Uncommon Sense
Chapter 3 The Call to the Adventure
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Before you start down this path you need to understand the place the journey of self discovery has in your life. All living things possess an instinct to evolve. However only a few ever respond to that instinct. The most important thing you need to accept about this is that It’s OK not to. It doesn’t make you bad or weak or any such thing. Evolution is a drive and for those for whom it is insatiable are the ones who answer the call. Let me say this again evolution is not for the many. It is for the few. Most of us just want to live and enjoy life as it is and there is nothing wrong with that. Since being this kind of person, a seeker, is now in vogue it seems that everyone wants to or should be the kind of person who wants to evolve. Nothing is further from the truth. Vanity and envy will not sustain you on a personal journey of self development. It is not glamorous or cool. Personal evolution is terrifying, deeply painful, disruptive and gut wrenching. You have to really want it to go after it. There are a few for whom good enough is never enough.
The distinguishing characteristic of someone who is ready to evolve is a yearning for a sense of things that go beyond just something you feel or believe. It is where you get to a point where you realize that the stories you believe and have been told about “who you are” are just that, stories.You can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong with your world but it is there, like a splinter in the back of your mind and you can’t get it out. You can’t shake the feeling that you are not who you are supposed to be. It’s a presence that haunts your every waking moment. This is evident of what mystics refer to as the call. The Call is best expressed by Joseph Campbell as the Call to the adventure. The Call is a metaphor for an awareness that something is not right with your perception of the world. The Call manifests itself as an uneasy feeling that results in a need to question the status quo. You many not be able to explain why you feel the need to challenge your beliefs, desires and values, you just do. If you are seeking depth and meaning in your life then chances are you have come to a point where you have a craving for an Uncommon Sense.
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Often times when you get the Call it’s confusing and disconcerting. Instinctively you turn to others to help make sense of what is happening to you. Conventional wisdom suggests that there is some profound mystery or conspiracy behind it. Not wanting to risk being separated from what is familiar many are vested in keeping it a mystery and they are content to cope by worshiping the mystery. For others there is a strict adherence to conformity in an attempt to suppress the instinct to answer the Call. No matter how you interpret it, the bottom line is that the only answer you will get from conventional wisdom is that “something” is wrong with you and you should abandon this desire. Even though they try to convince you of this, you are not buying it. somewhere deep inside you, you know it is not true. Natural Spirituality is a body of knowledge that provides a modern sensibility about human spirituality. It suggests that there is nothing wrong with you. You simply have reached a point in your mental life where you are ready to mature and grow beyond the boundaries of what you have been told to believe. There is an adventure waiting for you, a journey to a deeper and richer experience of life. The adventure is calling you. The destination is not without but within. This is not supernatural or destiny or intuition, instead try to look at is as a natural part of the human experience.
No one can answer the Call “for” you. The call is for you alone. The Call to the adventure is not about anyone else but you. Your path is not like anyone else’s. It’s your life, your evolution. Too often we believe we are smart and we could cheat the adventure. We come up with all manner of schemes and dreams to avoid leaving what we know. We create all kinds of conditions by which we will go on the journey. We want to be the “kind” of person that went on the adventure but we are not willing to even start. We even go so far as wanting to be “saved” from the journey. In so doing we abort our own development. Evolution by its very definition an activity that moves you away from where you are. You have to give up what you know and believe that is part of the deal. The Call is something you must answer for yourself. It is not a negotiation. To answer the call to the adventure you must surrender your normal world. Evolution is something you must surrender to.
UncommonSense™ is a companion, a guide, for the journey to evolving into your authentic self. What this book offers is insight drawn from a body of knowledge called NaturalSpirituality™. Natural Spirituality offers no fantastic story of miracles that you have to believe or some ancient elaborate myth to explain the mysteries of human experience. This is not “his”story. This is about your story. The human story. Natural Spirituality is not something you believe in. There is nothing old or new to believe in. Think of it more as a complete philosophy that brings a modern sensibility to human spirituality. It is elegantly simple but deeply profound.
The longing to learn what is true for you does not mean something is wrong with you. In fact it may mean that something is right with you. The search for truth is evident of a natural human need to evolve the consciousness in the field of time. It is a journey where the hero must navigate the maze of conventions, face the unknown, conquer their fear and return with the greatest of all treasures, their own uncommon sense. This is journey not without but within.
