Commitment is everything. Not the everything of hyperbole, but the everything of cosmogony, evolution and universal potential. Commitment is the relative made absolute. This goes back to the very beginning, not just of time, but of the whole process. Where does everything start? Everything starts with a spark. The universe started with a spark, an idea starts with a spark, a life starts with a spark -- or maybe that's a sparkle. The spark is an impulse, but an impulse goes nowhere, has nowhere to go. Until it does.
In the genesis of the universe, somewhere between nothingness and "BANG" was an impulse to become. An impulse for void to take form. But that primal impulse alone was not enough to trigger existence. Somewhere in the process a line was crossed -- a proverbial point of no return -- an implicit acceptance that once manifest, form can never revert to void. Commitment is the act by which the relative, subjective context becomes an absolute context for action; it is the word become form. The void could have become anything, but not until it committed to a course of being did existence as we know it begin.
In order to understand this we have to inquire as to what commitment was made. Was commitment to a particular vision or story of the universe to unfold? Was it to a course of action to explode singularity into an infinitely expanding universe of evolving form? What was that original commitment?
What Is Commitment?
It is fairly certain that the universe we know -- of which we are a part as opposed to observers or occupants -- is the result of the laws which govern it. That is to say, if the laws of physics -- known and unknown -- were different than they are, the universe would be a very different place, if it were at all. According to Stephen Hawking, even an infinitesimal increase in the strength of gravitation would have caused the universe to collapse moments after the initial explosion. A change in the other direction and stars, galaxies and planets would have never coalesced from the primal dustbowl. And certainly there can be no fluctuation of those laws, no circumstantial flexibility to their application. The universe exists because of the right degree of freedom existing within the correct constraints.
Commitment is the transformation of potential into reality through the establishment of an absolute context for action.
Creation is commitment, was the first commitment. And we were all there at the moment of creation; we were all together at that moment that nothingness exploded in a flash of potential. Not in the same form or awareness, but our atoms were emitted by the explosions of stars that were formed in the whirling chaos that arose out of that first flash into being. The potential for form, for life, for consciousness all existed unmanifest in that preexistent singularity. And here we are. We are that commitment to form which has become conscious of itself. Only the self of which we are becoming conscious is not simply our individualized self-awareness -- it is us looking at the very universe from which we are inseparable. In other words...
Commitment Is Our Nature
Commitment is the nature of our being. It is why we are here in terms of causation. The principle of commitment is universal in nature, yet we understand it so poorly, and apply it even more poorly. Our application of commitments is motivated postmodern narcissism. Our origins are found in traditions which absolute the stories and the directives inferred from those stories, irrespective of the individual context -- of personal history, culture and circumstance. But that doesn't exist in our culture. We have postmodern relativism and postmodern traditionalism. Postmodern relativism rejects the absolute in all its forms, and looks only at the individual context. And postmodern traditionalism takes the application of the traditional stories and interprets them within the postmodern context then propounds that infusion as the absolute. The individual reigns supreme in both perspectives, and there is no tolerance for an external, absolute context.
This narcissism has led us to become pathologically addicted to choice, and we make most of our decisions -- and worse, commitments -- based on how we feel in a moment. We also know that feelings are coterminous with hormonal releases, so we are basically making most of our choices based on a drug addiction. Some people are addicted to love, others to rage, others to fear; some are addicted to spiritual experiences, some to acquisition, some to danger, and some to self-perfection. So the content of our experiences causes a chemical reaction that we are addicted to, so we make the same choices over and over again, trying to relive the high even if the results are catastrophic. Some people get quite good at it -- business leaders, celebrities, spiritual teachers, self-improvement gurus and heroin addicts alike.
But our extreme narcissism is the result of the evolution of highly individualized consciousness operating at a pathological level. The demand of spirituality is not to renounce that developmental attainment, but to exercise it in a healthy manner. Free will is illusory until it is recognized and acted upon consciously, not out of habit, predisposition, or circumstantial urge. Commitment is the process that transforms the relative context of the individual aggregate of context and conditioned response into an absolute context for conscious, creative action.
Commitment In The Postmodern Context
The postmodern narcissist has been adrift in a sea of universal relativity for some time, and we are feeling in response the need for the rigor of an absolute context that we cannot find in culture. For many people, this is expressed in the search for progressive rituals and behavioral codes, more likely aligned with the very practical issues that move us rather than traditional belief systems, many of which promote the very same codes. So we have devoted vegetarians, environmentalists, organic agriculturists, modern renunciants, etc.
And the reason we feel so strongly about the truth of what we are practicing is that we are experiencing the truth of causality in the practice of conscious commitment. Where we stand to evolve is in recognizing that the content of those experiences are not the truth. That we don't all have to become vegetarians or practice celibacy or subscribe to a particular social view in order to live a life of truth through commitment. What we stand to learn is that spiritual practices and development programs are beneficial not for their content, but for their ability to guide us to operate in sync with causality, with the evolution of the universe -- that is to live a life of integrity and creation by engaging in the practice of conscious commitment. And those systems both succeed and fail for the same reason -- because a fixed set of methods and stories cannot lead everyone into the evolutionary process. Rather, prescriptions and proscriptions only create divisions, which lead to inequities and injustices and human suffering.
Elevating Our Approach
That is why it is critical that those of us who speak with self-claimed authority on such subjects stop teaching the content of our experience as truth. In so doing we create confusion, substituting the key that turns for the spark that drives the engine. When we raise our perspective and discourse to the level of causality itself -- when we move beyond metaphysics into an authentic inquiry into the nature of our experience -- we begin to uncover the same aspects of human behavior that have been described by esoteric and exoteric traditions for thousands of years, but from a position to understand and apply them in new ways.
We need to elevate our understanding of commitment above the content of the past experiences in order to attain an understanding of the principle that is valid in our present context. This leads us to a very practical mode of inquiry and practice in which we seek to understand how the principle can be applied effectively without prescribing specific applications. This inquiry demands that we examine the commitments we make and the manner in which we make them. What does it actually mean to commit to something? How does one life an authentic post-metaphysical life of commitment? How does one discriminate between a healthy commitment and a pathological commitment? What is a valid object of commitment -- should it pertain to anything other than behavior? Is it valid and beneficial to commit to an idea -- whether rooted in faith or empirical assertion? Should commitment implicitly be lifelong? Or is duration a product of the process of entering into a commitment?
Commitment is a fundamental principle of human nature and behavior -- one that appears in some form very early in almost every spiritual tradition. And our present existential confusion and social conflict demands that we explore such fundamental principles in order to change culture. This is goes beyond the the search for personal enlightenment; this is spirituality in the context of evolutionary individual and collective transformation. By taking a post-metaphysical, post-rational approach to this principle, we can find a fusion of the spiritual and the physical life that will allow us to push the developmental edge on a personal and on a cultural level and create real unifying change in the world. And that's what this is really all about: becoming a consciously creative part of the evolutionary process of the universe.
