The art of living is second to none. The art of understanding is also important: it should help us not only to comprehend the ways we have been bound and imprisoned, but also to find a path to liberation, to freedom, to fulfillment.
We need to start with assumptions about the world in which we are living and reflect in which way cosmology can help us to live and experience joy. We should be clear about what we are doing. Let me just state straightforwardly:
We don’t live in a mechanistic cage, which is the source of our sorrows and slavery.
THE WORLD IS A SANCTUARY, and everything in it is a part of this Sanctuary. This assumption is tremendously important. Once we truly understand it, we are immediately lifted. Literally, we can start living in a new way. This assumption becomes our ethical backbone and also the ways of understanding.
If the world is a sanctuary, you are a sanctuary. Each of us is a sanctuary. Therefore you have to treat yourself seriously— as a sanctuary—otherwise you are back in the cage.
If the world is a sanctuary, you must treat it reverentially. REVERENCE for life immediately becomes a part of your ethics. Put it simply: it becomes a mode of living in this world. You must not only believe in good ideas. You must implement them and use them as a vehicle of creative and joyous living. You must be prudent and discerning, you must not believe cynics and skeptics, who undermine your creative and reverential life.
You must also be consequential. From the ethical value of reverence for life, there immediately follows RESPONSIBILITY for life—for all life, especially for your creative, meaningful and joyous life.
Your consequential mind must also observe that from the idea of the world as a sanctuary, there follows an active mode of life: of living reverentially, with responsibility and under the umbrella of Right Livelihood. Yes, your life style must be wise and frugal. Frugality is an expression of your responsibility. It is only in this way that you can counteract this enormous tsunami of mindless consumption, which destroys the meaning of our life.
You must not only understand that you are beaten to submission, that you are being undermined, manipulated and persuaded, namely that consumptionism is your “new philosophy;” and that this philosophy will make you happy, while you know that it is making you moronic.
Living philosophy is not only a philosophy. It is a liturgy of enacting Life, which is bristling with joy— because you are a joyous phenomenon of the cosmos.
You must not be afraid of seeing yourself as a cosmic being. You must have the courage of accepting yourself as a dweller of a sanctuary. You must have the clarity of understanding that Reverence, Responsibility, Frugality and Universal Compassion, all come from one simple idea—of the World as Sanctuary.
By opting for Living Philosophy, you are opting for a journey of PARTICIPATION. It is an active participation. Like a phoenix you are recreating yourself from the ashes. You have enough cosmic potential within you to do it. You are co-creating with the cosmos. You are not allowing others to define you as if you were a stupid cipher. The renewal is possible. But you must do something with your destiny. The cosmos is an evolutionary creative entity. You are a part of it. You must show that it is so.
Our efforts to return to the strained harmony and meaning
Is not a pipe dream but an unbending determination
To regain our destiny.
by Henryk Skolimowski
