In the beginning human beings lived in a participation mystique with all of nature. About 6,000 years ago they left that garden within which there was only being without knowing. They didn’t leave because of shame or guilt but because of curiosity and the desire to know the real. They have been differentiating from that original mystique until now.
Perhaps something went awry. Or perhaps to know the real they had to know fear, anguish, terror, and suffering as well as loveliness, harmony, being well-cared-for, and peace. The real is a harmonic tension of opposites. They learned that they themselves were of all that they experienced outside themselves. They fell into the mystique of self and lost balance—too much of a good thing. They became mesmerized into a dis-eased state. Now human beings are suffering the final stage of that disease—late-stage individualism.
The cure may be found in We. All of us here—neighbors, pets and plants, both wild and tame, the weather, the planets, our suffering, our leaders, psychotics, and sociopaths.
What will future human beings say of the ones who went before? That they so hungered for personal self-interest they ate themselves into oblivion? That they became so preoccupied with individual obsessions, though they’d set out to know the real, they lost their way and couldn’t see it? That they spent thousands of years searching for the truth that was always right in front of them—in the cat’s purr, the potted shamrock’s resurrection, in the wildness of weather, in the myriad answered prayers that so often went unnoticed?
Or will they say of those who went before that only when humanity itself was threatened by extinction they finally accepted that love, the connective tissue, is the real.
In the series The Americans, about KGB agents living as an American family, what continually breaks through the ideologies—both American and Russian—and the violence, the subterfuge and deception, is each character’s humanity, their conscience, their love.
In the series Transparent, what breaks through all the gender confusion and neurosis and severance from ancestral lineage is each character’s humanity.
What is it to be simply humane? What if we each were to become laser focused on love. To have our heart simply relax open, put down old traumas and grievances and grief. To atone, become at-one with our race—the human race. And with our planet, thus far the only place we can survive as bodies.
What if each healthy cell (the individual) of this diseased body (the human race) was to assert its strong force, love, toward each diseased cell?
What will future human beings say of those who went before? That we were on the brink of annihilation and pulled it back? That each one of us took up the responsibility of Frodo and Samwise, and with all our humanity, love, and focus carried that ring that held the disease to the mountains of Mordor, endured our Golems to the end, and in the final hour flung the ring and the Golem into the eternal fire wherein the disease could be completely unmade.
No longer mystified, now knowing this human life is a divine mystery and we each are a relevant component. We are being asked now to actually be real and awaken from the neurotic figments of our individual imaginations.
*Thank you Summer Wood for the writing prompts
by Heart Light Digital