Existential angst. A fancy name for the crisis of meaning and purpose of life felt by many, and more commonly experienced in the teenage years. It is a feeling that life is slipping by and that it somehow, should be more than it is. It is the feeling that the valleys of experience are dull and boring compared to the high points of experience, and that the valleys are more frequent. The more sensitive, intelligent or aware someone may be, the greater is this affliction. Those who see more clearly often do not like what they see, and can see their valleys as vividly as their heights.

For some it is not an issue. Their perceptions lack sharpness and so everything in life is a fog. A vague yearning for something more is sometimes there, but is mistaken for hunger, sex or power. Those who see more clearly see their own plight and are able to identify their own yearnings more clearly. They may not see the path or the goal, but they see their own lacking and may even have glimpsed that better place. As Colin Wilson says, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Youth (as well as adults) lack for ways to intensify the dull experiences. Anything that provides massive over stimulation of the senses can provide relief from angst, though only momentary. Video games, loud dance halls or raves, sexual excitement, drug or alcohol use, athletic competition and many other things are all experiences that can "kick start" this heightened feeling and perception; they all have the power to lift a person out of their angst. They all risk being the cure for boredom. They are not all equal in their ability to solve the problem. In order to understand why, lets look at two important things about life:

1) Life, in the perspective of this time and culture, does indeed have no intrinsic meaning. Purpose and meaning in life are defined and projected by each individual, -and their truths are relative to the lives of those individuals.

2) The fundamental reality of life is about energy interaction. One's physical health depends on what one eats or how one exercises. So does one's emotional, intellectual and spiritual health ultimately depend on energy, -how it is gained, processed and expended.

These are the two most fundamental issues of life and the two most important principles in dealing with angst and boredom. You find these principles in the classical existentialists of Nietzsche, Camus, or Colin Wilson. You also find them in the new disciplines of warriorship, whether it be Dan Millman, Stuart Wilde, Georges Gurdjieff or Carlos Castaneda. In each case their messages can be distilled to these two points.

Using these principles you can rise above your angst and boredom, creating and asserting your own meaning of life, with the guideposts of energy management acting to provide some perspective.

2. DO WHAT YOU WILL SHALL BE THE HALF OF THE LAW

As stated earlier, boredom is an attitude arising from a quality of life and being that is misdirected or undirected. There is no direction. It is pointless, ...meaningless. There is a quality about it which has a low energy level and routineness about it which makes life a trial rather than a joy. Life is seen as being like the shadows in Plato's cave, instead of the vivid reality of direct experience. As Colin Wilson says, "Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one."

Great artists experience the heights of creation in their work, beside which the sorry every day affairs of man seem trivial. In those moments of creation, such as in Van Gough's Starry Night, the vividness and excitement of reality shines through. The world is a marvelous place and life is a blessing. The moments where we see it in clarity, when we experience things at their height, confirm the beauty and wonder of existence. And yet often it is seen through a dark haze or fog, which transforms it into shadow and boredom.

Boredom is, by its nature, a lack of involvement with experience. In a given circumstance, an individual has the potential to be drawn in, interact, and to become excited by an experience. However, those who suffer boredom choose not to interact or involve themselves in that facet of life. They often say that they see no purpose, and by saying this are really telling us that they are denying the purpose or meaning in life that allows them to get involved.

Life has no purpose of its own. At one time a purpose or meaning of life was tied to a bond with nature, and the things that went with it. However we have severed our bond with nature and alienated ourselves from that purpose. For a long period of time purpose was bound up with religion (and for many this still remains a powerful force). However, for many, science and the hypocracy of modern religions, have stripped it of authority, respect and relevance. Meaning and purpose in life have become, for our culture, a matter of pursuing a consumer life style and gathering as many toys as possible for our distraction. (It is not even good hedonism since the serious pursuit of pleasure is still frowned upon by pseudo-religious values.)

