At the very heart of reaching the elevated life is your drive to express humanity's most expansive sentiments. With gratitude for the possibilities to which you are heir (and author), along with a willingness to learn to embody the opportunity in word and deed, you have mustered the executive capacity to arrange your life as you see fit.
How you came to this (poetically described) conscious heart or (scientifically described) cognitive ability is interesting. That you came to it is one of life’s privileges and splendors.
As I have said, the combination of factors found in the force field from which you come is uniquely human. Animals are subject to nature, to a circumscribed range of stimulus/response genetic programming. And they are systemically influenced by the social structures in their circumstances.
However, these structured forces combined with the emergent factors of history and language give human beings access to the propelling and authoring possibilities of mind. Yes, like other animals, we are programmed to acquire “knowledge” through the senses and experience. But we also acquire it (and the privilege and splendor of conscious understanding) through our distinctive cognitive abilities. With this added force of life—this extraordinary human cognitive capacity—we can turn our attention (our receptivity and our creativity) in many directions.
Cognition is the process by which sensory input is transformed, elaborated upon, stored, recovered and used. You and I have an executive ability with regard to this processing. By deliberatively (and incrementally) coming to grips with the matters we bring to our mind, we can be responsible in the matter of how our lives are arranged.
Such responsibility is not readily mastered because most of us are initially caught up in another arrangement, one decreed by the prevailing conceptual reality. This reality is the coercive, sometimes punitive, pressure to conform almost single-mindedly to the acquisition of competitive standing, or to what I refer to as the lower range of normative ideals. (I say lower range because they are the ideals that make possible—in a “don’t rock the boat” sense—the mass scramble for rank and status.) Even if the focus of such an arrangement is not a good fit for our own sensibilities, many of us can’t help but join the struggle for competitive recognition.
Still and fortunately, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says in his essay titled, Circles, “The heart [ultimately] refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force, and to immense and innumerable expansions.”
And so, consciously attuned to the humane potential of our mindful gifts, we expand our focus to include that which remains unconsidered and undone, commit to the compassion and reciprocity that are ours to create and share, and arrange our lives accordingly.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.