There have been many theories posed around the reasons behind our existence. As individuals, we tend to think symbolically and seek meaning in our lives, and it’s natural for us to want to project that onto our tribe, our people, and eventually humanity. It gives us purpose and direction to narrate, to assign stories to our lives. We all do it, whether consciously or unconsciously; whether we are painting a bleak narrative or a colourful and bright one; whether it is about ourselves or our role in the human story. So, what is the point of life?
In the semi-conservative Jewish tradition in which I was raised, the meaning of your life is held in your legacy, your memory, and the change you were able to effect on this earth. The memory of those who have passed is literally kept alive by the memory of those that love them and their actions. This love and memory is symbolised by the annual light of a yahrzeit candle (a worthy symbol of fire of a religion born in the age of Aries). Later, reading about Buddhism and Hinduism, I began to understand life as a series of connected experiences that helped us experience all things, something that was also articulated in the writings and lectures of Dolores Cannon as the “Earth School” (Scientology called it the earth Prison, if you want a clue as to where they are at!). In any case, it’s the idea that you need to go through a set of experiences to learn. In this framework of understanding the point of life is learning. Not academic learning or intellectual learning; you’d have no memory of anything with each new lifetime experience, but experiential learning. Something in you is evolved, grown, or elevated through a succession of events and challenges. Something is changed within you as a direct result of experiencing something. It’s held in auric field powered by the heart, a possible explanation for the reason that in some ancient Egyptian mummification practices the heart took special importance.
As a teenager I begin to develop an understanding of life more like a Multiplayer Online Video Game. This is a very dated reference, because all games are online and multiplayer now. However, in the year 2000, and shortly after a spiritual awakening, it felt like a really profound thought. It’s the kind of insight you expect to have while high and forget about, but it has persisted with me the more I have studied about the human experience of the internal world, and the more I have experienced in my own spiritual practice.
Jung calls the unending, collective goop behind the deceptively real avatars of our personality “the collective unconscious“. He distinguished it from the ‘personal unconscious’ of Freudian psychology, where we hold our secondary trauma based mental programming that pulls us away from our heart’s desires with undermining self sabotaging behaviour. Jung relied heavily on symbols as a means of access, interpretation, and rewriting of this part of human consciousness. He understood that the symbolic mind had the ability to circumvent parts of rational thinking that were damaged by tapping into intuitive and innate understandings of all things that lie somewhere… else. He would use symbols such as a butterfly landing on a windowsill to help create breakthroughs for his patients – to cut through their limited understanding of their lives and their problems by directly accessing the mind’s own scriptwriting and creating a new story. Modern western mystics may not realise the work that Jung has already done on this when they use the term ‘script lining’ to talk about creating change on your life using manifestation techniques by creating a new life narrative.
Jung’s concepts were heavily informed by eastern mysticism (he even studied the effect of Kundalini yoga on mental health and was much impressed), so there is some resemblance there to the many ideas expressed in Hindu traditions of the cyclical and unending nature of consciousness that manifests in a multitude of forms. Universes on universes. The truth is, the collective unconscious is verifiable and measurable. It’s possible to see its traces in the phenomenon of multiple discovery, and in the shared symbolic language of dreams that serve as our filter in access to this great cosmic soup of awareness. The deeper you get into experiencing this soup of awareness, and experiencing what it is like to be awake outside of the body, outside of the ego and the mind’s experience of life (this life or past lives, it’s kind of irrelevant), the more you directly feel how each incarnation is just a drop in the enormous sea of who we really are. You feel more deeply connected to everyone else, because we are all here, playing this same game.
If we are all wearing these avatars, that we can discard and adapt at will, it creates a levity to life that if you’re not careful can flip into depersonalisation. For those of us with early life trauma, our connection to earth is too tenuous, and our ego is too fragile from abuse to exist simultaneously as an in individual identity (“Hi, I’m John!) and the great cosmic goo (“I am all things in all times in all places: that which is love”). For these people, the ego personality has already been programmed in childhood to think that it is nothing, in no time, in no places, and without love. So we must be cautious with how we explain the illusory nature of life to a population of humanity that is, quite frankly, already traumatised from their unhealed parents, caregivers, teachers, associates, and society. We cannot even begin to entertain these ideas without risking psychosis until we feel (and are) safe.
This is exactly where a note about privilege belongs. If you have a society – any society – where ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities do not feel safe, where women do not feel safe, and where gender and sexual expression are highly controlled and programmed with shame and violence, you are going to have large groups of people that are, in a realistic and pragmatic level, not safe in their immediate environment. Their fundamental right to exist on this earth is challenged on a daily basis, and they ended up with a particularly difficult incarnation. Frequently the people they will go to for help will perpetuate this abuse against them, and they will need to be extremely self reliant and indeed feel very separate as they set the right boundaries and affirm their right to live as they are on this earth. Because we are all part of the collective, the unfair and imbalanced nature of the game means that many people don’t currently have the privilege to be able to so easily articulate their connection to all things, as they are being repeatedly traumatised by their surroundings. Have empathy for this as we continue to think about the great connection between us, because it will influence how all of us experience this connection.
