I quit the news and social media about 2 years ago, because it tended to irritate my sensibilities. Then last year after I’d learned to keep my emotions in check ( somewhat ;>)), I started looking at it again, a little at a time. With the world rapidly deteriorating into anarchy and chaos, it seemed irresponsible to not pay attention to what was going on; or so I thought.
What I realize in retrospect is that no one really knows WTF is going on anyway and even if they did, it really doesn’t matter. “The only thing that matters is what’s going on inside of you, not outside of you.” I first began awakening to the truth of it twenty-one years ago after 9/11, when I started pondering the question: Why do we keep blowing it so badly as humans; repeating the same mistakes individually and collectively, again and again?
Mistakes are the way we learn, I get that. We can read, study and pay attention but in the end, as often as not we don’t learn until we fall flat on our face a time or two. But how many times are we supposed to blow it, before we began to learn our lesson? I’m not talking about trying something new here. I’m talking about doing the same thing over and over expecting something different to happen. There’s a big difference between making a mistake and insanity.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” ― Albert Einstein
Do we need to achieve a state of critical mass; where enough folks have individually awakened to reality, before we’re able get it, as a collective, human tribe? I read somewhere that it takes roughly 40,000 years as a soul here in the Great Wide World, to learn the lessons required to move to the next level. If you figure 80 years as an average lifetime, that would equal 500 reincarnations into 500 different personalities before you finally learn all your lessons and graduate!
Then that brings up a bunch of questions about souls. Do only humans have souls? Did we have a soul when we walked away from the Chimpanzees, 7 million years ago in the Great Rift Valleys of Africa? Do Cows have souls? Hmm. Our present human history only spans about 5 thousand years, (at least recorded history) so does that mean we still have 35 thousand years or another 437.5 personalities to try on before we get a chance at heaven?
Why is change so damn hard? Is it a Lizard Brain problem? Do we shoot our personal evolution in the foot to preserve the species? Freud had a name for it. “Repetition Compulsion; The desire to return to an earlier state of things.” Do we embrace chaos because it’s familiar? Returning again and again to abusive, narcissistic relationships because they’re predictable. Why do we continue to choose suffering over satisfaction?
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” ― Galileo Galilei
Based on the concept that we get 500 lifetimes to learn how to be human, it’s obviously not a simple task. But at some point you probably need to ask yourself; how many times do I need to repeat the same mistake before I learn a lesson? How many times should you allow someone to abuse you? How many times do you need to suffer? 3, 5, 7, 437.
Is the compulsion an attempt to make sense of suffering previously experienced? Is it an unconscious thing, like heart rate or breathing? Is it a cultural program – a belief system lodged so deeply in your human psyche that you don’t even recognize what’s happening? When you get burned by fire, do you stick your hand back in the fire? “Hell No!”
It seems pretty logical but obviously we’re missing something. Why are we intentionally steering humanity straight into the hell fire? What’s going on with the human obsession towards suffering, chaos and abuse? Is it just some misunderstood, unexplainable, natural phenomena on our present evolutionary trajectory?
If we consider that the only way we learn the important lessons on our soul journey is through the mistakes we make – i.e. when we continue to make the same mistake, the punishment becomes more severe with each repetition until we become so saturated with pain and suffering that we have no other option but to stop making that mistake.
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” ― Rita Mae Brown
Maybe this is just the first of many important tests in your Soul’s education. If you consider 40,000 years as the baseline for your soul-time, you’re barely a third grader. Just now, graduating from Soul Elementary School; learning to read reality and calculate the truth of it. There’s only a single, simple question on your graduation test.
Lots to ponder here. Good read, good questions. I wish I had the answer. We can however apply some of the lessons to our personal lives therefore helping humanity as a whole, albeit a very small amount.
Thanks, DD. The answer is No, btw.
Two questions, walk away from Chimpanzees and reincarnation, I don’t think so.