Chapter 16: Crossing the Channel to Our Essence

Our stories never perfectly align to the linear progression of life that occurs between our inception and our passing, where we grow, breed and transmit our culture before we die. This is a given since the viagnostic narrative can take multiple forms and head in any number of directions that include regressing back to a lesser state or commencing with a higher awareness that we may slowly lose or forget we have. There are no certainties about how our own stories will evolve or end and with no assurances about whether we will move forward towards what we seek or slide back to where we do not want to be. But if we truly live our lives, we will find the essential elements of the narrative already in place as we pass through its phases to understand life and ourselves in the process. The unfolding of the narrative is like walking through a labyrinth, where we may return to the same place several times before we uncover the secret passage or hidden network to our profound discovery and transformation.

However, even if we are fortunate enough to stumble upon the exit leading us out of our largely unconscious programming as we unravel who we really are, it does not mean that life gets any easier. We may gain greater clarity about the real world that fundamentally differs from the one we once believed existed, but it is challenging to acknowledge that we are actually living a curated existence, where we follow preselected paths and pursue predetermined goals that dictate who we should be and instruct us on how to be happy. It requires us to stop indulging in the illusion of self-directed lives, which are predominantly instantiations of cultural programs that are carefully instilled in us to appear as our own and purposely clouded to quell our deepest fears. But if we can lift ourselves out from the darkness of a reality we cannot perceive, we might get a glimpse into this ineffable essence that reminds us that we are more than the sum of the parts that our societies define for us, whether it is our chosen professions and lifestyles or our acquired beliefs and interests. That momentary insight, in concurrence with realizing we are incomplete, is sufficient to appreciate that there is substance to our contrived and hollowed lives that goes beyond material achievement, social recognition or even personal responsibility to add meaning to the world through our narratives rather than fulfilling the agendas of others.

However, we cannot grasp or contribute meaning to our lives unless we see our narratives as part of a universal story from which we all originate and in which we all ultimately partake to enable its elaboration and evolution. But many of us are taught to see our stories as revolving around ourselves or our families when we are merely being used as a means by which larger narratives are being played out. Naturally, our stories should be about us but only insofar as we are sources of potential to be actualized without personally being more important or less significant than anyone else is. We simply have the right and duty to align with our inner nature and manifest our shared essence to become a pertinent influencer or contributor to the cosmic saga in which we all have an initial part to play. But the more we try to exercise that right and related duty, the more the proponents and opponents of our social order attempt to dissuade us from seeking the expression of our essence. They do this by equating this to fables that will only ruin our chances of having a tolerable life and seizing the limited opportunities for advancement that come with being obediently productive or deceitfully clever in accordance with our inescapably dependent socioeconomic system, which serves nothing except for its own preservation.

We defend our system of sustenance whether we support or exploit it. However, it is only rewarding for those who succeed or obey those who succeed and remains punitive for those who fail or those who are loyal to those who fail, while it is especially brutal to those who disregard or challenge it altogether. Too many of us have a vested interest in maintaining a predictable hierarchy of social order as long as we are not the bottom of the resource distribution pyramid, and as long we believe that there is no other alternative to the one we knowingly and unknowingly sustain. Consequently, those of us who can sense and approach our essence increasingly risk undergoing waves of disapproval, indignity, abuse and even terror or ruin. But what we need to realize is that this engineered world depends on our cooperation as much as we have come to depend on it. And while we may be dispensable because we are replaceable by the next person unaware of this reality, we only end up sacrificing our own lives if we continue to pay homage to the real illusion. We will fail to recognize our true purpose in life, and the meaning we seek will be lost in perpetuity. Hence, our choice lies between living within an artificially proven structure and testing what truly makes us who we are. Although all phases of the viagnostic narrative are necessary to experience the fundamental significance of life, it is only in crossing the channel to our essence that we transform our challenges into the valued meaning of our story.