Having a good balance between being grounded (i.e. how well can you function as your avatar?) and connected to spirit (i.e. how connected are you to the source of all universal life?) is an essential part of this game. What is the point of coming into this life to do nothing but sit only in the experience of your inner self, ignoring all things outside of you, and all missions (unless your life’s journey is explicitly about this). You can be free and without roots, floating through experiences in a life of total nonattachment and ease, but never getting the point or the substance of the experience, learning or developing through real action. Guru Jagat refers to this limp and useless kind of existence as the “wet noodle of your incarnation”. Similarly, when you are so attached to the pain and suffering of your story, the rigidness of your ideas and your experience, that life feels heavy and like a burden, it will also impede your ability to bring your spirit to the game. How in the game do you want to be? Do you want to float through the game in a superior bubble of light? Do you want to be knees in the mud, hacking and slashing your way through the challenges? These are all valid experiences with equal worth, but are often better served by a healthy dose of both, in the right balance.
Taking this metaphor completely literally to its natural conclusion, we already are getting close to a 5th dimensional consciousness state of non judgement. Why would you judge someone that chose to play the villain in the game? You yourself chose, because of the wisdom in your experiences, not to create suffering. You then choose to be an activist to stop suffering. You then choose to educate the next generation. That initial horror was the signal to your symbolic sense of purpose to help guide others. This understanding doesn’t ameliorate the real life consequences and responsibility for your abuser, nor does it lessen power and significance of that pain – it validates it by weaving it into your story. Understanding that both things can be true is part of your role in this game. In order for you to be good at this, you need to fight substantially bigger and bigger bosses as you level up, so we find ourselves as a society tackling scarier and scarier monsters.
This is why, in the age of Aquarius, the role of healing has gone from interpersonal to societal. We are not just healing the individual in 2020. We are tackling systemic and societal issues, because we have evolved enough in maturity and power to address things of wider and wider scope, taking down systems of corruption that have been in place for far too long by unlocking the stores of bitterness and resentment in our hearts and mobilising that energy into healing action.
Beyond the seeking of individual meaning and purpose that we all go through, and beyond the seeking of societal meaning… should we consider what a universal meaning may be for the universal human story?
In recent years this really became crystallised for me. This isn’t coming from anyone’s writing in particular, but rather from the deep and meaningful experiences that I (and many others like me) have felt in meditation. When the body is in a relaxed state, in its natural position, with its anxieties quelled and its tension unravelled… when all the tears have been cried and the mind has been fully allowed to let go, the true experience beneath it all is love. Love for all humanity, and all things. The awareness of this as not just a temporary high of meditation and as the proper, fully healed state of a human, is life changing. Suddenly it becomes clearer why we are here: to get everyone we can to the point where they are at least, able to experience this at least once, if not as much as possible. Maybe we will be part of the clean up crew, helping others heal from their pain. Maybe we will only work in the arena of our personal lives, giving love and support to the people around us so that they can have an oasis of safety. Maybe we will be part of changing the society so that it causes less harm. We all have our role to play in this story of a never ending march towards love.
You will see on this site a channelled message from the Sirians about the love experiment. This came to me completely unprompted when I was in a hypnotic state during a QHT session. If you are really curious, you can message me and I will point you to the recording of the session. I was left with such an overwhelming feeling of awareness. As humans we really get battered into us, consciously or subconsciously, that we are insignificant. Partners and parents belittle our passions in which we find great meaning. We find inadequate support from a world that doesn’t appear to intrinsically value unless unless we do something profitable. We can prevent our ego personality from taking credit and making a whole scene out of it by finding our meaning not in our story (our individual story, based around what we should do and who we are supposed to be) but in the collective human story (how we can support humanity). In a way, this can has even more significance. In this channelled message, it was very much explained to me as a human mission to see that, even in dire circumstances, even when we have been wronged or hurt, that we can still choose to have an open heart, and to love. Often we get our first glimpse of this in the private arena, in our romantic relationships, in our families. Perhaps we only ever experience this devotion in a religious context, by devoting ourselves to a mythic God (an idea) or a guru (also an idea, like all humans you encounter). As the heart cracks open, if we make the effort to, we can spill this love out all around us into every interaction we have, by making the choices that support the service of love.
This is not the toxic positivity meaning of love and light. Honesty is light as much as knowing when to be silent. Expressing your emotions authentically is love just as much as making the effort not to put your pain onto others. You have the full authority to decide when and where each is appropriate for you, based on your own story. All that is held within us in shame must evaporate in the heat of sunlight in order for the real love within us to come out. Love cannot be enforced or put upon us; we must reach for it over and over again in the face of our own pain and disappointment. Even as we take on increasing challenges, we always have the option to love ourselves and others even more deeply. As your heart opens, loving yourself and another looks exactly the same.
Since that experience, although my life circumstances are quite different now, I feel empowered to live according to the understanding I gained through that channel. I may veer away from that understanding from time to time, but this is also the journey of love – gently guiding your ego personality back into a heart centered position like a loving parent. I hope this resonates with you as much as it did me.
With love,
Iael xx
