Deep Aliveness in the Rain-Soaked Pines
The priest, the dragon, and the ten thousand hunger-driven things
The Exiled Priest & the Dragon Bones
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spent his life in exile, asking around after dragon bones. He was a Jesuit priest and a scientist, and when he started talking about evolution, the Catholic church shipped him off to China for decades. Every year, he asked for permission to return, and permission to publish his ideas — and every year, the church said no to both, leaving him stranded far from home, isolated from his intellectual brothers and sisters around the world.
Somehow, he didn't quit. “If I should lose all faith in God,” he wrote, “I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.” He rode around the Asian steppe on a donkey, hauling geology equipment and fossil samples. He saw a pharmacist selling "dragon bones" as a cure-all, and asked where the bones had come from. His team followed the directions, looking for a good spot to dig for fossils; as a result, they discovered the skull of Peking Man (at the time, the oldest human remains found in mainland Asia, rewriting the timeline of early humans' spread across the globe).
He didn't quit writing either. Out of 19 books and countless articles, the church only allowed one book to be printed in his lifetime (a short scientific tract on the discovery of Peking Man). Still, he wrote and wrote and wrote, about the nature of divinity, about the noosphere, about humanity's place in the cosmos: about the evolution of consciousness and the "zest for living."
The Zest for Living & Deep Aliveness
The word aliveness is pretty close to what Teilhard meant by "zest for living." He described it as "a spiritual disposition" that makes "life, the world, and action seem to us, on the whole, luminous — interesting — appetizing."
Sometimes when people say aliveness, they're talking about thrill, euphoria, delight — but Teilhard went deeper, writing that "it is something utterly and entirely different from a mere emotional state," but is instead closer to a "primordial determination," or "rock-bottom will." (We could draw comparisons to Nietzsche's "Will to Power" or even Crowley's "True Will.") This zest for living is a bone-deep faith in Life with a capital L.
That's also what I mean by deep aliveness — it's not just a state of contentment, bliss, or thrill, but a stance toward the appetizing luminosity of Life, of the World, of Being.
States of euphoric thrill will come and go. Teilhard's letters and essays reveal a man with lots of good days and lots of bad ones. But through it all, his zest for living held up.
Cultivating deep aliveness might make peak emotions more likely, but that's beside the point. What's important is that even when things go bad, even when your worst day turns into a worse month, into a year that just won't let up — even in the middle of all that, deep aliveness doesn't need to go away. The luminous stance remains.
Tumbling Through Traceless Transformations
"Feared and revered as the awesome force of change, of life itself, the dragon is China's mythological embodiment of all creation and all destruction, the ten thousand hunger-driven things tumbling through their traceless transformations."
The way David Hinton writes about dragon is never anything short of gorgeous, an electrifying invocation of deep aliveness. As a scholar of classical Chinese and a long-time Ch'an Buddhist practitioner, when he writes about dragon, he isn't just writing about a mythological beast; in his essays, dragon is a vast cosmic principle, inherent in everything around us. It’s in a category with words like matter, energy, gravity. "The cosmos is all dragon, all generative transformation driven by restless hunger."
But just because something is a vast cosmic principle, that doesn't mean it isn't also vividly personal. "Dragon's claws flash as lightning in the thunderclouds, and its rippling scales glisten in the bark of rain-soaked pines." The large and the small are the same. Dragon is the churning dance of the universe, but it is also the raw energy of deep aliveness in each of us. "Consciousness is made of the same tissue as the cosmos."
Teilhard, for his part, would agree. While chasing dragon bones, Teilhard crafted a vision of a conscious cosmos, a cosmos that is forever unfolding in energetic evolution, its "traceless transformations." He believed that human consciousness was on the rise, and it would continue its spiraling evolution upward, driven to become something new.
He even traced the energy source driving the evolution of consciousness: "In the 'zest for life' there is nothing less than the energy of universal evolution... [it is] an energy, the feeding and development of which is to some degree our responsibility." (All italics his.)
It's up to us to transform the conscious fabric of the cosmos — a task we can only undertake by cultivating deep aliveness.
The Intimacy of Cosmic Forces
“We imagined [the Divine] as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” - Teilhard
I can talk about the sun as warmth on my skin, or as a brightness in the sky, or an impossibly vast roiling furnace in the empty black of space. We don't ask which one is really the sun — it's all of them.
Exactly the same, we can talk about deep aliveness as a sense of euphoric thrill; we can talk about it as a stance towards the appetizing luminosity of Life; we can talk about it as the energy that drives conscious evolution, or the traceless transformation of the cosmos itself. There's no need to ask which one's correct, which one's the real definition.
Deep aliveness is dragon; it's the zest of living; it's the practice of seeing the world as "luminous — interesting — appetizing"; it's the gestation of new structures of consciousness, new configurations of human culture.
But deeper than that, simpler than that, deep aliveness is what's available right here, right now, when we open into its current. New people find it every day. We always have the choice to open up to it, just like we always have the choice to step into the sunlight.
How to Cultivate Deep Aliveness?
That question feels like it will occupy me for the next few years. I have more aliveness now than I've had at any other point in my life, and I'd like to figure out how we can all not only cultivate more of it on our own, but surround ourselves with people who are also cultivating it.
I have some ideas, and I'll be testing more of them soon in a course and community offering. Deep aliveness has something to do with escaping left-hemisphere capture (an overreliance on blinkered, mechanical modes of thought). It has something to do with metis (the "one essential quality" to navigate life). It has something to do with soul-making. It has something to do with growing up.
And it has something to do with a dozen more puzzle pieces I don't have — but I think you do. Come join me, tell me about the pieces you see.
"We come to the infinite well of life with a thimble, and so we go away thirsty."
Perhaps we simply need to jump into the well
Thank you River for sending me to this. It strikes so many cords. I’m in my 2nd time swimming in this current, the flowing in the currency of Love’s deep fathomless unending aliveness in expression — all we sense, feel, think, say and do — what drives and powers it all.
Tibetan Dzogchen master poet Longchenpa speaks to the “zing” and you’ve helped me find it more clearly elucidating what he means clarifying what the direct experience is.
I’ve recently discovered I’ve lost the old motivations of instinctual misidentified body-mind functioning.