Equalness..Jed McKenna..

 

THE PLAY OF LIFE,

reflections from Jed McKenna

The horror-and-suffering end of the experiential spectrum is just as perfect and wondrous and beautiful as the love-and-beauty end. That’s a tough cross-paradigm sell, but what are we doing here if not elevating and expanding our perspective? You must learn to see with the same eye a mound of earth and a heap of gold, a cow and a sage, a dog and the man who eats the dog. 

I’m not suggesting that you feel that stomach cancer is the same as a basket of puppies, but there is a perspective from which they’re exactly the same, and that must be what you’re here to see because that’s where all this leads. We look through the filters of preference and bias and emotional discrimination, but we can flip those filters out of the way and see with naked, unaided, uncorrupted eye. You don’t have to form preferences and take sides and judge everything you behold, you can just look, just see, just sit back and wonder at the mystery and majesty of this production; not as a player on the stage but as a spectator in the nosebleed seats from where you can’t tell good guys from bad guys because from this altitude, all the players look like ants, which is, of course, what we really are. 

Life is about creation. The creative process is fully scalable; the same process that weaves a basket into being weaves galaxies into being. The point of creation is creation; it is an end in itself, and whether you consider yourself creative or not, you are a part of creation, no more or less than any other. The powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. A tree that does not produce a fruit may itself be the fruit; they also serve who only fill out the forest. Even if you’re not starting wars or writing symphonies or building a better mousetrap, you’re as much a part of the grand dramatic spectacle as those who swing the swords and sing the arias.

---Jed McKenna