You cannot master the unknowable. Just ask a fetus. A fetus may think it’s got the whole world in its newly formed hands, but on that magical day of its ninth month of development, BOOM! It dies an agonizing death to become a baby. A mouth breather. A completely differentiated creature of time.
Of course, once on the other side of the birth canal, the baby doesn’t see it that way. The baby sees its birth. It knows it is living, not dead. And it may not know right away, but will soon find out, that this is a one-way ticket out of being a fetus. There’s no turning back. The baby usually reacts to life by mourning its death as a fetus with a shower of tears. A baby shower, if you will.
Will you? Never mind.
If the baby’s parents suck at their job, it might just spend the rest of its existence unconsciously trying to figure out a way how to climb back inside Mother. We have a real problem accepting life, don’t we? Don’t we precious miracles of ourselves?
Alas, you can never go home again. Stuck here, why? Because being born into the world means we’re no longer fetuses. I know this is repetitive and obvious when we talk about physical birth, but we tend not to see this fact when it comes to phases of life we haven’t gone through. Phases we may never. Yet and still, we want to master them from our place right here, right now.
Surely, a fetus would want to do the same thing if it knew what was coming. If a fetus knew that becoming a baby was inevitable, and that fetus was anything like us, it would try to live the baby life as a fetus. It would gather knowledge of babydom, go on baby retreats in the breasty mountains or exotic jungles of… Wait, are women still into deforestation or was that a 1990s thing?
This is… sorry, this is getting…. Anyway, it would claim to have mastered being a baby, the fetus would—anything not to be born as one.
When it comes to those later phases of us that we may or may not birth into, they are a bit trickier because they are not completely different phases of physical being. We’re not dumped out of our bodies, like wombs, into a whole other environment and told to sink or swim. I mean, we’re still here. Still us externally, but not exactly the same us inside.
In the ultimate stage of being we’re not doing anything as obvious as traveling from womb to air. It’s that our total experiencing goes from duality to oneness, which includes duality. Duality (or multiplicity) is expressed through—represented by—the physical world, but the mind inhabiting the body and experiencing such is not the self center of the body. The self center integrates properly and takes its rightful place as the mouthpiece of the oneness consciousness in which all of this is manifesting. This means that the self-awareness aspect of oneness mind is expressing through-and-as you. When whole, that is who you have “become.”
“Become” is in quotes because really you’re not becoming anyone new. You’re realizing the truth of who you are so deeply that the self properly integrates in the organizational scheme of life. Cue “waking up” metaphor. Yes, like waking from a dream, that woken you is a complete revolution from whatever eyes you were just dreaming through, and yet both self senses are you.
Unlike a fetus, you have a choice whether or not to be born anew. What you have done up to this point is choose not to. Some of you choose not to by saying you already have because you’ve studied it and had some interesting experiences. Experience isn’t being and we can’t be born anew through the acting out of birthing experiences. The self loves to play dress up. But if the beard has a string and the cloud is made of cotton, you’re only playing someone else’s god for applause.
Good, in this instance, which is the only instance that matters, is not good enough.