life in the absence of hope is to feel like we are already dead. Without hope, both desire and fear fail as basic motivators to eject us out of inertia. We stop having desires when we stop believing that we will ever fulfill them, and our fears enter into predestined defeat when we can no longer conceive of a way out of the negative conditions we are anticipating or already bearing. Instead of fighting back or exercising patience, we openly invite our inevitable punishment because any resistance will only amplify our pain. Unlike elation and anxiety, which are emotional states, hope is belief wrapped around possibility, and it is the perceived probability of outcomes that underlies our emotions. If we believe something will give us satisfaction, we get excited about the prospect of consuming or possessing it. If we believe something threatens us, we respond with unease or possibly with a preemptive strike. While we can train ourselves to subdue our feelings and tame our actions, it all depends on the strength of our beliefs in the expected events of life. If we assume we have a chance at achieving a positive result or avoiding a negative consequence, then we have hope. If we believe that our unfavourable circumstances will never change no matter what we do, then we fall into the pit of our misery and become unshakably despondent.

However, hope is not belief confined to an isolated set of expectations. It builds on continual permutations of temperaments and experiences that jointly shape and underpin a particular frame of mind, which can be opportunistic in what we can extract from life, moralistic about how life should be, idealistic about how it can be or realistic about how it will likely be. Although our dispositions seem to germinate our optimistic and pessimistic mindsets while being configured by the accepted folklore of our times, a momentous encounter or shifting series of incidents can always alter our alignment to life. Our expectations are blinders, whether they are positive or negative, because we really do not know how an unlikely event can change the possibility of what was once deemed immutable. Hence, it is specifically in being deterministic in how we think and in what we believe that significantly affects our sense of hope.

We are at the mercy of our beliefs whether we purport something to be carved in stone and outside of our control or we declare fate to be in our hands and position ourselves as the sole source of our successes and failures. When we oversimplify or overgeneralize, we assume that one primary variable can predict all or most events, or that one distinct case somehow defines a pattern. However, when we see events as being influenced or probabilistic rather than being preordained or completely controllable, we enter into a space of potentiality where the true enemy is our presumption of certainty. If we do not relinquish our expectations and practice honesty with our beliefs, we may instead wish for misfortune in the lives of others, especially if we have suffered while others have gained success or happiness at our expense or if we have witnessed injustices of a corrupted and unsustainable system. But if we open ourselves up to the truth that we have yet to discover and move from the expected or resolute to the possible, the universe will no longer seem restrictive or as something to be conquered.

Unfortunately, the current or more precisely the biocultural current we can refer to as the epiculture tends to bait us with the mesmerizing appeal of both liberal and traditional doctrines that hypocritically avow to promote self-determination, but demand that we follow sanctioned paths to success that conveniently meet the insular interests of others with higher societal status. In actuality, most of us simply feel obligated to support the only political structure and economic framework we believe has no alternative, and remain pacified as long as our bearable levels of security, freedom and belongingness are sustained. But while we may feel momentarily safe by aligning with the submissive crowd and with values seemingly compatible with our upbringing, we are not confidently protected when we do not feel right about the things we are asked to do or to tolerate. We are forced into a kind of amoral compliance and almost instantly shamed if we dare to contest the edicts of a system that only obsesses with its own self-preservation.

Even with the best of intentions, many of us fail to break out of this endless obstacle course of low value activities and needless routines that slowly suffocate our souls. Our way of life guarantees our entanglement in matters of little importance, which intensifies our hunger for meaning as our most intimate thoughts and feelings are silenced by the constant grinding of our unhindered consumption. We are almost defenseless against the barrage of distractions and preoccupations that overtake our sentient existence as the mind is tricked into being devoured by the very thing it presumes to be devouring like a snake eating its tail. This is the inexorable addiction to keeping ourselves busy. Since life is movement, we are deceived into believing that we are only living when we are in motion. This is why many of us are terrified of being still, whether it is the apprehension of falling behind the rest of the world and being abandoned or the dread of being vulnerable as we face our own emptiness.

