How do you define work?
In our homo sapiens species, we define it as a means to survival. It means we have to make a living, or in other words, earn money or do something to live the life we want. Simply put, work is an action taken by an individual or a group of individuals to get a return or result. From the point of view of physics which proves every action has an equal and opposite reaction, isn’t everything that is happening in this physical universe a work? Now, if we expand this narrative or definition beyond our species, not just to other species, but also to everything that exists around, isn’t every atom at work – a cosmic work?
So what separates our human work from cosmic work or the cosmos itself?
What I am doing right now as I type, and what you are reading there, and what I did above – defining to understand by giving a meaning for a narrative to get the life we want. Hence, it is important to know what life we want to live to experience. And what if you don’t know, does your life or survival stop if you ever stop working? No, because you are part of a bigger work – the cosmos! Then why does this species have to separate their work when there’s already work happening by nature. The truth is we don’t have a choice because of physics. We are born premature and need initial physical support, then need to be educated or taught for almost two decades, and by the time we reach to make decisions on what life we want, we are cognitively overloaded and have only limited energy to make life-changing or empowering decisions. There are only two directions you can look at or actually work to figure out what you want from life – inside or outside.
Fortunately and unfortunately, if you haven’t reached a point of pain or awareness where you start looking inside to figure things out, you will only be repeating what was there before just a little differently, that is learning or getting influenced by the external world, even your external mental healthcare support systems including your friends and family. Then what about internally? How do your imagination, visualisation, introspection, self-reflection, and planning work inside you? Through almost two decades of personal and social conditionings, the internal process is mostly designed to function in the external world which is a result of the cosmic work. So how will you ever know, if the happiness, contentment and peace you feel through your life is actually yours and not given by the world or evolution?
For that, let’s go back in time a little before homo sapiens started to emerge. What was work back then? Does the above definition of work apply to our ancestral apes as well? Maybe not the first part, but definitely the latter one does. Just like any other living organism, they also had to breathe, eat, sleep, procreate, and move for survival or to keep living. Can we say they were living their lives as they wanted? Most wouldn’t, because as humans we are evolved to use our intelligence to understand, and so we understand the quality of life is part of growth, be it internal or external. Can this intelligence be part of the bigger work that gave birth to humankind for us to grow? And that is how the complex economic systems started creating this separation of work from the bigger cosmic work. So this separation of work is an egoistic feeling in homo sapiens to live through for their own survival just like any other activity. If the separation gets distorted or in terms of psychology, ego dissolution happens, you will have to do the cosmic work of finding your true self through an already conditioned life or choose to surrender to the flow that can also push you to physical or philosophical suicide in the name of hope, belief, faith, or whichever word suites the ego.
So the only way to get through this interlinked cosmic work for you to find your true self amidst this workforce mob, you have to do the actual and maybe the only work that ever existed, that we did before we became homo sapiens and workers, let go of your physical being to be here and now..!
ego feels..! 