Purpose, Death and Time
It has been a long 5 months since I walked this hillside. Wildfires that burned my house and moving to a new state left little time for quiet walks in the forest, so I relish this January day with the sun filtering through the breaks in the clouds igniting the droplets of rain still hanging on the moss. The earth is soft underfoot and the moisture seems to muffle all the sounds.
I stop to sit on a log and relax into the soft moss, feeling the nourishing energy of the forest, giving thanks for this moment. My mind asks. “I want to reconnect, to get to know you again.” And the forest answers.
We are always here, time doesn’t matter. It is not even a question patience. If there is no time, there is nothing to wait for, nothing to anticipate. There is only the moment, silent, empty, yet full of the enlivening sound of presence. You distract yourself from this emptiness, but it is your nature. You will come back to it. You have no choice but to come back to it for it is who you are.
You are concerned about death, but it is irrelevant. Death is just another phase, another show like a sunrise or sunset. The void is always present, Life is always present. The snow turns to rain and melts off the mountain, the snowflake does not care. It knows it’s true nature is water in any form that it takes.
“So is there a task that I came here to do that I need to complete?”
You were born in a difficult circumstance that gave you some scars that you have spent a lifetime working to heal. Your mind wants to make something significant out of that, and on some level of awareness it may have some significance. But it is no different from the seed of a pine tree. Some fall on rocks, some on good soil, some are stunted by overcrowding, some have ample room to flourish. It is the play of Life fulfilling its imperative to create more life. If you develop the skill to see beyond your own limited self, perhaps you would see the only purpose is the expression of life itself; to wake up from the dream of the separate self, to wake up from the dream that you are important.
There is no place for pride in surviving a hardship or living a long life. For in fact you had nothing to do with surviving. It was life itself flowing through you. You either heard it and were guided, or missed it and stumbled ahead based on your own mental concepts. If you thrived through the difficulties it was an indication that you were able to get out of the way and let life in all its incredible complexity work its magic. It is a level of complexity so immense that you would never be able to figure it out and therefore would never know how to do it right.
And yes there are stories of spirits after death of the body wandering around, analyzing what they did and figuring out what they need to do next, preparing for the next incarnation. On that level they have a purpose, they have a goal of growing their love and compassion. But that existence is still on a dualistic level. There are many levels of existence. This physical world is one, disembodied spirits are another, the kingdom of forest divas and animal spirits are another. Perhaps we forest spirits are a bit better at seeing through the illusion, but we have our own blind spots.
The human mind and the human spirit have a tendency to look for purpose. What is there is none? What if the whole purpose is just for life to express itself in as many forms as possible? It is not a school; there is no agenda, nothing you have to do. On the other hand Life is Love of all life. So to come back to your true nature is to learn that you are love. That life is love. It is not a purpose, a direction or something to be achieved, because you are that. It would be more correct to say it is waking up from the delusion of separation created by a society that has lost touch with each other and nature.
You get a taste of that in the woods because beauty itself is an expression of love, an expression of life. When that gets distorted, when life looses touch with itself, things become ugly. A wounded tree growing on a mountain ridge stressed and worn by wind and snow still radiates beauty. That tree is still connected with the earth, with spirit, with the essence of tree. It does not grow to hate wind or snow or want to kill other trees, it does not try to destroy the very things that give it life. It is not raging at the world. That behavior is the result of the human condition of separation that breeds fear, distrust that blossoms into anger. The tree is quiet, peaceful, slowly developing its own strengths to withstand its challenges. Accepting its challenges with neither anger nor joy. Only living in connection, which is the source of joy.