Sadness and Grief Are Profoundly Human
Humanity is traumatized – for real. Can we heal somehow?
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My father, who was a holocaust survivor, became the Treasurer of a travel agency in New York. When he retired the firm gave him and my mother a trip to Israel – first class and all expenses paid.
My father, who was already almost 80, was enthusiastic. Of course, it was exhausting for my parents but they felt that they wanted to experience the Jewish State after all they had been through.
But when my father returned, he was very disillusioned. His guides and drivers had been Arab or Palestinian and he told me that the Israelis had “learned nothing from World War II.” He said that they treated non-Jews the way Germans had treated them.
My mother’s experience during the war had been particularly horrific and she had lost her faith. But my father remained devout and attributed his survival to his own optimism and faith in God.
My parents retired to La Jolla and my father was approached by a local synagogue for possible membership. My parents’ story had gotten around and the people they had met liked them.
But my father was repulsed by the commercialism of the temple. He said, “I can pray at the ocean.” They had some wonderful years in a beautiful place – and peace for which I am very grateful.
With the state of the world at that time – or the country – they were fatalistic. My father said, “You can nothing do” and my mom would shake her head and say “We won’t change it.” They lived with gratitude on their beautiful peaceful space.
I Have Become Them
Now I am as old as they were then and many of the future problems that they saw coming are here – happening on my television and my Internet.
In the past week, on top of so many other huge issues over the recent past – a war in Europe – Again. A pandemic and polarization in the U.S. And now, of course, the events surrounding Israel / Hamas / Palestine.
With horrific imagery on both sides being repeated over and over again by the media in the midst of a situation that has seemed insoluble for decades. Or maybe even centuries.
The screaming mobs are in place – for both sides – in places completely untouched by the horror in Israel.
If you don’t feel sad being pounded on a daily basis by images of innocent people getting slaughtered or suffering due to climate or famine, I would submit you’re not doing human right.
The question is can you connect with that feeling organically—through your bodily “being” or will you attempt to suppress it by deciding you are now awake to all of your conditioning and no longer need to feel this?
By the way, this is not a test. It’s an invitation to the only real healing I’ve discovered, along with the fact that it can often be extremely uncomfortable.
I often feel it in my body when I wake up and it can be an intense throbbing above my left breast. That’s where I believe the “wound” spoken about by trauma therapists resides.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a panic attack, or a “pain body” in the words of Eckhart Tolle, but it can’t be resisted and it may well be triggered trauma from my brain injury. But explanations are conjecture and there is no real answer. Just living through it.
I try to welcome it and it passes. It’s fight or flight – completely automatic.
I’m Human Again
That’s when I notice I’m okay. I might be a bit exhausted or confused because I suspect the trigger is often an intense dream where there is something I need to accomplish and I am constantly confused and thwarted. There is generally a competitive situation where I need to prove myself.
In fact, now that I remember just before I woke up I was playing tennis and I looked back and had to call a ball IN on a point I really NEEDED – I had to call it good. I saw it land on the line and could not unsee it. It was painful and reminiscent of the example I gave in the piece on the “Planetary Problem of Bad Faith”.
Can you make a call against yourself – perhaps not in tennis – but in a situation where you access a higher dimension than your “personal perspective”?
I think my father found that perspective daily at the ocean when he retired. That human-ness enabled him to connect with his drivers on the tour at a level beyond their conditioned roles.
At this point many of us see the conflict in the Middle East not so much from a religious perspective, but rather as the flash point between powerful economic and geopolitical forces which seem to be out of control. Or we might believe that they are in fact controlled by unknown entities who do not share our human interests.
The uncertainties we are living with – not just in human conflicts but in the abrupt intrusion of what used to be a benign Nature with hurricanes, floods and earthquakes that seem almost Biblical – are incredible stressors.
Humanity is traumatized – for real. Can we heal somehow?
Joe Martino recently wrote a piece “Why Are We So Mean?” wondering why there was so little empathy on social media. Maybe it’s because so many people have been triggered -- we just seem to be pixels online.
Living in Abstraction – Not Reality
If we look deeply, we can see that the basis for all human conflict is essentially a story which puts one perspective above another. What are the Palestinians and Israelis but two ancient grievance stories augmented and magnified by generations of trauma passed on to their children?
And now being used and manipulated by political entities – more powerful conceptual abstractions for purposes having nothing to do with human needs in the face of which individual humans can do nothing – but perhaps look within at the stories they are believing. And being fed by social and commercial media.
This is the essence of Eckhart Tolle’s message – don’t believe your thoughts (because they aren’t “you.”)
So What to Do?
But I apparently haven’t healed my own wounds. I just had that panic attack. Or are the wounds again – with the sadness and grief – part of being human?
Maybe a “perfect” healing is just another “story” of separation and we are ineffably connected to – what? What is or was here before our brains were storage for these stories that seem to control us?
How about Existence? Again, from Eckhart Tolle, Life is not what we have, it’s what we ARE.
