IS: Your generator and you
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A generator, abstractly, is a power source. There are electrical generators, code generators, and generator functions of existential risk, but the kind I want to ask you about is, what powers the alive-ness of your life? What gets you fired up? Something you can feel, can tap into as the source of your drive, your purpose. What animates you? What lights you up?
Maybe you sense that it's a passion that you have, a core value that grounds your care and motivates you to work toward positive impact. Maybe you have a sense of "tapping into" the fundamental truth, goodness, or beauty of the universe, (or the Holy Spirit, or the Dharma) and when that's flowing you're on fire with purpose. Maybe it feels like "resonance" of your self in integrity with your surroundings in interdependent co-arising. Whatever shape it takes, it's where you bottom out on the "why?"s of your being, where the "this is true" has no more "because" underneath and that ground (even if it's groundless-ground) supports the stack of what you do in your day-to-day life.
This is a different vocabulary than I usually use, and I want to caution against a reductionist "this is my single cause" frame — there might not be an identifiable "thing" there to point to, and I tend to use language like "who and how you want to be" to gesture at the complexity of attuning to rightness or integrity or flow in our being. Regardless, I want to ask you about your connection to that source of aliveness and energy. Can you feel that connection right now? How big of a wobble does it take for you to notice when it waxes or wanes? What helps you connect to your power source, and what dampens or obscures your connection?
I can feel my connection (throttle?) to my generator strengthen when I connect with my deep values and cares. Or when I make contact with beauty via nature, or in music. I can feel the aliveness in the presence of those I love, and in excited conversation with those with whom I feel united in purpose and perspective. I can't really, it seems, just will myself to "turn it on" consciously — but if I turn inward and seek stillness, I can often discover it arising there too.
Carrying that connection — however and whenever you find it — and authoring your actions, behaviors, and decisions in cooperation with that energy... that's the trick, the thing we tend to lose sight of, isn't it? Then we wake up at some point feeling disconnected or aimless and ask, "wait, why am I doing this again?" In this moment I want to prompt you to try an "alignment check" with yourself. Let it arise from your lower layers: What comes up in your awareness as fueling you, or as draining you? If so, what might you want to adjust for yourself to be able to live just a little closer to your generator, cleaning the lines of positive fuel supplying your vitality and virtue and drive?
It's probably not a striving, that adjustment — I bet it feels like an allowing, a releasing, a welcoming. Accept the embrace, channel the energy, and let it FLOW through you!
Cheers,
James