I woke up this morning thinking about aliens.
I know - bear with me.
Have you ever thought about the fact that if there’s life on other planets, it won’t be human.
We are the only beings in the universe having a human experience.
Which is not to say that other beings in the universe have no souls, that they are not on their own journey of growth and ascension. Just that their journey won’t be like ours. They will have their own chequered history with spirituality and truth, their own crosses to bear (figuratively speaking).
The human experience is unique to us here and now. In the thirteen billion years of the existence of the universe, the human experience has taken up only the tiniest fraction, and it will not last forever.
We do though. Our souls do.
We are here, on this planet, in these bodies, right now, for a reason.
The idea comforts me. Maybe I don’t know what that reason is, and maybe it often feels like I’ll never know what that reason is, but the fact that I am here, in this moment, means there is one.
We talk about being human as a messy experience, imperfect. We know that being human means belonging to the race that created racism, torture, war. We took the violence and pain and suffering that was part of the natural order and perfected it, honed it into a sharp point, a tool to be used to achieve our own purposes.
But the human experience is also divine. These meat-sacks we cart around house the holiest of holies, an eternal soul. Every day, in every way, we change the world around us with our choices, with our actions. These pinpricks of light that enliven us, that connect us to one other are the consciousness of the universe given form.
We are both completely human and completely divine. And there will never be another experience like this one. This messy, painful, sometimes violent experience is the only existence like this in the universe. We owe it to ourselves - and to the universe - to experience it completely, to ground ourself in it and live it to the fullest.
Meggan Watterson writes ‘I felt like for a moment, or maybe an eternity, I really got how massively beyond my comprehension this being human is’. We forget that. Or rather, we choose not to notice it, not to remember it, because it is too big, too incomprehensible. Our tiny brains want to make the human experience small and mundane, commonplace. Because if we spend too long thinking about how big the experience in, how important it is, we get overwhelmed. We don’t want our human experience - this life right now - to be important, to be our only turn at the wheel, because what if we get it wrong? If there’s no do-overs, then the mistakes we make now are with us for eternity. Much safer to feel that we are not important, or that if it doesn’t work out we’ll just try to be better in what happens next. Or that there are others out there, somewhere in the universe, and we’ll leave the being perfect to them.
We miss the point. Being human isn’t about being perfect. It’s not even about striving for perfection. It’s about realising our imperfection is what makes us perfect humans, and living into that experience.
One day the aliens will rock up on our doorstep. They’ll bow deeply to us with respect, and we will bow deeply in return (haha jokes, we’ll probably shoot them out of the sky, because human, but let’s pretend for a moment). They will tell us what it is like to be a soul in their particular kind of body, the kinds of things they have learned and done to ascend and grow and contribute to the well-being of the universe. In response, we will tell them that we spent our millennia on earth trying to be something that we were not, striving for perfection in our bodies and our minds, ignoring the perfection that already existed within us. They will be puzzled. ‘But this is the experience you have been given? Why do you strive for another? If you were meant for perfection in this life, you would have been incarnated into a perfect being.’ They will be puzzled and frustrated by how little we have learned, how we have squandered our opportunity in this life, in this form. And probably, they’ll get back into their spaceships and look for another planet with incarnated beings to learn from, telling us that they’ll return in another ten thousand years to see if we’ve learned anything from our mistakes.
I’d rather learn from them now. I’d rather live into this experience, perfectly imperfect, 100% human and 100% divine, right now. Being human is completely and utterly beyond my comprehension, and I don’t want to wait to understand it before I begin to live it.
Join me.