Human in Full

Spring was starting to pop out—my favorite time of year—and I was a bit disappointed in myself for not getting more pleasure from the beauty of the blossoming trees. Their beauty pleased me in a vague way, but nothing in the seeing touched my heart or 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 something important in myself as I bent over to smell some hyacinth and drew in the breath of that sweet aroma. As I drew in the breath of that early-spring flower, my consciousness deepened. And this deepening was of a different nature from the deepening I felt when ancient Jerusalem 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 when something in my soul was kindled. I’d gone to see a documentary about Mozart: “In Search of Mozart.” I don’t usually go to documentaries, but I made an exception for Mozart because his music has so often and so deeply moved me with its beauty. The auditorium had a good sound system, and as In Search of Mozart played on, we heard one beautiful passage after another—from opera to orchestral to chamber music—so marvelous that one is transported to a special place that seems to belong especially to music.

How long would be the list of all the different entryways—embedded in how we’re put together—that lead to deep experience?

Here’s one more way we humans can enter 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 social primates can feel vividly alive in a way different 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 “Aha!” thrill of insight. (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.) That is, an avenue into deep positive experience from having one’s mind blown through the intellect. A creature with a mind that 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 thinky guy, Aristotle, tried to claim for his Greek philosopher’s way of being human.

(For him, THINKING RATIONALLY was the ideal way for a human to live—and he formulated a specious case to prove it: that because we are the most rational animals, we must focus all our energy on cultivating what’s unique about us. Really? If there were another animal at least as good at rational thought as we humans, would that change how we should strive to live? Of course not. Life is lived from the inside—what we experience—not as a 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 wise pursuit of happiness involves striving to make our lives as fulfilling as possible, in as many ways as possible — being as grateful for the capacity for sexual pleasure as for the capacity to think like Aristotle.

One-sidedness fails to heed 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 deeply complex. Many opportunities, many dangers. So the human organism has emerged from those millions of years of evolution with a correspondingly many-dimensional way of experiencing meaning—where what has been life-serving is rewarding, and what has been life-threatening is 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, drawn by sexual feeling, or brought to life by moments of connection—they would have been less likely to pass along their DNA and create descendants like us.

Evolution has thus crafted us with a veritable orchestra of instruments that play into our consciousness. We have emerged with motivations 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.