ENTERING THE CHANNEL

When we reach the crevice of our narrative, we face a distinct set of choices. The first decision we need to make is whether we should resume or end our story there and then. The choice may seem obvious given it is our natural inclination to live and pursue the possibilities of life regardless of how devastating our loss and suffering may be or how much cruelty and corruption we may encounter. However, for those of us who keep returning to the existential void or remain permanently trapped in a reverberant maze of self-doubt and superstition that our fragile egos may generate, we may find ourselves at the end of a pointless story as we fall and vanish into the abyss. Nevertheless, the more likely choice we make is to trail back to the current and assume a false identity with the staged portrayal of happiness and conviction as flimsy evidence of our approved success and maturity. But this too is a kind of death, where we may be physically alive but spiritually dead as we display emotion as a mere act of psychosocial survival. The final choice is to confront the unknown, where we must find and traverse the hidden channel through the darkest places and moments of our existence and overcome our mortal fears of enslavement and futility to discover and convey who we really are. This is the critical point in our viagnostic tale where we decide to let the world recite a predictable story of our lives or direct it to chronicle our enlightened and instrumental events that have yet to be written or read. Do we succumb to a fictitious life that avoids the universal truth? Or do we muster the courage to endure this seemingly dark obscurity of existence with the intent of seeing and contributing to its underlying meaning?

The channel represents the fourth phase of the narrative. It begins the moment when we commit to a course of action that aligns with who we truly are and continues for as long as we maintain a commitment to transcend the obstacles or forces we encounter that respectively block or oppose our essential manifestation. It can be and usually will be as basic as a value or principle by which to live our lives that expresses a fundamental element of our awareness. For example, some of us may place a great deal of effort in behaving respectfully towards others because we believe that such deliberate conduct is not only necessary but part of the ultimate aim of life. To apply and never deviate from this principle, despite being severely abused, demands the kind of bravery that can easily be mislabelled by others as cowardice. For this reason, we may treat this as the courageous phase of the narrative. However, it is not uncommon for some of us to purposely translate our acts of boldness as measures of greatness to unjustifiably rationalize shameless displays of arrogance or entitlement as compensation for our deep-seated sense of inadequacy. Such cases do not reflect our attempts at entering the channel, but rather at reinserting ourselves back in the current with a deceptively dominant status.

One important distinction for us to make between the current and the channel is that the channel takes us past the crevice, whereas the current only brings back us to the crevice or avoids it. Since the crevice signals both the exit from the current and the entry point to the channel, it is also the trigger for initiating our transition from being what we are told or programmed to be to becoming what we were potentially meant to be. However, it is solely in our erratically taxing advancement through this viagnostic metamorphosis that we genuinely transform, which can only occur if we are in or on the right channel. Another way of stating this is that we have chosen the right path or have tuned our spirit to the right frequency, or as some of us might say, we have aligned to our natural vibrations. All of these expressions suggest that the channel can have multiple meanings, which include being both a passage and a frequency that directs us to our essence and ultimately develops our story regardless of its outcome. It also embodies the unadulterated choice and unswerving commitment we make based on a deeper, higher and broader awareness to reveal and experience the meaning we seek.

The channel signifies the greatest challenge and risk that each of us must undergo to move our stories forward and recover the mystical intuition we lost during our childhood, and the hope is that we regain the freedom we always had and rediscover our native tongue to help describe and test who and what we really are. If we fail to select a suitable course, we simply collapse back into the current and eventually return to the crevice. But being on the right channel does not mean that we escape the crevice or the current. We never entirely leave behind because they behave like permanent fixtures of the narrative that hold it together and the phases simply reflect the story running through them. Each act or part plays its role in developing the story. The context provides its footing, the current puts it into motion and the crevice and its emptiness drive it to its purpose. But it is the channel that captures the meaningful discovery of the narrative. When we choose or find the right path, we continue to follow the current as if it runs parallel to the current without losing awareness of the context or the crevice. We also track the current because it represents the present in the passing of time, where we observe the patterns of life and acknowledge its boundaries without completely confining ourselves to them as we uncover our inherent capacity for enlightenment and transcendence. There is no reason for us to be condemned to an unconscious life. And while we can be caught in the current or get lost in the crevice, we can always find ourselves through the channel. Hence, it is here where and when we learn to align with our essence as we synchronize with reality to derive meaning from our viagnostic narratives.

