How can you live life fully? Perhaps you know of adventurers who watch sunsets in the Himalayas. Perhaps you know of monks who tend tiny gardens with meaningful strokes of the hoe. How is your life in comparison? Are you grinding out the 8 to 5 in front of a computer, or immersed in the pointless noise of campus life? You want something called fullness of life – where you actions carry meaning; where you are aware of your actions and fully conscious of life. Vague stuff when you try to convey it to someone else, but you know it is more than a dream.
A few people decide that experiencing more is equivalent to living a fuller life. In other words, more Pepsi in the glass will make the Pepsi taste better. An entire life is spent moving through increasingly exotic experiences, never realizing it is the experiencer which is the source of the problem. It is you that suck life dry. The telescope distorts the view of the moon – the moon is as it should be.
Life is as it should be, but you do not know this for certain. The solution is more than just accepting the bad with the good – animals do that quite well. To see life as it is, you must first examine the perception mechanism – you must first question your definition of your self. The possibility exists that you are more than a perception/reaction machine. You may find you are that from which life emanates. From that superior perspective, your present-day struggles to fully experience life will seem unimportant. Your very existence will be unimportant and the question of living life fully will vanish. To illustrate this point, here is a poem playing on the Zen story of the man chased by a tiger:
Sages say a man was chased by a tiger,
Finally clinging to a root above a canyon.
As mice chewed his handhold, he ate a luscious berry.
Why?
Let go of that root,
No need to wait for mice,
The berry is as empty as air.
To live life fully you must study the self that lives. Obviously, you recognize it as the source of your problems and not the external world. We can see the beauty in the grime of battle or make a sunset into a bore. To study the self, you must first gain some control over it. You must be able to focus upon a difficult subject. You must redirect your energy from its outward direction. You must conserve, focus, and use your mental and physical energy to discover the false aspects of your self – to continually refine your self-definition. For practical steps to take in studying the self, I suggest you read Richard Rose’s paper “The Three-Fold Path,” the Meditation Papers, and papers six through eight of The Albigen Papers.