U2 Can Find Meaning & Purpose from the 2nd Half of Life

 

In order to live a life of meaning and purpose you too (U2) must learn to give yourself away. As the knight Percival (Parsifal) asks in the story of the search for the Holy Grail, “Whom does the Grail serve?”, you too must ask what the holy meaning and purpose of your life is here to serve. I love to watch U2 clips on YouTube. Their song With or Without You is, for this Irish storyteller and writer, is a kind of mystic poem and modern day rock anthem.  This song, like all great heart songs, works on various levels.  It is a song about the struggle to live in relationship.  At a more mystical level it can be considered a song about the struggle to live in duality. At the heart of the song are these lyrics

 

 

And you give yourself away

You give yourself away

and you give and you give

and you give yourself away

 

 

 

 

 

This giving  yourself away can be giving yourself in the surrender of physical love making.  It is the giving one’s self away in the union of the mystic with the Beloved. It is giving your self away to the work that expresses your soul essence and not simply work as a means to an end. It is a mother giving herself away to build a world of safety for her children.  It is the mature male who is focused on protecting all children who he meets.   Whatever way in which this giving yourself away happens it is important that it does happen.  This is not simply about giving yourself to a project for the purpose of ego satisfaction.  This is not what I take these lines from the U2 song With or Without You to mean.

 

 

What you give yourself away to has to be bigger than your individual ego self.  It is in this way that you find meaning and purpose.  It is a paradox that in giving yourself away you find what you are seeking.  This giving yourself to something larger than the ego is important at some stage of your life.  It is especially important during the second half of life beyond the age of fifty.  This is when you begin the process of individualisation and you leave what is culturally expected of you to go in search of your personal holy grail, asking the question, “Whom does the Grail serve?”  This is another way of asking, “Whom will my heart serve?”

 

 

The Grail is the cup that is said to have held the blood of Christ. The blood is the container of primal life energy that flows through the body.  The Christ is the experience of non-dual consciousness that allows you to know and to be all that you are here to be.  The Christ is the servant of all and serves from the knowing of Love.  Do not confuse the Christ with the time space body of Jesus of Nazareth who knew how to give himself in total surrender to Love as one who lived from the experience of Christ Consciousness.  This confusion of the historical Jesus with the dimension of Christ Consciousness is such a common error that no one really ever questions it.  No one has Christ Consciousness.  It is not something you own but is who you are to become as the revelation you are intended to be.

 

 

In the first half of life we give ourselves to creating a career, a family, a home and a kind of identity.  At the midpoint of life many people struggle and begin to ask a question from another song,

 

Is this all there is?”

 

 

These three cycles are universally recognised – at least for women in the maiden/mother/crone cycle. I am not quite sure what the three cycles are for men except that they are there.  The tragedy of many people’s lives is that they refuse to transition from the first part of life into the second.  This resistance is experience by both men and women as the midlife crisis.  They think that the skills they have learned in the first half of life prepare them for the  journey of meaning and purpose in the second half of life.

 

 

In the case of many men, they continue to live as boy men, living the idea of success as opposed to failure.  When they retire they live a life of narcisstic self-indulgence and all too often they find that their life has lost meaning.  Most high powered executives who are men and who have heavily invested their time and identity in their work die within three to five years of retirement.  I suspect they exit on the planet because they feel they are no longer of productive use.  This is a tragedy.

 

 

If you are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty you will be experiencing mid-life.  For many of you this is a cycle that might be termed ‘the will to meaning.’  If you do not have this experience of will to meaning then it might come later.  If it does not come, pray that it arrives.  I mean that literally.  The sadness is that these cycles are known but not taught.  They were known and ritualised in indigenous societies but ours is a culture that focuses only on the first half of life, which is, in reality, only half a life.  In India it was traditional for a man to leave his wife and family and go off to a forest or mountain to find out who he was.  Fifty is a good age for someone living on the Indian subcontinent even in this day and age.

 

 

There is no need for you to leave your wife or family or husband or partner or job. There is a need to leave the culture that invites a never ending focus on self-serving.  There is a need to transition and turn around and quest.  There is a need for you as an individual to answer for yourself the question “Whom does the Grail serve?”  The grail is a symbol of sacred unity.  It symbolises what is whole in you and what way in which you can make the world whole.

 

The quest begins with a question.  What are you going to do with your “one wild and precious life?”  In the second half of life you learn to give it away.  You learn to surrender to Love’s purpose and not your own.  You listen to the still small inner voice.  You listen beyond the manic clamour of your mind and the collective mind.  You learn to centre yourself and become the knower within. You claim your true King within or your true Queen within.

 

 

You too can give yourself away and live a life of meaning and purpose.  It is an antidote to what they Jungian analyst Robert Johnson terms the unlived life.  It is an antidotes to the pull of a depressed life energy that destroys so many lives.  You become, in the words of the poet W  B Yeats  a Wild Wicked Old Man or what the storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes terms the Dangerous Old Woman.  This Wild Old Wicked Man and Dangerous Old Woman are those who are ready to give to their community the best of who they are for the highest good of all.

 

Giving yourself away with a sense of purpose begins with intention and moves through faith into Love in action.  It is not simply ‘do gooding’ but leads to  the knowing that giving yourself away is the only sensible answer to the question of existence.  In this way you give meaning to your life and live the wild and purpose-filled life. So rather than grow old and slip into a loss of meaning in the second half of life remember that U2 can find meaning and purpose for all your life by giving yourself away.

 

For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul.

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