Ultimately, we do not know what will happen in our stories, but we must maintain faith in our perseverance to actualize who we truly are as we actively attempt to express or contribute something meaningful through a variety of unexpected ways in the time afforded to us in this world. And although our chosen channel does not come attached with specific instructions to follow, we are nevertheless equipped with the moral fortitude and wisdom we need to test our resilience against the harshest struggles of life. It is often in the exact moment when we no longer feel we can go on any further that an undisclosed inner voice summons us to persevere in our travels through the unknown so that we may realize our strength of character. Over the course of our lives, we all have the opportunity to discover that there are specific sets of challenges and hardships we are designed personally to endure almost effortlessly and ceaselessly unlike the rest of us. These experiences bring us closer to understanding the whole point of our lives, which preferably leave us with less apprehension and more determination. The viagnostic narrative is the means by which we unveil the meaning of life for all of us to see and feel.

THE TRUE TEST OF OUR RESILIENCE

Although darkness persists in the channel just as it does in the crevice, the channel is illuminated by purpose to guide its crossing whereas the crevice demands a conscious leap of faith after our disillusionment discourages us from moving forward or trusting the universe. Yet clarity of intent does not remove the residual distress we feel after we take the initial steps required to slip through the cognitive battles and cultural fissures of our seemingly elaborate existence. We undoubtedly face our riskiest unknowns about life that will challenge our sense of reality as well as our greatest adversities that will measure the tolerance we have to endure the aftermath of life-altering events for indefinite periods of our lives, during which we may come to realize and fulfill our unwritten destinies.

We only know that we have chosen and passed through the right channel when we experience the true test of our resilience. This is because any other passage will likely send us back to the current to start over again or to resume where we left off with no prior memory of the crisis that placed us before the crevice. If we make the wrong choice or no choice at all, we will find ourselves once again looking over the edge of our obscurity and almost on the brink of self-destruction while frozen in the eternity of indecision and disinterest in the world as we become disinclined or unable to amend anything anymore. And given that we will spiritually die or remain morally lost if we do not move our stories forward through the right channel, we need to choose our path deliberately so that we own it and learn important lessons from its outcomes to recite back to our sentient world. Suffering is only bearable when it serves something worthy of its narration, and we only willingly undergo anguish when there is recognizable purpose or value as opposed to when events seem completely senseless, and therefore, meaningless. By willingly aligning to the right channel, we will confront our trepidation, rise above our misery and surpass our illusory boundaries as we essentially reach further into what we already are. And when this occurs, we can endure failure because we find resilience in knowing our calling and realizing our potential regardless of our externally defined and perceived success.

One of the things that many of us may think we do not have but do is courage. We neglect this because we have very narrow and archaic notions of what it means to be courageous. Typically, we associate this with physically risking our lives to save others or engaging in combat with a stronger opponent. Other examples may even include standing up to a bully or facing the prospect of public humiliation, but courage is much more basic than that. Almost anything that we find difficult to do and sustain yet continue to do requires a form of valour, especially if it induces fear, and this includes upholding a commitment to action when we have little faith or sense of what good will come from our persistence. Courage is getting up every day to take on the world when we are at the point of giving up entirely. Sometimes, we are driven by the anticipated dread of an alternative scenario if we do not act accordingly. And while that may seem cowardly to some of us, we would be lying to ourselves if we alleged to not experience some distress when making decisions with potentially serious consequences. It is also quite normal to feel anxiously uncertain about the positive outcomes we hope that our exhausted efforts will achieve. Therefore, we are either in denial or too afraid to admit that we are afraid. And although there may be legitimately competitive reasons for pretending to be fearless, there is no courage to claim if there is no fear to declare. Nevertheless, fear is a critical survival response to real threats, and so, how we deal with it is what makes us what we are.

Our resilience depends on a multitude of factors, but many of them operate outside of our direct control such as the presence of caring relationships and a relatively cohesive community. This demonstrates that while building real confidence enables us to be more independent, being able to rely on the support of others is essential to our adaptation and endurance. In addition, we realize that some of our greatest struggles frequently involve overcoming our dreadful anticipation of harshly negative outcomes however slight their probability may be as well as our traumatic response to memories of recurring failure, betrayal, tragedy and worst of all, deprivation. These challenges account for a disproportionate degree of our hardship even before we experience real consequences to our choices and actions. Unfortunately, a mind consumed by imagined events that have yet to happen and may never occur can burn much of the psychogenic fuel needed to cope with actual difficulties when they finally arrive. Hence, letting the inevitable transpire while evading only what can be avoided, instead of pointlessly fighting what we cannot, helps us to refocus our efforts on the positive value we can appreciate and offer as we allow ourselves to recover from any prior stressors we have endured.

