Beyond The Crack In The World: I'll Meet You There

When we look around ourselves at the sad state of our existence, we have to ask, “Why isn’t it better than this?” After three to four thousand years of civilization, the bulk of humanity still processes information in the same fashion, responds with the same prejudices, and glorifies the same sort of limited viewpoints. There exists a fear of becoming something larger, wiser, more profound. We cling to our frailties like the Church clung to the notion of an Earth-centric universe. It is as if we are afraid we wouldn’t exist without our fears and desires. We need a universe that circles around those fears and desires and makes them hauntingly real. This is our identity.

Can you imagine living in a universe that does not circle around those fears and desires? Your culture would want to reel you in, your religion would want to reel you in. “You must share our fears and desires, loathe what we loathe, cheer what we cheer. That’s what it means to be one of us. You must be one of us.” This can be a lonely path, punctuated by a few good friends. It’s also good to find more.

Last week was my 59th birthday and an unexpected gift arrived, an email from a young man who had stumbled on to one of my articles here on BC. He expressed his great feeling of separateness and how sometimes it made him feel superior. Most of the time though, the feeling made him feel full of doubt about himself. He wanted to “stand tall” in terms of spiritual experience. He asked, “What else is there, or what else should there be?” I sent him the following reply.

“The best reply really is the shortest. In a Zen way I could say, "Just this!" and it would say everything, but not enough.

When one encounters the Great Largeness of existence, the proper reactions are both humility and awe. Both qualities are in short supply in this world. If you were to really grasp the magnitude of the process that has made you, the billions of years of the formation of the universe and suns and planets, the millions of years of human evolution, then you have to ask if the life you lead is worthy of all that great effort.

I do not know what things cause you to doubt yourself, or what things cause you to perceive the crack in the façade of the world and make you feel different. It is necessary to see the crack, but it is easy to be overcome by the separateness from the ways of the world. We are wired to be social creatures. Many spiritual traditions solve the problem by living apart in cloisters and monasteries, but that creates its own inbred problems.

Article Author: John Spivey

John Spivey is a writer and furniture maker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his family. His personal blog is called Nature, Craft, & Soul. He can be contacted here.

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