Living a Life of Ultimate Vulnerability, Part One
To discover who you are and what you're about requires great humility and genuineness. It requires you to look at who you are without pretense or artificiality. Learning to live congruently (basically, in accordance with who you are and with what you're about) also requires great humility and genuineness. Beyond that, it requires vulnerability, because it necessitates that you empty yourself of anything that's not you or doesn't belong. In doing this, voids (of a sort) are created, and those voids must be filled. But those voids can't be filled by you, because any attempt to self-fill a void within you will result only in your filling yourself once again with that which isn't you and which doesn't belong.
Our neediness is not a condition we can understand rightly, readily, or completely. It's like trying to talk about something we don't know much about but don't know the extent of our lack of understanding. Written another way, it's a lot like a blind man holding a mirror to his face in the hopes of recognizing a familiar image, only to be reminded once again he's blind and has no tangible concept of what he looks like or, even, what it means to be blind in terms of its comparison to seeing. And so, we face a dilemma: we're in need of something in our personhood that's impossible to meet within ourselves. And that creates stress within us and makes us feel vulnerable. We're lacking in something, know it deeply, and yet have little clue what it is we're missing.
To fill the voids, we can't look to others either, for they, too, are blind and will only add that which isn't us and which doesn't belong. And so again, we feel the perplexity of our vaguely experienced deficiencies. We don't know what it is we're missing; yet, deep inside us, we each know we're missing something really, really important. Coming to such a realization (and admitting it out loud [so your neurology gets the message]) is the first step toward illumination and, ultimately, our salvation (e.g., the salvaging of our life).
That's all for now. Next Wednesday, we'll pick things up with Part Two. Until then, God's peace...
IKIGAI Weekly Blog Schedule (per The Training Trinity):
Mondays: Meditative Prayer
Wednesdays: Holistic Discipline
Fridays: Martial Arts Practice
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