Chuck’s Place: Human Infinity

We are animals who know that we are going to die. Our animal compatriots who share the planet with us have no thoughts about life beyond life. Life beyond death, or infinity, is a human obsession.

Infinity is what the word says: the absence of finiteness, life beyond the limits of space and time. Though in today’s world this kind of “spiritual focus” is often downplayed as simply wishful thinking, certainly beyond reason, experiences with infinity appear everywhere in everyday life.

Portal to infinity…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Take for instance the simple act of going to sleep at night. All animals that live in a body, and for whom night is the natural time of rest and rejuvenation, go to sleep at essentially the same hour every night. Human beings, however, often suspend time and live in consciousness into the wee hours of the night, whether it be in reading, interacting with screens, thinking, playing music, creating, or fearfully refusing the dread of dying to the day and facing the darkness of the night. As the night progresses and one remains awake, one enters the altered state of timelessness, impervious to the needs of the finite body that must somehow function the next day.

Others make their forays into infinity through massive accumulations. This can take the form of hoarding where the limits of space are suspended and one lives with unlimited stuff. This can take the form of vast accumulations of wealth, wealth way beyond the realistic needs of many lifetimes. Such insatiability, an active pursuit to continuously possess more, touches the limitlessness of infinity.

Falling or being in love is a powerful suspension of space where lovers meet in the experience of oneness, a timeless union that touches the wholeness of infinity. So powerful is the nectar of this infinite experience that many simply cannot commit to a finite relationship because once limitation sets in, the sparkle of infinity dulls and one is prompted to go in search of it elsewhere.

The myriad of addictions of our time are actually spiritual attempts to reach infinity in material form. Take food. The pleasure of food intake without restriction, without boundary, gives entree into the limitless joy of infinity. To drink without limit, to suspend time, drinking through the night without limit, is to enter countless worlds of dreaming possibilities within the confines of a world that is still limited by the 24 hour cycle of day and night.

The preponderance of drug addictions in our time is directly proportional to the hegemony of reason over our lives, which so shuts down an active connection to explorative spirituality. Drugs in their many forms offer experiences beyond the limits of the body, in forms that range from euphoric stupor to access to superhuman abilities of physical prowess, from transcendent communication and creativity to energetic travel and experience unrestricted by bodily inhabitation.

Obviously, these many attempts to experience infinity in human form stress and can kill the human animal that contains the consciousness that seeks to experience MORE. They do demonstrate, however, the human spirit’s quest to experience its infinite potential no matter how spiritually impoverished our lives may be.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, appreciating this instinctual human need to realize  spiritual potential while in human form, squarely call out to and embrace their intent to experience their full potential. That spiritual intent naturally appears in dreaming and in magical experiences in everyday life.

If we can merely suspend judgment and open to what happens to us everyday, as synchronistically magical, we will indeed find our way to human infinity, safely, soberly, and fully.

Every moment is actually infinity,

Chuck

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