Such a mindset also regards radical transformation and healing as some kind of achievement.
They are not.
Such things are an event of un-earned grace. If that sounds unfair to you, you have much to learn about the way life works. That is why we waste so much time and effort warring against war, suffering and disease, trying to create Health and Peace as "winners". Such a perspective is too narrow to be workable.
Health includes disease.
Peace includes war
Life includes death.
This is the paradox. Without one, there is no other. They are not counterpoles; they are the two side of the same coin.
When we approach each moment in wholeness and newness, we become less interested in comparing any one experience with any other, or any one person to any other. Each begins to show up as unique and complete in itself. That someone else does not take a step that seems obviously preferable to me, says nothing of that person's intrinsic worth. Not really. Or of mine for that matter.
The significance of your life or my life cannot be measured meaningfully in relation to anyone else's. Everyone and everything can only be truly acknowledged and appreciated in his/her/its own intrinsic wholeness. That means we have to go beyond trite comparisons and look into each "öther" as a unique experience to be explored on its own terms. That's a tough one to swallow. If that were true, though, it would mean that my life is no more or less worthwhile than Jesus Christ's. But maybe that's part of what he was trying to tell us..... don't be too hasty to judge.
At the age of 66, when I sometimes succumb to feelings of failure because I might have gone further...... when I feel that someone else has failed because he/she might have gone further, I know I am measuring life from a very narrow and invalid perspective. The way points ahead for me, but thankfully not neccessarily in a linear extension of where I have been and where I am now. I am still looking for new possibilities and the opportunity to take quantum leaps sideways. This does not deny or devalue where I have been or what I have become: I take all the experiences of that with me in gratitude and (in some cases) some pride.
To observe and experience life is one thing; to draw conclusions from all of that --- the treacherous "therefore" -- is quite something else altogether and, I think, misses the point of living. Transformation may lead to healing, and even to cure, but this is not always so and expecting it to be so is bound to cause anguish. To think that, in order to be healed one must be transformed, is reasonable, but far from valid. Such logical expectations narrow our relationship with life, undermining our capacity to fully live and realise each moment uncritically, just as it is.
I really tried pushing away some aspects of existence to attain another level of consciousness; the experiment was spectacularly unsuccessful. It devalued where I was, and where I had been. I found only anguish and pain in resistance, and I got stuck.
This is the greatest paradox of all -- in order to reach a state of Wholeness, I've had to take the path of Wholeness. Nothing wrong now. Nothing lacking now. Nothing that should be some other way. The deeper healing of our planet begins one person at a time with the only person I can heal -- me. I tried going to work on the problem, the disease. That didn't work. what is working is entering each moment with a fundamental realisation that .....
Just as we are
We are all ever
And already
Whole.
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