Human Flourishing

For several years I’ve been exploring in my own life the experience of human flourishing. Human flourishing is a very old and revered view of what our lives can become. It is an indelible and ancient human longing stretching across time and diverse cultures. It is the whispered secret message of the great sages and wise healers. It is a noble and compelling vision of our humanity. It will not leave the human spirit. The great Indian sage Aurobindo referred to this full unfolding of our possibilities as the “perfection of human life.” Here we refer to it as human flourishing – a profound health, happiness, peace and wholeness permanently freed of all forms of suffering and distress.

It is a paradox of history that the East – which carefully held the wisdom of ancient Greece that fueled the first western renaissance – has similarly held the knowledge and experience of human flourishing which is now primed to fuel the second western renaissance. Once again we are ready to reclaim our forgotten heritage and with it a deeply held hope for a life and world equal to our human endowment. Having matured our outer possibilities we are now on the verge of maturing our inner ones as well.

Long ago in our own western tradition the healers, mentors, and guides that took us to the depths of our being were called iatromantis, sacred healers. They introduced us to our innate nature, to our divine nature, to the place where human life effortlessly flourishes in its natural state.  They used a particular method to introduce us to our innermost self and the essence of life found at these depths. They called their method or process incubation. In the East and now in the West we call this same process meditation. This universal path to the center of our being has remained the same throughout time. Only its name has changed. The universal truth is clear. It is in the stillness of mind that we discover our true nature and the essential mystery of being. If we can tame our mind and transcend its obscuring chatter and conditioning we will discover the core of our humanity. And we will find that it is good, peaceful, happy, and whole.

But the challenge is great for westerners who have elusively focused on and mastered the human intellect. Our intellectual capacity has brought us great comfort and physical security. Yet its dominance over our life completely covers over the qualities of human flourishing that lie dormant within each of us. It is like a dense cloud cover that separates us from our deepest essence and keeps us locked in a world of abstraction – a world of thoughts, ideas, ambitions, striving and disconnection. It forces us to live in the past and future, robs us of the nakedness and freshness of experience, batters down our hearts and destroys our natural connection to each other and the earth.  And further, our intellect fabricates an “I,” a sort of imaginary CEO of our life, and places it in charge of this abstracted world that is more imagined than real. And this “I” is not a gentle soul that seeks the depths and fullness of our being. It is misguided, confused, insecure, self-cherishing, pleasure-seeking and filled with afflictive emotions. We live our lives in the small room of our intellectual life, congratulating our selves for outer achievements while desperately and silently crying within for what we have lost – if and when we can even remember the immensity of this loss through the busyness of our days and years.

The challenge is great because we don’t know what we don’t know. Here and there we see a great wise one whose life has flourished. We think, that could not possibly be our destiny. But it is. It has always been. It will always be. But we cannot see it because of the obscuring false self and life we’ve created, embellished and superimposed upon our life source As a result we are forever busy going somewhere, achieving something, protecting something and living in the dual demons of hope and fear. So we cannot see what is possible because we don’t know what we don’t know. Thus we are condemned to ordinary lives, the usual mental stress and distress, ordinary disease and an ordinary death.

The challenge is great because even if we read about it, sense and touch it for moments in “peek-peak” experiences we are immediately detoured in the wrong direction. Experience a touch of human expansiveness in nature and nature becomes your refuge and escape. Experience it in the heights of sexuality and that becomes your craving. Experience it in wealth, name or fame and that becomes your attachment. Experience it in alcohol or drugs and that becomes your addiction, Experience it in the early blush of romance and you get married to it. But none of these transient outer experiences will take us home. In each case the result is suffering rather than human flourishing. All of these experiences are false glimpses. They are stimulus-driven, external, and by nature impermanent. Grasp at them as hard as you can. In time they will be lost. We mistakenly and sadly exhaust our life energy seeking the richness and depth of this precious human experience in such worldly activities and satisfactions. But we cannot find it in outer experiences, objects or people. Yet paradoxically it is close at hand. It’s so close that we cannot see it. The real gold is within each of us, already and always fully present.  It cannot be sought. It can only be known. It is truth-driven rather than stimulus driven.

The challenge is great because human flourishing cannot be easily placed in words. It is neither an intellectual nor a cognitive experience. It is “being” and presence itself in the unelaborated nakedness and timelessness of human experience. And as soon as we attempt to speak of it and describe it an ignorant clever person grabs the words, distorts the meaning and tries to brand, package and sell it for money. You can’t sell the intangible. You can’t sell what is already given to each of us. You can’t sell what belongs to life. Yet we try and given our confused longing for a larger life we grasp at any hope, pay the price and lose the prize.

