The unexamined life is not worth living. Really, Socrates?

How can an unexamined life not be worth anything? Does the robin in my garden examine her existence as she flies on yet one more mission for worms or insects or whatever baby robins eat? Does she think “Those kids will be the death of me yet.”

At rest, does she wonder if Schrodinger’s cat is in the tree or not in the tree? I doubt it. She is lovely, chirps in the sun, and chose her mate because he was capable of helping her create demanding children. Is more than that necessary?

Does my dog examine his life? I believe he often wishes he was with the dog sitter who takes him on long walks on trails with deer, raccoons, and foxes, and cooks him homemade meals with chicken, ground beef, and rice. I believe my dog experiences longing, but while longing can lead to examining, it is not in itself examining. Still, I believe if he were verbal, he would say his life is worth living. All the smells!

Pressed, I say that everything is alive, if not self-examining. It is all made of atoms, the basic carrier of “aliveness.” My last ex-husband and my daughter argued with me, saying a rock is not alive. But, of course, it is. We just happen to think while a rock probably doesn’t⏤but then my ex was an entrepreneur and my daughter a scientist, both tending towards certifiable facts as determined by humans.  

Question: Do atoms have self-sensations? A buzzing of some kind? 

You see, I am a mystic, and it’s annoying that in our society that is like saying “I am an dingbat from the 15th planet out from of the star Siegfried in a galaxy 300 million lightyears to your right.”

And I am a mystic by experience, which trumps faith.

To continue, perhaps only creatures with what humans presume is higher consciousness can examine their lives. 

Question: Is self-consciousness the beginning of a need to believe there is a higher power that will save us from meanness?

Question: Will that pint of chocolate almond ice cream I ate last night while watching that program on giraffes show up on the scale?

Whatever, we cannot not examine our lives, born as we are with raging curiosity. Even more important, when we are born, we seek out patterns in order to discern what is around us. In the process we will make mistakes. It is inevitable. We will pile misconception on top of misconception, and we will define ourselves, we will say “this is who I am,” in relationship to how we feel about the world around us as we see it and people in it as we see them.

Question: Are immigrants more criminally active than Episcopalians? 

The dilemma is, we cannot truly examine ourselves⏤our make up, history, the influence of events in our lives on our sense of being⏤without examining the make up of time and space. You read me correctly. We cannot understand who we are unless we examine time and space and their co-dependent physicality, and we cannot examine time and space without trying to grasp pure consciousness beyond time and space.

Question: Is that the most condensed complex paragraph I have ever written?

Physicality is energy in form, atoms making alliances among themselves until, pow!, at some point in some creatures self-awareness comes into being. 

Question: Has self-awareness been in the division of form out of beyond time and space, i.e. pure consciousness, from the beginning?

Question: How can there be a beginning within pure consciousness beyond time and space?

Whatever you tell yourself, you don’t really know when self-awareness comes in. You can only guess, and if you think self-awareness is assigned only to higher intelligence, you might want to reconsider. I don’t have a dog in this fight except accuracy, AND that what you come to believe makes a difference because what you believe is real determines how you live⏤not only your ethics and actions but how you feel inside. 

That is, you fit yourself into the world you create and perceive in your unique individual way. If you perceive everything in the physical world is alive in a shared “One-ness” down to rocks and atoms, it affects how you feel. It provides nourishment and companionship and strength. It expands you, you feel the hunger of the baby birds. The robin feeds you. You begin to perceive a pervasiveness of love. (Sorry, but I’m really not an alien from 300 million light years away even if you wish I were a dingbat.)

Question: Is anyone listening?

To continue: We examine our lives, but we examine them at different levels. Is the worm food, or is the bird a murderer? It depends if you are the bird or the worm. (But that is just a clever thing to say rather than being totally on point.)

To continue on point: 

Point 1) We must examine our lives at minimum because we think, act, love, care for others, and live in a world of form and we want to stay alive, usually. Whether in any moment we realize we are “examining” and determining our lives is up for grabs and depends on the person.

Question: Is this the best color fingernail polish for me? I tried blue on my toes, but it was only fun for a couple weeks.

Question: Do I have obligations to strangers?

Point 2) Curiosity and irregularities pull us to figure out who we are, the stuff of us, the alpha and omega of us. We are pulled to something that feels like “home.” We need help. Without a sense of connection to a “larger,” we feel gaps. It takes immense courage to stand in awareness of the “gap” with its profound loneliness.

Some of us choose to examine that space. Many of us try to avoid it. We are each forced to examine the “gap” when events slam us into darkness. It, too, is inevitable.

Question: It that last statement such a cliche that it needs to be edited out?

Question: Do I need to put in the part about the light at the end of the tunnel? 

We both create and perceive divisions in our daily lives, unending differentiations, some of which are only in our minds but are as real to us as our own existence. . . 

. . . and it is our existence that is at question here. Are we a higher life form than a rock or the same level of life form? If rocks did not exist, we would have nothing to live on as self-conscious life forms. 

Question: Which came first, the rock or Beyond Time and Space?

I am a mystic through experience, not through books or thinking. “I” disappeared along with rocks and time and space into pure consciousness free of time and space. It doesn’t mean I can explain how time and space come out of beyond time and space. Don’t ask me.

There is a reason why the Grand Unified Theory hasn’t been captured. Pure consciousness does not respond to questions. The whole is not the whole if divided into answers. It is being, and it is enough, and it fills the gap most of the time.

The mystery is not if the rock is alive⏤and do consider that it is⏤but that all physical existence is simultaneously beyond time and space and within time and space.

Think of time and space as a microscopic jungle gym on which unlimited differentiations (“things”) born out of beyond time and space have a field day. A jungle gym built of aliveness and overrun by creation.

Question: Does pure consciousness, i.e. beyond time and space, watch us, turn us into entertainment, intrude with synchronicity or loss or glimpses of itself to further the storyline? 

Question: Have glimpses of beyond time and space, in their reassuring peace and love, been codified by humans into a thing and named  “heaven”?

As differentiated beings, we cannot go as “Dick, Jane, and Sally” to beyond time and space. We cannot return to pure consciousness as separate creatures but we can get inklings when we feel the rocks are alive.

We have no choice but to examine our lives, like it or not, but how deeply we go seems a matter of free will. Interesting thing, free will. Think of it, your will has freedom to re-examine your life, re-examine the alpha and omega of you, to guide you to where love pervades everything.