Output

We spend our lives thinking that the purpose of life is what we put out of ourselves. Our “output.”

Think about this for a moment. From an early age, we’re expected to produce. We produce homework. We produce cooperation. Later, we produce work, in exchange for money. Or perhaps we produce work but don’t get paid for it. In any event, it’s always the results that count– what “comes out of us,” what we do, what can be of value to the outside world. If we can hang it on a wall, show it to others, drive it somewhere, hit nails with it, then it has value. 

Otherwise, forget about it.

What if the whole purpose of life is quite different? 

What if what has meaning in life, if what really matters, is what falls into us— the whole of the life we take into us, all the impressions? What if it’s what we form within us that matters, not what we form outside of ourselves?

Experiencing life from this perspective, thinking about it in this way, might produce a very different picture of what we are and how we do things. If I care about what is inwardly formed in me first, I take a different kind of responsibility. I attend to myself and what takes place in me. This is quite a different thing than attending to the external. It’s not that what happens externally isn’t important; it’s just that all of that comes after what forms internally. My impressions, in other words, don’t emerge from my life; my life emerges from my impressions.

Over the course of an entire life, I take in the whole universe I encounter. This is a unique universe, an idiotic universe, specific to me and the perspective I occupy. Yet from a certain point of view it is the supreme universe; I am the creator of this particular universe. No one else can create it; no one else could take responsibility for it. It exists only because I help make it so. And if I'm not responsible to it, if I don’t attend to it carefully, it can’t form in a proper way. Much of what takes place in it disappears into a darkness that goes both unexamined and unappreciated.

The idea of seeing this may seem like a stupid or unpopular one. It turns the world of things that I am so devoted to on its head, substituting a world of inward impressions which can’t be seen or fully expressed. This in turn may seem to imply a weird kind of futility; if we can’t touch it or see it, if it can’t be used in the way we expect the material things around us to be used, what good is it? We forget, perhaps, that the world of things is always driven first by the world of ideas; and we forget this constantly. So much so that ideas, the intellect, the ability to imagine is sometimes mocked. We forget that the world of things comes after the world of ideas, and that in fact everything we invent and do outside of ourselves arises from this mysterious creative darkness that we call being. If, that is, we call it anything at all, because we even forget that we have being or that it is the original force that creates the world in the first place.

I would submit to you that it is everything we take in that matters in life; that is the singular substance we take to the end of our lives with us, the sum total of everything we have been, everything we have experienced, everything we have encountered and pondered and sensed and felt and thought about. It is this wholeness of being made for something real; all of the material things outside of us are objectively temporary, but our Being is a whole thing more durable than the things that come and go throughout our lives, whether we produce them or someone else does.

This, in any event, is how it strikes me this evening from my hotel room in Hangzhou.

 May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.