The Search for Truth
Our own personal evolution in the field of time starts with a yearning for an uncommon sense. As the hero of our own lives we often hear the Call to the adventure beckoning us to embark on our own personal search for truth. Albert Einstein once said that “The search for truth is more precious than its possession”. The need to get a sense of things that goes beyond what we believe and what we have been told. We hunger for the truth no matter how it makes us feel. What we experience as The Call is a pull toward the search for truth. Our journey to self-discovery begins when we answer The Call, abandon the normal world and go in search of truth.
The search for truth is an undertaking that naturally fills us with terror. It is a journey filled with peril and wrought with seemingly impossible obstacles to overcome. Truth is by its very nature elusive and subjective. How are we to know the truth and where will we find it? We may even become consumed with fear and foreboding at the mere thought of going on that journey. After all there is a price to pay in the search for truth. Such an undertaking will cost us what we so desperately want to keep. It will cost us what we believe, our purpose, our meaning, our self worth and even our very lives as we know it. The simple fact of the matter is that we worked so hard to become vested in our own delusions that to risk them seems too high a price to pay for self discovery. This actually makes sense. Instead of courageously answering the call we shrink and cover our ears. We willingly abandon our reason in favor of faith. We seek out the guided tour of the familiar. We are eager to align ourselves with what makes us feel good and gives us hope. We interpret “truth” to be something that fits in with what we already believe. We cop out and instead of looking for the threshold to the adventure we are desperate for a coping mechanism. All of this is a perfectly understandable response. For some however this terror is not enough to deter us from the path.
The search for truth is uncertain and we are desperate for certainty. The landscape of conventional thinking is rich with all manner of “truth” of which we can be certain for any number of reasons. The kind of truth that conveniently does what we hope it will do, take away the fear and foreboding. We need only accept it without question, believe and be saved. It is a compelling bargain that is so good we dare not pass it up. Humans have the unique ability to believe what they want to believe whether it is true or not is irrelevant. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves and others of the “truth” of our confessed values and convictions, the truth is inescapable. Our values vanish in the face of fear and desire. With a little experience we come to know this and we secretly wonder how long it is before someone else knows that we are a fraud. The fact is we pretended to answer the Call but we never went on the adventure. We never took the journey. We never faced the trials. All we really wanted to do was to change the way we feel. This is how we come to a false start and to settle for the safety of the familiar. For all our pretending we are haunted by a nagging feeling that we are not who we were supposed to be. We can’t quite place it or express it but we know it. Even though we may openly deny it, deep inside we know that what we believe is something we want to believe and we only do because of how it makes us feel or more importantly because of what it makes us “not” feel. We abide in this artificial space but try as we might we cannot shake the feeling that there is something went wrong in our lives. We don’t feel like ourselves and so we are desperate to feel something. We try to smother our doubt in the latest fad or become meagerly nourished on self help. We are then devastated to discover that what we believe is new is only new because it is new to you. All of this anguish, simply to avoid uncertainty and to get away from a feeling. Feelings are a thing deeply felt but only imagined. Change is the only constant in the universe. There is no such thing as certainty. How is it to live in fear of losing something you don’t have? You cannot lose something you never had. Nothing is permanent.
The simple fact is that no one can give you the truth of your soul. Without taking the journey to learn the truth for yourself all you can ever have is faith in what someone told you. Faith alone does not wisdom make. Faith is not a means to knowledge. Faith is not a path to an uncommon sense because believing something doesn’t make it true. To find the truth of your own soul you must answer the Call and embrace the adventure. You must abandon the comfort of your beliefs and seek the truth and so come to possess it for yourself.
The Call is about a search for truth. It is an unquenchable thirst in those for whom there is only one way, only one answer and that is to answer the Call.
At some point in everyone’s life they get the Call to Adventure, just like the heroes in our myths. However very few people can answer the Call. Most can not. The fact is most of us don’t even know the phone is ringing. Few abandon the normal world and go in search for truth. The instinct to grow beyond your environment is a natural part of our humanity. It is not a group thing. It is a deeply personal choice. Evolution is for the few. Only If you are content to be apart from and separated from your normal world, should you answer the call and proceed to the threshold of the adventure.
You needn’t fear a spiritual journey. Think of it this way, what is it about who you are right now that is so valuable that you are willing to give up all that you could ever be just to keep it? Is staying where you are worth giving up all the wonderous places you could go? In Natural Spirituality, we see the spiritual journey as a natural evolutionary step that helps you to mature into your authentic self. The Call is a pull toward a natural evolutionary stage in our cognitive development. Our journey to self-discovery begins when we answer The Call and go in search of truth. It is not a never-ending journey, it is an evolution. The idea is to get up, get in, get it, get out and get on with your life.
