I recently watched one of those theosophical doccies on Netflix, presented by Morgan Freeman. It was one of those deep, thought provoking and bare knuckle enquiries into the nature of God, which I naturally found appealing, considering my latest preoccupation. However, for a little while I found myself reminiscing on the man himself; no, God is God, I’m talking about Morgan Freeman, the man, an accomplished icon of a thespian kind. It has been long ever since those early years when I saw his film, Lean On Me, for the first time. The year was 1990 and I was in Matric. Other than his great part in it, as a strong headed principal of Fair East High, I remember the film as the only one I have ever watched well over five times before that year ended. I found it truly inspiring, to a point where I (now open) secretly think I should dedicate the fact that I passed matric, to the makers of the film.
Thirty years on, now with his hair all white, like the suit he wore in another of his blockbuster movies, Bruce Almighty, he comes again to inspire me on a matter very close to my heart – purpose – that very reason why we ever do anything at all. Purpose is the reason why we get out of bed in the morning; why the giraffe has such a long neck; why a cup has a hole in it; why we lick ice cream much quicker on a hot day, just to name a few. In this case, he shifts focus to a discussion between a journalist and a Kabbalist.
The Torah is a Jewish scripture that consists of the first five books of what we know as The Bible. Just like the Bible, it starts with Genesis, and its Genesis starts with the word, “Bereishit…” which means “In the beginning”. There is an in-depth method of studying the Torah, called Kabbalah, which seeks to unearth from it the hidden truths about the nature of God and creation. Through the Kabbalah, each letter and each word of the Torah is analyzed from different perspectives in search of this truth. Because the truth is perceived from an unending number of perspectives, whatever the Kabbalist gets to learn at any point, and however startling it may be, it still fills them with a sense of humility for knowing that it is only a part of the totality of God, but not the whole God. For that reason, the the Kabbalah continues to be a study of the perpetuity or eternity of God.
One such analysis has been done on the word, “Bereishit”, which could be rearranged to form another word, “Berit-esh” which means covenant of fire. From the same word, Bereishit, comes another word “Rosh”, which means head. To combine the words Bereishit, Berit-esh and Rosh, as they occur at the beginning of the Torah and in their description of the act of creation; one may derive a meaning that says: In the beginning of creation, there was a mind of God, that visualized physical creation as it should be. Between the mind and the physical creation that was to ensue, there was a covenant of fire, a promise, which established that physical creation shall always be as the mind determines it to be. This means there is nothing that we could perceive as physical; an action, a structure a process or condition, that was not determined to be that way by the mind of God or the mind of those whom God has created. That further means, the power of creation is in the mind – in the beauty of the visions we seek to realize through physical creation.
A spoon is a physical object whose shape is determined by the purpose set in the mind of the one who created it. They created it that way, according to what they wanted to use it for, in the belief that its form would be more efficient in serving its purpose. A knife has a different shape from the spoon, because it was created from a different purpose. Both the knife and the spoon could do many other things, according to the different purposes set by the different people using them. However, they would be easy or difficult to use for anything, depending on how close they are being used to the purpose they are created for. Happiness is a state where the is harmony between the the purpose of a thing and how we use it. It is what we seek to achieve with anything we do.
Of all the different things we could ever do as human beings, nothing makes us feel we are using ourselves more efficiently than when we realize peace in any situation of life. Any other feeling that we experience, such as pain, fear and suffering, are simply warning signs that serve to alert us that, at that moment, we are not using ourselves as we should. They are what a knife would experience if it were to be used as a spoon, or how a cup would feel like, if it were to be used as a knife. All of them would be misused, if used contrary to the purpose they were created to serve more efficiently.
To find meaning in life, we need to remember the covenant between purpose in the mind and the physical situations in the world. We need to be mindful always, of the fact that physical situations are determined by the mind that creates them. If we find ourselves in situations that do not bring us peace, all we need to do is go back to the mind and remember what purpose we set for that situation. Once that is clear, we then come back to recreate it according to that purpose. To recreate it is always to choose what we would find empowering about the situation and choose to see only the evidence of that, because every situation of life, in its oneness with creation, offers us everything in it, and we only experience from it what we decide in our minds that we want to see. Whatever evidence we spend more time and effort looking for, ultimately becomes the reality we. In that way, the mind is our primary reality; purpose always precedes creation and peace, is the only purpose that a human being is created to serve more efficiently than any other.