While we may require the current to put our lives into motion, we also need to liberate or detach ourselves from its alluring hold. Since our edification is a necessary part of our development, we can only escape the programming of our accepted norms and predefined constructs of perfection by pushing in further in order to loosen its grip and broadly see things for what they are. This is what permits us to question what we are told is valid or appropriate, recognize what is true and sense what feels right. Both our conformity and resistance are essential to our survival and evolution in the cultural wilderness. But as we light up our imagination to see the possibility of things, we concurrently discover our inner truth that teaches us when to align and misalign to the universe.

In the film Pan’s Labyrinth [6], a young girl is lured by a fairy into a fantastic realm unbeknownst to those around her, who are caught in a harshly incompatible coexistence between a communal good in defense of basic civil liberties and an institutional expression of evil that demands unquestioned obedience. Although she is being taught to follow a regimented life, her spirited innocence evades a censored imagination by trailing the scent of her curiosity that awakens her to a much more intriguing, subterranean reality hidden beneath the cruel, dark fantasy above. Yet it is the land of the oppressed where her purity must be tested so that it can remain intact, and her sacrifice teaches us that it is better to die with the fervent conscience of the soul rather than to preserve the cold indifference of the current, where everything is deformed into its opposite. This is illustrated by the actualized illusion of enslaving ourselves supposedly for a better future life while disregarding the imagined possibility of freeing ourselves to unleash our ever-present potential.

Our narrative is not about the relative success we achieve according to some external standard. It is about finding real meaning in everlasting hope at the root of who we really are because our immortal sense of completeness is only found in living a meaningful existence with authenticity. Without genuine meaning that is free of demands or expectations, there is no hope to sustain and no pain worth bearing. Hence, when we see resiliency in our hope, it is the spirit of our inherent will emerging to acknowledge its own presence and to manifest the enlightened meaning that perseveres through our narratives as we face the darkness of life and its incomprehensible suffering.

THE DARKNESS THAT AWAITS US

We become aware of a dark force in the second part of the narrative, which many of us label as being evil. We may not yet encounter it directly, but we can feel its ominous presence or see evidence of the damage it may have left behind. Being unaware of its source can stir up our apprehension and cause us to quiver as it waits for the right moment to declare itself. It seems that we subconsciously know that it is especially when we are most vulnerable that we suffer the fierce blow of its abuse by the hands and words of those within our physical and emotional vicinity. Although we may associate evil with a totalitarian form of order or the spread of nihilistic chaos, it expresses itself the least expected ways. It possesses the people we cherish to do us harm, and it inhibits our compassion when we most need to love. Our trust is fractured as it fools us into perceiving our enemies as friends and our friends as enemies. We cannot detect it because it lurks deeply and silently within us all, searching for the opportunity to break or drain our spirit, and cast doubt in everything we do. We are haunted by shadows of the vanquished that cheat us out of our innocence, and blind us with fear and hatred so that we may never find it again. Evil is the menacing phantom that imprisons our souls. It injures and destroys as it feeds on life, and seeks to dominate because it cannot create on its own.

Even if we are temporarily spared of its torture, our accumulated history leading up to our present state is inundated with cautionary examples of the classic struggle for power accompanied by the brutality that underlies the frayed disguise of an impassive civilization. Just as the ocean current cares little of whether we live or die, this callously sinister force only seeks to show its strength and extend its reach with no regard for what it ravages as it progresses ultimately towards a dystopian vision for us all. Intoxicated by its potent destruction, it keeps remnants of what survives to recollect its conquests, and to purposely ignore the fragility of its evanescent supremacy. But while there may be conditions of abundance that may temporarily allow most of us to have an unlimited share of a seemingly expanding pie, the inescapable constraints of scarcity in life unavoidably drive us to acquire access to resources that will interfere with the livelihood of others. Hence, without collaboration and mutual compromise, we apply a range of self-serving tactics, from subtle deception to blatant coercion, to garner more power or maintain an advantage over competing others. This can easily become our way of life as it seizes control of our beliefs and actions under the banner of inborn rights or moral justification, whether we see ourselves as instigators or retaliators.

