KAUL: Kindness, Awareness, Understanding, Love (part 2)

So here's a story. My family has just done something that really hurt me (no details provided here, but it's bitter). I have gratifying thoughts of writing a sharply critical email to them. Those thoughts arise from the ego, angry and hot. They must be usurped by KAUL, or the base animal wins by scorched earth.

The animal is our inner sasquatch. A wild beast of the woods that triggers on everything to defend territory, resources, and the id. That is our core physicality. We are that. Even in ascended lives we wrestle with the beast. Our occupying soul has travelled across galaxies to take on this physical form, and seeks the challenge that particular form provides. The pains and sufferings and joys and ecstasies of physical incarnation are collectively an invaluable source of spiritual growth, and that's why we do this human thing.

A long time ago an illuminated orb formed at Source, emanating from the cosmic Oort cloud, and drifted into the loving baby blanket of an ethereal, cottony fog. We are born blind because we are void of experience, and true sight is experiential. Here at home, in spiritual form only, sight is projected from within — if we've seen nothing, there's nothing to see. With nurture, and being enveloped by the source of infinite knowledge, our souls acquire awareness. One day, when perfectly ready, we are asked by our nursemaid's loving voice if we'd like to try being a butterfly perhaps, to drift buoyantly across meadows, sipping from colorful bowls of sweet nectar, and we say yes, and spend a week on the side of a Swiss mountain, in awe, doing exactly what was described to us. Then one beautiful sunny morning, as we float lazily across a kaleidoscopic glade of wildflowers, we are snapped up by a passing bird and torn into bite-sized bits. Then suddenly we find ourselves back in the aether, wrapped in a cotton-cloud blanket, crying from the rude and painful shock of being eaten, cradled in the arms of our loving nursemaid, who coos softly and explains that leaving the heavenly cocoon to assume any physical cloak always ends in the death of the chosen body. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it isn't. But now we are home, where there is no pain, warm and happy and gazing into the beautiful face of our home mother, whom we now see clearly because our eyes have been opened by the extraordinary physicality of a fleeting life on a far-flung planet the locals call Earth. She might look like she has a butterfly face, but that's entirely appropriate and still beautiful to a brand-new baby soul.

And so it goes.

In the aether we can preview anywhere in the universe we choose, and select all sorts of fascinating but brief embodiments — perhaps an ant for nineteen days, a bird for a year, or a dog for seven. Then one day, back at home, we meet an ancient soul passing by. They're not haggard and weary but illuminated and dense, carrying a great wealth of experience and profound suffering across an untold number of lives. We gasp in awe at their beautiful blue aura and spiritual gravity. "I want to be like you," you proclaim, and they stop, and turn to you with a face so filled with love and knowledge that you gasp again. "How can I be you?" "You must go and be a human," they whisper, in a breath that carries both caution and compassion for the road you'll inevitably now take. Because you saw it in that passing soul and you were fascinated. The longing. The pathos. The love. The tempering undergone numerous times in the crucible. And you desire it rather than shy away, because at Source you know it will be temporary and fleeting and intense in the grand scheme of things. And you run to your nursemaid and plead with the urgency of a toddler: "I want that!"

And so you find yourself a six-week-old baby, kicking your arms and legs into the cold air as an earth mummy applies zinc oxide cream and tapes on a fresh diaper. And of course you're unaware of where you just descended from, or anything else for that matter, other than that you're hungry and there's a deafening noise coming from, well, your own mouth. Ssshh, your mother says, and latches you on to her nipple, and there you are. Your first human life.

We are all of us, to a person, inherently schizophrenic. A soul and a body battle for dominance. Soul amnesia is a critical adaptation — to prevent rendering us non-functional, incapable of learning, and probably as a safeguard against suicide of the body we chose to inhabit. If we wholly recalled who we were and where we were from whilst walking around in these heavy, painful, sad sacks of meat, we would take the first exit and never return. But we endure these bodies to learn, and so must come with zero memory of home. To truly struggle without a safety net. To feel. To love. To know pleasure. To get closer to Source, albeit far from home and a long way back. Even though we don't remember, we can be conscious of the fact that we are here by choice — each of us on our own amazing journey, each at our own stage of development, each here to find and experience the meaning of love.

That's why we need to be KAUL, because feeling love here in hell is often hard and sometimes seemingly impossible. Humans can be horrible, usually when they're in the toddler stage of soul development and in their kindergarten lives, one through five. They're not much better in grade school either, and high schoolers can be repellent too, though you get more of a mixed bag. It's not until you reach university that things smooth out. But in day-to-day interactions we can't always immediately tell what grade someone's in. And it doesn't matter, because we've all gone or will go through similar processes. The point is we must love them all regardless, despite how despicable they transpire to be. We can loathe their human behavior, but we must love the soul (sometimes buried deep) within, and remind ourselves we all stem from the same cosmic nursery and are siblings. Children of Source.

Here on Earth, it takes a long time to tame the inner sasquatch.

The theory of loving others is all well and good, but is there a hack to help us attain that? I believe there is. Or at least it's the one I use. It's being KAUL. It all starts with Kindness. Yes, that. The cliché so clichéd it can induce nausea. And I mean the contrived kind — the fake-it-til-you-make-it kindness. Because it's easy to be kind to those we love. It's when we don't love them anymore, or meet those we don't like, or don't even know well enough to like, that kindness needs to be contrived. Because it's the trigger to openness. Kindness is sunshine, and we open our souls to it like flowers on a May morning. When a person opens, we can see things. Indescribable nuances (sometimes amazing, often mundane) that give us glimpses. That comes to us as Awareness — our kindness gently unfolds a satellite dish, or a set of antennas, that passively receives the transmission they release in response. Those waves are caught by our antennas, via an acquiescent exchange of emotional data. Be stoical. Sometimes it's hard to hear their messed-up words and see what emanates from an opened being. Instead of quickly knitting an impenetrable fence to safeguard our typical intolerances, process the data, and you'll gradually acquire understanding, in real time, as you're captive to the conversation or interaction. Understanding is the root of all empathy. Without it there can be no insight, compassion, and Love. Love is the knowledge that we are all of the same Source, thrown together, disparate but not so different souls, assembled here by choice disguised as happenstance. Love is remembering we all started out the same — small orbs of light energy from the cosmic Oort cloud — and that we were all newbies once.

If you are on your 23rd life and meet someone on their 3rd life, your KAUL is mandatory. If you are on your 15th and you meet a 30, your KAUL is imperative. Each soul must first be treated with kindness (even contrived), so your antenna elevates to catch their signals, which will imbue an understanding of where they're at. All that fosters empathy, or admiration, or just cold knowledge, and the heart illuminates with Love. Not a chocolate-box platitude, but an authentic Love born from the sudden understanding of the person we stand before. That they are us and us them. All on a journey that spans infinity, and our uncountable lives on this and a plethora of sweet-spot planets circling distant stars throughout a Russian doll of universes. So be KAUL.