Congrats! 🎊
This is the final step towards integrating all that the Fountain of Freedom has to offer. Take a moment to celebrate this big win! Here, in Level 3, you have:
Explored the realm of sleep,
Developed a system to overcome biases,
Embraced mistakes as feedback, not failure,
Tuned the mind to see how things interlink, and
Adopted mindless work for a more fertile mind.
The meta-theme of the Fountain of Freedom, and this Level 3 specifically has been “presence.” A meditative, self-reflective presence that flows you towards freedom from your own mental barriers.
A Fragmented Presence
If you remember, in Level 1, we had a visualization on how we often act like someone who’s lost in their own movie on the phone even while sitting in a theatre where a friend’s biopic is playing; and how this self-obsessed behavior, that often leads to misunderstanding, needs to be replaced with empathy.
Well, there is another culprit at play here: presence.
The fact that our self-obsession can lure us away from the present moment to the thoughts about our past experiences or future fantasies is because we have a bad relationship with the present, to begin with. It is as if we are living in fragments, with a part of us in the past, some in the future, and leftover in the present.
And almost everyone suffers from it because that’s how our society has conditioned us, with our consciousness operating from the past and chasing the future. Slowly, the present starts feeling more alien to us, uncomfortable, devoid of the nostalgia and hideouts of trauma we are hooked to and the miraculous “ideal” life that lies in the mist of the future. To such a mind, the present is not a promising place. It feels “boring!”
The Symphony of Life
In his lecture “Music and Life,” philosopher Alan Watts says:
In music one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord; because that’s the end!
But this is the polar opposite of how the world usually operates, with people saying things like, “I’ll be happy when [X] happens!” Life seems all about views that are worth the climb. Are we trying to justify our lives with a single moment of accomplishment? Just to prove something?
Watts continues,
We’ve got a system of schooling that gives a completely different impression. It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of “come on kitty kitty kitty”, and now you go to kindergarten. And that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade, and then come on; first grade leads to second grade and so on, and then you get out of grade school. Now you’re going to go to high school, and it’s revving up – the thing is coming. Then you’ve got to go to college, and by Jove then you get into graduate school and when you’re through with graduate school you go out and join the World!
And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance. And they’ve got that quota to make, and you’re gonna make that. And all the time that thing is coming. It’s coming, it’s coming! That great thing, the success you’re working for. Then when you wake up one day at about 40 years old you say “My God! I’ve arrived! I’m there”. And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt.
And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and we were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.
All the Presents are in the Present
In the end, we must remember that “time” is just a concept. “Future” is a concept. None of them exist. All that’s there is the here and now. And all we can do has to happen in the present. We need to live outside our heads that love to be everywhere but the present and strengthen its relationship with reality.
This realization breaks us out of the social conditioning that taught us to value a definitive point in the future more than the present experience. A mind thus neither blinded by the biases of the past nor illusioned by the expectations of the future, is free to be fully present. What has passed, has passed, and what has not yet come, has not yet come.
It is here, as we lose perception of time, that we start flowing in an eternal present, the way we were born to live. In this state of no rush, we fully absorb every experience, every conversation, and interaction, and make the most of everything we have. We develop a “presence of mind” that manifests in different forms as wit, empathy, flow, resourcefulness, non-reaction, and non-attachment, all coming to us naturally, without any force.
Slowly, we come to terms with the fact that no happiness is to be found in the “future.” It is right here, right now, in an attitude of contentment with the current state of life. If we cannot have it here, we cannot have it anywhere. As Robert M. Pirsig said, “The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”