Saturday, February 10, 2018

Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, February 10, 2018 - Healing the Pain of Being Human

    The struggle is real. It’s not in your imagination. You have not failed at anything. You are not being punished. This is a universal experience. Being human is painful. A faithful heart feels the pain while sensing the purpose. Nothing is in vain. No time is being wasted. All shall be well.
    Yet…
    We addict ourselves to things and people and circumstances to forget the pain of being human. To obliterate it from our cerebral cortex for just a few moments at a time. That bliss. It’s false, but so close. It’s junk food, not veggies. But the drive to forget can be so strong, the fear so profound, we make tragic choices in the effort to just taste — however briefly — our connection to Source. When we suffer, we seek it even more.
    On some level, I feel we know we are more than we appear. We are larger than we can see. Science understands electromagnetic fields at least to the point where they can detect them and see them interacting as they overlap. The human body is electromagnetic. Is our field part of us? Am I really 5’10”? Am I taller? What does my field do when I am near someone else? Is it having a conversation with their field? Though I know not what it all does, there is more to me than me.
    Why does over 80% of humanity believe in a higher power or unity theory of some kind? When do people ever agree that much about anything? Some could conclude that we are having a collective delusion. I’d prefer to think of it as constructive delusion, if delusion it be. Something which improves the quality of my life just to ponder it. Statistics agree.
Frankly, I find it harder to believe that all life is somehow not connected. But why? I don’t know. Somehow, something in me nudges me to believe in certain things unseen. I am not alone, far from it. The vast majority of humanity feels the same in one form or another. We conclude there is more to us than us.
    So what are we experiencing when we seek to heal the pain of being human? I suspect it is the desire to remember more lucidly that we co-created the tests we take. We are trying to remember that we are neither weak, nor powerless. We want to touch our divinity. Some are better at it than others. And the more desperate the desire, the more vulnerable we are to choosing a junk food path to find it. But the desire is still the same, addict to monk. Our need to tap into the greater part of ourselves we feel we know is there. Like wealth in a bank account with your name on it. If only you could remember what bank it was.
    The challenge I suspect we are being given is the opposite of what we try so hard to do. The pain of being human is our classroom. We just don’t see it that way. We feel as if life is something that is being done to us. A harm we are experiencing. A victimization. It’s logical. That’s exactly how our biology is designed to react to discomfort. Nearly all of religion from ancient gnosticism to modern Christianity reacts to the human body as a vile and regrettable vessel unfit for the glorious eternal beings we hope we really are. But what if we gave our higher selves a little more credit?
    What if we treasured our humanity as some cultures do? What if we recognized that our difficult human experiences are tied to something larger, something against which we are far from helpless?
    I posit this not because I have achieved some kind of nirvana of the body or have a peace over all that happens around me. My humanity is painful too. But when I put the many pieces of faith and science together it makes me wonder. If there is more to humanity than its humanness, what healing might take place if we stop resisting it?
    The practice of nonresistance here essentially challenges us to welcome our humanity with the intent of using it as the pathway to understanding all that is not human about us. The irony is typical of all life, isn’t it? It’s a fractal of nearly every human learning experience. The thrill of being on a journey. The surprise of irony.
    To heal the pain of being human we must accept our humanity. Let it be our textbook for the divine purpose. There can be no failure if love is truly at the center of it all.

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