what if everything we need is already within us?
what if everything we need is already within us?
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By design or by consequence, we were born into a life of desperately wanting what we can never guarantee for ourselves. Always at the mercy of our connections, of fate, luck, and circumstance. Always insecure in what we have, never able to manufacture or collect enough proof to convince our survivalist nervous systems that we are and will be okay.
And why? Because the aim of the nervous system to keep us alive at all costs is fundamentally futile. Death is inevitable. We are born with the instinct to survive, but none of the tools with which to remain so. We eventually learn the knowledge that we must die, but never how to make peace with this fact.
No amount of money can save us from death.
No quantity of friends or family kneeling around your deathbed stops you from dying alone.
No achievements or accolades guarantee that you’ve earned a life beyond, let alone better than, the one you are currently living.
Yet survival is so innate within us that we can rather convincingly lie to ourselves that if we do this or perfect that, then maybe we will be the one exception to death’s rule. And what could be a more meaningful use of our time than doing all that we can to avoid the uncomfortable certainty of death?
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We’re sold all manner of remedies to negate the fundamental disalignment of our body and the nature of life. A religion, a doctrine, a lifestyle, an exercise regimen, a skincare product, etc. All things that generally begin with the idea that there is a problem within us, and we agree because we feel the problem there. We feel that roiling between life and death, and we are anxious to relieve it. Then, once you’re sufficiently nodding along in accord with said person or product’s description of how the problem is manifesting within us, we start throwing money at it.
Money has no value to us morally; it only maintains its value as long as there are things we feel compelled to spend it all on. Beyond shelter, food, basic clothing, and healthcare, we don’t technically need that much more that money can buy us.
That’s why the ad industry churns billions of dollars every year, constantly presenting us with new manifestations of our fundamental “problem” and new remedies that are guaranteed to ease our suffering.
There is no money for healthcare providers to make in teaching us how to live healthily. There are only the incentives they receive from pharmaceutical companies that profit on our reliance on medications to combat poor lifestyle choices (and not always, of course, I take and believe in medication).
There is no profit for processed food manufacturers to make from your shopping exclusively at your local market, so they keep their costs low enough that we often have no choice.
There is no profit for religious entities in truly healing you, only in speaking promises of one day finding peace as a reward for a life structured just so, and a donation to the cause never hurts either.
If self-help books or gurus really made you whole, they too would be rather poor, and we all would be rather complete within ourselves.
If you’ve ever heard the expression, “you can’t help someone who does not want to be helped,” — and, especially if you’ve lived this and found it true — you know that healing comes only from within. So then, what of this truth can’t be applied to any external source that promises to sustain our suffering? Why do we trust them? Why are we sold on their empty promises?
