The Pressure to Forget Who We Are

No matter how many times we’ve been here, each time we incarnate into this world, we come as strangers. We find ourselves in a body we scarcely know what to do with, cared for by people we don’t recognize and themselves having no idea who we are (but plenty of ideas about whom they want us to be). And we’ve forgotten who we are and why we came. Already estranged, we are now in a world that wants us to be something else. We can feel the pressure of our parents and their parents and the line of ancestors – their unmet needs falling onto our shoulders, hoping we will find an answer to questions they didn’t even know how to ask.

Over time, we gradually discover the shape of our own karma when the same things keep happening, the same emotions arising, the same judgments returning, the same people with different faces. Then, too, biological imperatives grip us with hormonal force and direct us toward partners, approval and the survival of belonging. Beyond that, still, it seems that everyone wants something from us, for us, with us, by us; and the social and industrial machines want to harvest us to fulfill their vision. Research dollars are spent in finding out how to capture our attention, plant insatiable needs and inadequacies in us that make us think we must have what they would sell us – things, people, or conditions. Religions take advantage of our need to belong, and our need to connect to something greater than what we see – but give us dogmas and pressures of conformity rather than illumination and liberation.

It’s enough to make us forget our soul that sought to incarnate here and fulfil its vision, its yearning, its destiny. Yet something knows we are more than all those distractions. The distractions may take over again and again, but something inside arises in deep yearnings and itching dissatisfactions of the things of this world, all its beauty and the love that can be found here notwithstanding.

Still, something inside knows there is more. And that becomes yet another temptation for the spiritual predators whose teachings never quite satisfy because they are not nearly large enough to contain our secret immensity, or to tell us who we are or why we are here – only who they want us to be. They try to impose their vision, their “methods” and articles of faith with promises of salvation, illumination, liberation or mastery if we only make enough effort, attend enough trainings or give enough money. But this only sometimes partially works because, again, their vision, ideology and methods are too small, too circumstantial and too general to fit any of us.

What’s necessary is that we find our way through our precious vision found in the secret corners of our own lives where our destiny has planted its seeds of future growth, and gives us again and again the lessons we need to find the direction that belongs to us, the path that opens to our steps, the life that is hospitable to our gifts.

We could be discouraged by all that seems to oppose our self-realization, or we can take heart at how resilient, persistent and forgiving is the Greater Self within us.