Becoming Human

Osho Rajneesh was once asked why, considering the depth of our species’ compassion, its intelligence and in light of its highly developed state of evolvement, do we still commit acts of insanity, brutality and cruelty. We could re-phrase the question and ask how can humanity be both God and beast. His answer was

`Man is a becoming’

And in those few words he captured the human experience; we are not complete, we are in the process of forming ourselves into something, but we are not formed yet.

Perhaps if all aspects of ourselves were forming at the same rate, this process might be easier, but we don’t; some facets of humanity (such as the ego) are highly developed. In fact the sense of self is so developed that we can observe our sense of self through our self. No mean achievement and one which would have been less straightforward to humans over a century ago, who could not reference the work of Freud and Jung who had discovered the maps by which we could locate our-`selves’. We have taken enormous leaps in the past century into awareness of our `self’ and yet we remain mere infants in our emotional body; given the right conditions, which are legion and occur daily, we become angry children caught in the cycle of the blame game.

For animals, since their varying aspects of consciousness appear to be developed at stages of parity, this does not set up any long-term consequences. They experience their emotion and act upon it immediately, dissipating, rather than accumulating emotional energy. I refer here to wild animals, `human’ animals are more complex due to their contact with the human psyche – they seem more prone to picking up our bad habits.

For humanity however, the picture is so different because of this disparity in the level of development between ego and technical advancement on the one hand and emotional consciousness on the other.

Humanity has created a society for itself in which everything is highly organized and structured. Were we not so ordered we could not possibly maintain our current levels of population. Structure creates stability; it acts as a container for all the ideas, feelings and practices of a grouping of people; on a mind level it constitutes a telepathic agreement between members of a social group as to how they can behave, what’s acceptable and what’s not etc. These agreements are essential to the smooth functioning of any society (human or animal) and their existence, which is often unquestioned, is highlighted starkly when two cultures clash who maintain different agreements within their social structure. The most obvious example of this being the ancient clash between settled and nomadic cultures – a charged relationship which continues into modern society.

Essential though they may be, these structures, particularly since they are mostly unexamined, are open to abuse and manipulation, especially by members of society who hold greater material and psychological influence, and of course, they provide us with weapons with which to abuse ourselves.

Enter into this equation the `infant emotional mentality’ of humanity and you have a recipe for disaster. In many ways, and for a great part of the human population both past and present, this is precisely what the human experience has been, an unending series of disasters, exacerbated by the human mind’s inability to adapt to adverse situations due to the mental constructs it has employed to give itself a sense of security.

Now, in the 21^st century, humanity is showing signs of becoming complete. There’s still a long way to go, it appears, and yet there is a conscious awareness working among us which is bringing our various developmental stages into balance. This is our challenge; to bring all our aspects of consciousness, mind, ego, emotions, feelings, into a state of parity with each other, and since we are so egoically developed (and over-identified) the work lies with the infant emotional body which has been so conditioned to react to any threat that the structures (created by egoic mind) have imprisoned it in. And because life demands change, structure is constantly threatened and so our emotional consciousness is repeatedly thrown from violent reaction to violent reaction, a process which weakens and exhausts it further and opens it to becoming more susceptible to reaction.

As always, the work must begin with an understanding of what work needs to be done. To understand that, we need to examine the myths the egoic mind has created over thousands of years, and we must personally liberate ourselves from those belief systems. Beliefs such as humans are the most superior species on earth (and thus they can use and abuse their environment at will, since, in this belief system, it’s all for humans anyway), that gender determines role and ranking within society, that humans are inherently faulty and need to be saved by something/someone outside themselves, and so on . . .

All these belief structures keep us from realizing our true nature, we are deep wells of compassion and love, but our wells are so clogged with the debris of institutionalized belief that there is no access to the sweet water that would flow from us like a fountain of light. That we are capable of clearing the debris there is no doubt; we have clearly demonstrated unfathomable skills for organizing and ordering, but we are invested strongly in keeping that debris in place and we have an infantile emotional reaction to any attempt (from within ourselves or without) at opening us up to our own enlightened possibilities. De Mello once said `if you become upset when somebody challenges an idea you have, you’re tied to it’. It’s a good indicator of how invested we are in ideas and beliefs that are rarely, if ever, our own.

There is a necessity for us now to be open to the possibility that all our beliefs and institutions no longer serve us (if they ever did) and for us to begin the process of re-evaluating the cultural foundations we build our lives on. If this seems an impossible task, or at least, an elusive one, just start by questioning those institutions which don’t seem to evoke happiness in people’s lives; marriage might be one (the attempt to fuse permanently 2 people who will inevitably be driven to seek individuation – this drive being an evolutionary one); sexual codes, conduct and taboos another; devotion to work (enslavement), endorsed by ambition another, and so on.

It doesn’t take rocket science to see which areas of human’s lives cause misery and depression, and yet we continue to perpetuate them, we feel driven to adhere to them out of fear of rejection (from society, from mother) and aloneness. But we have to run the gauntlet of our fears, less we be fused to `mother’ for our whole life and never truly `become’ ourselves.

These fears also arise from a knowing that if we begin to clear our debris, we’re going to hit some pretty stagnant water; trapped and un-moving, this slimy muck has been rotting inside the human psyche throughout our recorded history and we have a serious resistance to getting in there and clearing it up. Yet it must be done, and it may not be so hard; once the flow is renewed, water tends to cleanse itself, so we can focus less on the dark waters of our shadow consciousness and more on the crystal waters of our source – it will bring our shadows up and out for us, and then we shall find ourselves revealed to ourselves, for

`If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

Jesus Christ – Gospel of Thomas

It is this bringing forth, tempered with a conscious emotional response, that will bring us toward our own completeness.

Jonathan

I am indebted to Jill Hall’s seminal work, `The Reluctant Adult’ in the writing of this article.