However, resilience is not about having a positive attitude or being happy, which is a belief many of our cultures overemphasize. Although it may seem emotionally preferable and may even encourage favourable results, it is neither pragmatic nor prudent because being overly optimistic can expose us to serious risks given that a positive view of the world can be just as delusional as a negative one. As perpetually imperfect and incomplete creatures, we can best serve ourselves by seeking genuine instances of security and fulfilment rather than making futile attempts at attaining perfect states. We want to work towards balance or optimal conditions and characteristics, and this requires us to embrace both the positive and the negative by offsetting one another. Hence, being resilient means being risk sensitive but not risk averse, where we try to be positive while being realistic in our goals and expectations as well as monitor for opportunities while weighing the risks and detecting the traps of seemingly attractive prospects. We learn to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, but we focus on what is likely. Moreover, we avoid worrying except to direct our concerns towards prioritizing what is indispensable or to prevent needless events altogether, but it is senseless to ruminate over things we can neither change nor determine their veracity or danger.

While we need the strength of our resilience to cross the channel of our viagnostic narrative, its true test is a moral one and ultimately requires us to undergo some form of spiritual transformation in how we think and feel regarding ourselves and existence as a whole. We can refer to this as viagnostic metanoia, where we pass the examination of life by demonstrating the fundamental change in our understanding of it through how we reflect who we truly are in how we give back to the world. This necessity becomes clear when we see the distraction, preoccupation and indoctrination of a self-serving system that encourages us all to secure our place in the pecking order of its hierarchical rat race, where heroes and villains are no longer obvious to us and where good and evil are dependent more on belief than intent. Any attempt to attain enlightenment and achieve transfiguration naturally questions the cultural dominance of a ruling ego that can instantly mobilize its forces of allegiance in applying sociosexual pressures and geopolitical conditions to break our spirit, both emotionally and economically. Hence, in order to persevere in our viagnostic quest to attain completeness of being, we need to develop our own deeper or higher sense of virtue that can transcend the blind judgment of others and permit us to experience the mutuality of our essence by fully participating in life. But before we can truly discover its meaning, we must be prepared to accept the moral ambiguity of life.

THE HUMBLE UNVEILING OF GOOD AND EVIL

When we are young, it seems easier to distinguish between good and evil because the stories we recite present a very simplified view of the world divided into those who help others in need or follow the rules and those who break the rules or hurt the innocent. This is an upgrade from perceiving pleasure as good and pain as bad like most living organisms. In addition, we recognize familiar faces like those of our parents as being trustworthy while strangers might trigger suspicion. However, that quickly changes as we experience life in all its shades of grey where people begin to appear as varying blends of compassion and cruelty or of generosity and greed. We gradually see that moral partition blur more and more to the point where we respond desperately in search of absolute friends and foes that lead almost immediately to their invention. Whether we are right or wrong, we conjure up an enemy to situate our individual and collective identities on the side of our own defined good in this classic struggle to achieve a meaningful victory over evil. We see this in sports, commerce and politics as well as closer to home within the family or community and in the workplace. Even art and music serve as forms of segregation by positioning ourselves along with our affiliations as the lords of good taste. But these symbolic divides only serve to distract us from our true essence and conceal the real battle between good and evil.

We tend to associate evil with those whom we believe try to harm or conquer us whether it is to establish their dominion over our chosen way of life or to dispose of us as an inconvenience or obstacle to their own plans. We are also inclined, rightly or wrongly, to link malevolence to those who attack some aspect of our identity such as our ethnic background or any other characteristic used to distinguish and divide us. Moreover, many of us see evil as a kind of possession, where we believe that it lives within or among us. However, evil may not reside with individuals or groups as much as it surfaces through our interpersonal and intercommunal interactions with one another, regardless of our close ties, because it is through action or choice that we reveal intent and it is through outcome that it converts into a matter of concern. This is clear on a grander scale when we consider how we are drawn to the benefits and promises of technological innovations, but we minimize their existential threats and critical roles as instruments of power until we experience their negative impacts on our lives.

