Gathering Awareness – Entry #18
Whenever I make an honest appraisal of my earliest memories from childhood, one theme that always emerges is a powerful desire to belong. That single desire has remained at the forefront of my earthly persona until this present moment. I have always felt a compelling desire to belong to something that is more than just me. And it isn’t only a desire for connection with other people, although that makes up the bulk of it, it is also a desire for a failproof connection with the Source of Life itself. As you might expect, I had an instinctual need for human connection when I was a baby, and I’ll assume that is a natural and common need for most human children, but I hadn’t even begun to understand my desire for meaningful connections with others. And beyond that, I had no understanding, or even a clue, about having a desire for connection with Source. I’ll assume that is also a commonality we humans share. The focus of this discussion, and I’m hoping it will become a Bonafide discussion, one where readers add commentary, is our desire for connection (unity) with each other. Why do we create communities?
From the moment we’re born we make contact with other human beings. Our physical interaction with others begins at the moment we emerge from the womb. Even if it is only our mother who is present at our birth, we are inevitably touched by human hands. For some of us, those hands are warm and nurturing, while others are greeted by uncaring hands, and in the worst-case scenario, they are the hands of cruelty. Whatever the circumstances of our birth, we are physically reliant on help from others if we are to survive past infancy. It seems as though our instinctual drive to belong to a group of others is an evolutionary feature of being human. It’s part of our genetic makeup that recognizes our physical vulnerabilities and addresses them by giving us the inborn instinct to belong. The desire to belong comes from an entirely different place; It comes from a place of individual preferences. It is the sum-total biases of every interaction we’ve had with others until this present moment. If we’ve learned that we can’t trust other people, then it is likely that we won’t have a desire to connect with them. If we’ve come to the conclusion that human beings are compassionate and willing to lend us a helping hand, then we are more likely to desire their company. Whatever interactions we’ve had with others, and however those various interactions may have colored our preferences in terms of wanting to belong or not, we can still learn to rely on our intuition when it comes to allowing or disallowing other people’s access to our personal lives. In effect, we can choose our own tribe.
Thank you for stopping in to read! I’ll continue to explore the theme of unity for the rest of this week. Please feel free to comment with your thoughts on this subject, or any other, for that matter!
"Grand Providentia United" 