Living a curved Life

Ecstasy is a curve

By Richard Rudd

We live in a world of angles and edges. This is the modern reality. But I would like to remind you of another world – a truer world, the world beneath our daily lives, a world of quietude – a world of curves.

I find myself increasingly in this world of curves these days. I suppose it is absolutely natural, having lived and played for the past 10 years in a world of systems and edges and reason, of logic and structure and answers. I would share this new world with those who would listen, and with those who can open their hearts enough to contain it. For I have realised something momentous – that ecstasy is a curve.

Everything about our language reflects how curved a life we lead. To live a curved life is to allow one’s life to sluice fluidly over the hours and days and years. It is to let everything just slip through your fingers. The ultimate curve is the smile, and the more softly we flow through life, the deeper the smile glows within us.

Nature loves curves, but man’s mind cannot stomach them – they are too filled with uncertainty and above all they are too easy. In our modern world, curves are no longer economically viable – in architecture, they cost too much time and money. Gone are the graceful arches, the sweeping columns, the flowing stonework embodied in the great cathedrals of Europe. Rare are the simple soft edges of adobe. Everything today is angles, numbers, blocks and squares. Even the curvature of the female form has been supplanted with the angular and the straight.

But when we come towards the end of our lives and we begin to look back, will we really measure our life in terms of the straight and the hard-edged? Will we care about what we have achieved? I think not. The only true measure of life is how much ecstasy and wonder we have felt along the road and how deeply we have loved and been loved.

This is the true art of life – but it is so sadly lost in this age of attainment. Goals are fine, but only as the vector points that kiss the curves of our lives. There is a great con that has been put out into the world – that the highest states of consciousness are unobtainable to us. This is absolutely wrong. Our only real challenge is to let go of thinking that we must earn them.

Ecstasy is so easy. You just have to stop what you are doing for a moment. It’s just there. The ecstatic world cannot be attained or grasped. It can only be allowed, which means that we must soften our gaze and our touch and our voice and our mind. The only thing that matters is that we let go. If you are not already in this process of letting go, then you are missing the essential in life and chasing the non-essential. You can never have that straight line you are looking for. You will never find that answer or that certainty because life itself is built from uncertainty.

In a discussion one day, Heisenberg told Einstein that God must simply have more information than we do. I love that exchange. Even Einstein, lover of curves, could not accept it utterly. And Heisenberg was right – life is a mystery to be lived, not a riddle to be solved.

To live a curved life is to go on becoming softer and more yielding every day that you are alive. It is to entertain the great yin forces of the universe. In the belly of this yin, all edges begin to lose their angles as consciousness gets out its great sandpaper. Boundaries dissolve, moments flow from one into another, the seasons all merge, words become like music.

As in my own life and work, dreams begin to take on a life of their own and the subjective and personal moves into the place of the impersonal. Nothing you say or do needs to make any sense. No event requires that you understand it. No relationship needs to be changed. No suffering needs to be removed. The essential is to move inwards – into the fires, into the wounds, into the unknown. There is nothing stronger in this universe than a curve. And yet a curve is also the softest shape in the universe. If you attack life, it will fight back and it will always win because in the end it will steal your happiness. But if you let it win you over, if you let your suffering cut deeper into you, it must sooner or later dissolve. You leave it no choice. But how few understand this.

You cannot learn how to live a curved life. There is no system or sequence that can be followed. It is something that awakens within you. In the past, I have talked much about the awakening of the solar plexus centre. If you travel deep within the body, you will see that it is made up of nothing but curves and arcs intersecting and flowing into each other. All curves lead to one place – the belly. The belly is made up of three bowls or diaphragms, and as awareness explores these bowls in depth through the medium of the breath, the living spirit of higher consciousness is permitted to awaken.

There are maps. There have always been maps. I am one of the greatest lovers and readers of maps. But then there is the territory. If you don’t take your eyes away from the map, you will miss the real core. The real central theme of all my work with the Gene Keys is the transformation of human awareness in the solar plexus area. There are no real answers in this book, which is why I love it, and why many do not understand it. There are only descriptions of human states of consciousness. But these states are real. If you read any aspect of any Gene Key, you will find yourself in there somewhere. But the highest states, those frequency fields we crave so much – they will never yield to our efforts. If we don’t learn to soften the way we spend our hours, we will never enter those territories but will remain nothing more than stone-faced voyeurs.

Ecstasy is curved. That is my central message. Look around yourself and see how many curves you can see. You will notice an immediately strange phenomenon – the moment you find one curve, it leads you into another. The process never ends. This is what solar plexus awareness is like – it bridges every waking moment to the next moment, making our lives one long, beautiful arc coming out of the void and going back into the void. But you must hurry softly – if you don’t allow yourself to realise the great mystical secret, you will miss out on so much fun in life.

In today’s worried world, this truth is needed more than any other thing – the remembrance of the essential – to trust in the curvature of your life, to enjoy where and when it intersects with the parabola of others, and to stop from time to time and rest beneath a shady tree and just enjoy the perfume of your own being.

To explore more curves, read Richard Rudd’s beautiful book – The Art of Contemplation, available from www.amazon.com