Although we do not need evil to ensure suffering for limited beings subjected to the cold and harsh reality of the cosmos, some of us believe it is a necessary counterpoint to the intent of our narratives to fulfill our essence. It reflects the path that leads us to lose our harmonious spirit and to impersonate a supreme being bound to a purely materialistic existence. It is also what we fear most in an elusive enemy that never directly reveals its sinister presence to us as it infiltrates all manner of sentient life like an underlying network of advanced intelligence that manipulates the nature of all animate beings. However, the responsibility lies with all of us as individuals and communities to recognize that evil presents itself with good or bad intentions when we try to force something unnatural to happen in the world such as unsustainable growth and sovereign immortality.

Many of us believe that good and evil are embedded in the universe as part of something supernatural that ties everything together because it exists within everything, especially life, and because we cannot have one without the other. Although derived from our culture as much as our biology, this mystical concept seems to predate our earliest ancient civilizations. It is a core belief of most religions and a common underlying thread of epic fantasy literature. We infuse this in popular culture and see this specifically referenced in the Star Wars [16] film franchise as ‘the force’. Although it operates beyond our mortal capacity to completely fight it or control it, it is nevertheless part of us. This means that, like the Jedi or the Sith, we can harness its power to some unknown degree. But it is our awareness of this ability to wield this cosmic force that leaves us with both its temptation and responsibility, and the expression of its inherent good or evil depends on the choices that arise from exercising our agency, either freely or involuntarily.

We like to invent and promote stories about the perseverance of the good, which often emerges from the most unlikely sources. It could involve an unassuming, wholesome soul who was spared the moral captivity of a corrupted system or a relentless underdog who persists despite being beaten countless times in defeat. This is because the overconfidence of a dominant authority frequently underestimates how adaptive and unyielding people can be. They become powerful symbols of guiding light that give us hope and inspire the solidarity needed to prevent or overcome nefarious control and expansion, which we commonly associate with darkness because we fear something lurking in the shadows in search of the opportune moment to harm or enslave us when we least expect it. In a way, hope and fear respectively represent good and evil, which both breed and hide inside us.

However, the influence of ill will lies in its denial since we are inclined to see ourselves as good or at least not see ourselves as being wicked or corrupt. It is easy to maintain this deception because we tend to project evil onto some external force or opponent, while we neither direct our attention to acknowledge its fire that rages within us nor expend any energy in untangling its hold on our actions. But both dread and greed can devour us all when we become embroiled in morally ambiguous situations and staged conflicts, where the perpetrators and the protectors become indistinguishable and where our innocence becomes a rare and precious commodity we struggle to salvage. Hence, while we may prove our moral fortitude when tested by the cruel obscurity of life, it is only in the humble unveiling of good and evil in ourselves where we face who we really are in order to pass through the channel.

The moral humility we find in our honest introspection helps us to confront our own demons generated by our traumas. It also provides us with some insight into the complex characters of those who wrestle with their own ghosts and monsters while we learn to distinguish our real friends from our true enemies and weigh the risks of caring for those with the capacity to cause us suffering. If we truly want to love anyone, we must first approach ourselves compassionately to nurture the child of our needs and tame the beast of our troubles inside us all. By listening to our competing concerns, we can redirect our energy to apply a more comprehensive strategy that integrates our opposing or distressed parts instead of trying to eradicate or suppress them. The meaning we hope to embody by crossing the channel depends on our will to achieve peace in the battle between good and evil within ourselves.

The channel is ultimately where the great trial of our convictions unfolds and its verdict depends on how well our beliefs are informed by reality and how well we prepare ourselves for the murkier side of life that we cannot avoid or dismiss. Life discloses what we truly believe and who we really are by how we endure and overcome its anguish and by what types of challenges we can purposely undertake, and it is in our fortunate moments of self-awareness that our path becomes abundantly clear. In other words, we know who we really are and what we are meant to be by learning which situations we are best suited to handle in our lives and by testing our cultures in the harshest conditions that we drive good and evil to their intersection. And it is in the outcome of their collision that we discover the true values we need to close the gap in our incomplete sense of fulfilment.

THE MEANING OF OUR UTILITY

We find meaning by filling the void we unearth in the life we live. It is in moments when we see something as unfinished or unfulfilled that we act upon that awareness to bring it to its completion. We all more or less do this in basic ways like when we mend something that is broken or arrange a set of things we find in disarray. Our sense of who we are or who we have become routinely has to express itself in a public or private setting to engage in the performance of an activity out of interest or duty that adds some piece of ourselves to the world. We derive meaning from the value we contribute to the world and especially to others, and this runs much deeper than describing the things we experience or interpreting salient events around us. It is not enough to simply notice or imagine value, and this includes detecting what others overlook. We must actualize it for meaning to be tangible, which normally takes form in the act of doing or generating something in the process.

Unfortunately, many of us nervously or impatiently focus more on the pretense of doing or achieving the things that we collectively applaud but mistakenly reward to the point where we develop a preference for imitating life rather than living it. We also draw too much attention to relative status in terms of wealth or popularity as some means of inclusion in our society while actually encouraging the deterioration of social bonds and reducing genuine meaning in our lives. Consequently, we substitute the channel for a fictional adventure through the biosocial current, where our dominant cultural system superimposes standardized paths onto our unchosen stories. To live our lives with the intent of getting what we are taught to believe we want when it involves doing nothing or little that we naturally want to do, particularly when we know what we actually want, makes us feel or know why we are emotionally and spiritually enslaved. The greatest master of our lives is the one who persuades us to submit without need for brute force by activating any of our acquired fears. Such fears are not limited to socioeconomic imprisonment or failure and they can include the fear of extreme pain and unhappiness that results from betrayal, loss, abandonment and a ceaseless sense of loneliness, futility and insignificance.

However, there can never be an end to fear since there is always something to lose when something has already been gained, and this begins with life for all of us. We are afraid of dying because we are alive, and many of us are frequently apprehensive about a lack of purpose or substance in a life that feels incomplete. But we know we suffer less when we are able to find the meaning of our utility in a world that can easily elicit a sense of isolated dependency, where our false independence is actually unidirectional dependency in that we rely on the world far more than it relies on us. That is the unspoken terror we feel and instead of being forced into submission to a foreign existence, we want to be free to allow our imperfection to drive us to being complete. We can do this by tapping into our essence and manifesting its inherent value outwardly through our inner nature and our unique set of experiences that shape us into who we have become regardless of our alignment with what we really are. But this requires us to stop perceiving ourselves as something imperfect or deficient for which we feel the need to compensate by employing several methods of building our own sense of importance and value as well as deterring or delaying the prospect of death or prolonged distress. A common response is to have as many self-affirming experiences as we can for their own sake before we are no longer able to do so. Another response is to not live our lives by spending more time trying to mitigate risks we cannot reduce without increasing other risks as we might inadvertently do to our children.

Regrettably, many of us are enticed by the dark side that lives off the fear, ignorance and misfortune of others to gain a preferable position in our shared system, convincing ourselves and those whom we resource that it is the way of the world and in our overall interest for the great show of life to go on playing. The irony of this structure is that the more we feed off the toil of others, the more we are dependent on them to create the illusion of our independence. But nevertheless, we use others among us as fertilizer for own alleged growth only to discover much later in life that we have become feed for something more depraved that provides nothing in return as it instinctively tries to steal everything until there is little to nothing left to plunder. As a whole, we behave towards our shared planet like bacteria in a test tube rapidly consuming all the food available and reaching the apex of perceived dominance over our confined environment until there are insufficient resources left to meet our voracious appetite just as the viral element of our overly competitive collective dies out almost completely.

We may think that balance will eventually be reinstated by the universe, and life will reignite somewhere at some time in the not so distant future. But to continue the biocultural lineage of our growing intelligence and accumulated discovery demands that every bad action is met with a good counteraction to maintain the minimal degree of equilibrium necessary. Believing that restoring balance will occur naturally and that we need not participate in its restitution means that we are gambling on the likelihood that not everyone shares our view. We also risk becoming part of the wickedness of the world by doing nothing, or worse, promoting the same abusive system in the process of trying to outwit it. It is only in the basic morality of our utility that we can counter this trend, which is to add a little more value than we take. We cannot escape our core needs and concerns, but we can keep them from distorting the real meaning we want to derive from life.