A balance of power at every level of human interaction seems vital to our self-preservation and the sovereignty of our being. However, as long as our perceived separateness from everything else that comprises the world persists, we will deny reality at the most fundamental level and invite wickedness to be proclaimed as normal and permissible. Evil is bred from the unwillingness to accept the principal terms of life. Although a rejection of the universal truth seems pointless, such a revolt is itself part of that truth since it is its own stubborn resistance that prolongs this primordial battle into perpetuity. Evil is not synonymous with fallacy. It inconspicuously utilizes falsehoods to propagate its legacy. Hence, our challenge has less to do with winning this fight than it does with learning to see past our own delusions and assumptions, with the rarest capacity for objectivity, to acknowledge on which side of that battle we reside. Good and evil tend to be relative terms in that one man’s declaration of virtue and justice is potentially another man’s decree of iniquity, and vice versa. We can generalize this further to suggest that our desired sense of order can be a source of chaos and interference with another’s utopian pursuits. Our inevitable differences, however infinitesimal they may be, are constantly used to reignite our conflicts over incomplete versions of the truth that prevent finding legitimate meaning in the narrative of our lives.

We perceive darkness in many ways, which range from the most literal as the absence of light to the most figurative as a sign of malicious intent, but darkness itself is not evil. It merely shelters both the good and the bad, and it is only by approaching its obscurity that we learn to distinguish between the two. However, our true fears lie in what we might discover outside in the world or especially within ourselves when we illuminate the truth. Since our uncertainties and doubts are like fissures and cracks in our confidence, we may question our faith in life and in others. More disturbingly, our personal explorations may jeopardize our engineered identities by evoking the repressed side of our being. We tend to use the shadows of our lives to conceal the overprotective monsters we harbour within us all as they wait for threats to force them out into the open, but this subconscious censorship also entombs the potential of our extraordinary nature so that we are unable to unearth who we really are.

Our mistakes may originate from our ignorance and imperfection, but it is the stubborn perpetuation of our ignorant beliefs that we open the door to unwittingly doing the malevolent work of a figurative or purported devil. The more we unquestioningly entrench ourselves in the conformed ways of an automated system that only gives us the impression of autonomy, the more we risk becoming servants to a soulless apparatus designed for its own self-preservation. While much of what we define as evil is a relatively subjective attribution, we generally agree that malevolence is expressed as the fundamental disregard for life. It annihilates or enslaves living creatures by feeding on them as resources for its own subsistence, and it polarizes societies into conflict by letting us accuse our neighbours of wickedness as a diversion from its own intent. Evil disappears in the misconstruction of reality so that we do not recognize its distinguishing quality in ourselves or in our communities.

Although we tend to think of life as the binary state of being alive or dead, the whole of life consists of fluctuations among numerous conditions that are perpetually incomplete. As one is fulfilled, another is deprived. This demonstrates that living is a process, and it is change that permits the emergence, adaptation and continuity of life. However, it is our imperfection that demands change and that leads to a preferred state from where we are or to return to a comfortable state where we have been before, regardless of whether it is real or perceived. This is how we feel alive, and it is by flowing through the current of life that we may embody and wield its force. We simultaneously lose and regain ourselves within it in order to avoid becoming completely attached to or detached from our environment, and we accomplish this by welcoming our defeats as much as our victories and our enemies as much as our friends.

The current can be leveraged by any of us, whether we are driven by benevolence, indulgence or malice. It does concern itself with our whims or our skills, and it is only answerable to itself. It simply functions on the information it has at any given time and place since it is constrained only by what it knows and adjusts accordingly as it knows differently. When we find ourselves in the current, we have little choice but to behave in a similar manner. This does not mean that we are safe if we mirror its movement given that it allows us to die as easily as it enables us to live. However, it does mean that if we work with what we have, as imperfect as we may be, we can ride the flow of change to get us out of disorder and into alignment. The current is essential to the viagnostic narrative so that we can maintain its momentum as it passes through the darkness that awaits us, where we will most likely confront the evil that hides both inside and outside of us, and where we will hopefully find the source of our meaning and unleash our essence.