everyone

Everyone’s war: to try to disentangle the built in glitches of the human condition, which I am going to try and over-simply define as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and Judeo-Christians tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs.

Some say, “Desire is the design flaw”.

The Yogis, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity.

 

We are miserable because we think we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and devine. Before you realize this truth, you will always be in despair.

 

“You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not”. Epictetus

 

It is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and hold on to that experience forever. It’s about self mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world be revealed to you.

 

Human life is a very special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral, they never get the chance to find out who they really are. But we do have that chance.

 

So, our whole business therefore in this life, is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.

 

Live upon the earth, yet not on it, and be fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the richness of all men.

 

And in actuality we people are made up of the same stuff that stars are made of, so it’s only our nature to shine. Right?

Gino Obuseng