Tikkun Olam - Heal the World

In Honour of my grandmother
Ruth Nora Reiner Lucchesi Wolverton
(19/3/1922-12/4 2006)

© Melina Magdalena (2006)

I’ve spent so my years longing for release from this life, that I have a strange attitude towards death. Trauma broke my connections with those around me, even my young children, and while these have been restored somewhat, I know we would have shared a much deeper psychic bond, had this not been the case.

And so come many questions that probably could not occur, without this disattachment from life first being present.

So what is the purpose of what happens to us in our lives? I begin from the premise, that life is meaningful and not a chance occurrence in a world of coincidences. For me, this belief is a vital component of the choices I make in my life.

I believe souls contract to come to this world, as we may perhaps to other worlds we know nothing about, in order to fulfil certain criteria, answer certain questions, experience and learn certain of life’s conditions, particularly where these directly relate to this three-dimensional physical realm, and in how embodied people relate to one another, with all the restrictions that entails. As any good teacher knows, when the parameters of observation and experience are reduced sufficiently so to concentrate a student’s attention on one particular aspect of the topic under consideration, learning and understanding takes place almost like magic, because there is little else that is possible in that situation.

Though we live with three, four, five or six senses, most of us have an inkling that there are other dimensions, and perhaps other senses to which we do not have access in this world. In this way, our perceptions are narrowed, pared down, so that life on this planet can offer us specific learning experiences. This can be so, even without our ability to consciously imagine a different kind of life, with a different set of dimensions and senses that might be available to us.

I do not believe that souls contract to make the journey to Earth only to have their lives snuffed out at random. I do not really understand the current western fascination with violence, murder and crime. That in the contemporary entertainment culture there is so little else on the menu of our common imaginations speaks to me of a deeply fundamental disturbance in the pattern of our living, here on Earth.

This having been said, I do believe that when people are met with death, accident, or illness, whether this was planned from some other realm, or whether it strikes us unprepared and unexpected, it becomes us to struggle with these events, and to strive to survive and learn from these experiences as they present themselves.

Furthermore, the vast range of life opportunities for experience on earth offers us so many learning experiences. As a simple example, one could contrast the viewpoint, observations and experiences of a person who is drawn to learning about life as it is lived under the water, with the creatures that inhabit that realm, with a person who has lived solely in the desert. There are the so many modes of living, for example, the various styles of family and community, and the experiences of individuals whose lives are lived along a broad spectrum of diverse abilities and intelligences.

A person might well contract to lead a life which entails a degree of pain and suffering and illness, or equally, to lead a life in which he or she cares for such a person. A life that is simple and pleasurable is not necessarily meaningful or rich in experience, because it lacks challenge. In my life, I value in hindsight even more, my friendship with Sarah, who died at eighteen, having thrived with her multiple disabilities and with the secret knowledge that she would die young. Sarah spent her years bestowing sunshine and reaching out to those around her. I don’t think her life was an accident.

So how does this relate to the immense suffering in the world today – all those souls without sustenance or safety – all those who are killed on the roads, who die at the hands of rapists and murderers? What purpose can be served by the enormously increasing population increase on this planet? Perhaps we humans could find a way to sustain life for the earth’s starving, suffering millions, if we chose to work together, instead of in competitive opposition? Perhaps devoting ourselves to such a great purpose is one way of healing the world? I wonder though, whether there might be other explanations for these things?

Is it not plausible, that these things occur as direct rippled consequences of unplanned, unnegotiated disturbances in the fabric of life upon this earth?

I cannot rationalize that the holocausts and genocides serve any purpose. While these may have existed as possibilities, they were never supposed to happen on this scale. I don’t believe people contract to come to Earth in order to be slaughtered in their millions. We on earth are supposed to be learning how to do things differently and better. We are supposed to remain excited about the world, to go on exploring and learning and creating.

I do not believe that good comes from genocides and holocausts, though I do believe in an endless potential and possibility that good could come if, now that they have occurred, we make the effort to heal ourselves and our world.

If the instigators of these events have anything to answer for, it is the profound disturbances that have spider-webbed themselves through the societies, nations and communities that have been directly affected by them. Perhaps we’re all a little warped as a result.

I have no idea what leads them to do what they do. I’m not sure how I relate to the idea of evil. It seems unreasonable to me that good can only exist in dichotomy, but maybe such violence and hatred is the direct manifestation of evil?

Like dis-ease, ill will spreads and infects those with whom it comes into contact. Souls whose lives were eradicated by intent and purpose exerted solely in an effort to wreak their destruction, return to Earth in an effort to regain what they lost. I believe many of these people wander in a deep confusion mingled with hope that in beginning again, they might pick up where they were forced, so abruptly, to leave off. But the world can never go back to what it was before the destructions occurred.

It makes me wonder whether the disturbances do not affect just this physical realm? Perhaps the feeling that we live on the precipice between life and death is not just a feeling, but a distinct possibility? Perhaps souls are making the journey back to Earth ill-advised, unprepared and misinformed?

As the dis-ease infects our communities, it changes the way in which we relate to one another. Our outlook is altered so that we expect disaster. Instead of good-will and hope, we live in fear and cynicism. There are those who have come in order to reach out and assist, (and everyone alive who has come into contact with one or more of these blessed souls knows what a blessing they are). And there are those in diminishing proportion to the others, who have not yet been directly infected with the legacy of violence, who come to earth simply to live their lives as we have always come here to live our lives. We look upon these people with a mixture of envy and irritation. Their lives appear so bland and simple – how can their outlook be so unsophisticated? How can they live so stubbornly in denial of the terrible burden beneath which which the rest of us labour?

The confusion, fear, grief, cynicism and anger of the many breed hatred and violence. The cycle continues to build and grow. It seems there are not enough sane people in the world. Or if not sane, the proportion of people whose lives will remain untouched by random acts of hatred and violence diminishes in direct proportion with those who are forever marked as a result of such tragedies, unless the balance can somehow be redressed.

This is a little to do with the idea of forgiveness, which is met so often by fortified walls of resistance. What’s to forgive, that my life has been destroyed by the actions of so and so? What’s to forgive, that my children have been senselessly murdered? What’s to forgive, that I have no hope of a future? Truly the idea of forgiveness has never been more difficult than in this day and age.

It’s not that forgiveness won’t help. Forgiveness helps the sufferer far more that it helps those who inflicted the harm. Of course it will help, in releasing people from the bonds that hatred have forged. But forgiveness is a huge demand, and one which suffering souls do not make easily, without the clarity of perspective that time lived during a period of peace can bring. It seems that on earth, such clarity is becoming almost impossible to attain, at the same time that it becomes more and more essential. Those who have been harmed fall prey to the easy trap of becoming those who then go on to inflict harm, because their ability to see that they have a choice in these matters diminishes. The destructive cycle continues uninterrupted.

Tikkun Olam. Heal the world.