The challenge is great because we have become great “doers.” We can achieve just about anything. But one cannot flourish by “doing.” When individuals start down the path of human flourishing one of the greatest obstacles is the ingrained habit to try to “do” it. This leads to tension, stress, judgments, comparisons, perfectionism and ultimately failure. One can only arrive there by being. And from my experience the hardest thing to do is to just be, to experience what is as is without the superimpositions of the conceptual mind – its judgments, interpretations and elaborations that color and alter the simplicity, freshness, and beauty of the present moment. It’s difficult at first to let life be and to become one with is natural flow. Only then there is no separation, no controlling and ambitious “I,” just a resting with ease into the natural unity and essence of life. Only then can we arrive at who we have always been and welcome our self, returning home to our basic goodness and sacredness.

To perfect human life and achieve the profound, expansive and enduring health, happiness and wholeness that is already and always has been available to us one must first recognize with great disgust and frustration that there is more to life than we have attained. We must realize with certainty that our efforts to achieve a larger life that befits our humanity have been misguided and mistaken. The great mythologist Joseph Campbell said that it’s likely spending your life climbing a ladder that’s up against a wall, reaching the top, looking over the wall and realizing that all the time you’ve had your ladder against the wrong wall. What you were seeking is not there and never was. Then you must come down the ladder let go of all the false ideas, ambitions, strivings, and lifestyles that led you to the wrong place. That means deconstructing what doesn’t work so you can discover the authentic object of your lifelong longing. That’s how we begin again. It’s difficult and it’s easy to mislead yourself into thinking that reorganizing your life, like rearranging furniture in the same room, will take you toward the larger life you are seeking. But that’s not the way it happens. Human flourishing is not a progressive process of growth and development. It’s an unraveling of the obstacles to a deeper life. It’s a revelation of what is – here and now and always.

There are three phases we move through in the process of re-discovering our good, joyful and noble humanity. First we must re-establish a basic sanity or what we can also call a basic wellness. The ravages of lost childhood intimacy that scar our development result from the western experiment with parenting in the context of the isolated nuclear family. In traditional times children were raised within a community of parents, friends, relatives, and elders who were always available to provide the intimacy and guidance that is the proper foundation for a sane human life. As modern westerners this has not been our fate. As a consequence of this experiment in child rearing we unknowingly and mistakenly seek to re-capture the lost ease, security, comfort and “beingness” of a diverse, loving, and well guided childhood through boundless striving, ambition, controlling behavior, busyness and perfectionism. If we are temporarily “successful” in this endeavor we suffer the side effects of ceaseless stress, mental distress and premature disease. If we fail we suffer a certain painful sadness, disgust with our self, doubt and depression. In either case we take a near fatal detour from the great and precious possibilities of human life, wasting our energy, our days and too often our life. We must first heal this basic wound if we are to move toward human flourishing.

There are two ways to achieve this. Psychotherapy, a uniquely western method, helps by shining a light on the historical causes of our loss of basic well being and sanity. It helps us to minimize and manage early trauma. It serves to lessen distress while we aim at healing the root cause of this wound. Meditation gets to the fundamental source of the problem, allowing us the opportunity to re-parent our selves in adulthood. Meditation teaches us how to quiet the mental chatter and busyness – the usual outward expression of this basic lack of wellness. With practice and a progressive stilling of the mind we recognize that we have never lost our true nature. We discover in it the silence between two thoughts, or as the poet says, in the stillness between two waves of the sea. And slowly, with a loving effort and devotion, we recapture the inner peace, delight and ease lost in childhood. With time we gain stability in this basic inner wellness, re-discovering our true nature. Of course, we never really lost it. It was just covered over with misdirected worldly efforts mistakenly undertaken to recover our forgotten happiness and carefree inner life. Once we have recovered our basic wellness and sanity the next step unfolds naturally.

By healing this basic wound to our inner life we slowly dissipate the emotional afflictions and mental chatter that are the result of our misguided outer search for what is only found within. All of the afflictive emotions – attachment and dependency, anger and hatred, jealousy, self-centeredness, doubt, confusion, arrogance, fear and so on result from our basic lack of well being. Slowly, as we re-gain authentic inner peace our mental afflictions and chattering mind come to an end. We recognize the actual cause of our afflictive emotions and worldly busyness. The establishment of a basic wellness allows us to meet the world from an increasing abundance rather than a sense of deprivation. We progressively focus on others rather than on our self, on giving and service. Life takes on a certain beauty, truth, ease and goodness. Our mind and heart open. This cessation of afflictive and negative thoughts and feelings is the second step on the way to a larger life.

