The Nearly Lost Secret of the 3rd Fundamental Day in Human Existence... 🤫
You know the first two, but there is a third important day in every humans life.
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"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." — Mark Twain
Sage wisdom from Twain, to be sure. Meditating on this quote will take you far, however…
…there is a third day of extreme importance in your life.
One often overlooked, and one nearly lost to the shadows of history.
I have reason to doubt, given the life and context of Mark Twain, that he unlocked this third gate of human existence. No matter, he will have more opportunities to try again.
The First Most Important Day...
... is the day you incarnate on Earth.
The day your individual experience begins.
I have written about the unbelievable significance of your experience recently (here and here). I won't rehash much.
This is the most fundamental realization.
You are here and this is it. But this realization is just the beginning of your journey. It is the starting point, the necessary foundation from which you progress.
"The fact that you have an individual experience is more significant, wildly fascinating, horrifically terrifying, mercilessly painful, and ecstatically blissful than any single individual experience." – Eric Brown, The Most Fundamental Realization.
Upon this foundation, steeped in the divine tragi-comedy of your human experience – you begin to write your story and enact it in the world.
This leads us to...
The Second Most Important Day...
...is the day you find out why you were born.
Some recoil at hearing this. Many of us were raised in the stage-orange, scientific-materialist, pseudo-nihilistic view that life is meaningless and random.
I invite you to consider the possibility that this is not the case.
Consider instead that the infinite intelligence of Nature and Existence itself has brought you here, now, as you are, to play an integral role in the evolution of Being itself.
The challenge, game, and opportunity is now: what is it about me that makes me fundamentally necessary to the world?
Answering this question combines two factors: the Truth of yourself (your personality, desires, strengths, weaknesses – self-realization writ large), and clearly perceiving the state of the world and what is most needed.
The unification of these two forces (matching your jigsaw piece into the board of the world) is how you find out what you are called to do in this life.
This process of weaving together your unique strengths into the tapestry of the world is known as right living — your dharma.
We can separate your Dharma into your inner and outer. Hinduism and Buddhism both converge on a similar answer for your inner dharma, just expressed differently.
Your inner dharma is to seek and discover the Truth of who you are and bring yourself into alignment with this Truth. This Truth is that your small self is the All Self. The Ground of Being. The existence-tissue of life. You are something the entire cosmos is doing.
Your outer dharma is the path, work, and commitments you enact in the world to assist you in realizing and grounding your inner dharma.
"It is far better to perform one’s natural prescribed duty, though tinged with faults, than to perform another’s prescribed duty, though perfectly. In fact, it is preferable to die in the discharge of one’s duty, than to follow the path of another, which is fraught with danger." – Bhagavad Gita
Every moment, obstacle, and event in your life is an opportunity to cultivate your inner dharma, to awaken to the Truth of who you are.
This is why any wisdom tradition worth its salt takes self-realization and worldly service as axiomatic pillars.
Self-realization and contemplative practice are required to discover the Truth of Who You Are, and worldly service/action is how you Enact and Embody that Truth.
These lead to Moksha (Nirvana) – liberation from the cycles of birth and death (Samsara).
This leads us to...
The Third Most Important Day...
... is the day you die before you die.
At the top of St. Paul’s Monastery in Attica, Greece, there is an inscription that says:
“If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.”
Many don't realize the mystical psychedelic origins of early proto-Christianity. The best overview is in The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku.
This quote means exactly what it says.
If you (the small separate Ego-Self) have a death process (Ego Death) before your physical body passes, then you (True-Self) won't pass when your body passes away.
As with all mystical and wisdom traditions, you must remember that this is pointing to a direct experience, not merely writing poetry.
In Greek, the Catholic Eucharist is sometimes called the pharmakon athanasius, meaning the “drug of immortality.”
But it is not (as many psychedelic psychonauts mistake) the psychedelic compound itself that unlocks the gift of immortality — it is the death experience they reliably induce.
Ancient Greece is the bedrock of modern civilization.
Democracy, philosophy, mathematics, sewage, nation-states. You name it, the Greeks played some part in inventing it.
And yet—without fail—from the likes of Marcus Aurelius to Plato to Cicero – they are on record claiming that the Eleusinian Mysteries was their culture’s most important contribution to humanity. The Eleusinian Mysteries were the ritualistic rite of passage that facilitated this death process.
This quote comes from Marcus Cicero (106-43 BC), a legendary Roman statesmen, philosopher, lawyer, known as one of the greatest orators and prose stylists of Greek culture. He has this to say about the fundamental importance of the Mysteries and the initiations therein to Greek culture:
“For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called ‘initiations,’ so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope.” —Cicero
The founders of modern democracy reliably state that the Mysteries, more than anything else, were the shining accomplishment of their culture.
The immense importance of this must sink in.
To spend but a moment in the infinity of eternity is enough. To experience existence beyond the confines of the separate Self will put you in touch with the True Nature of who you are—the infinite, endless, Ground of Being.
Like a phoenix, reborn from the ashes, this process is the third most important day in your life.
In a way, like all things in nature, it is cyclical, taking us back to where we began: re-incarnating. Re-membering.
These are the most important days of your life. I hope that you experience all of them.
Many humans only get as far as the first one.
With love, EB. 💛