DMB Digest: Cosmic Metrics
And the thing that plops out at the end of my life funnel.
As of late, I’ve been puzzling over the age-old dichotomy between material and spiritual. The real and invisible. The concrete and the imagination. Or as someone once put it, Mammon and God.
I’ve been attempting to see the whole thing as automation or a big, grinding set of machines on one side and a product on the other—something like an assembly line. But as I see it, when it comes down to answering the ultimate question of, “How now should I live?” there are two ways to approach the equation.
Either A) I can come at it with an idea of the product I value and reverse engineer the machinery to produce what I desire, or…
B) I can follow raw inspiration in the creation of the machine and allow myself to be surprised by whatever plops out in the end.
If you’ve ever even remotely sniffed the how-to-be-an-entrepreneur isle of your library or pondered starting your own business, you know which of these two approaches come recommended the majority of the time. (The answer is A.) But I don’t find it as simple as that.
The astute among you will have noted that for such an assembly line to make any sense at all, there must be both machinery and product. So, you may ask, how is this imagery an example of a dichotomy at all? And that’s just it. I don’t think it is. I mean, how can the material and the spiritual be truly opposed to each other? Unless…unless perhaps they be seen as two sides of the same coin? In that case, they would be opposed at the same time they are conjoined, right?
It’s not that you can only have one or the other. It’s not that only one can exist at a time, or even that one must supersede the other. I think the solution to the riddle is that only one side of the coin can face up. Only one can guide my organizing process, which leads me back to my earlier assembly line proposition, and the question of which comes first, the machine or the product.
But perhaps I’m still not looking at the matter from the proper angle. After all, why couldn’t I start from either proposition? The value of the product or the value of the machine that creates it? Neither the product nor the machine or the combination of the two seems to fully represent the opposition and/or the meshing of the material and the spiritual.
That’s when it all circles back around to what some of us refer to as the heart. Internal motivation. What do I truly want my assembly line to produce? What outcome am I obsessed with? The material or the spiritual? Whether I allow inspiration to guide the mechanisms or I start with the product and work in reverse, what is it I value to begin with? The purpose of my assembly line? That’s my north star. That’s my controlling force.
I’ve been thinking about all of this in regards to my author brand and my product funnel. What do I want to produce at the end of the assembly line? Money? Profit? or discovery and understanding? Each has a different set of metrics. Each dictates a different series of gears and levers, or at least a different way to configure the same gears and levers.
Perhaps the answer to the riddle is something along these lines: the value of my life’s work will be weighed only once, and it is up to me to choose the nature of the scales upon which my production is weighed. I can choose one or the other: to weigh the material or to weigh the spiritual. I think this is what it means to serve either the material or the spiritual, to serve either Mammon or God.
It’s not as simple as the machinery we choose to construct via our daily actions and strategic choices or even the products we create as a result. It’s the way we choose for those things to be evaluated. It’s the motivation behind the choices we make.
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