This Human Life
Forgetting and remembering the divinity within
We are born.
Before that we are a soul stream. Like lightning, we come in, make the choice again to embody. Oh this lifetime, the learning. We gestate, contained. We breathe underwater, primordial. We grow from a seed. We already feel the world, sensing and feeling is what we do here.
We come out into air and light still holding God’s hand. Maybe already the thread has been frayed. Maybe already we have gotten some information about separation. If not, there is just one field and all that ripples through it. There is the boundless heart. We are a tuning fork, we sound the waves.
Slowly or even suddenly, we take self. The journey is afoot. This first contraction, joyously celebrated by mortals, is the invitation to discovering its falsehood. It will take a lifetime and more. We swim in the waters of forgetting, they are everywhere.
At first we stay close to truth and feel the sparks all around. We are the sparks. Others delight in us, finding their way back momentarily to nature, only to return to life’s projects. There is a lot to do to stay afloat.
Then come words. Everything has a name. And when we name everything we lose the connection to things as they are. We start living in approximations.
It’s all part of the plan, the human puzzle offered to be released. Language reduces and also expands. It opens doorways to beauty. Beauty, not a consolation prize, but a thread back home.
We learn that the bird is alive but the stone is not. The world cleaves, we cleave. This distinction separates heaven and earth. We learn to be blind to the force that animates all things, even ourselves.
We learn that we have two parts, a body and a mind. In this age, standing on this soil, our mind is the worshipped king. This separation will break down in times of love, in times of loss, and in times of grace. But we will still return to the forgetting.
We feel pain and the world won’t hold us here. We learn there are things too hard to face, too hard to feel. We become intimate with fear. Whole pieces go into hiding, go underground. We live trying to dance around chasms, walking along edges. We are afraid to dive. We believe there is no bottom.
Over and over we get invited to unwind this dream. Some will begin the journey, others will keep sleeping for now. But in the end, at the end, we will all return to the one ocean, if even for just a moment of undying brightness.
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