TIFF Notes Summary Part III
Closing on us from the future is a primary challenge to our species. An empowering, potential-actualizing destiny for the human race is threatened. The current landscape of human existence is undermined by the pursuit of short-term, extractionary goals. Our awareness is inundated by noise and confusion. Our technology addicts us. Systems are designed to separate, divide and frighten us. What hope we have to shepherd our species beyond the problems on the horizon depends on the survival of the human soul. Spiritual agency is a vehicle for that journey and the throughline of these posts.
Agency is the power to exert control over your life. Spiritual agency is a more encompassing conception of that idea. At once, it is the specific authority of personhood while also an acknowledgement that life requires a deep process of actualization. It’s the freedom to think and to act based on factors inherent to your person. Agency is the foundation of identity and a birthright. Spiritual agency is the root of life, and a responsibility.
Running counter to agency is suffering. Suffering compels action, forcing reaction. As with chaos and order, light and darkness, these forces are forever in tension, always shifting. Agency helps create, while suffering is a destroyer. In an individual life, how great that destruction is often grows from the breadth and depth of the suffering being lived. These forces are interlinked. They demonstrate the power of suffering to compel acts of spiritual agency which inevitably end in annihilation.
Freeing yourself from suffering is a deeply motivating impulse. Getting free from suffering shifts some people only towards chaos and misery, perhaps driving their alcoholism, domestic violence, or self-harm. For others, it’s a matter of creation, of hobbies, of meditation. Any outcome is built of possibilities. In a normal life, freeing yourself from suffering is a matter of routine. In a homeless life, freeing yourself from suffering is a task nearly impossible to accomplish without self-destruction. As with even the simplest moments of our lives, options colour actions and choices. In this way, agency demonstrates its crucial role in human society. Tearing free of suffering is, appropriately, a definitive act of personal spiritual agency.