The Outliers

Why suffering and seeking are the vehicles of transformation

“My life feels driven by a sense of “not enough”. It’s like my identity has always been organized around seeking something. That something keeps evolving but the feeling of lack is constant. In your essay, you wrote that “enough” is not something to be attained but something that is already true of raw being itself. I can follow that intellectually but not yet experientially. If my movement has been rooted in “not enough,” then what actually happens when that energy falls away? How does a person generate momentum? Or does a different kind of movement emerge from somewhere else entirely? And what would it mean for our society to operate in this way?”

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Even that gnaw of ‘not enough’ emerges out of the enoughness of the moment. It is not a flaw in your design. It is not a glitch in the matrix. It is not a bug in reality. It seems to be a feature of it. The insatiable appetite of the hungry ghost is also a manifestation of this raw being. The incurable lack, the compulsive seeking - as distressing as they may feel - appear as necessary stages on a developmental arc that begins as unconsciously whole and ends as consciously whole.

We are not in charge of this process. This self that we identify with is merely one of the artifacts of the process, as I see it. One that formed unbeknownst to us and falls away on its own - much like the umbilical cord of a child falls off after birth. Our conscious grasp of existence is woefully narrow - we are mostly concerned with how we feel today, this week, this month, this year. Our aspirations are low hanging fruit - the desire to have more comfort, more security, more love, more validation. And if we can get it for a day, a week, a month, a year - we feel satiated for a time. Yet, the arc we are actually on is much vaster, much grander in scope - one that is intertwined with the journeys of every other sentient being on this planet - human or otherwise.

We think this has to do with how we think, feel, and experience life - it doesn’t. This sense of “I” is a temporary and useful illusion designed to motivate a specific kind of blinkered movement. Reality seems to require us to become self-consumed, self-concerned, and self-obsessed for a while which is why we have evolved this shiny boundary of separation within us. This glittering reflection that hypnotizes us and prompts us to obey its every whim and fancy. None of it is accidental. It all happens inevitably.

We do not choose to be driven by the energy of ‘not enough’. It is the energy of ‘not enough’ that chooses us. And just as it chooses us, it also leaves us when its objective has been satisfied. Our own desires or aversions in all of this are moot. They are merely emergent from that same “not enough” energy. Even the desire for “enough” arises from the “not enough”. The enoughness of raw being desires nothing, including itself.

Let me use an analogy that might help make this more clear.

The life of the monarch caterpillar begins with one purpose and one purpose alone - to consume incessantly, voraciously, and unceasingly. Its entire existence is driven by an unrelenting sense of “not enough” that keeps it seeking more. From the moment of its hatching, the caterpillar multiplies its weight 3,000 times. That is the equivalent of a human baby, typically 7lbs at birth, growing into an adult weighing 21,000 lbs in just two weeks. The caterpillar knows nothing of contributing. Consuming is the only thing it knows. Its life purpose, its ambition is linear - bigger, better, stronger, faster - unconditional growth. It cannot pause. Because stopping is synonymous with death.

It goes through five different stages of molting - a process in which it sheds its rigid exoskeleton which has grown too confining. This allows it to continue growing to a size that is significantly larger than when it began. Once it has reached a certain threshold weight following its 4th molt, it stops eating and finds an unobstructed branch from which it begins to enter its pupa stage. It forms a chrysalis and over the next 10 days undergoes a radical transformation.

Its entire biological structure begins to liquefy through highly regulated cell-death processes known as autophagy (which translates as “to eat oneself”). If you were to break open a chrysalis mid-stage, all you would find inside is a clear gelatinous liquid - with no recognizable anatomical structure of any kind. And yet, within just a few days, an entirely new anatomy comes into form. The chrysalis opens and a monarch butterfly emerges.

The life of a monarch butterfly is radically different than that of a monarch caterpillar. From a creature that once grew to 3000 times its size to one that can migrate 3000 miles - the butterfly is not driven by linear ambition but by an aesthetic intuition. Its function as a pollinator is one that is vital to the survival of the whole eco-system. Its core purpose becomes one of an environmental contributor. It exemplifies the virtue of plentitude in our minds, and yet…

…it could not have undergone its metamorphosis until it had achieved its threshold weight. It could not have entered its pupa stage until it had become so fat, so decadent, so self-consumed, so saturated with its own gluttony - that it could not bear the weight of its own existence. The energy of “not enough” was the vehicle that delivered it to the threshold of its own metamorphosis.

