Mission 15: Practising Wonder
In the West – we often judge too quickly. So your mission this week is to find ‘wonder’. You might look for it somewhere you have been before and recreate the experience by suspending your judgement. Is it an awesome sunset (or rise)? The wonder of deep space, a puppy, nature or even your own partner? I will leave it to you.
You see a beautiful flower with dewdrops catching the sun in coruscating rainbows of colour. ‘Its just a flower with raindrops’ says the mind and the moment of wonder is broken. There is just a moment there, when entering wholly into the experience is offered to you before the mind jumps in and categorises your experience as ‘seen before’. That moment is always there but we often refuse the connection through rationalisation.
Much of our Romantic art, music, literature is based on sharing these moments of wonder where we become intimately connected with the universe around us.
Many of us know that worldly ambition, material aspiration and perpetual growth are a formula for environmental ruin and mass unhappiness, yet our society is led by people who pursue these goals and promote these values. We are forced by our culture into filling our hours serving these aspirations and often miss out on the most important aspect of our existence – being here and now in the moment. This is where all the good things are, wonder, laughter, pure being, love and joy.
Oh poor humans to have lost our very souls in money awareness. With the importance of money you can never be in the now, unless perhaps you are lost in the wonder of counting it! Awareness of money means you are worried about how to meet the bills (future), where you are going to get some more (future), how to protect what you already have (future), doing the accounts to see how much you have spent (past), how much you earned (past), justifying your existence to the taxman (past).
Soon, the personal meaninglessness of existence can only be filled by consuming, owning and winning. Once this awful virus/addiction takes over, the hungry ghost abandons integrity, fairness, compassion and humanity in pursuit of their goals to gain money, status and power. And lose their sense of wonder at being a miracle of existence. Their soul dies and their life is made of lies.
We are ruled by a governing system without soul, without heart, run by psychopaths interested only in gaining control over money at the expense of life itself, destroying the ability for all humans to evolve further. Oh for a sense of wonder in the seats of power.
For me – it’s the stars. Once you enter into these twinkling delights its not long before you realise that you, everything you think, everything you do are pretty much irrelevant given your place in the scale of things. Amazement, awe – wonder, takes over and ego dissolves, placing you where you belong, a miracle in a miraculous universe.
What provokes your sense of wonder? Your mission today is to go and find it and bring it on without judging!