Matter reacts. Life adapts. Spirit creates.
With that, I have summarized the 14-billion-year cosmic process in three stages and just six words. I’m using the term ‘stage’ here less in its temporal sense than as a way of identifying distinct levels of complexity in the evolutionary architecture of our universe. True enough, energy first fused into matter, then stirred to life, and eventually awakened as spirit. But each preceding stage continued as foundation to subsequent ones, not just persisting underneath the others but taken up, incorporated, and transformed in the breakthroughs they represented.
You, for instance, are a rather remarkable synthesis of physical matter, animal life, and creative spirit. Your life is generated and sustained out of a deep economy of physical reactions going on in your body all the time. And as you move through the changing environments of your life, your body and mind are adapting so as to optimize your ‘fit’ to the way things are. The adaptation of life amounts to this constant quest for the niches where environmental stress is manageable, internal distress is minimized, and the opportunity for longevity and reproduction is greatest. Once life finds such niches, it settles in and makes itself at home.
Think about the various niches you have settled into, those safe corners and familiar grooves where “everyting irie.”
And this is our problem as human beings. Whereas the material processes that keep us alive are autonomic and unconscious; and while slipping into a best fit with our surroundings is a preconscious preference for the path of least resistance; that aspect which makes us most uniquely human – our creative spirit – must operate in full awareness and by conscious choice. For this reason, habit, convention, custom, orthodoxy, and even morality as the rules that determine our social affections and behavior, can keep us so deep in our grooves that spirit has no chance of waking up.
If my reader ever wonders why I am so critical of orthodoxy (not only in religion) and the mental bypass of conviction which closes the mind to everything but its own absolute truth, this is why. As the theme of this blog is ‘exploring creative change’, my passionate interest is in that transforming process whereby human beings break through the constraints of family patterns, tribal traditions, belief systems, and identity contracts that keep us asleep.
My message is not that we need to trash them all, necessarily, or leave them behind and go it alone through life. When the creative spirit awakens in us, some of these things will be dropped off and left behind, as their authority is no longer required. But others, like that literal god who comes to life again as a literary figure and metaphor of the grounding mystery, can light up with fresh relevance and illumine the path ahead. Creative spirit awakens ‘on the other side of god’ and invites us to live in conscious awareness of our place in the unity of existence.
In an interesting way, each of those three stages in the cosmic process surpasses the one immediately preceding it by breaking (through) a law that would prevent its progress. Life has to overcome the stabilizing force of entropy which is constantly pulling matter down into more steady states of equilibrium. By self-replication, sexual reproduction, and social bonding, life pushes upwards against this law of matter and thereby secures for itself a higher stage of existence. Life’s law is that niche-seeking survival mandate mentioned earlier: stay as deep inside those grooves of pleasure and avoid any pain that signals compromise, exposure, and a loss of security.
Habituate yourself to your surroundings, to the circumstances of your life, to the role-play and ideology of your tribe: that’s what the preconscious law of life will have you do. It’s safer inside the circle, where you can live closer to what you know and be assured of the resources you need to survive. Do what you’re told, don’t rock the boat, stay in line, wait your turn, look before you leap. If you’re still alive, it must be working. Why tempt fate? What’s the point in thinking outside the box, when the box contains all you need to know?
I could add more platitudes and proverbs of the status quo, but you probably have a pretty good feel for this law of adaptation that manages to keep so many of us spiritually asleep. If the creative spirit is to awaken in us, we will have to confront, break through, and rise above the trance of security and its delusion of meaning. The very identity that has been shaped for us by our taller powers and tribal handlers is now our greatest impediment, our most formidable obstacle to genuine liberty.
Just say to yourself, “I want to be free to live my own life, to follow my bliss, and realize the fullness of what I am” – merely let those words out of your mouth, and just as quickly will come rebuke and admonition for entertaining such a selfish fantasy. So insidious is this reproof against genuine self-actualization, that the script spins automatically inside your own head. What you don’t understand is that this script, together with its sponsoring tribal ideology, is itself a fantasy, and a selfish one of the highest order.
After all, this is the center of identity known as ego, which is really a mechanism of social adaptation by which the tribal mind replicates itself in the individual. You were disciplined, shaped, and instructed to hold certain things as self-evidently true. That’s just the way it is, you were told. Because I said so. It’s in the Bible. Your brainwashing was nearly complete before your rational and critical-thinking prefrontal cortex could come online to help you see through much of this so-called wisdom. If you grew up in a strict religious household, then the everlasting consequence of god’s judgment further secured your duty as carrier of your tribe’s memetic code (i.e., the cultural analogue of our genetic code, but constructed out of memes rather than genes).
Needless to say, the creative spirit doesn’t break (through) the rule of life in society as an act of belligerence, but as liberative and transpersonal, meaning that it breaks beyond the ego stage of consciousness and sets us free for a larger vision of where we really are, and where this great cosmic process is inviting us to go.
Tracts of Revolution 
Of course this is an invitation to meditation of any kind, not only Latihan. But to better understand the liberative meditation process people should know how their brain works. Otherwise, the content of meditation will be taken as “spiritual”, as religion, as revelation of a higher “spirit”, what is plain superstition. A new and larger consciousness is needed for the human species go a little further. The question is how. This article may help people with higher right brain, but not those with stronger leftandcentral brein.