Coming Home to Work…

“How am I not myself?” Mumbles Jude Law’s character to himself after getting inadvertently tangled up with the existential detective agency. On its face, “who am I?” is undoubtedly a strange and yet somehow paradoxically and profoundly useful inquiry.

This afternoon I enjoyed the company of 16 other curious souls joining in the monthly alumni congregation for the Pacific Integral GTC community; today’s inquiry, Presence.

Disrupting the common convention for these Zoom meetings of breaking out into smaller groups to increase the opportunity for intimacy, our member guide today held us to the larger communal space. The practice was simply to meet together in the discovery of “presence.”

What is this “presence?” My earliest recollections evoke memories of grade school attendance check; the familiar call and response, “Johnny so-and-so?...”

“Present.” Came the reply…

Beyond being present, one can also have presence, as in “the imposing nature of her stature and charisma was a presence to be reckoned with.”

Taken a step further, each of us it would appear exists within The Presence… Indeed, how am I not myself?

In the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai, “wherever you go, there you are.” Just another way of reminding us that home is where the heart is. Lest I offend with too much cliché, allow me to elaborate.

Whether we find it in hedonic pleasure, spiritual transcendence, somewhere in between, or all of these at once, it is widely agreed that the marrow in life is found in the sublime. Perhaps this is for you, around the family dinner table, maybe in the arms of your beloved, maybe you seek this alone in nature, on the meditation cushion, in the temple… Some of us seek this sublime in the purity of mathematics, the untouchable elegance of poetry, in crafting with our hands, or in service to others.

“Home” is often that place considered most nourishing. Home is safe, it is where we can “be ourselves.” Home is that sacred shrine within which we can relax, open ourselves most fully, and recall that aspiration to be our very best, to meet that whichever it is that we consider divine.

“Work,” on the other hand is often just the opposite. If we “come home,” then we also “go to work.”

For a privileged few of us, work is our passion, it is what moves us deeply, we have found our way to some productive engagement with the world wherein we are nourished both in our deepest joy and aspiration, and as well in our reciprocal relationship with our culture or society. For much of humanity on the other hand, “work,” (and particularly within the reaches of global capitalism) still often equates to “toil.”

How am I not myself? If some great portion of my life (at 40 hours per week, almost 25%) is spent in this toil, in those places, am I truly wholly myself? Is that how we are organized? If so, could it be different?

If we look closely, when we truly find ourselves present to wherever we are, we find only profoundly transcendent mystery. If we look closely, both the “where,” and the “self” that discovers it each and together express a magical quality, a kind of unspeakably majestic grace, a quality of presence and yet without any static boundary or existential condition beyond the awareness in which we seem to arise.

This may sound strange, but you can try it for yourself. If I sit and I think and I look closely, I can discover the distinction between experience arising in awareness, and the ideas of me and my skin and this room and time passing. While all those latter “ideas” appear to have quite meaningful and practical distinction, not one of them exists prior to or separate from the constantly alive and dynamic awareness that exists only now. Only now, only in the present, and yet since the present has no distinct beginning or end beyond ideas of past and future, only in the presence.

Daily life may be profoundly familiar. I thought, this morning to myself, how strange to live in this wheelchair, with all of its natural constraints and relative friction. So often I navigate no more territory in a day than a short path between my bed, around the foot of it, out the door and right, 3 m down through the living room and right again, 2 m more and left to my desk. Later, I’ll return back again, with a stop just outside the bedroom door in the dining room for dinner and the evening’s entertainment.

Where is the mystery? Where is the sublime? Where is the marrow? Is it in the present? Is it found by being in the present? Do we discover ourselves as aspect dimension of “the presence.”

For eons, when humans stumbled into this inquiry, the devoted path led among the mystics, among the meditators, among the hermits, the monasteries, the convents, the spiritual and religious seclusion. This is not an easy path, it leads away from loved ones, the dramas of life, the distractions, the propaganda.

Few of us follow that path. Fortunately, more recently, there is another.

For simplicity, if we may, we will call that former path, the path of the “Spirit.” Some many thousands of years of our evolution later, a new path beyond toil and towards the sublime emerged. Let us call this next path, the path of the “Mind.”

The path of this inquiry, the application of not only spirit of intent, but mind of rational inquiry, is the exploration not so much of presence itself, but knowledge within it. This path is not so hard as the former. It is not a solitary place, nor does it require of us such a total and absolute devotion.

Where the path of Spirit demands everything of us, the path of Mind requires only that we set apart some time as sacred and devoted. This we can do in measure, and so too is measured our reward. While in the first path, the intent and subsequent full realization of the reward is a total union with presence, with the divine, some God, some Enlightenment, a totality; in the second, the reward is measured in relative terms, a continued aspiration of increasingly greater achievement.

And yet… Even in the highest mental aspiration, there is still the separation of object and inquirer. The path of Mind is accessible to vastly more of humanity, and so attainable as well. That path lifts many further out of toil and towards some celebration of Home, but still not all.

