Awakening to our Perfection as Humans

Many people commented on my piece about the collapse of the Empire on Truthout, and a number of them said its isn't possible, its not in human nature to share.  I totally disagree.  I think we have been sold a bunch of lies about what human nature is and isn't.  Many will have us believe that all that is good in humans is really Divine, and all that is bad is human.  I had this belief myself for a while, that I had a Divine spark of God inside of me, and then there was my humanness.  Or I split myself between my higher self and lower self.  I have now come to a place of integration, and see how that view served me for a while, but was utterly wrong. 

Where I am now is that what we have been calling our Divine self, or God self, or Christ consciousness is just us as humans in our natural state.  That what we have been doing for the last ten thousand years is heaping more stress and trauma on each generation, causing blocks to experiencing our authentic selves.  Then those of us that have had experiences of ourselves free of the blocks for short amounts of time think its something magical and mystical and not of our selves but of God.  I'm generalizing here, but I think you get the point,and everyone uses different language for these experiences.  More open minded people may still try to love their "humanness" or "inner child" while still feeling embarrassed and less than enlightened by the strong impulses and emotions that are coming up, less open minded people will deny those aspects and think the devil is out to get them.  Most people handle all of this by numbing out through TV, food, alcohol and other drugs. 

What I see is that those "unruly" impulses and emotions that are coming up are places where our blocks to experiencing ourselves as integrated whole beings are.  That all of our impulses are opportunities to integrate, and what we need most is attention and loving space to unpack those places inside of us.  I think this is my work in the world and think it may be the work of this time.  Seeing that what we have been told is enlightened and evolved is actually just our natural state once we release the traumas and unpack the repression.

I recently read a book by Chellis Glendining called "My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization."  She posits that the move from being hunter-gathers to agriculturists created a separation that caused trauma for humans which has been passed down from generation to generation and that most people raised in Western Civilization show signs of PTSD. That to stop the damage we are doing to the environment, we need to do the trauma work inside of ourselves so that we can reconnect to one another and to nature.  Human beings who are not traumatized feel empathy and connection to the world around them. 

From doing my own trauma recovery work over the years, and living in multiple communities with many people, I can see how Glendinings theory plays out.  Doing the work to end my own repression has caused me to be more kind and loving, having more attention and empathy for others. And let me just say that for myself, the process was a shit show.  I'm not going to pretend that it was pretty, I had to go deep into shadows and impulses that had me acting in ways that embarrassed me to my bones, wanting to just curl up and die on multiple occasions. And yes, at times I even thought I may be possessed.  But it was worth it!  I am freer than I've ever been, I still have some places I repress myself, but they are small compared to how dis-empowered I felt for so much of my life.

I think most people may think to themselves that they don't really have trauma in their childhood or past and so what I'm talking about doesn't apply to them.  Unless a person had trauma that was outside of the norm for people in our culture, we don't think of our childhoods as traumatic.  Here is the problem, for something like 99% of human history, the way our bodies evolved was in hunter gatherer tribes.  For the last ten thousand years, everything has changed.  We are evolved to expect certain things in our childhoods that we need for optimum development.  Babies and children know this instinctively, but because most adults have lost the ability to listen to their own instincts, they through their unconscious actions do things that are traumatizing to the baby and child.  Some of the things we expect because of our evolution are to be fed foods that are natural for humans to eat, (what we ate as hunter gatherers including breast feeding for a few years), to always be with a protective adult when a baby (including sleeping), to be held most of the time until ready to crawl, to integrate into the larger community through imitating the adults around us, to get grounding through the Earth's electromagnetic pulses, to get sunlight, and to express our natural impulses and emotions as they come up in a loving attentive container with clear boundaries.  This is not a complete list, but its some of the basics.  Children raised in tribes where they get these needs met tend to be happy healthy productive adults.  Jean Leidoff http://www.continuum-concept.org/ studied and wrote about such a tribe in South America.  She didn't seem to think adults who aren't raised this way could recover, but I think we can and will.

I believe that an awakening to our own beautiful, perfect Humaness is possible, through loving containers where all of people's impulses toward integration are held with love and seen as perfect. I have experienced these containers myself, and have experience holding this kind of container for others.  I see this as key to the fall of the Empire, empowered happy people sharing resources and living from our passions.