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When the hero in a tragedy acts out of great passion and longing, he is often blind to the choice he is awakening. He participates in a sequence of actions without ever dreaming where it is actually leading him. Often it may be clear to others, but not to him. When one acts greatly, one engenders great vulnerability. True recognition is withheld. The ground of realization prepares itself slowly. You are so close to what you are involved in that you literally cannot see it. This can often happen in relationships. The film Fatal Attraction portrayed a man who was guided totally by sexual passion and was blind to the nature of the person with whom he had become involved. It can also happen in a life over-committed to work. The workaholic is doing everything right to provide for the family, but is blind to the fact that he is already losing his family because of his obsession with work. They never see him; they and he are quietly becoming strangers to each other. When we spoil our children, we deprive them of learning the art of discipline and the recognition of boundaries. We think we are showing them love and support. Ironically, we are preparing great difficulties for them. Irony continues so long as you do not see. Then, when you suddenly do, you see through the whole sequence at once. You realize how the consequences have been building the whole time, unknown to you. Such recognition breaks your blindness; it also shows you clearly your own part in the story and your responsibility for what happened. It reveals that you have been obscurely complicit in your own downfall. Irony is the shy sister of such recognition.

It is vital that one’s spiritual quest be accompanied by a sense of irony. To have a sense of irony ensures humility. Even in your moments of purest, honest intention, there is a sense in which you do not know and can never know what it is that you are actually doing. There is an opaque backdrop to even the clearest action. In everything we do and say, we risk encounter with the unknown. Often its ways are not our ways, and only at the end do we see the deeper meaning of our actions. Certain longings want tenancy of your heart; when you succumb to these, you betray your deeper, eternal longing. You need to remain open, yet maintain discernment and critical vigilance. Critical openness is true hospitality and receptivity.

Longing Keeps Your Sense of Life Kindled

The value of such openness is that it permits a crucial distance between you and the activity of your life in the world. It keeps a certain inner solitude clear, so that you remain aware of a primordial longing of life rising in you. Longing in this sense is not a search for gratification or pleasure. This longing is the primal presence of your own vitality. It is the sense of life in you which makes you feel alive. Psychology, philosophy, or religion rarely refer to the “sense of life.” They concern themselves with the outer meaning of the world, the inner meaning of the soul, and the threshold where the two meet. This search for meaning is as ancient as the awakening of the first question; it is as new and urgent as the question that is troubling you now. Without a sense of meaning, life becomes absurd and surrealistic. In our times Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Kafka have explored the possibilities and consequences of taking any human action amid the unpredictable chaos of life.

When your sense of meaning collapses or is violated, it becomes exceptionally difficult to remain creative or even to continue believing in anything. In the Siberian Gulag, prisoners were forced victims of absurdity. They were forced to do tasks that involved hard labour in the freezing cold. Regardless of how minimal and slight a task might be, the human mind always desires that the task have some significance. The Gulag prisoners were often forced to move hundreds of tons of stones from a pile to another location some miles away. Each day, in the freezing cold, each prisoner filled his wheelbarrow and slowly wheeled barrow after barrow of rock to the other location. You can imagine their sense of satisfaction as over the weeks the new rock pile began to grow from the transported stone. Every stone was earned. On the very day that all the stones were transferred, the guards made the prisoners begin to bring the stones back again to reconstruct the original pile in the same place. This forced absurdity would eat into the coherence and break the secret belonging of any mind.

Each Person Incarnates Longing