These wise words have been written and spoken, preached and beseeched for centuries. And yet, here we are – the schism only wider. We continue to hurt only because we have been hurt and refuse to feel the pain of this.
The pain has to go somewhere; it is an energetic force field. Because we, individually and culturally, all refuse to accept the pain that has been inflicted on us and the pain that we all have inflicted on others, the cycle continues.
Human beings are a pathetic lot in many ways … and we also have the possibility to transform. Again and again we hear about self-responsibility and again and again we think, and act out of, the lack of this most critical spiritual law. We refuse to be responsible because we do not want to face the worst in ourselves. We would much rather point to the ugliness in the other. We then hate in them what we know we have in ourselves. The guilt of this continues the vicious cycle of hate and violence towards others, and, if felt into deeply, ourselves.
We all have some greed, vanity, hate, superiority, inferiority, self-will, pride and fear. No one is spared. This is the human condition. As a species, our very survival once demanded that we have some one-upmanship, some self-preservation, some deep longing to improve and be “better than.” Today our very survival depends on something else – our evolving our collective consciousness.
Our next step in the evolutionary process is to bring consciousness to our deepest selves. By inclusion rather than refusal we can, if we are willing to feel, without rejecting, the worst in ourselves, we can transform.
The pain inflicted hurts, very much indeed. It is quite normal and natural to want to avoid this pain.
Unfortunately, our avoiding this pain has us only continue to inflict on others what was inflicted upon us.
Yes, it is sad, but the true tragedy lies in our continuing to refuse to feel this sadness. The pain then gets locked inside, blocks our creativity, our natural intuition, our desire for connection.
We keep ourselves “safe,” we believe, from the possibility of ever being hurt again by blocking out what love comes our way. This is the true tragedy.
The narrative that is playing itself out in the world right now is the narrative that we all have playing over and over again in our own psyche. My prayer is that we can each, every one, stop and feel into what it is that we are trying to avoid by projecting our pain out into the world.
Yes, pain does hurt. What hurts even more is hate and fear. There is a price to be paid for all of the horrors human beings have inflicted upon one another. It is our own individual work to be willing to do our part by accepting, without flinching away, the pain that has been inflicted upon us and the pain we have inflicted.