Birds do it, bees do it
In a dream I was reading a very astute column by Wes Annac on generalists and specialists. I don’t think I can remember what Wes was saying well enough to reproduce it here. I’ll have to say instead what it inspired in me, with my apologies to Wes for not being able to “bring back” what he was “saying.”
I saw that we can approach life as a generalist or a specialist. A generalist was one who was here to sample things, to wander down all paths, to smell the roses, experience broadly.
We often think that a generalist is necessarily a dilettante, but I have to add that Archangel Michael regularly in my readings reminds me that he wants me to be a generalist in some respects. He makes the point that, outside the body, I don’t have a body. So this is my big chance to experience what life is like from inside one.
So he asks me to be sure to take time off and experience what this life has to offer. I chided him and suggested that he wanted me to “eat, drink and be merry.” And he responded, very knowingly: “Yes, and isn’t that hard for you?” And yes, it is, because I have a monk’s temperament.
A group of us were joking on a conference call about what we would do after prosperity and I said I would have a cave in the Himalayas with all the amenities and a large teepee in the desert where I could spend forty days and forty nights. That about reflects it.
So Archangel Michael would like me very much to be a generalist.
A specialist, I think, is someone who has a path and follows it rigorously, to solve the great puzzle of life: Who am I? Just yesterday, Jesus through John Smallman, pointed to that special object of this life for us, but implicitly of all lives.
“Here in the spiritual realms we are observing, with enormous joy, humanity’s rapid progress towards awakening. Yes, we do keep telling you this, and the reason is that frequent enthusiastic encouragement, like this observation, assists you in focusing on holding and strengthening your intent to wake up from the illusion.
“There still remain many distractions that would attempt to divert you from your path, and so we will continue to draw your attention back to the task in hand – waking up and becoming fully conscious beings, as is your Divine destiny.” (1)
Well, the illusion that we’re waking up from is that we’re separate from God, that we’re not divine, etc. The reality is that we’re all God. Everything is God. So the answer to the great puzzle “Who am I?” is “God.”
The specialist is hell bent for leather on a path to solve that great puzzle. Mine is the path of awareness, although this lifetime it’s the path of service. I can’t say I’m hell bent for leather on the path of awareness but I do feel dedicated to the path of service, so much so that I feel it difficult to accede to AAM’s request that I smell the roses.
Experientialists in general tend to be generalists. Those who follow their hearts and those who’ve arrived in the higher dimensions and are in flow tend to be generalists. So I’m in no way disparaging them.
Those who are concentrated and in the final stages of realization tend very much to be specialists. Most of the biographies of saints and sages on Earth – the biographies of Bernadette Roberts like The Path to No Self and The Experience of No Self or Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space – tend to be tales of specialization.
And they often encourage us to “get serious” or “bear down” and complete the work. But once completed, people in a state of bliss become very much generalists again. One could say that, in the Zen proverb, as long as mountains are mountains, people are generalists but as soon as mountains are no longer mountains they become specialists, so to speak. They’re embarked on that phase of life that sees them bear down to realize themselves.
You said it much better in my dream, Wes. I tried so hard to remember it and I swore I would. But the only thing I brought back was the glow of seeing for the first time what AAM was talking about by asking me to smell the roses.
I’ve had one or two days when I actually did relax for a few hours. I’m getting better at it. I’m working hard at it – at relaxing. I am specializing these days in being a generalist.
Footnotes
(1) “Jesus: The Curtain is About to Rise on the Next Act,” channelled by John Smallman, July 19, 2013, at https://wp.me/p1B8dY-fn.