Life is pleasure in experience. One example was I hit the road very early one day last week, and was driving a windy, hilly road. On one turn, I could see just the top of a very red sun, and thought it beautiful. Then it “set”, as I went down a decline. For the next twenty minutes, it played peek-a-boo with me, rising and setting, always in different places. It made me happy.
Driving the same road in reverse yesterday, I came upon an opening in the clouds with a beam of light coming down, like heaven had opened. Behind me I saw a rainbow. It was amazingly beautiful. I really enjoy complex, moving skies, and the interplay of light and shadow.
To the point, though, it would in my mind be a sin to let the beauty in our world go unnoticed. There is so much ugliness, that we must be attentive to what is right and good and wonderful.
Jim Morrison–who really wasn’t very smart, but had the capacity to seem that way–once said “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” That seems clear enough: live in the moment. But he died as a drunk and likely as a heroin abuser. Somewhere along the way, he lost the dawn.
And his apparent distinction–between morality and experience–is a specious one. Why would Christ not want us up enjoying the dawn? He would be there with us.
In my mind, sin is a separation from the capacity for this sort of experience, from feeling deeply. You don’t die because you sin; you sin because you die, because you lose contact with some primal feeling of respect for yourself and others. The first thing you have to do to sin–say to cheat on your wife–is rationalize it. This can include getting drunk, but that is simply a rationalization through avoiding an adult and conscious decision.
I have a clear conscience. I have not always done what I ought to have done, but I have only rarely done something I ought not to have done. My sins are of omission, of for example drinking too much when I could be up and about exercising.
There is something about innocence and pleasure that go together. Our children express emotions spontaneously, but as we grow, we pull back, many of us because we have made conscious compromises with our own first principles. You can get that promotion, but only if you stab the other guy in the back. You can run a profitable business, keeping money for yourself that could and should go to the people doing most of the work.
Whatever the cause, people lose touch with the life within them. For myself, I am endlessly fascinated by everything around me. I never, ever, ever get bored. I enjoy looking at how elevator signs are put together. I always find it interesting that nobody ever has a 13th floor, even though 14 obviously IS 13 (I saw a 14A and 14B the other day, which normally means a front and back entrance, but in this case it was just a new solution to this old problem of triskaidekaphobia). I like watching small insects, and how trees move in the wind. Etc.
I am not bragging on myself, so much as suggesting a possible way–Tao–of interacting with life. I am not being excessively self-congratulatory, I don’t think, in saying that I am a creative person. That creativity comes from a largely unregulated and spontaneous, living, interaction with what I do all day every day.
What I do for money sometimes involves ladders, safety glasses, and a hard hat. If you’ve never worn a hard hat, you may not realize that it gets hot under those things. By law, they can’t have any ventilation holes, so you sweat a lot. Safety glasses trap heat, too, and the cheaper ones fog up a lot. It’s uncomfortable, and I get a bit grumpy at times, like most people who do manual labor.
Yet I was standing there the other day, and realized that you can do that work with love. Rather than looking at physical objects as intentionally retarding your progress–there’s always something in the way in the plenum–you can stop being so damn stupid, and realize they are just there, and that with gentleness and attentiveness you get more done faster anyway. After thinking this, the day went faster, and I left happy. Any work can be done like this. There’s always some pile of something–patients, legal briefs, emails, phone calls, lighting ballasts, walls to be painted, lawns to be mowed–and you can attack that pile as an enemy and be irritable; or you can realize that that work can have any meaning for you that you want, and that if you are mad, it is because you are being childish. Life is work. It cannot be anything else. You can work with love, though, and grow from it.
Growth creates life, which creates more growth. This is how we are meant to live.