With continued exploration of our sublime essence we begin to catch glimpses of human flourishing. We begin to feel an inner and outer expansiveness, an authentic happiness and wholeness that is immune to the adversities of life, a peace that surpasses understanding, a wisdom that knows life as it actually is, and a love and compassion that sees the needless suffering of others and feels naturally compelled to act in service to help eliminate this suffering. These glimpses slowly gather together, gaining stability, clarity, full sanity, high-level wellness and finally human flourishing – the perfection of our precious human life.

This is an inner process not an outer one. It passes through the three phases we’ve described above – the re-gaining of a basic wellness and sanity, the cessation of mental afflictions, ceaseless mental chatter and outer busyness, and the revelation of our deepest self. This movement is the movement of healing from coarse to subtle to most subtle – from confusion to sanity to flourishing.

It is a patient process by which we find and again return to our long lost self that is the repository of the qualities of human flourishing – health, happiness and wholeness. The closer we get the more difficult it becomes to describe the experience of human flourishing with words. Words refer to ideas. Health, happiness, and wholeness are not ideas, things, mental constructs or cherished possessions. They can only be known through direct experience. That is the dilemma. That is the danger – mistaking, through the use of words, the false for the real, the limited for the abundant, what’s natural for what’s mind stuff. It’s a challenge, but we can experience and achieve what we cannot adequately describe with words.

An authentic realization of our innate natural state of flourishing is permanent. It does not fade. It is abundant and cannot be exhausted. It surpasses all understanding. It is profoundly easeful, carefree, healing and peace-making. It is not stimulus-driven but rather, arises from the truth of our life. It is immune to all adversity.  It is earthshaking and yet so simple, sweet, and ordinary. It is as if nothing has changed and yet everything is different. When we touch it we know it, embrace it and become one with the beauty and richness of what is, exactly how it is.

Fortunately those who have realized this simple truth and perfection of human life have left us a road map that can help us along the way. To help us navigate this road map mentors and guides must be carefully chosen. Although they can assist us in unfolding our essence that has always been the core of our being no one can do it for you or for me. It is our own endeavor, our own greatness and our own nobility to choose an authentic vibrant life, to perfect our humanity and to use our life to assist others who seek the same.

Yet it is not so difficult and it’s certainly easier than a life of stress, distress, premature disease and suffering. We begin with a faith that there is more to life than we’ve lived. We then read, listen and study to gain an understanding of our circumstance. As this becomes increasingly clear we begin to practice. We begin to unravel the mental knots and chatter. We begin to touch the stillness, peace, and wholeness that we know is awaiting us. The early results of this effort can be experienced in days and weeks. And this fuels our faith, motivation and effort. As weeks become months and years we know we have finally found the correct path home. And we know that our home is good, peaceful, happy and whole. So the results begin early and mature over time as we move through the three phases that take us toward a flourishing life.

But our efforts do not stop at the development of our personal inner life. We live in an interconnected world. So our practice becomes seamless throughout the day. We stop and slow our mind. We become more mindful. We listen to others. We really listen. We become more generous, kind, patient, and loving. These changes in outer behavior feed our inner practice and a deepening inner practice brings greater ease and joy to our outer life. The end is a flourishing within and without.

Those who share in this vision deeply care that it becomes a larger vision for our culture. So it is essential that we be vigilant of the tendency to trivialize and consumerize this precious possibility of human life. This would, as it has repeatedly happened in our time, distort, destroy and deny this gift to many who seek this larger life.  We must hold the purity of this vision in our heart and our actions. We must take the time to know human flourishing in our own lives and avoid the urgency to prematurely teach others. If we can hold this noble vision and become it in our own life we will have a more plentiful, health, and happy world. We will become who we already are and have always been

And finally, although we must each arrive at our fullest humanity through personal commitment and effort, it is best that we do so in community. A Center for Human Flourishing can be a sacred place of retreat from day-to-day life where we can share with others the joyful process of returning home to the essence of our being. Such a center would reflect in its setting, atmosphere, teachers, resources and community the vision we are seeking to actualize in our lives. It will serve as a lifelong resource a place of training for those who seek to help others, and a living testament to the perfectability of the human condition.

                                             For Further Information or Readings

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Comments

[Melanie Taylor, RN]

Dear Dr. Dacher
I wanted to say I was just finishing a college class that was utilizing your text, Integral Health. I have been touched by many parts of this book and the CD that came with it. I have difficulties with GBS and I was finally able to get some relief from the constant burning in my hands after doing the meeting of Asclepius exercise. You see, my own grandfather was a doctor and he was the person I visualized as my mentor and assistant.