The School of Becoming

Here we are, living on this fairly special planet; as Terry Pratchett described it and us, “…where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

That’s us, indeed: a spiritual entity living in a body evolved over time from ape ancestors. Spirit vibrates at a high frequency while the body vibrates at quite a slower frequency, and somehow in some grand cosmic experiment perhaps, the two are brought together to live, to experience, to learn. 

I’ve addressed this before, the idea of this world of spirit and body being a kind of school, that we are here to learn about… What exactly? This is about what I believe about that. 

To learn about making choices, about how to choose, and what and why.

To learn to recognize the divine in and around ourselves, to recognize the divine in others around us, to recognize it in all around us.

To learn love.

We face lessons every day, and as we grow through experience and testings, we evolve as spirit. The lessons and the tests we face as individuals are scaled to how much we already know and the information we have whether or not we’ve put it all together yet. In fact, those pop quizzes that drop in front of us are often the tools for joining the bits into understandings. We fail a lot of tests, or get low marks because the information that we believed to be true and so applied to the problem was in some degree just wrong. 

It’s no problem, failing a test: It will come back again in one shape or another until we get it right or right enough and can move on. To make it easier, each time it will be presented more pointedly, louder, more intense until we get it. No matter how many times we fail, evade, postone, or ignore the problem, it will come back to us until we pass it.

Lessons also scale up.

We teach little kids about fire being hot and dangerous, and not to play with matches. By the time they are in high school hopefully they have learned enough more to respect fire but not to fear matches. An adult who won’t use a match because of being so well-taught in kindergarten is crippled in a world where control of fire is one of the most important tools.

_{An aside here:  When I say ‘we’ I am not talking of all humans, but mostly as the people descended from the ethnic Western Europeans who sought to dominate and define the world by their own paradigms, who considered themselves the most evolved, therefore wisest and rightest of all peoples of the Earth. ‘We’ need to study a little anthropology, to get it that all human beings have faced the same basic challenges in living on Earth, living as bodies, comprehending our place in the Big Picture…  And every community of humans has answered the challenges according to its own experience lived over time. Solutions are rarely universal, but they are logical and correct within their own context. And they are wrong and mistaken, too, every one of them in some regard because no one has the full picture.} 

This world is built around dichotomies: up and down, night and day, hot and cold, right and wrong, life and death, male and female…  When we are young, we only have to choose one or the other. Then, as we get older and more experienced, we discover that there are many shades in the spectrum between black and white. We realize that everything is on its own spectrum and that the extreme opposites are not as simple as we once found comfortable and easy. 

The more we learn, the more our minds and hearts mature, the more dichotomies reveal complexities that require us to fine-tune our decision-making. Nothing, it turns out is either/or. Everything is and. It’s all part of the lesson plan. Most lately we are confronted by a lesson in which gender is not as simple or as comfortable as we have believed, and just as the way that many were troubled or even outraged (and some still are) at the notion that skin color does not define or diminish a human being, or that divorce was a legitimate course for a dysfunctional marriage, these lessons are learned and moved on from by more and more people in any given community until we are ready for the next challenge to our cherished but mistaken beliefs.

With every changing of the tide there is resistance, but there is also inevitability.  The forces that make tides are immense compared to the force of that which refuses change. A storm may create a surge for a time that inundates the land, but that surge is not the tide. Tsunamis are overwhelming and devastating, but they are temporary and limited in scope. 

In times of discovery of the complexities of dichotomies like gender where it once was so simple, ‘we’ can look to the many other ethnicities that have found solutions that allow and accept and move on. They have a flexibility in what might be called humility in the face of a Reality beyond their understanding. 

Every one of the lessons about such things are about learning to make choices, learning to perceive the richness and depth of divinity in and around us, and learning finally what love means.