And so, any individuals who seek any meaning with depth, (-the one-eyed man who sees the true shallowness of our lives-), feel the vacuum of purpose. As a culture we have no direction; lives set adrift without any path, -this is the angst that burns in the souls of those cursed with the ability to see more clearly. These are what Colin Wilson calls the Outsiders.

Life not only has no purpose of its own, it is also seems simply absurd. Much of our politics and leadership defies common sense. The drudgery of working as a wage slave is dismal. The existentialists say that life is absurd, but it is not life that is absurd, but rather what we have done with it. Don't blame life, but rather our absurd culture and priorities. Blame a culture that is stripped of meaningful ceremonies and where people with visions are locked away a lunatics.

Am I arguing for angst and saying that people are right to feel meaningless? No. It is not life that has meaning, but lives. Meaning is brought about and imposed by the will of the person living. People make their own meaning, bringing it into reality through their own will. People choose their purpose. I choose to rediscover the meaningful bond with nature. I choose to spend my life teaching young people to raise their awareness. Others may choose to make great films or paintings, or to create fine gardens, or even to become great gamblers. The act of raising one's will to an action or a feat of creativity, -this is what heightens our experience and gives it purpose. It is the antithesis of sitting idle and refusing to act because one is bored. Will is the key. To engage will in an action about which you care is to overcome angst. To choose a purpose and then apply energy to it is to give life meaning. It comes from within. It is not outside to be sought, but inside to be harnessed.

Seekers of meaning in life will be thwarted until they realize that life doesn't come complete with meaning, but rather is an ingredient that you add. Unless you make the effort to add it, you don't get it, ...and so drift, ...and yearn. Like a silver ball in a pinball machine, you bounce around from random experience to experience, at the mercy of whatever stimulation that captures you, looking for anything that will alleviate boredom. Every type of stimulation or super-stimulation is like a gravity well drawing you in. Some are like black holes.

If you realize that part of living is finding and activating your purpose and then delivering the energy necessary to actualize and realize it, then life dwells more in the heights than the valleys.

3. THE ENERGY OF THE WARRIOR

To choose a path and assert our will is only half the battle. Crowley said "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." He ended up a sad and wicked heroin addict, remembered as one of the most evil men in history. There is no doubt that he lived his life with intensity and purpose, but the path he chose led downward. Not all paths and purposes are equal.

There are laws of energy which control the human animal, intellect and spirit. Once a purpose is adopted, the necessary will must be applied. Both must be present to actualize consciousness and awareness. Purpose sets the path, and will gives us the means to travel it. Difficult paths require more will. Some paths sabotage the will, leading to a dead end. (-But paths are a matter of choice, so the poor decisions need only be changed.)

The feeling of boredom, -the feeling that life is happening to you and passing by-, is a product of a lack of energy being applied to the will. It's spiritual laziness. Either there is not enough energy to fuel the business of living a life with will power, or else the energy is there, but messed up and wasted in ways making it unavailable to the realization of our purpose. Undisciplined and wasted energy doesn't leave much for our will, and so we don't pay attention to life, are not aware of it, do not participate in it, and it passes us by.

For many, sliding downhill through life is the normal course of events. Ignorance is bliss. Those who have no notion or sensitivity to a higher meaning of life allow it to pass by and seldom have more than a vague feeling of loss. When life comes to a close, it is remembered like a Sunday afternoon having passed by without notice. But some of us notice. And for those of us who notice, there is either anguish, angst and melancholy, or the solution of disciplining our will.

Dan Millman provides an excellent analogy of human beings as a tube of garden hose through which water (which represents energy) must flow . Ideally the water flows through with little obstruction. Water flows into the tube and out the other end. The water flowing in represents the energy intake which we all must have in order to live. This includes air, food, emotions from others, impressions, along with other forms of natural and spiritual energies. Inside the tube, they are changed, processed and utilized so that the water exiting the hose represents our energy output. This energy output consists of our deeds, our waste, the emotions we share with others, our creative activities, our sexual exertions, along with the energy which travels with our attention and our prayers.

