Redefine Life Expectancy: Discover Life Before Death

TRANSCENDING PREOCCUPATIONS WITH SURVIVAL

This life we human beings lead is a strange thing.  On the one hand, we are just another mammal that has been designed to survive a wide variety of environments, with a set of instinctual responses and drives that resemble other mammals in many ways.  What we have in addition seems to be an extraordinary capacity to analyze, conceptualize, manipulate, and alter surrounding environments in order to ensure our survival.  This requires constant mental as well as physical attention, preparation, and work.  So we are born into a world as vulnerable creatures that need to recognize threatening conditions and react quickly. So fear, anxiety, uncertainty, suspicion, wariness, pain, guilt, pressure, urgency, loss, concern, anger, greed, jealousy, and even shame and embarrassment, are felt as forms of discomfort that call the body to do something to address the unsettling conditions that are perceived to cause them.  

Although extremely helpful to facilitate our survival, responding to cues based in discomfort is not very helpful when survival is not an issue.  In fact, the success of this way of functioning in the world has resulted in our degrading environments worldwide, with no end in sight to our seemingly insatiable needs to produce and consume without regard to maintaining any balance with other forms of life or sense of humility.  So here we are spiraling downward, suffering in many ways from our built-in mindset seeking out and reacting to the slightest perceived deficiency and insecurity. 

Yet, foremost, we are spiritual beings in human bodies with which we are so strongly identified that we often lose sight of the fact.  Not only are we built to survive, but we are also built with the capacity to transcend our preoccupations with survival and experience the mysterious unfolding of nature and our selves in the moment.   This transcendence of the false identification with "survival mind" delivers us into a new form of aliveness where we can discover and witness over and over, infinitely, the mystery and miracle of being fully human.  The great news is that this is possible, with a little discipline and practice. Find out more by viewing my Ebooks in Books/Resources or by downloading them from Gumroad.com/johnhain or the Apple iBook Store (for iPads and Macs)