Divine Surgery

They may have roots in early childhood. Or they’ve festered since adolescence, or maybe just yesterday. I’m talking about emotional pains caused by incidents that hurt so badly the wounds have never fully healed. 

All the blights on our original innocence, big or small, affect our thoughts and emotions for the rest of our lives.

Common treatment

One way to reduce the pain is to keep busy, entertained or distracted. This method covers up and ignores the causes lurking underneath, staying away from the deeper experience of self. It is a very common antidote.

According to a controversial 2014 study, a high proportion of people would rather give themselves an unpleasant electric shock than spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts.

A lot of us drug ourselves with herbs and chemicals to numb the pain. Or we are addicted to emotion-suppressing behaviour patterns.

These hiding and suppressing tactics aren’t dealing with the issues. They’re just buying time. But eventually the tumours have to be removed, or illness sets in.

True healing

The only solution is to go under the knife. To dig down to the source and remove the growth. This knife is well known, but we don’t easily surrender to it. 

The healing knife is exactly what we avoid – it is being alone with our selves, getting to know ourselves deeply, leaving nothing hidden or suppressed.

The surgeon is the practice of meditation and mindful living. Meditation is practised to let go of mental and emotional programs. Mindfulness is to stay watchful over programmed reactions re-emerging during the day.

There is no doubt that these practices are psychologically therapeutic. The evidence abounds in thousands of peer-reviewed articles in positive psychology literature. But healing depends on full commitment. 

Full commitment

A little bit of meditation here and there, and a few mindful thoughts, won’t relieve the pain of the human condition.

For the vast majority of middle-class rate racers, the time and awareness required for lasting beneficial affects is simply not doable. The knife of surrender merely scratches the surface, and the old wounds return to hurt like before.

In our busy lives we are forced to function where emotions are unconscious drivers and habitual thoughts dominate. Here, on the outer edge of ourselves we are sharp and tuned to the world, like the fittest animals surviving and thriving in nature. That’s the zone we have to be in to keep on keeping on. And when we’re used to being there, it seems life’s only joys reside there too.

If we had to choose to let go of the mental and emotional programs that drive us, we would fall into an unfamiliar realm of self that seems dark and perilous. If we loitered there long enough to see the real light in this darkness, we would fall behind in our lives. How would we continue to pay the bills? What would our friends and relatives say about our wilting flowers of material success?

And surely delving deeply into meditation and mindfulness spoils our fun.

Few of us choose to fully commit to our mental and emotional healing. We neglect our deeper selves. We choose to carry on patching up a façade of contentment by piling up distractions or medicating the pain. That’s the way of life we are accustomed to if we’ve grown up under the influence of the West.

Cultural lie

The Western value system says we have to be productive. We have to be building investments and futures, and making and doing. We are completely brainwashed into thinking that hard work is a moral value and ‘economic expansion’ a societal virtue.

There’s a pervasive suspicion that simply being in the moment, doing nothing, is lazy and good-for-nothing. Being happy with less is unambitious – not to be encouraged.

This perspective hasn’t come about by accident in the West. It started with the industrial revolution. The working class had to be hard-working or the relentless expansion of the European military-industrial complex would not have been possible. The wealth of the richest few percent would never have outstripped the combined wealth of the rest of us.

I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy of the global elite. I am saying it’s the perfect storm of human nature and capitalist macro-economics creating a world order that incarcerates the vast majority of us in lifestyles that keep us disconnected from our deeper selves.

Without the Western paradigm, every corporate company would grind to a halt. Imagine if middle class people decided to deconstruct their first-world, consumer materialist lives. Imagine if we were content with where we are right now instead of working doggedly to upscale constantly.

Global gross domestic product would collapse.

But we’d be happier. First we’d have to face the pain of going under the knife… then we’d be immeasurably happier.

Not so radical

I’m not calling for a society of hippies, sitting around smelling bad and smoking weed, singing revolutionary songs or spiritual ditties. We may not find it necessary to totally change our livelihoods – although some might.

I’m calling for balance. We must work as much as required to meet our basic needs, and no more. There’s a comfort cut-off point – striving for more than that is unhealthy. All it does is keep us trapped in the cycle of wants – distracted and disconnected.

We have to devote our lives but there’s not necessarily a radical change. Just a gentle commitment to growth. Divine surgery is prolonged, and painful at times. But a certain gentle forward momentum carries us through when suppressed pains come up. This is what defines the divine therapy – it has positive go-forward beyond our understanding or ability.

As the knife cuts away the pain, we are free to live our true human birth-right, spending more of our time just being. We can love unconditionally, imagining and floating on hours of nothingness, inebriated by silence or mid-afternoon laughter, and snacks on picnic grass under hundred year-old trees.

The underlying anger, disappointments and sadness of our lifetimes lose their grip… as we surrender to the knife of divine surgery.