Sadness and Grief Are Profoundly Human

Humanity is traumatized – for real. Can we heal somehow?

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

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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.)