It's funny how these things work, because shortly after writing this post on emotional evolution, I came across these words shared by Elizabeth Gilbert, which talk about the same idea. I wanted to share them here to remember them.
Years ago, a wise friend offered me a wonderful explanation as to why sometimes it’s so difficult to be a person — and why (in particular) our emotional pain can be so confusing, so enduring, so punishing, and so difficult to comprehend.
She said, “It’s only because our bodies are so ancient, but our consciousness is new.”
Let me explain this concept to you, as she explained it to me:
Our bodies are composed of elements that have been in evolution for hundreds of millions of years. Even the humblest and clumsiest human is a stupendously well-crafted machine whose ingredients have been tuned and refined since the beginning of life itself. Our bodies are an ongoing story of advancement and transformation that begins with the first single-celled organism on Earth and culminates in Serena Williams (Yes, I am watching the Australian Open as I write this!).
Anyhow...the point is: the degree of refinement and intelligence contained within our physical beings is absolutely sublime. Our respiration, our digestion, our reproductive abilities, our immunity, our balance, our musculature, our reflexes, and our remarkable senses — it’s all been tested for millions of years. And generally speaking, it all works remarkably well. Feed your body correctly, give it some sleep, provide it with oxygen, water it daily, lay off the cigarettes, and the whole system might run like a dream for as much as a century.
Our bodies are old, and well-tested, and they rock. But our consciousness, by comparison, is NEW. Really new.
Humans have an emotional operating system that is unlike any other on the planet, and that — evolutionarily speaking — is incredibly recent. We must forgive ourselves if we don’t entirely know how to use it yet. We’re still working out the bugs in the system. To have these restless minds and these roving emotions is a huge responsibility. We possess not only mere sentience, but extreme consciousness. Unlike other species on our planet, we live in something called “Deep Time” — consumed with a profound awareness of the past and a constant sense of the future. That awareness of Deep Time can make us feel confused and overwhelmed. We hold onto memories and we make plans — and our memories can haunt us, while our plans can obsess us.
What's more, we are emotionally and psychologically complex — possessing, for instance, a longing for divinity that our tree-dwelling ancestors could never have imagined (and we sometimes don’t know how to handle that, either, because ideas of God are outrageous and mysterious and humbling.) We feel desire — and when that desire is thwarted, we sometimes go a bit insane. We dream. We invent. We feel shame. We get anxious, and can't figure out why. We are fearful when there is nothing to fear, because we can imagine monsters, even when no monster is in sight. We make art. (How weird is THAT?) We fall in love. We hate. We resent. We forgive. We hope. We mourn. We brood. We grieve — sometimes for decades, with no relief.
It’s a lot to handle. And — unlike our most basic bodily functions— it’s all new.
So, yes, sometimes we cannot understand our emotions, and often we cannot figure out how handle them or heal them. But that’s only because we’re still practicing with this radically new software.
Think of it this way — if you break your femur (the largest bone in the human body) that bone, properly cared for, can heal in six weeks and you’ll be walking again soon. No problem. Which is amazing. But that’s only because the body is ancient and wise, and it basically knows how to fix itself by now.
But if somebody tells you that you’re fat and stupid, thirty or forty years later, that wound might STILL HURT — just as deeply as the day you first heard those painful words. That’s CRAZY. But that’s only because the consciousness is young and full of glitches, and we don’t totally know how to manage it yet.
If only emotional pain were as easy as a broken bone! But it isn’t.
What’s the upshot of all this? Be patient and loving and compassionate. Be patient and loving and compassionate with yourself, and be patient and loving and compassionate with all of humanity. Never forget: we are just all beginners in an unprecedented consciousness experiment. It's mighty, it's strange, and it's hard.
We are in evolution now — even as we speak. Some of our fellow humans seem to be more highly evolved than the rest of us — and why do we call them “highly evolved”? Because those people seem to possess a compassion that is so broad, so generous, so heightened and so healing that they make human consciousness seem like a gift, not a curse. They take even their most difficult suffering, and they transform it, alchemy-like, into love. They show us what it could be like, to possess these remarkable minds. They make humanity look good. They sometimes even make it look easy.
Let’s all try to be more like them, and help this process of human evolution along, shall we? How? Be patient and loving and compassionate with everyone in the world, from yourself on outward — and take note of the places where your compassion fails. As Jack Kornfield says: That’s where the work lies.
It's worth the work. It’s amazing, what we are. But it’s even more amazing, what we could be.