I like monkeys. I really do. Especially baby monkeys.
In view of the amusing videos that I’ve watched of monkeys in action, five qualities came to mind: agile, curious, sociable, mischievous, promiscuous. When it comes to the content of our DNA, we humans share a lot in common with our primate cousins (over 90%).
In light of this commonality, I amaze myself at how capable we are as human, in spite of our monkey-like brains and bodies, to regulate and navigate the many challenges posed by our restive, restless monkey minds.
Many of us have evolved successfully as human by transcending mere urge and impulse to cogitate and contemplate the nature, quality, meaning, purpose, directions, origins, and consequences of our thoughts and feelings, choices and actions, behavior and conduct. This is no small feat, in no small part because of the genetic fusion orchestrated on chromosome 2 tens of thousands of years ago by our makers in hiding.
And yet, we are plagued, through no fault of our own, by our sordid love affair with negativity.
As we evolved into becoming more human than primate, more reflective than impulsive, more focused than scattered, more deliberate than haphazard, it made sense for us to be acutely aware of negative events, not only in our environments, but in our tribal relationships.
Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your point of view), this is a legacy that we all carry with us today: teflon brains for the positive; velcro brains for the negative – and it remains a challenge for many among us to dispute the negative even as we affirm the positive.
One scientific study is reported to have concluded that we think, on average, 60,000 thoughts a day, 95% of which are the same as the day before, 80% of which are negative, which add up to an average of 45,000 negative thoughts a day. Talk about evolutionary conditioning.
With this conditioning, we persist in programming ourselves and each other with even more negativity.
Think for a moment: what is this programming doing to our collective abilities to attract and manifest the lives of our dreams? What is it doing to our collective ability to disclose and expose the truth of who we are and what we are really and truly capable of being, doing, and having?
We would do well to ask these questions: what do we do with the restless agile monkeys in our minds swinging from thought to thought? What do we do with the crazy reactive monkeys in our minds that are daily continually getting stung by the scorpions of life?
These are not idle questions.
The energies of unity and harmony continue to ramp up, infusing us from within and from without, exposing all manner of deep, dark, bad, ugly urges and impulses that we have, up to now, been able to keep in hiding from ourselves and our distracted monkey minds.
Could the transmutation of this exposure not be the supreme challenge of our times?
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One might say, if tempted, that humanity is a strange mix of monkeys, robots, puppets, and zombies.
A more accurate (and compassionate) perception of humanity, in my view, is that we are children of the cosmos – cosmic children, if you will. In light of this attribution, and in viewing Earth as a kind of school, you might say that we have our infants and our toddlers, our preschoolers and our school-aged children, our tweens and our teens. Having said this, I don’t think it’s too farfetched to say that there are few, if any, adults in this particular curriculum. Adults in body, yes, but emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually speaking, most of us remain stuck in kidulthood.
Follow the daily news for a week and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Many if not most lack the consistency of maturity to cultivate a sacred imagination. We just have not grown up enough to bear the burdens of cosmic adulthood, in ways and by means that make needless chaos, conflict, and confusion a thing of the past, evolutionarily speaking.
Our makers in hiding are waiting, waiting, waiting. I can hear them saying: “come on, children, wake up; awaken, enlighten, empower – you can do this. Stop fucking around (like monkeys)”.
Okay, maybe not that last bit.
So, what are we waiting for?
Maybe we need to stop acting like victims, forever seeking disclosure and exposure from someone else, and instead, move into creatorhood (and towards adulthood), while gaining the consistency of maturity to absorb the disclosures and exposures in our own good time. First, optimize. Second, co-create and consummate. Third, disclose and expose. Fourth, repeat steps one, two, and three.
This circular process is a process for actualizing our potential.
With the agility and curiosity of a monkey species in full swing.
Which offers a simple outline of a curriculum for cosmic adults.
Here, I must respectfully appeal to your sense of cosmic maturity: if not us, who? If not now, when? If we are not for ourselves, then who will be? If we are only for ourselves, then what the hell are we?
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To share information and inspiration on what is happening on this troubled yet promising world, I drew up two lists of sites that are serving the causes of personal, global and/or cosmic awakening.
This post has been filed under Commentary in the Ultimate Outline.
Note: my evolving outline on approaching a realization of the ultimate in personal fulfillment can be found here, accessible from the nav menu under the page “Be Here Now”.
Note: this ever growing perspective began here: Ultimate Perspective