The truth was, there were even hesitations on arriving here after nine months of warm containment. The vibrations of war were not encouraging.

Beyond my brain’s indecision, beyond my body in the bed, in the small bedroom, beyond the apartment, the ambulance, the hospital, the operating room, in the church of saint Mary's the maternal force of my mother’s cry determined upon this body's survival.

During a lifetime of investigation, I have been brought to the conclusion that 

Language

Language being the expression of thought drives the direction of human societies. Language has been and remains the creator of our perceptions, we know ourselves through definition. Being thus defined we each own that definition stated as ‘I am’.

The sustaining of (that I am) self is undertaken by the ego while defending the body-mind against adversity, threats, and debilitations to its wellbeing. This primary act we have defined as life. That definition implies its opposite, death.

For all human history roughly following the beginning and use of language these two words, life and death, have been the point of our sense deduction of meaning. Searched out by such questions as ‘why are we here, is there purpose to our being, where do we go when we die?’ 

What we experience and call ‘life’ is Existence.

Existence, simply defined, is a form in space, from the minutest quark to the cosmos. Forms come into Existence, exist for what we experience as time, and then do not exist, they are temporary. By accurately defining being here as Existence, we are then left with applying an equivalently accurate definition to the phenomena we call ‘death’.   

When we observe the phenomenon, death, it appears that life has left existence. We conclude therefore that Life is separate from existence, which is both true and untrue. It is true that it no longer appears to be enlivening the form (body) we are seeing as dead, it is also untrue, as it continues as a pulse now running in a diaspora through the matter of the body. The person that was once seen by us as a particular composite form has begun the process of breaking into many simpler discrete forms. Life is still present along with existence, it is only the particular form of existence (as a body) that has changed.

We exist consequent with Life, as does everything else. This symbiotic relationship is misapprehended for what it is because our Existence arrogance (f) creates the false assumption of a life-death duality arising through a total ego concentration of our beingness on existence. An Existence which is short, temporary, and fearfully out of touch with Life. Life that is independently permanent beyond existence.

Our short, temporary discomforting Existence gives rise to the eternal questioning of who we are and why are we here, it is an unconscious knowing that our incompleteness resides in our temporariness, set against the permanence of Life. We long for that permanence.

What is required for us to overcome suffering and go beyond just Existence   

                 is found in the Near Life Experience, that is,

a conscious Life existence.

Illustrating the balance between Life and Existence.

Natural           Imposed          Example An animal:     In the wild.        In captivity

L  i  f  e          Existence                                                 L  i  f  e                Existence

existence          Life                                                        existence                 Life    

L  i  f  e          Existence                                                 L  i  f  e                 Existence

NB: The upper- and lower-case writing of the ‘E’ or ‘e’ indicate the ‘False’, imposed condition overriding the ‘real’ natural process, shown below in an illustrated form.

By using a new vocabulary, it changes our perception, reduces our Existence in a return to existence, and acknowledges the embracement of Life. 

Existence 

For anything to exist it must have form, that is, it takes up space in the three dimensions we experience. Everything that does so only maintains its form temporarily, from coming into form, continuing through constant change until it no longer has its recognizable form. Life pulsations that form everything, from microorganisms through plants, animals, humans, planets, and the whole cosmos move through these forms causing the changes that arise over what we experience as time.

Responsibility

Consider how short a single life is. As a child or teenager life seems a long stretch ahead, when your fiftieth birthday arrives you may have the thought ‘I’m past halfway now’. In one's eighties and nineties, the end is almost a visible oncoming horizon.

The number of actions one can place upon the world in such a short time is very limited, yet collectively humanity has imposed a tremendous force upon the world, covering it with Developmentalization-Existence. Of course, you will say ‘I didn’t do all of that, I just live my life, my action is limited, local, I’m not a planetary force’. In so doing you not only absolve yourself from responsibility, but also fail to understand the nature of the relationship between the individual and (the history of) our species.

The whole of human history must be owned and acknowledged with an acceptance that we did this. Because the ultimate truth is that when the earth was first dug into to, we did it; when the trees were felled to make warships, we did it; when we fought and subdued our own kind, we did it; when writing was invented, we did it; when beautiful carvings were fashioned by sculptors, we did it; when empires sought to rule, we did it; when art and creativity flourish, we did it; when Penicillin was discovered we discovered it; when mount Everest was climbed, we climbed it. When the atom was split, we split it; when a bomb was made, we made it. When it was dropped, we dropped it. And when we give our lives for the sake of others, we do it. Humankind did these things, and that is who you and I are.

It is because we fail to take responsibility for our history that we continue upon a path of destruction that could easily lead to the extinction of many more species, including our own.

We do not like this idea.

We feel that as individuals we have a singular and separate autonomy from the collective actions that mark out human history. But we cannot divorce ourselves from the roots of our being; a species that has and continues, putting the pressure of unnatural Existence on natural evolution, thus causing a cancer in the system. In our defense we say ‘I did not intend to do this’, which is perfectly true. So, then we must ask ourselves, each of us, what is our intention in living this Existence. If we are honest, we discover that our only conscious intentions are self-centered orientated.

This absence of awareness of beyond the self was described by Buddha as ignorance and is at the root of the feeling we experience as incompleteness.

INTENTION

All self-orientated intentions create containment, that is they hold us in existence.

Being thus restricted, no matter how ‘successful’ the outcome of the intention, we never quite experience completeness, there always seems to be a further step just out of reach. The desire for (complete) fulfilment combined with the knowledge of our short impermanent existence produces anxiety and fear.

We deny and bury that fear by developing ambition beyond contentment.

The attempt to satisfy the inflated collective ambitions of humanity has built a prison of Existence.

Inflating the ego’s ambition with cultural expectations way beyond its purpose we fail to comprehend the simple truth that what we give to Existence remains of Existence – and will cease with Existence. We unconsciously know this to be the case, hence the short-lived satisfaction gives way to the inexplicable discomfort of an unsatisfied feeling. In other words, for all our striving we have not collectively reached in any sense the truth of Life. We still operate solely within Existence.

There have been exceptions, primarily individuals who have been shocked in some way out of and beyond the ego self. There have also been, in the past, groups of people who have not developed the self-view, almost entirely living within the Life stream of being during their existence. Being ‘primitives’ outside of our civilized Existence, they have mostly been discounted, as have so often those individuals who try to share the shock of their strange experience.

One other exception to the mass of humanity is those who deliberately seek Life beyond the confines of Existence by following the narrow path contrary to the common highway of Existence-arrogance.   

We are not going back to a lost past, and waiting to be shocked out of the discomfort of complacency is a foolish and undesirable gamble. We have to determine upon a change; to do so we must first have Intention.

We make an Intention to prioritize Life over Existence.

By embedding in one’s mind the simple change of language proposed, we begin to make Life conscious beyond the confines of Existence-arrogance. As this new Life-awareness sinks into our being we begin to experience changes in our outlook on the world and within our heart and mind. A confidence enters into what we do, a realization that striving is of the ego, being at ease is how Life moves our being, just as the tides move the whole ocean, irrespective of what the temporary waves are doing.

May you be well, may your days and nights be filled with Life.

Comments and questions - sucinno@hotmail.com   Subject: Nearlife.