377: Learning to be Alive

“Worry is really misplaced imagination”, someone told us recently. In this conversation, we consider what it is to bring our rich capacities for imagination, reflection and attention to the living of our lives, rather than as a way to escape life. What becomes possible when we commit to being changed by our experiences, in much the same way that light illuminates and changes a room, rather than ‘going to sleep in the middle of the show’? And how much it matters that we engage fully in the work of reflective conversation, making sense of and metabolising our experiences so we can learn from them. Living this way isn’t ‘navel gazing’ but a way of turning our experiences into learning rather than rigidity, and supporting us in bringing ourselves more fully into life.

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Highlights of our conversation:

00.00 Introduction and Welcome
04.08 Exploring the source, MC Richards’ ‘Centering’
08.07 Learning and Consciousness
11.59 Awakening to Life: The Challenge of Engagement
15.59 Processing and Metabolising Life
20.01 Imagination and Reflection: Staying Awake
23.52 The Value of Reflective Conversations

Here’s our source for this week:

Learning to be Alive

You don’t need to tell me what education is. Everybody really knows that education goes on all the time everywhere all through our lives, and that it is the process of waking up to life… It takes a heap of resolve to keep from going to sleep in the middle of the show. It’s not that we want to sleep our lives away. It’s that it takes certain kinds of energy, certain capacities for taking the world into our consciousness, certain real powers of body and soul to be a match for reality. 

That’s why knowledge and consciousness are two quite different things. Knowledge is like a product we consume and store. All we need [for that] are good closets. By consciousness I mean a state of being ‘awake’ to the world throughout our organism. This kind of consciousness requires not closets but an organism attuned to the finest perceptions and responses. It allows experience to breathe through it as light enters and changes a room.

That which we consume, with a certain passivity, accepting it for the most part from our teachers, who in turn have accepted it from theirs, is like the food we eat. And food, in order to become energy, or will, [must be] transformed entirely by the processes of metabolism. 

We do not become the food we eat. Rather the food turns into us. Similarly with knowledge, at best, we do not turn into encyclopedias or propaganda machines or electric brains. Our knowledge, if we allow it to be transformed within us, turns into a capacity for life-serving human deeds. If knowledge does not turn into life [it] poisons just as food would if it stayed in the stomach and was never digested, and the waste products never thrown off.

M C Richards, from ‘Centering’

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash