Philip Jacobs ~ Lessons of Life

 

 

 There are several lessons that I have learnt from my observation of life, that I wished I had known from the very start. The first is that you can trust the process of life and it`s unfolding. So many times in my life journey, I have experienced deeply traumatic events that I could not see the purpose of at the time. These events have ranged from chronic illness and the loss of those I love, through to redundancy and loss of home. Yet when I look back on the events from a fuller perspective, I always see how they led to deeper insight and creativity that I could not foresee at the time and they also pushed me into where I needed to be in life. It was as if I had been seeing the world just through a letter box and could not see the whole picture. I have observed this so often in life, which is why I now trust life`s unfolding and trust that there is a greater purpose, even if I cannot see or understand it at the time.
That leads onto my second insight, which is that things never turned out the way I anticipate them. When the future prospects have looked very grim, at a certain point there has always been an unforeseen intervention that makes the outcome quite different from what I would have expected. As an old man once said on his deathbed: "I`ve had a lot of trouble in my life, most of which never happened".
The third and most important of my life lessons, is quite simply that i`m not who I think I am. It`s as if there are two of me. One identity I call "Philip". Philip is a man and an artist and does Philip things, like designing textiles and looking for dinosaurs and Hiroshige paintings. But behind Philip there is another identity that quietly observes the ever changing drama of life, all without comment. It was there when I was five and it`s exactly the same when i`m sixty five. Compared to Philip, this other identity is like the still depths of the ocean. Like the ocean it is totally still, even when a life storm rages on the surface. This other identity is also always unconditionally happy. Almost like happiness just shines out of it, and it takes great delight in everything it encounters: people, nature, art, music, animals etc.  The art of life i`ve discovered is knowing that your true identity is this much deeper unchanging sense of self. It is necessary in life to play the "Philip" role, but at the same time to have this background awareness that what you really are is this great ocean of stillness, which in a strange way also includes everybody and everything. Nothing is separate.
Sometimes when life is very difficult it is as if the curtain of time parts and we become aware of the underlying mystery that has been there  all along. This can also happen when we are confronted with great beauty, such as when we look up at the vastness of the night sky. It is as if the boundary between "self" and "other" dissolves and we see that we are already the whole universe.
So when you are in the middle of the life dance and it seems overwhelming, remember your real identity that is always present as your safe place and true home and that is always beyond trauma and illness. It is even beyond birth and death.

 

 

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