The nature of evil is to exploit and devour value, and inevitably destroy it to cause disorder for all of us. It is the parasite that feeds on the good because it itself has no value to offer except to complement the good, which is why good and evil need each other to understand their roles in our own stories and in the greater narrative of life. Good does not know it is good until it confronts evil, and the base function of evil is to trigger the parallel rise of good to offset the iniquity that has proliferated. When value is extinguished or stolen, we develop or recover the good by generating or salvaging value. This means that creating value is a basic good, and utility is its demonstration. It does not have to be something physically productive or fully achievable. It must simply have an impact however difficult it may be to detect as long as we come to own our sense of purpose and not let anyone impose it on us.

Unfortunately, as a society we lay claim to what is or what is not valuable, and our contributions can easily fail to be appreciated as often as they can be overly commended. While we may all be encouraged to be productive and seek fame or credit, being able to measure a high yield or to gain popularity is not necessarily equivalent to making a positive change in the world. Furthermore, much of what we do only appears to be important, and hence it is not surprising that many of us do not feel that our efforts have authentic value. Our impact seems minimal or inconsequential, and sometimes proves to be detrimental even to ourselves. But rather than recognize this, many of us continue to compare ourselves with one another because we feel our value cannot stand on its own merits. We become petty as we engage in ruinous gossip and excessive ridicule, while we play the blame game as a typical tactic to redirect attention from ourselves. Evil always because we do not recognize it when it appears, and the greatest trick the devil plays on us is to turn our own productivity against one another and against ourselves as we lose sight of a common or greater good.

Utility means more than productivity or generating an efficient output. It has to have purpose in that it is providing something of perceived value, and we find purpose in producing and sustaining that value. This suggests that we need to know our values In order to guide our sense of utility. And while we may not always be able to quickly and easily articulate them, we discover what they are based on what we do in the circumstances in which we find ourselves because we act on what we believe is important in a given situation. In essence, a value is a belief about what is important. But since determining what is genuinely important can be a lifelong exercise, we are more likely to accept what we are told is valuable if we do not challenge our inherited beliefs and widen our views of a world occupied by corruptible and  indifferent sociopolitical systems overseeing complex economies that predefine and measure our value. Questioning our way of life or an aspect of what we follow does not mean it is wrong; it merely allows us to consider and confirm our rightful place in the universe. Otherwise, we always risk living a mesmerized life that can easily be exploited to direct our energy to things that serve the self-interest of others at the expense of the utility we seek to offer.

When we align what we do to who we really are, it feels effortless because we are so clearly focused on what we intrinsically value that it simply becomes a liberated act of being rather than a coerced state of doing. But believing our lives come with a purpose will not free us of a difficult existence. While we can partially reduce the physical and emotional pain we want to avoid, we cannot evade our moral suffering or the agony of thinking and doing things that somehow feel wrong to us and that are hard to bear. We experience this when we partake in unnatural acts that are driven out of us to perform and instilled in us to feel normal, and therefore, acceptable or justifiable to the point of almost being compulsory. But it is absurd to live by senseless rules and expectations that neither deliver us to where we want to be nor realize any of our potential. We know we can only be free when we channel our energy and ability to something valuable to us that demonstrates utility. If we have to suffer in our work, then we should do so for something worthwhile. Many of us know we have chosen our path when we determine what pain we are willing to endure. And we endure it when we cross our channel by believing in the value or utility we will bring to the living universe, which in that moment becomes our world as much as it belongs to anyone else. We become part of its creative process as well as its nature to restore balance.

EXIT THE PASSAGE TO THE END OF OUR JOURNEY

Two modes of experience run concurrently throughout our stories, which divide into our outer and inner lives. Our outward experience is what we refer to as the journey and our inward experience is represented by the passage. The journey constitutes the sequence of events, choices and outcomes we face that are expressed as achievements and tragedies, as feelings and lessons, and as inspirations and crises of faith. And the passage is our enlightened path through our encounters with reality that leads to a profound state of awareness where we come to a holistic understanding of the meaning we seek to find or derive from our stories. We acquire wisdom as guidance along our journey that flows with the current of life, but the passage is the channel to our essence where we discover our morality that conveys what matters through the values we practice in our lives and that unveils the significance of our stories through their evolution.

