The Life Circuit

WHAT IS LIFE? To try to define it would be well nigh impossible. No verbal definitions or explanations could convey Life’s subtle quality. It must be experienced at first-hand before we can know what it is.

Most of us have had some glimpse of Life at one time or another in our lives. It may have been a flash of inspiration, or that magic time when we were in love and the world of everyday things was temporarily transfigured. The experience has often been fleeting, and the high moments in our lives are painfully apt to be followed by a slump when depression descends, often for no reason.

The Swing of the Pendulum

It seems that we humans are suspended, as it were, between two opposite fields of attraction - the positive or Life-pull, and the negative or nature-pull, and as a pendulum we swing between the two. At first, we gravitate much more to the negative rather than the positive pole, which means that we are habitually under the sway of the nature influences. If the higher Life influences should exert an unusually strong attraction, we may be temporarily drawn from our natural field of oscillation; but this positive pull will inevitably result in a reactionary swing further into the negative field. So, if we picture ourselves as the pendulum, this provides some simple explanation of those unpleasant reactions which all of us at first experience.

We need not be content to remain ‘swinging’ within the negative field. If we consistently respond to the positive attraction and are not unduly disturbed by the negative reactions that at first we have to put up with, we shall gradually shift nearer to the pole where Life operates, so that we move increasingly into the sphere of the positive rather than the negative, and we function without struggle, strain or reaction.

All this sounds wonderful in theory, but someone will be asking: ‘How can I put it into practice? How can I cultivate the capacity to respond to Life?’

Vital Connections

Obviously we have first to discover one or two things about Life. Here, for instance, is a valuable starting point:

Life for man is the result of and proportionate to the connections he has created.

It may seem strange at first that we can connect to Life, that invisible, essential quality, through and by means of our material surround. But after all, why have we come to this planet of earth? Surely because it provides the particular kind of schooling needed, and an all-important facet of the curriculum is to learn to use the ordinary, everyday things of existence as a means to discover and make contact with Life.

We can see how this attitude works with the gardener, and how the plants respond not only to his expert care, but to his vital interest. They flourish and are more alive. In fact, it seems that their vibrations are tuned up by having contact with something of a higher frequency. It may even be that flowers especially cared for in this way, will actually convey these higher vibrations to others. So something beyond the flower may pass from the giver through the gift.

To connect with Life through connecting with things means giving everything its rights, and this is a process that we achieve progressively. Not only do we widen our knowledge of how things are made and how they work, but we become aware of much that we were quite unconscious about before. We shall gain in sympathy and insight into the nature not only of things, but of people, including ourselves. And these conscious connections will enable us more and more to operate in the field of Life.

Falling in Love

We have a vivid demonstration of how Life works through making human connections when it comes to the greatest experience in most of our lives - falling in love. The attraction between man and woman is all too often taken for granted as something that merely pertains to the nature plane, however we may romanticise about it. But sex provides one of our most important lessons in the school of Life. Each of us, whether male or female, is merely a side, as it were, a segment of a circle. The completion of that circle makes the circuit of Life. And because it is necessary for us to learn that we are but segments, incomplete, Life precipitates us into falling in love with the opposite side, with someone who represents the other segment of the circle. This is not merely to meet the urge towards physical mating, but that each may find through the other what is lacking or dormant in themselves. For though each of us is but a segment, yet, whether we are walking the earth in male or female form, we have the other side to a greater or lesser degree latent in us; it needs to be drawn out and developed if we are to graduate in the school of Life.

If we follow the way of nature, we shall merely depend upon what we find in another to compensate for our inner lack. Then neither of us will grow and our relationship will become stale. In fact, there will be no real relationship; as a physical relationship alone does not make a relationship. Only as we learn through our relationship with the other sex to grow in wholeness of being, will our attempts lead to any lasting fulfilment.

The same principle applies to all our human relationships. And here we shall find that the most promising meeting ground between two people is a mutual interest which takes them beyond their little personal concerns and isolations. Working together in shared responsibility should also call out latent qualities in each, so through this vital interest, Life can begin anew for both.

Beware Familiarity

If we value a relationship, it is all-important to see that we do not spoil it by taking it for granted. No human relationship truly is, except to him who makes it voluntarily in a spontaneous, creative spirit. When any relationship becomes a familiar condition, it has ceased to have the nature of genuine friendship. The only form of friendship that can endure and bring happiness is that which is too sensitive in sympathy to assume its own certainty.

Do not let familiarity spoil, even degrade, a relationship. Always look at your companion with the idea of seeing them anew. Never keep anyone imprisoned by your old picture of them. It may not have been a true picture anyway, or, if it were they may have long outgrown it. See them anew, try even to keep romantic about them - and this applies also to your attitude to yourself. Above all, respect the other person; listen to their point of view, even if they are taking the opposite viewpoint to yours. Never allow yourself to dominate or be dominated. Each must give the other a chance to express their own individuality; this is essential in any working equation.

If our meeting with another should involve a difficult problem, or some difference of opinion, a preparatory tuning-in to the person we are about to meet is of far more importance than rehearsing the points we are going to make. Try to establish a circuit with them in the unseen before meeting them physically. That bit of prior contact may save us from endangering a valued relationship by the frictions of argument and conflict.

Through practising this art of making connections with things and people, we shall come to enjoy the vital experience of contact with Life itself. And just as the law of the circuit when applied to things electrical produces light, heat and all manner of activity, so does the process of making a circuit with the power of Life result for us in illumination, liveliness, warmth and human sympathy. We begin to express through ourselves that vital quality which is Life.

Ian Fearn


© New Renasence Trust (Registered Charity No 256640)