Human society, appears to me, to be collectively emerging from its own ‘4th molt’. We have reinvented ourselves many times - structurally, ideologically, politically, economically - we have achieved unprecedented progress and prosperity - we have grown gluttonous, decadent, self-consumed, and saturated in our own self-importance, driven as we are by our need for unconditional growth. And yet we feel the weight of our own existence more acutely than ever. We appear to be entering the pupa stage in which we use technology to build our own chrysalis - that tomb within which we consume ourselves as technology gradually dilutes culture, community, communication, critical thinking - and eventually liquefies it all into a clear gelatinous soup.

It is impossible to know what the other end of that process will look like - anymore than it is possible for a caterpillar to envision itself as a butterfly. Yet, what seems clear to me is that the energy of “not enough” is delivering us to the very threshold of our own metamorphosis (or annihilation).

Yet, the clues for whether this is indeed a transformation we are headed towards or a one-way ticket off the edge of a cliff are visible in the edge-cases - the outliers to the bell-curve of humanity. Those individuals among us who have gone through these various moltings and have entered that chrysalis phase, have undergone that liquefaction of identity - and have not been destroyed by it, but have emerged as something entirely unprecedented to their former selves.

Rather than speculate on someone else’s experience, I can only narrate to you my own. Each “awakening” I experienced was another molting - a shedding of one layer of identity in order to inhabit a new. The first occurred at the age of eleven, when I sat in a dark room and spontaneously asked to know God. The second occurred at the age of twenty-two when on the edge of suicide, I experienced an awakening that introduced me to that pure consciousness in and as all things. The third occurred in my thirties when I finally shed my skin as a seeker. The fourth, a few years later, when I shed my spiritual ego altogether. And then a few years ago, I entered a dark night phase that lasted for two years, during which the entire framework upon which my identity had been constructed began to come apart at the seams. My will, my ambition, my desires, my aversions, my motivations - began to liquify until I found myself floating endlessly in a quantum soup of existence - watching my life fall apart.

Yet, the form that emerged from that was a whole new way of being - one that is no longer rigidly defined by the parameters that once shaped it, nor wholly moved by the forces that once drove it. An existence that was once fundamentally driven by insatiable need is now moved by pure aesthetic. That aesthetic informs everything. When I look out at the world, I do not see things as ‘this’ or ‘that’, ‘black’ or ‘white’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘meaningful’ or ‘meaningless’. I see only aesthetic experiences. I see living as a creative act in which I am guided by my own intuitions to extract the nectar of each moment and in the process to inevitably spread the seeds of possibility over the vast terrain of human consciousness. Not from ambition but simply out of how I have been redesigned. Every word I express emerges from metabolizing life’s nectar and then enters a field of intelligence in which it takes on a life of its own - unbeknownst to me and beyond the borders of my own comprehension or intent.

These words: “motivation”, “meaning”, “desire”, “dislike”, “hope”, “fear” - meant something to me once. They were significant drivers of all my actions. Now, they feel like relics. An exoskeleton lying discarded somewhere that I sometimes visit and marvel at. I gaze at the carcass of that creature I was - the numerous legs that moved ceaselessly to propel me blindly forward. I have no need for all those legs now because I have two wings to carry me.

And unlike walking that required ceaseless effort, friction and striving - flying requires sensitivity and spontaneity. The ability to sense the winds of the moment and glide upon its currents. That does not mean life is a constant updraft - there may not always be thermals to ride. Flight is not perpetual uplift. Sometimes there are lulls that require the beating of wings. Yet, my primary mode of movement is no longer “motivation”. It is flow.

What does that look like in terms of daily life?

It looks like staying on top of the ever-piling laundry generated by a family of 4 without exerting much effort. It looks like meeting others exactly where they are rather than where I want them to be. It looks like not looking forward to having a good day nor dreading having a bad one. It looks like eating when I’m hungry and sleeping when I’m tired. It looks like enjoying silence exceedingly more than my own thoughts.

It looks like realizing that none of this was ever about me and yet it required a ‘me’ to come to this realization.