Let me digress for a moment to recognize and honor the idea that there may be some condition of existence for the human being that is itself, at once and naturally in harmony. In the modern world, we often romanticize native and indigenous cultures as expressing this essential and original goodness and oneness. I consider there to be much truth in the beauty of living as inseparable brethren to all of the elements, those that swim, walk on four legs (or more), those that fly, or crawl along the belly, those that are the sky, the wind, the rock, the fire. I will say no more on this for now, except to note that in the accounting for “all” of humanity, those numbers also represent a very few of us in total…

For the length of my short life, from my teenage years and on, it has been a central thought for me that we can, and must, as humanity do a better job of caring for ourselves, for one another, and for our home here on earth.

Since those earliest years, I have come to appreciate more and more how each of us are doing in every moment the very best we know how. I know it is true for myself, and I have never seen anyone exemplify otherwise. In every decision I am weighing what awareness I can and seeking the greatest happiness at the least cost overall.

In short, that “better job,” arises (dare I say “is presenced”) as an artifact, always and whenever it may. It is always in the greater lens of context and reflection that we can learn in what ways we may have been mis-taken. Let us have compassion for ourselves, let us have compassion for one another, and for all of our sakes, let us have compassion for this earth and all that that contains.

So there we have a path of Spirit, still present, still rarefied, still absolute in its goal. Also we have a path of Mind, a systematized process of object knowledge acquisition, distribution, and application; less costly, perhaps further reaching, more incremental and humbled in its goal. Both of these paths together have brought many from suffering and toil to the sublime.

Let me bring this Home if I can. (Notice the implicit prayer.)

In 2014 I came across a book by Frederic Laloux called Reinventing Organizations. In it the author was describing patterns they had detected in a certain “emerging” class of organizations. These organizations are found throughout the globe and with examples present in a far-reaching range of sectors, from education, to manufacturing, agriculture, product sales, service, and beyond.

The defining feature of these organizations, it was described, was set upon a developmental trajectory based on existing models of evolutionary trends. Mr. Laloux identified the breakthrough organizational principles of these “Teal” organizations as three critical elements paired together: Evolutionary Purpose, Self-Management, and Wholeness.

I’ll leave it to the reader to investigate the details of those, should you be so interested.

Meanwhile, I was struck with the apparent pattern at play across time. The path of Spirit lifts few, but it has the power to lift totally. The path of Mind lifts a great number more, though not quite so far as the full journey. Here we have the path of Body — the work we do every day with our hands, feet, minds, and spirit…

Traditionally (in modernity), our working environments fail on the count of nourishing our spirit. Some of these contexts might nourish our minds, but again any evidence of either of these will refer primarily to the privileged few mentioned above. Primarily our working environments have given us just the basics of Mr. Maslow’s pyramid.

But with these breakthroughs above, bringing my whole self to work, directing my own actions and from a sense of alignment with some collective around a meaningful purpose, what then might work become?

What would it mean if so many of us as “go to work” each day, find our way into a presence of alignment around our own self-directed meaning, with our whole being, body, mind, and spirit, all engaged in what once was toil?

Might that lift us, in the largest numbers yet, through fullness of body, richness of mind, and into the sublime and transcendent Presence of spirit? Wouldn’t that be the marrow of life?

What would it take to shift the way we organize our engagement to extend to billions the opportunity to come home to themselves by the simple act of going to work?

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“Please Come Home” - a poem by Jane Hooper.

Please come home.
Please come home.
Find the place where your feet know where to walk
And follow your own trail home.

Please come home.
Please come home into your own body,
Your own vessel, your own earth.
Please come home into each and every cell,
And fully into the space that surrounds you…

Please come home.
Please come home to trusting yourself,
And your instincts and your ways and your knowings,
And even the particular quirks of your personality.

Please come home.
Please come home and once you are firmly there,
Please stay home awhile and come to a deep rest within.
Please treasure your home. Please love and embrace your home.
Please get a deep, deep sense of what it’s like to be truly home.

Please come home.Please come home.
And when you’re really, really ready,
And there’s a detectable urge on the outbreath, then please come out.

Please come home and please come forward.
Please express who you are to us, and please trust us
To see you and hear you and touch you
And recognize you as best we can.

Please come home.Please come home and let us know
All the nooks and crannies that are calling to be seen.
Please come home, and let us know the More
That is there that wants to come out.

Please come home.Please come home
For you belong here now.You belong among us.
Please inhabit your place fully so we can learn from you,
From your voice and your ways and your presence.

Please come home.Please come home.
And when you feel yourself home, please welcome us too,
For we too forget that we belong and are welcome,
And that we are called to express fully who we are.

Please come home.Please come home.
You and you and you and me.

Please come home.Please come home.
Thank you, Earth, for welcoming us.
And thank you touch of eyes and ears and skin,
Touch of love for welcoming us.

May we wake up and remember who we truly are.

Please come home.
Please come home.
Please come home.