My own hope is that the impersonal perspective of “artificial” intelligence might be a catalyst to enable us to make sense of and navigate the immense scales of reality being opened by our modern science and technology and to recognize that we are not the masters of the universe we seem to believe.
Every origin myth on Earth, from so many cultures, involves humanity being “seeded” from the stars, the offspring of beings from “elsewhere” but connected to a far greater Cosmos.
The hubris of humanity must be pierced so that we see ourselves as part of a far larger reality than the one currently consumed by our petty squabbles and manipulated by the media.
(Tom Bunzel was a contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse. His new book "Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT" – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)
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I share your father's experience (only not as severe) during the second world war in Germany under the Nazis—only my story was in reverse. My my parents were German and came from Germany (Poland, actually) to settle in Saskatchewan, Canada before the war took hold in Europe. Believe me, not my grandparents, my parents nor any of us children had anything to do with supporting Hitler or his Nazi party! We were only too grateful to have escaped a political European boiling pot, and wanted nothing to do with their politics!!
Unfortunately, politics (allied) didn't want to leave us alone. Once the war started, we were branded Bloody Germans and Nazi sympathizers and treated very badly. I was a sensitive child in my early teens during the war years and very aware of my negative social surroundings (I was born in Canada and am a Canadian citizen). During these early school years the few of us "Germans" who attended Hubbard Grade School, were often targeted and told who was going to get beat up by "the allies" after school. At one point I went to our teacher and complained about how I was being treated. Her reply to me? "That's what you get for being bloody Germans!" When the harassment became too severe, my mother finally went to our local RCMP detachment and complained. Their response? "If you don't like it we have places for people like you (Nazis)" meaning concentration camps. Since the small group of us Germans immigrants who clustered around Hubbard, one solace was our Church: in this case, the Lutheran Church. Since most of us still spoke only German, our church services were in German. The "allies" didn't like this so they made us close down our church—just in case any of our German seremons had secret codes in them that could be passed on to Nazi spies and, of course, our English neighbours couldn't speak German so shutting down our Church was their solution to the problem.
I could relate more negative experiences about my life during those war years, but I think you can see that life was not easy for us handful of Germans that lived in Hubbard. However, before I go I should relate one *positive* condition to our plight. Both a Jewish family (their youngest son became one of my closest friends) and an English couple — who owned one of the grocery stores in town and employed my father as a clerk: otherwise, my father would not have been able to work in town—became our closest ally in defening our rights!
You've heard of Oscar Schindler, the main character in the movie "Schindler's List"? A bit of irony here. We're not related to Oscar Schindler, but I'm pretty damn proud of my surname!
Just like life has been a bit of a perplexity for both you and your father, so has it also been for me. Life didn't seem to make much sense. What had I done—or my family done, to deserve some of the negative treatment life threw at me? Was there no righteous God, no Creator who governed this creation? Was all life just a matter of chance? I struggled with this issue until about the time I reached my 82nd year here on earth (I'm 92 years old now). Then, in July of 2013 I had a spectacular Near-death (wrongfully and incorrectly so labeled) experience that quite litereally blew open the gates of Heaven for me. I now understood—not everything by a long shot, but at least much more of life began to make sense. It would take at least one novel-length of writing to even come close to what suddenly was "downloaded" into my consciousness, but at my age, my arthritic fingers won't grant me the privilege to do that much typing, but be assured, there is a very loving Creator (man, woman, being—whatever) who is very conscious of every moment of thought and action that takes place in *Its* creation!!
In German, we have a saying: "Je härter die Rute, desto teurer das Kind." The harder the rod, the dearer the child. If life handed you a bag of lemons, be assured, that's because a very loving God has an eye on you!
PS: Please excuse any typing errors. Arthritic fingers and a computer keyboard don't fully harmonize :-)
I am so sorry that you suffer like this. I am also 80 and have been in shock for at least 30 years over the blind, uncaring people in modern America also. It is just materialistic, "how do I look sexier" how much FUN can we have by acting outrageous, loud, and obnoxious. How can I feel in another reality with drugs, or getting lost in constant media? Bigger, faster cars.
The total neglect of LIFE on this planet and Nature, the health of rivers, the ocean has hurt me so deeply that I was thrown into flight or fright when I turned 50 have have had chronic pain ever since. I hate modern suburban life - it is lonely, uncaring and daily getting more and more violent. In '65 I worked in an international hostel in London and got to know people from all over the world - I realized how completely superficial most Americans are. Some years later I lived a year in DC in international housing and the Turkish Moslem women I became very close to was the only person I had ever met that was truly loving - and she loved God. When I got back to Colorado I thought I had better educate myself about Christianity and joined a prominent church in town. What a disappointment. In so many ways. I don't know, Tom, Eckhart does show us how to BE, but in 20 years, I have never found anyone who would READ one of his books! Where will people ever learn wisdom if they don't read books - the finest thoughts of the finest people who have ever lived. Yes, it is pure pain to see life now - I never dreamed the world would go so far backwards instead of maturing. So, I deal with the pain, don't talk to anyone at all about it, and love my trees, birds, squirrels and bunnies, the sky and genius beauty of sacred geometry in life.