This seems to be simple process, but several things can influence and interfeere with it. First of all, the amount and quality of energy input can be degraded. Poor diet, toxins or drugs introduced to the system, unhealthy emotional or sexual relationships, corrupt ideas or other negative sources of energy can send bad energy into the hose and system. Secondly, inside the hose, obstructions may occur, due to drug dependencies, self delusion, compulsive behaviours and general wrong use of energy. The good energy that comes into the system gets misdirected or just plain blocked. As a result we perceive the world in a misinterpreted or stunted manner.

Learning the right intake and the right use of energy is what I like to call the "path of the Warrior". The Warrior does not fight against others, but rather fights against the things that are trying to put him to sleep. It is a fight with oneself to fine tune energy management and move in a positive direction towards greater awareness, consciousness, intensity of living and clarity of purpose. -Different purposes for different people.

Boredom is a result of a lack of discipline. People are bored because they can't be bothered putting enough energy into getting involved. What do people do who are chronically bored? Usually one of two things:

1) They increase their stimulation through using drugs or engaging in highly physically stimulating activities in an effort to make life more real, only to find it a hollow and short lived high. or

2) They deaden their lives, reducing the energy inflow to almost nothing so that it doesn't hurt as much. These are the people sitting in the coffee shops, chain smoking and having meaningless conversations about meaningless topics (when they talk at all).

Both ways of coping are unsatisfying to some of us, to the point where it is intolerable. A life of such boredom or such fake experiences seems hardly worthwhile, and it feels that way because we've missed the point. We're waiting for life to present us with purpose and salvation, but if we want more than animal mediocrity, we have to work for it. We have to make our own purpose in life, and we have to cultivate our will and our personal energy in order to move towards it. This is what it means to be on a path, leading to a higher place. A path with heart. The path is not easy. It requires discipline. It requires effort. But the result is a richer, more authentic, more aware and intense life experience, where boredom has no dominion.

Appendix 1: GAMBLING, PURPOSE AND ENERGY

Having just seen the movie Rounders, I am inspired to add something using gambling as the model. What I'm writing here is not about gambling, though. That is just the topic or the model I'm using to get at a larger issue, that being how determining purpose and managing energy work together.

A person may choose the art of gambling as their life's purpose. It is not a better or worse purpose than anything else. To pursue this purpose someone has to perfect skills of memory, observation, understanding human nature, acting, patience, timing, strategy, -all of which are skills of the warrior, -all of which would contribute to an intensity of life and a heightened degree of awareness. Such a person would not be bored.

But how can we say that this would be a valuable life purpose when we see the misery which gambling brings to so many? How can we consider it a noble profession in a world where it is held in very low esteem? Having the purpose is one thing; having the discipline and energy management to go with it is another.

The gambler who experiences misery is the compulsive gambler. He is a slave to the energy highs and lows associated with gambling. For this person, gambling provides the energy rush and release necessary to catapult him into an intense and meaningful state of living, but the rush brings a let down (like a drug high) that is dark and miserable. Further more, since the behaviour is compulsive, desperation rather than discipline becomes a motivation. For such people, their energy is consumed by the gambling, leaving little for other parts of their lives, and often putting them in undesirable situations of debt. This life purpose is pathetic.

However, there are professional gamblers who are not the slave of compulsive behaviour. They have become masters of their energies and take pride in their abilities in the game. They do not act out of desperation, but apply their skills and are thrilled when they win. But they also know when to quit. They bet, buy in and buy out motivated by their purpose, not their compulsion. This is, in fact, a Zen of gambling. It provides profit. It hones important skills. It can be the honorable profession of a warrior and lead to a full, rich, purposeful life, devoid of boredom.

The meaning of life is that you have to make your meaning, and since meaning does not come pre-packaged, it can be almost any meaning. Including gambling. But to validate that meaning, the discipline and energy management of the warrior must be exercised and followed. Like two sides of the same coin, they fit together.

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