Life is first of all a Boot Camp. Exercise. Following Orders. Doing what your supposed to do to avoid getting yelled at. Smiling because you have discovered it works. Not smiling at hateful people who don't like smiling, and learning that over and over again. Learning how to drive, ride bicycles. Remember run and walk? Probably not. But life in all of its magnificence and in its "mundaneness" happens through the matrix of repetition. Athletic prowess and plowing fields and petting your dog and affectionately loving your fondest one.
Serotonin Starts Building When You Walk
Life is a Boot Camp. But mainly it is a friendly one. However, if you don't learn to keep the rules, stay inside the lines, show up at the right time, do what you said you would do and pay your bills -- you will suffer in an extraordinary number of ways. Life is a Boot Camp, but the intention is to produce Divine Marines. The whole thing is designed FOR you. They say that Serotonin (the ultra feel good neurotransmitter) starts building in your body when you walk. Nature itself is telling you to move. Nature is saying: "Move, you will be happy." You as a Marine of any number of possible ranks, because of the repetition of boot camp will enjoy that wonderful Pauline phrase: "afterwords - the peaceable fruits of righteousness". So -- the big point: Boot Camp is good for you!!
The Young One
The Repetition of Boot Camp constitutes the structure and the structuring of life. But life is so intriguingly wonderful, other than being repetitious, we should never focus too much on the Boot Camp part. When you watch a baby trying to walk. And it falls so many times you can't count them all. You stop and stare into their eyes. Their eyes are alive with sparkling expectation. Unless they are actually hurting, they will just keep on keeping on. And then that moment happens and their steps turn into piston-firing marches all over the back yard.
The Old One
And then when you see an octagenarian plodding through each step, fighting the arthritis that asks them just to quit, you see the beauty and magnificence of keeping on and the ultimate power that lies deep in the human soul which states -- "If I can keep on, then I am not dead". And then the step-by-step, it does not discourage itself it states: "If I keep on, then I am declaring my inner power!"
Beauty
The "Beauty" part of life is nature, sure. Walk around every day and try to soak in the fact that there is not a view off of this planet like the one you are seeing for so many light years, they can't be named or understood. Because we don't know where the next earth is, we can suspend ourselves in absolute wonder over the splendiferous surroundings. The human beauty we can all experience is not for the distorted fantasy-driven, addled mind, beauty is what you see in all your friends, loved ones, relatives and others. Beauty is what your mind should observe as it etches itself around the canvas of our vast brains.
Yes, when you see a poster of a young Marilyn Monroe, it is easy to be swept up in life's classic forms. The woman is astounding because they can do all that they do physically, AND have estrogen and be utterly functionally equipped to do all that life throws their way. And the beauty of the male can be summed up in a sculpture of David, or just appreciated as a young athlete speeds across a field, free of any of life's worries as the wind bounces his locks in free abandon.
It is so easy to intermix sex and romance with beauty and it surely is true that they are inextricably knit together. But if we were all sexless and sterile, beauty would still be beauty. Remember that all of earth's beautiful wonders are down here for us. Beauty is made for us, decided by us, and spun through the weave of our eyes' complexity. It is truly one of the things that makes life what it is, and we should know that "ugliness" manifests itself usually where destruction and evil have trampled the scene. Beauty therefore becomes a flag, an announcement, a song, that says life is working out well here.
The Bong
This word begins with a "B", and the intention is to sum up sensuality in all of its many forms. The Bong is our pronouncement that we were given a carousel of sensors that wire us in such a fashion that we can feel the passing of a tiny breeze, the sound of a fruitfly, the drunken feeling of so many diverse substances that it you would need an encyclopedia.
Before you get your legal sensibilities all in a flight, or your hedonistic impulses burning, stop for a minute and say to yourself. "On the one hand, one should not consume all that lies under the South American canopy" --- but there is more in "heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy" as Shakespeare said. This is a delicate topic because of crime and politics and probably the most controversial of the "Life is" topics, but that controversy itself tells us that there is much complexity in us, much of it we gloss over, much of it we moralize over, much of it we paint over, much of it we obscure. Very little of this broad topic falls under quiet consideration and we can just leave it at that.
Ceremony's Sake
Perhaps the best way to comment on the "drug" question and the "substance" question is to observe that many things in ancient history were used in ceremonial situations. Today, we tend to mass produce, mass consume and become utterly spent because we "take it to the limit" when it should be sniffed or sipped. That is a comment on our Age as much as it is a comment on the "Substances". I know one individual who drinks several glasses of tequila on certain occasions. He calls it his ceremonial drink. He never drives after these occasions and goes at it with a near reverence. He only does this about two or three times a year.
The "Bong" of life is a big biological challenge too. Many of these substances are harmless at one level and downright killing at other levels. Then there are tobacco and poppy that have been the scourge of the species. Again, these problems tell us more about ourselves than the substances do. "Many a slip between tongue and lip" is an old folk saying because it shows us the dangerous probabilities that lie at our door constantly. Danger, danger and more danger sit right next to serene, consciousness-altering gentle inebriation. Life is definitely scary in this regard. It should make us more reverent, but somehow it tends not to.
The Beach
The Setting. Ah, yes WHERE we do our living has so much to do with what life is. Being able to have a "roof over our heads" and get the basic pleasures of life is such a precious goal. It makes life what we dream about. Turning over in our sheets and kissing the one we love. Napping on a sun-soaked beach, screaming madly at a ball game, chatting around a table at a bar, or asking for God's blessing around a massive Thanksgiving table, all become the "beach" of our lives. In poorer countries, homes are built of tin and leaves, and concrete bricks and scrap wood. Not to compare structures, but the "beach" tells us that a happy family can live in very small cube, and a howling angry couple can echo their epithets in a 10,000 square foot castle. "Here on earth have we not continuing place", as is declared in the Book of Hebrews, and this saying does make us be grateful for the homes and houses that we do have.
It Is Sure We Can Take Nothing Out...
Life is for our Training. It is not for grabbing the best car, or planting ourselves in the nicest house. It is not for adorning or cluttering our beach with super bongs and beauties that don't know our names. It is not a Boot Camp for getting out of, it is a Boot Camp for getting into. The Boot Camp and the Bong with the Beauty on the Beach is not to be consumed by. It is for our peaceable pleasure. When we truly inhabit the physical and mystical nature of the around, we can be thankful daily, but not taken in by it all.
For truly, everyone's Boot Camp, Bong, Beauty and Beach are different. That just makes the whole prospect of living more fun, more variety-filled and more richly textured. Then instead of living in envy, we can live in a state of wonder that there is enough for everyone, if we would just taste it and savor it. Then when we "work out our salvation with fear and trembling", it will be because we were in a constant state of reverence over it all: The Camp, the Beach, The Beauty and the Bong. "Mazel Tov" (Jewish Phrase). May the starry canopy above you display itself wondrously over your Life. Christofer French is the Founder of Astrologygetalong.com.
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