The Complexities of Human Nature
One of the most difficult things to hold is the incredible complexity of the human being. Looking through the home page of today’s BBC news yields a top story about the school shootings in Newtown alongside the incredible breakthrough of a robotic arm able to be controlled by thoughts for use by quadriplegics. A story about people helping subsistence farmers in Africa to grow honeybees to supplement their income runs next to one of the car bomb that killed 17 in a market in Pakistan.
We build and we tear down; we create and we destroy.
When we turn our attention to the outer world this complexity becomes challenging to accept. How is it that humans are capable of both such extraordinary achievements and such terrible destruction? That we, at the same time, form partnerships for common good across boundaries of ethnicity, culture, and nationality even as we instigate war against others? That our imaginative and intellectual capacity leaps across limits to invent life-saving medicines, build soaring sky scrapers, and fly tens of thousands across the globe daily, as well as crafting bombs capable of annihilating entire cities?
Facing this complexity of human nature there is a tendency to divorce from it, to call it “Other” and create “Them”. But the glorious, painful, awe-inspiring, and thorny truth is that “they” are WE.
Turning inward, this is easier to comprehend. How often do we put effort toward our own improvement, reaching milestones we ourselves have set, while at the same time we berate ourselves for our failings? How many times have we moved forward in our lives only to sabotage our evolution by turning away from our own brightness? Conjuring a choice job interview and then showing up late and unprepared; manifesting at long last a romantic partner only to turn away from our fears of union?
What parts of ourselves do we love, and what parts of ourselves do we hate?
The inner mirrors the outer, and the outer the inner. When we divorce from our own duality and complexity – creating “other” or “them” – we delay the healing. We even compound the problem by creating agitation over the split – psychologically we understand and move toward wholeness.
What if, instead of splitting or divorcing, we found ourselves capable of holding all aspects – what we decide, at this moment, to be both good and bad – at the same time? That, instead of denying aspects of ourselves, pushing them under the sand, we acknowledged them and participated in their shift? Could this be a first step toward transformation?
And if we did this, what would happen to the outer world? If we each focused so intently on reigning in our various aspects and transformed one of them would the whole world feel the shift?
Can we change the outer world by changing our inner?
