A Human in Full

Spring was starting to pop out– my favorite time of the year, and I was a bit disappointed in myself for not getting off more on the beauty of the trees covered with their blossoms. Their beauty pleased me in a vague sort of way, but nothing in the seeing touched my heart and soul.

There have been times when SEEING has given me some deeply meaningful experience. I think immediately of a moment in Jerusalem, where I looked at the Old City — the ancient walled town, important to a whole set of religions — across a valley. The warm stone of the ancient structures and the whole composition as it sits on the earth came to my eyes as a picture so moving it was as if a psychedelic drug had kicked in.

But for whatever reason, such was the state of my consciousness that the sight of the earth coming back to life in the form of beautiful blossoms did not turn me on.

I had no idea I was about to open up some important spaces in me as I bent over to smell some hyacinth that had emerged and opened their petals so that one could draw in that sweet aroma. As I drew in the breath of that early-spring flower, my consciousness deepened. And its deepening was of a different nature from the deepening I felt to SEE Jerusalem as it presented itself to my eyes. With the FRAGRANCE, it was as if I had entered a place where the reality of living in the world is filled with feeling, where I experienced myself as a creature that has desire.

SEEING and SMELLING: two different routes to feeling fully alive.

Our humanity possesses a range of capabilities, each with its own language, its own kind of music, operating as different “organs” of our consciousness, contributing each to the experience of a human life.

There was another moment recently where I felt that something in my soul got kindled. I’d gone to see a documentary about Mozart. I don’t ever go to documentaries, but with Mozart it was different because of the many moments he’s given me of being moved into a profound sense of beauty in the way he expressed his meanings through music. The auditorium had a good sound system, and as IN SEARCH OF MOZART played on, we heard passage after beautiful passage of music from opera to orchestra to chamber: all so marvelous one is transported to a special place that seems to belong to music especially.

How long would the list be of all these different entryways in our composition that can lead to deep experience?
Here’s one more way we humans can get into the FULLNESS of our experience: through our inborn capacity for humor. When we get off on the joyous funniness of things – generally, together in a group — we human primates can feel very alive in a different way from SEEING OR SMELLING. We’re built to get off together through the bond of a good group laugh.

One that’s important for me is the thrill of the “Aha!” feeling of having insight into things. (The image of Archimedes excitement jumping out of the tub and running down the street yelling “Eureka!” because he’d figured out how to solve the problem of the supposedly gold crown.) I.e. that avenue into deep positive experience from having one’s mind blown through the intellect. A creature with a mind, which offers a path to an important form of going deep: “seeing” in the sense of “understanding.”

But that’s just one of the avenues, not something with the special status that another thinkey-guy, Aristotle tried to claim for his Greek philosopher way of being human.

(For him, THINKING RATIONALLY was the ideal way of living for a human to be — and he formulated a specious case to prove it: i.e. that because we are the most rational animals, we must focus all our energy in cultivating what’s unique about us. Really? So if there were another animal around that was at least as good at rational thought as we humans, would that CHANGE the way we should strive to live? Of course not. Life is lived from the inside (what we experience), and not in some competition in which we care only about what we’re BEST at.)

The reasoning mind is just one of the organs of our consciousness, and a life well lived fulfills as many of them as possible. Surely, the pursuit of happiness is striving to make our lives as fulfilling in as many ways as possible, being at least as grateful for the capacity for sexual pleasure as for the capacity to think like an Aristotle.

One-sidedness fails to listen to the voice of Life-on-Earth as it speaks to us through our many-dimensional organism. The reality in which our ancestors had to survive, if we were ever to come into existence, was profoundly complex. Many opportunities, many dangers. So the human organism has emerged out of those millions of years of evolution with a correspondingly many-dimensional way of experiencing meaning—with what is life-serving being rewarding, and what threatens life being aversive.

If our ancestors hadn’t responded rightly to what they saw, or to the smells of their world—if they hadn’t been moved by insight, or drawn by sexual feeling, or brought to life by moments of connection—they would have been less likely to pass along their DNA to create descendants like us.

Evolution has thus crafted us with a veritable orchestra of instruments that play into our consciousness. We have emerged with motivation to seek insight, to make sensuous love, to honor what is beautiful, and to adopt the perspectives that humor provides.

A life well lived, then, would not confine itself to just one of these avenues, but would draw upon as many of them as possible—seeing deeply, feeling deeply, thinking deeply, connecting, laughing, loving—bringing to life the full range of what we have been equipped to experience.

A human in full seeks to have all those capacities richly employed, to water all the roots from which our aliveness grows.