Where to Begin
If you are going to embark on a search for truth then the first order of business is know what you are looking for. There is no context independent truth. There is no universal truth. All truth is true within a context and false outside of it. Truth is the output of the axiomatic model used to represent it. Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem elegantly illustrates this logical fact. The means to get to truth is also a major component. Truth from a faith perspective is what is true for you and usually has some emotional utility. You accept it based on how it makes you feel or more often than not of how it makes you “not” feel. Truth from a rational perspecitive is an objective fact about a relationship between two objects. For example the statement “the snow is white is true” we can accept it as truth because the relationship between both objects “the color of snow” and “the color white” are both objective facts. The statement “Snow is not white” may be true depending on what you believe defines the color white. In order to find an objective truth you must hold it to a standard that is higher than the reactionary impulses of how you feel and what you believe. You believe what you want to believe. Believing something doesn’t make it true. Not believing doesn’t make it false. If you want the truth then you must ask yourself why do you “want” to believe? The only way to get to objective truth is not to believe. If you are sincere in your search for truth then you must hold truth to a higher standard than what you believe. In this way you can align your designation with what is true given a context and what is true for you with what is real and can be rationally defined. In this manner you can rest assured that the values you use to guide your life are objective and not subject to the expediancy of group consesus, beliefs and convenience. If you are going to embark on a search for truth then you must come to a decision on your standard of proof first. You can’t find what you are looking for if you don’t know what it is. How will you know when you have found it?
It is also important to understand that the truth is not convenient. Truth is no respecter of history. The truth doesn’t fit comfortably into your life. Accepting the truth is often painful and it disrupts your world. Truth doesn’t make you feel good. In fact it gets a lot worse before it gets better. Truth is not popular. As a general rule, chances are, if everyone “believes” it then there is a good chance that it must not be true. Truth isn’t something someone can give you. Just as no one can live for you and no one can die for you, so to can no one give you the truth. Truth is not a gift. Truth is something you must earn by your own efforts. You cannot wholly accept truth by faith because what is true, in order to be the truth, must be true for you. Truth won’t give you power over others. Truth is about power over yourself. Truth is not safe nor will it keep you safe. To get it you must be willing to take some deeply personal risks. The truth is not free. If you are serious about learning the truth then you have to be prepared to pay the price. Therin lies the problem. We are often not mature enough to face the truth. We want what we want and we don’t want to pay the price for it. Truth is inconvienant and we do so hate to be inconvienced.
As a practical matter most people are looking for a verisimilitude (something that has the appearance of truth). They are looking for something to align themselves with that makes them feel special. What they want is something or someone that changes the way they feel about their lives. Something that doesn’t disrupt the status quo. They are holding out for anything less obvious than the simple truth. They do this because of a very valid need to protect and perpetuate an emotional state. Consequently most of today’s “spiritual” truth and insight is really a kind of Spiri-tainment, a form of entertainment with a spiritual theme and the appearance of being true. Spirituality is a billion dollar industry. The most profit to be made comes from appealing to the need to protect and/or perpetuate the audience’s emotional state. The hard reality is that most people would rather die than think. They would rather suffer than learn. Therefore a verisimilitude as a technique for delivering an appeasing message or an emotionally satisfying experience is extremely effective. It is so effective that the audience becomes vested in making real what is not real because this is the truth they “want” to accept. So much so that it often leads to mass delusion: an irrational obsession for making what is not real, real and what is not true, true. Under this influence the mind will actively distort, generalize and even delete what is clearly obvious. When this occurs then the search for truth turns into a campaign to prove you’re right. The truth no longer matters. All that matters is mantaining the verisimiltude.
In the search for truth it is important to distinguish between objective truth and the appearence of truth. You must decide on what you are looking for because it will determine what you get.
The first place to begin to look for truth is in yourself. The Call to the adventure is not about a journey outside. It is Call to a journey inside. The truth of your soul is a symphony to be percieved not by your senses but by the intellect. It is an experience that resonates throughout your entire being. The place to begin is at the beginning. The beginning of truth is in you. The longing to learn what is true for you does not mean something is wrong with you. In fact it means that something is right with you. You needn’t fear the adventure. You need not shrink from your own heroes journey for fear of losing your way. You needn’t search for someone to “save” you from your own development. Courage is not something you are born with. It is something you learn. Courage takes only one step. Until you find the courage to answer the call to the adventure you will remain a copy of a copy and a slave to your own indecision. If you don’t want that then you must find the courage to take that first step, and then another and another. Courage is the act of taking action inspite of one’s fear. No one can give you the truth. All you need do to find the truth is to surrender to your own journey of life, one day at a time.
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