Participant: Dear David, I was wondering whether a spiritual flourishing of an ordinary human being in a given lifetime is limited by the capacity this particular human being can take, so to speak.
David: First, there is no ordinary human being rather there are unique human beings, and each one represents a singular attempt to flower in this lifetime, in this circumstance of life. So, the idea that we are somehow ordinary should be re-evaluated in terms of being extraordinary, and extraordinary in the sense of being unique, that the flowering of that particular life or person is something non-replicable. So, that’s why it’s extraordinary. If a human being does not flower, then that opportunity dies forever. There may be many other human beings, but that does not qualify the failure in any way. It’s a total failure in the sense of something not germinating and then going through the stages of evolution and finally the flowering, however you conceive of this flowering.
Would you read the question one more time?
Moderator: I was wondering whether a spiritual flourishing of an ordinary human being in a given lifetime is limited by the capacity this particular human being can take.
David: The capacity is infinite in every human being however it measures up to what appears to be a kind of comparison that’s attempted. So, when we talk about capacity we are talking about simply overturning the conditioning inside of a human being. That defines capacity if you want to use that word. This idea of capacity is really the question of chance in many ways. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just random who flowers and who doesn’t, since one can put forth a great amount of effort and never flower and put forth very little effort and flower. It seems to be random in a way, although I don’t believe that that incite ends the discussion that it’s random.
So, each individual human being has a propensity built inside that’s already active to move in a direction in life, to do what it occurs to that being to do and so on. I think the ultimate question is whether the ideas that come up inside of an individual are in fact original in that person or put there through conditioning. This is why I alluded to the idea of capacity as conditioning and whether it is in fact controlling a person’s life, or we could say what kind of conditioning is controlling a person’s existence.
So, if all of the ideas in a given individual are put there externally, for example the parents say, “You must become this. You must become a doctor. You must become a lawyer. You must make a lot of money. You must do this. You must do that,” and that individual takes that on and then owns it and lives inside that frame of reference, then we can say that the conditioning has not been penetrated. For flowering to happen the conditioning must be relaxed, elasticized or dissolved, so that what then can arise inside that individual’s consciousness is the original or aboriginal impulse inside of that being, the aboriginal meaning organic impulse that comes about when that being is left alone and allowed to come into their own felt existence. So, that being naturally begins to feel into their existence in a spontaneous and unique way.
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