[Skybird]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Joseph Campbell used to say that people often talk about searching for "the meaning of life" when what they are really looking for is the experience of being fully alive.

Only humans (as far as we know) seem inclined to ascribe a pre-ordained meaning to their existence, as if there needed to be some grand eternal supernatural point to it all. Life just is: there is no point, beyond being alive, other than the aims and purposes that we adopt or create for ourselves. Which ideally should arise from and add to that experience of being alive as the unique individual that each one of us is.

In one of the gospels that didn't make it into the church-approved canon - the gospel of Thomas - when Jesus is asked about when the Kingdom of Heaven will come, he is reported to have given a much different answer than the one the Powers That Be allowed into the official version.

He said, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

When is eternity? Where is "heaven"? It's here, it's now, if you can see it already immanent in the world as well as transcendent of it. So is hell - if that's what you see, if that's the world that you make for yourself.

There is a Zen saying that when one person becomes enlightened, the entirety of existence becomes enlightened. What has changed about the entirety of existence? Nothing, except that the entirety of existence for that individual is what s/he perceives it to be, nothing more and nothing less. When that perception is enlightened, so is the world - for that individual. The kingdom of heaven is spread out upon the earth - and s/he can see it.

Couldn't have said it any better. And Campbell, he was a really great mind, really.

Here are two more quotes that I like very much. the first is by Eugen Drewermann, a former theologican and psychotherapeut who came into massive conflicts with the church and was kind of banned therefore. In one book he wrotes this sentence that I never forgot again since I stumbled over it:

"Denn dieses vermögen wir Menschen gerade im Angesicht des Todes: uns auszuspannen bis zum Horizont, weit zu werden bis an die Enden der Welt, und also den Tod zu besiegen indem wir begreifen wer wir selber eigentlich sind." - "Because this we humans are able to achieve right in the face of death: to expand ourselves up to the horizon, to become wide until the edge of the world, and so to defeat death by realising who we really are." - E. Drewermann: "Mut zu Leben. in: Seelsorge im 20 Jahrhundert"

the other is from one of my absolute most favourite movise of all times, Terence Malick's "A thin red line". There, the narration voice from the off says this:

"One man looks at a dying bird, and thinks there is nothing but unanswered pain. But death's got the final word. It's laughing at him. Another man sees the same bird, feels the glory. Feels something smiling through him."

And in the same movie, the final scene at the end of the film ends like this, after all the horror and all the beauty that just had been seen:

"Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes! Look out at all the things you made! All things shining!"

A fantastic, brutal, fragile, horryfying, beautiful, humane, spiritual movie. If you don't know it, go watching it. Stuff like this you see in the movies only every ten or twenty years or so.