In one of his numerous treatises Manly P. Hall made the insightful comment that for all the successes of scientific understanding we are still left with the mystery: what is force? what is life? what is consciousness? what is mind?
Singling out one piece of that mystery, what is life? It is not so easy to summarize. On the one hand, life can be described objectively as animated parts—biological functions. It could be measured in heartbeats or breaths over time. And then there is the so-called subjective aspect to life…Here the objective accounts seem to melt away. From an experiential perspective perhaps all attempts to measure life feel inadequate.
It’s one thing to say, what is life out there, and it is another to say, what is life to you. Even as people try to resolve this duality they sublimate one to the other. People emphasizing an objective approach might describe existential experience as an illusion (the more romantic types might call it a lucky accident), whereas the subjective approach might infer purpose out of biological complexity.
I could imagine Nature saw humans as a resolution to the question, “When life observes itself what will it see?” I am reminded of Nietzsche’s statement: “When you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you,” his lesson on the etiquette of staring.
I have a default to write cryptically that I probably need to resolve. What I’m alluding to is how we choose to perceive life can be a healthy approach. Rather than see life as an empty illusion, which is a deleterious statement about your-self ultimately, see life as magnificently purposeful, perhaps inefffably so, which ultimately nurtures your own spirit.
The timeline of your life could be meted out in heartbeats and breaths, but it couldn’t account for the character and timbre of each inhalation, each exhalation. No heart monitor could comprehend the secret language of evocation of each heartbeat pulsing your unique embedded signature upon each tidal waveform, returning with gifts from other pulsing life forces to inspire you until you expire. Now this is breath, this is anima, this is spirit.
Principle Vitality 