However, we cannot unravel the meaning of our viagnostic narrative and navigate to our unique place in the cosmic theatre of life until we are able to run against the current by passing through the channel. We tend to feel the ease of our instruction when we follow the current, but we also experience a disruptive departure from our inner nature and implicit values. This becomes evident when we come to realize that our lives are built on the appearance of virtue disguised in narrowly defined success and shrouded by a delusional sense of happiness devoid of any genuine meaning. However, when we cross the channel, we undergo a reversal of the current where we become misaligned with the artificial tide of society to embody a more thoughtful nature and less mendacious culture. We feel that we are aligning with the deeper truth of life that reveals the significance of our potential utility, but we suffer the consequences of being at odds with a purely self-interested system that tries to manage our lives solely to serve its own ends. And the more we challenge its faithless disposition and games of deception, the more it attacks our contributive value to the world. But this is not a fight that we need to win or lose. We only need to persevere in the universal struggle to approach and manifest our essence, which is our intrinsic function in the greater narrative of life.

It is only by being open to the truth, empirically and morally, that our path will become and remain sufficiently clear to us to redirect and dedicate our efforts to a meaningful existence. Many of us do not see how this deviates from seeking the recognition and reward of performing in conformance with shifting societal norms and assumed civic duties or in accordance with the celebrated egocentricity of misleadingly liberal cultures. But when we are too invested in things that offer us little or false value, we risk being drained of our vitality and ultimately being discouraged from pursuing our nobler endeavours as we fall into despair. Alternatively, when we become aware that our livelihood is being diverted to its own irrelevance, we also become highly sensitive to our need for authenticity within ourselves and outside in the real world to be honoured and realized. Hence, this struggle with the fundamental truth of life can equally make us inch towards reality or sink fully into fantasy until there is nothing left of who we really are that we can retrieve back into our lives.

However, since most of us believe that our function is primarily to live and presumably to live well, it is not surprising that we question or even outright reject the idea that we are obligated to die or suffer for what we believe to be true or just. Yet some of us readily admit that staying alive for the sake of just being alive without meaning is the spiritual equivalent of being dead, and we would rather die than not be able to manifest what we truly are. We could even argue that without death or suffering, we could not derive meaning from life. This awareness affords us the choice between living with purpose by complementing the value we receive with the utility we add back into the world, or scheming through life speculatively or callously trying to escape its realities and to defer our fate until its concluding moment. But regardless of the path we firmly or hesitantly choose, life will force dilemmas and decisions upon us, and our narratives will inevitably terminate. We may not know exactly how things will end until we are close to the finale, but we can actively shape or disclose what a sentient existence means long before and specifically when our mortal confirmation arrives.

It is during the fourth phase of the viagnostic narrative before we exit the passage to the end of our journey that we learn not to confuse our morality with the façade of goodness in the servitude of evil. There is no heroism in jumping blindly or arrogantly into action just as there is no prudence in being paralyzed by doubt or indecision. Only those of us who are unable to handle any degree of uncertainty in our lives believe that morality is the absolute distinction of right from wrong. The rest of us know it is about our capacity to face the ambiguities of life in the multitude of conditions that trouble us to apply meaningful effort in yielding value without being destroyed and replaced by counterfeit achievements that tax our energy and resilience in enabling who we really are. Our morality arises from our conscious power to act and solidifies when we accept responsibility for our choices and the consequences of life.

The channel is the roughest part of our journey through life because it is here where we test and disclose the greater truth of life encoded in each of us. It is more than merely finding our correct route or passage to being or living by what we truly are. It is also about staying on the right course by working towards utility as we fully commit to illustrating the meaning of our stories on the grand stage of life. And it is through the appreciation and application of authentic value that we define our morality, where purpose is the symbolic light at the end of the proverbial tunnel or underworld passage that guides us through the darkness of life while we attempt to tame our desires and fears in order to grasp and embody its lessons. As we tirelessly fit one more piece of our puzzling life together, our transcendent will animates our values and canalizes our efforts to successfully pass through the labyrinth of our transformation and enter into the final stage of the viagnostic narrative that aligns with the universal truth, which all of us intuitively come to live and know.