When you think about it, it’s kind of odd that anyone looks to a teacher, teaching, messiah or scripture to tell them how to win at life, or live correctly, or awaken to an enlightened state or radical identity shift. There’s no commandment that says Earth needs to be a place where natural humans have to learn to be natural humans, instead of already knowing. Look at the rest of nature: Trees know how to be trees; fish know how to be fish; lions know how to be lions. They don’t go seeking a master lion or awakened fish or enlightened tree to sit at the feet of, for years, just to learn how to “achieve” their natural state.
And yet billions of people follow Jesus, or Allah, or the Torah, or study the Vedas or Buddha’s Dharma, or seek an enlightened master who can tell them how to properly work this thing called life. As if we wouldn’t know what to do without these God channels or books telling us how to be, what to do and what not to do in this world.
And other billions don’t turn to any scripture, faith or messiah to know how to live; they simply live their life as best as they can, figuring their daily life experiences will guide them to what they need to know to live the best, happiest life they can. These people may even be more on the right track than all the path, religion and teacher followers. There’s at least one school of thought that says everyone who follows a religion or seeks life guidance from a master is only doing so because they’re desperate to find answers and happiness in a life which, if they didn’t believe in these gods, messiahs and scriptures, would seem utterly alone & meaningless. The old quote, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”
And yet, here we are, supposedly the Crown of Creation, supposedly the most evolved beings on the planet, a group of 7 billion lost souls, all wondering how to make sense of life and achieve some modicum of true peace and lasting happiness, if not a clear understanding of why we must die after a 100 years or far less and whether we go on in some form after earthly life is over. Everyone wants to go on, no one wants their sense of personal identity to stop. So we have Heaven or reincarnation or floating up to become some sort of helpful astral being in a “light body” or no body at all, but all of them some form of continuing as “ourselves,” as some divine form of who we already are, or think we are.
Do those “afterlife” versions of our bodies, selves and heavens or planes of consciousness really exist…or did we just make up those myths to comfort ourselves about our impending deaths and possible “non-existence?” Do we really need to go on? And while we’re here on Earth, do we really need to seek guidance, from any source old or new, on how to simply be and be human? These are core questions, totally worth asking and contemplating.
Maybe life is just an “is.” Maybe, as one wise person once said, “Life is not a problem to be solved, it’s a reality to be experienced…and when it’s done, it’s done.”
And yet our consciousness reaches out for something lasting, some deep understanding of the whole Cosmos and why it exists. If it’s all a Great Mystery, and the human mind can never pierce or comprehend the whole Truth, then why don’t we just leave it alone, stop wondering & seeking for something deeper, live out our lives and families and careers and aging years, and stop asking? Many people do. Others feel driven to keep seeking deeper meaning and higher states of experience, even if they seek all their lives and the answers still elude them.
Neither course is right or wrong. Life is just an “is” and it’s going to go on fine (or not go on,) whether we figure out what it all means and unlock the key to The Mystery, or not. Whether we wake up or not. The Universe isn’t demanding anything of us to continue being impelled towards it’s full fruition. We didn’t create the Universe, It created us.
And yet somehow, even though it may seem that the Universe could go along fine without the human race, thank you very much, in a very real way, the Universe needs us. Not so much in the way that we’re “special” ’cause we can think and reason and realize God in the way perhaps other animals cannot. More like in the way it needs every part of itself, the way in which it needs every blade of grass, to complete Its experience, its “journey.”
Which brings up perhaps the most important question: Is it we who desire awakening to the bliss & knowledge of the Oneness, or is it Spirit’s inexorable “mission” to know Its whole Self through all these planets, beings and experiences, through us, that’s driving our longing to press ever onward?