"Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion."
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
Understanding who you are is profoundly mysterious, a call to the wild. The moment you go in search of more, you learn this, because understanding that involves making sense of your inmost being is generally gained after trials and travails. And even then, can be elusive.
Our first sense of some kind of understanding is our awareness of ourselves via ego and all that is associated with sense reality. We can only make sense of this I as this body, or through associations, such as identity-what I do, what I have, what I own, how I move through this world, you as other in relation to me. Et cetera. Later, through time, we may get to place ourselves in the larger scheme of things, as part of something greater. But it's so interesting to me to see just how long we can go until we see the need of doing so.
"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly"
― Mary Howitt, The Spider and the Fly
I often laugh with my friends and say, "I think I came here because I didn't want to be left behind and miss out on anything". I hate to feel left out. My friend, Cherry, says she came for chocolate. Having heard about the delicious sweet from the heavenly grapevine, she was all in. We both discovered what everyone does.
It doesn't matter the why of it.
I couldn't know that sorting out me-ness, them-ness, and it-ness would be a kind of game I would play, only to seek to get some knowledge and get back to my origination point. Then I couldn't know that this-here life was not the be-all end-all of anything. Just another stomping ground. Just a different angle on living, being, growing and understanding to be gotten at my soul's instruction. I could agree to the journey, but never really know that it was just another opportunity to witness how my soul's longing to understand the why and what of itself was so deep, that it would send me on countless such journeys to see itself, yet again, from another angle.
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."
― Helen Keller
But damn! Hard lessons here.
It's as if the joke's on us. We are not an I really. We are everything, but here we play out our individualized roles for the sake of what? Learning? Experience? How to get down to the nitty-gritty of things?
Stumbling around in materiality eventually impels us to reach for more, seek out more. The glitz and glamour of shiny things and experiences, and interactions with others, for their own sake, will never be enough.
"You didn't get here by accident. The condition of your life, for better or for worse is here because of a very reason. Learning this lesson was one of the most difficult things I've ever done."
― Josh Hatcher
I now know that as a larger being, someone or something that transcends this fleshly body, that exists in realms and realms of unexplored territory that I deem the multiverses is ME. (This version of me can't really know [yet] how vast I am). I only intuit as I expand my capacity to perceive, to dive deep into my consciousness, to plumb the depths of the dark and hidden places I was warned away from (by well-meaning others, who learned to fear their shadows early on, too). I understand that this little sojourn on earth was designed for me to get to know that, in a cool and unique way, one that only something much smarter than me (and yet, me), could cook up for the experience of my learning, for the experience of its own desire to know itself intrinsically. To know itself in a deeper way. Through an incessant longing.
Whoa.
The profundity of the overall understanding that I have in this moment, is that despite appearances here, there is a level of my being where I am trulymadlydeeply loved and in love. And needed. By me, for me. For this journey. This boggles my mind as I sift through the layers of meaning in that awareness. I am left with only that moment of realization that all the experiences, good and bad, were not about punishment or reward, but just the yearning of a deeply feeling being to love itself, know itself, glimpse itself through an expression of itself, here and now, as me.
That's a mind full to get, then absorb.
That's what I'm talking about. That's where I've reached. It serves to give clarity to my experience and push me ahead toward further acceptance.
It boggles my mind. Astounds me.
And then, it silences me.
© 2019. Egyirba M. High. All Rights Reserved.
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