Okay, I get it – life is complex. It’s so complex that maybe I can’t fully comprehend how complex it is. Maybe I could accept the fact and simply give up working at making any kind of change in my life. After all, I can’t accurately predict the outcome of whatever action I might take to effect that change because my actions are in the context of a complex adaptive system – life.
Although I now accept that life is so complex that I can’t begin to appreciate just HOW complex it is, my experience of that complexity affects me differently according to my degree of illumination. Let’s examine how my experience of complexity changes with degrees of illumination.
When I experience life in the first degree of illumination, my focus is on should and must. I must survive at any cost. I have expectations that should be met. When they are not met, I will tend to bump up into second degree illumination – I mount a defense, an energetic effort to force the complex adaptive system of life to comply with my musts and shoulds.
It may be a fool’s errand, but I’m down – literally, as in downhearted, down in the dumps, down for the count – for the challenge at this level of illumination. The more I struggle to impose my egocentric shoulds on the world, the weaker and “downer” I get. The weaker I get, the more likely I am to slow down the defenses.
When my energetic effort to force life to comply with my wishes totally fails – when I get that I can’t change my life in the way I should, I will be at the third degree of illumination – choice. I will make a choice to either let that should go and move into the next level of illumination, or double down on my efforts to defend my should, pounding my head a bit harder against the wall.
As I accept the accountability of level four, I release the need to defend my suffering – my body and my mind begin to feel the return of my lifeforce energy. I start flowing WITH life as a process that is perfect just as it is – beginning my process of awakening to the fact that I AM the complex adaptive system I used to think was outside me. I relax.
From the fifth degree of illumination, I accept more and more of the system as me – until, ultimately, I realize oneness with the universe.
The more I learn about the universe that I AM, the more I understand and flow with it. I get it in my whole being that I AM the creative force within a complex adaptive system that is operating within a complex adaptive system that is operating within a complex adaptive system… ad infinitum. I experience I AM at every level – fractals.
