The only way to come to Life.
There’s a wonderful desire deep within the human consciousness. It’s the desire to return home. Our home is Love. It is our essence. It is what we are.
As we look around our world and the state of humanity today it seems this desire is not doing so well. Our personal, intimate experience is often one of pain and disenchantment. From childhood, we soon discover psychological and emotional trauma that shapes our destiny.
The love that abides within our core is mostly left unnourished, or grows in part, is lopsided and becomes fearful, self-protective. We learn to become what our parents, educators, society at large deem to be good and right, acceptable. The process is fraught with confusion, mistakes, experiences that leave lasting unresolved traumas.
Our psychology is based on two simple propositions. Go for what you like and avoid what you don’t like. Sounds reasonable, rational. Who would go towards what they don’t like? Only a fool. The criteria seems plausible. It hasn’t changed over millennia. It is the building block of our personalities.
We may have different likes and dislikes but that’s fine the story goes.
What do we teach the child? To express its likes and dislikes. It’s how we learn to speak, converse, communicate. We instil this propensity and laud it when it’s to our liking:
‘Well done, baby. You’re so clever!’
And endeavour to do the opposite when deemed necessary:
‘No, that’s not nice, baby. Not good for you.’
And so it goes. If you think this is simplistic, I would ask you a simple question. ‘What do most people on the planet talk about day and night?’ The answer, if you look at it honestly is what I like and what I don’t like. All aspects of our lives are built on these two edifices.
What’s wrong with that is the logical question?
What I like and dislike shapes who I become. My opinions, which are mostly second-hand, (the child copies its elders who copied theirs) are what I believe and express and live my life through.
I choose everything through my limited perceptions of existence which are based on
arbitrary ideas of what is right and wrong. They are arbitrary because they are not whole. They are a partial mode of perception handed down by my society from past experiences of someone else’s partial understanding of what is good and bad.
They are arbitrary because one person’s idea of what is good and bad may differ from another's and often does.
At each stage of my development, my opinions change and are superseded with what I believe to be more truthful opinions. This is based on my living life which is one of ever more painful experiences that I avoid and the search for enjoyable ones.
As the search continues I look for exciting things to make me feel alive, (alcohol, sex, drugs etc) and try and avoid the horrible things (alcoholism, abusive relationships, addiction etc). The natural love I was born with (witness the baby gurgling in its cot), has long since vanished and I must seek evermore outward substitutes for the love that I crave but cannot find.
This love which I seek unconsciously and which is my birthright, my essence is pushed deep into the subconscious and not acknowledged except in myth and fairy tales of love and romance.
As I grow in living experience which demonstrates to my partial intelligence (partial because it is based on personal, changeable likes and dislikes), I am faced with the ghastly truth that there is no lasting, enduring, glorious, wonderful love.
Instead, I am faced with the realities of the lack of love. There is pain and suffering in my self and everywhere I look. There is confusion and a myriad of opinions on what anything and everything means and I have tried so many avenues that have led to disaster and unhappiness.
What am I to do? What is this existence?
The same brain that chose through likes and dislikes and created the havoc of my personal life due to society’s ignorance of love is now seeking a way out of the problem it has created.
How does it do this? It’s all it can do. It shape-shifts throughout the centuries with religion, art, science and philosophy, looking for the answer to its unhappiness and restlessness and hoping for a better future through social, emotional and economic revolution.
The other thing that we do, is talk about the past or future. Next time you speak to someone see what it is.
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Where are you going?’
Likes and dislikes and past and future.
'Well, what the hell are we going to talk about? Nothing?'
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Wouldn’t it astonishingly refreshing if everyone said nothing because they saw that it was all our second-hand information that has created the mess we’re in and through this perception, this humility in the moment, to say nothing because I see that nothing I have done or said in my whole life has truly been mine. It’s all been a lie.
Not going to happen, obviously.
My likes and dislikes and the past and future are arbitrary notions. They are constructs of the mind to escape from the awful truth: There is no love in my life apart from a personal love which changes, is full of fear and pain.
My love might be taken away from me through circumstance or death. My lover may stop loving me. My personal love is composed of what I like, wish, hope: My lover will love me, stay with me, and what I dislike, wish, hope: they won't love me, they will leave me.
This is the same for everything in my life, be it job, family, home, health, children. Including life itself.
So what can I do?
Anything I do will be merely cosmetic. A cleaning up of the prison of my likes and dislikes.
I can try to be good, live a good life, live a healthy, well-balanced (according to society which is based on changing past, future, likes and dislikes), caring and helpful life.
I can surround myself with new friends, not the bad ones of my youthful ignorance but new ones of self-improvement and sharing, co-operating and empowering.
I can find people who understand me and I understand them and we can empower each other and we can share a group sense of what is good and what is not so good.
And the people who think differently?
The barbarians on the edge of the mountains of the one human unconsciousness?
Humanity is one. The many selves based on dualistic ignorance that have no knowledge of a love that is not personal must continue to divide into the two camps. It doesn’t matter what the camps are. As long as there are two, we are divided.
The appearance of existence, projected by the glorious instrument of the brain into separate, divided people and things ‘Out There’ will continue forever.
One part of the self will continue to seek ever more civilising elements from its partial understanding of reality and the other part will do the opposite. It can’t do anything else. It has to do what it is designed for, unless…
Unless, oh glorious day! Unless the individual (Only the individual can do this. No mass solutions. No community. No tribe.), through pain and suffering, again and again, comes to her/ his senses and declares to themselves through their living experience:
‘I give up. I have no answers. I will say nothing until I know. I have created this mess through my self, my selfish desires and ignorance of life and love.’
Oh, happy day.
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