What are we doing here?What determines the origin of life? Do we choose to be here? Do we choose our parents? Is life just random? Do we have souls? What is a soul? When does the soul enter the body? At conception, at the embryo’s first heart beat? When the fetus starts to move? At birth?
These questions come from my fertility patients. They can’t help but bubble to the surface in women who are encountering difficulties conceiving. When life seems not to be playing according to our expected rules or as planned, we naturally want to make sense of it, put it into perspective, and somehow manufacture a sense of fairness about the process. Our brains demand ‘fairness!’This is one mystery we can’t figure out. Perhaps this is one area where medical science, research, and rational logical thought just can’t touch. I hope we never can.
I hope we never get to the point where we play God so much that we are the ones that answer these questions. Perhaps we just aren’t meant to know. I believe that the origin of life, conception, and the manifestation of material being from seeming non-being is meant to be a mystery. The answer is mingled somewhere within the answer to questions such as “Who and what is God?”
I grew up severely Lutheran. My personal life experiences and the church left a huge, gaping abyss. My questions that weren’t answered by the church seemed to be answered more by science. I looked for my truth there. I studied medicine, the height of scientific thought. Yet eventually, the gap between Life and Science left a void as well. Life isn’t religion; life isn’t science, either.
Look at the evolution of human development. There was a time when nature, wisdom, and life were synonymous. Yet we were more crude back then. Eventually we learned about power. And we wanted more control. Then humans used mythology to answer some of the looming inquiries about greater meaning. Finding appeasing the many Gods wanting, we turned to a different type of religion as the answer to explain and make sense of life. It appeared something like this, There Is One God, and there are certain ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to have a relationship with this all powerful, Man-in-the-heavens deity. Over the last millennia, we have been questioning this view as well. This male, control, and power-oriented, organization isn’t providing the solutions relevant in the 21st century, either.
Most of my patients are either subjugated by religion, science, or both. I see their minds grappling to make sense of their predicament either with their logical rational minds, or become resigned to the horrific possibility that perhaps their unworthiness to have a child is God’s will! They come to me looking for a scientific way to improve upon their physiology first, and secondly to make themselves worthy in God’s eyes so they can be granted the gift of a child.
Both religions and scientific ‘reasoning’ seem wanting when confronted with infertility. Is God trying to control population through making people infertile? When I bring up this topic on retreat, a majority of my patients pay increasing attention, as they have thought of this question before, but are afraid to really say it out loud. What if it were actually true…. Then what? Well, why, then, aren’t more people in Africa infertile if God were making these grand determinations from the sky?
Highly charged, debatable life issues like premarital sex, birth control, abortion, stem cell research, cloning, etc., are put into a better perspective when we step outside the realms of science, religion, and politics.
I heard a Catholic Priest explain at a Resolve meeting once, that the reason infertility treatments were a moral sin were because the man has to masturbate in order to produce sperm. That was the funniest thing I had heard in a long time. Does that mean that if the infertility issue involved failure of ejaculation, or required surgical extraction of the male germ cells that it would be okay? What kind of sense does that make?!? What kind of God would think that?!?
I can get caught up into the rightness and wrongness of what I do as well. I can think opinionated thoughts like this: That through medical intervention we can achieve babies through desire and means alone. If we want it badly enough, and have enough money, we can force a child into being. I call these our modern-day, technological ‘trophy’ children. Even if we are too old, too scarred up inside, have egg problems or sperm problems or uterus problems, we can use donors and surrogates and clinics and lawyers to make these our children.
Yet, opinions are just meaningless brain data that we have latched onto and called our own. Everyone has them and they are subject to change based upon experience to the contrary.
I fully immerse myself, body, mind, life, spirit, and soul into what I do. I meditate on it. I am not allowed to help people unless I am pure with it. I am not allowed to enter the realm of really helping another soul to heal unless my soul is clear. I give this a lot of attention. Maybe too much. My opinions don’t matter. My truth does.
This is what I know to be true. This is not handed down through beliefs, bought truths, or placebo-controlled, double blinded studies. This is what I know when I come from a place beyond thought; when I tap into the wisdom that defies rational understanding, this is what I know from the inside out.
I am aware that we are at a critical point in our evolutionary development where we are being shown a deeper truth. This deeper truth is not defined by wants anymore. Infertility brings women down. Most women that I treat will do anything in order to have a child of their own. And yet, for those that come to me, they have done everything, and still have no babies.
They have always been taught that if you want something bad enough, you will get it. Be good, study hard, think right thoughts, gather all the available information, process it, find the right husband, doctor, clinic, and medical protocol, and you will succeed. Yet they have done all those things, and are still not rewarded. This defies all rational understanding. Doctors say statistically, blah, blah, blah. Old eggs, poor sperm, thin endometrium, blah, blah, blah. Use a donor. Use a surrogate. Some do everything recommended to them, and yet, it still doesn’t work. Now they are at a critical point of despair, brought to their knees in sometimes suicidal hopelessness.
Okay, here it is – this is where the miracle of the story comes in. When they say, Screw it! Life sucks. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going to adopt, forget about children, leave my stressful job, my husband, kill myself, whatever. Something happens inside, and it’s called a number of names, like letting go, surrendering, abandon. There is a shift deep within. They know what to do, or what not to do. It may be to adopt. It may be to allow the child in that has been waiting for this state of abandon. It may be to do our true work in the world. They have found the place of wisdom. The place of no control.
I silently laugh when women I work with say, “But I’m really trying to let go.” There’s no trying involved. This is in the not trying, the not doing. The answer comes in the quiet of meditation, in facing the undeniable and sometimes horrifying truth that…. WE CANNOT CONTROL LIFE!!!
We can’t make sense of this one. We can only get close to the miracle, the point at which life is allowed to emerge, but we can’t fully get there because we are in material bodies being governed by this mass of gray matter called a brain, which is still material in existence. Truth is beyond that. Life is beyond that. Yes, even new lives.
We can control what we put into our bodies. We can control what jobs we take, what stressful situations we put ourselves into or don’t put ourselves into. This is what I teach during retreat: Everything physical, mental, and emotional that we can control to put our bodies into a point of receptivity.
Then the rest of it is magic. It is in the huge beauty of unknowing, the unleashed miracle that we are teeny-tiny beings in a magnificent universe that we will never comprehend, no matter how much quantum physics or string theory we understand.
We are at a critical point of knowing vs. not knowing. We have advanced from a point of sheer survival to one of controlling our environment to one where we think we have all the answers, to……..
The knowledge that we don’t! We now must live through spirit. We must tap into that deeper wisdom that defies understanding. We must admit that we don’t have the answers but we must take full responsibility and live through our hearts, not through our minds. That’s where the real answers are.
I have reached the point in my own understanding that I don’t think that an outside God controls my destiny anymore. I don’t think that living according to a moral code of right and wrong is making the world a better place. I don’t think that by understanding the natural world we can control or dominate it. It is a critical point of knowing that we know only as much as our minds allow us to wrap our little accumulations of neurons around. No more. Thought only breeds more thought. Answers come from a place of no thought. No morality. Of WISDOM.
God isn’t a man in the sky. Heaven isn’t a place where we go. God is everything. Heaven is everywhere. Now. That understanding puts us in the place where miracles occur. This is a place where we become energetically aligned with the miraculous place where the souls of the next generation will be allowed to come in and make a difference on this planet of ours. And it usually takes a process of coming to ones knees in the horrifying acknowledgement that we must live from the inside out. According to the laws of nature, which are within our very cells; that tell us that this planet will cease to exist unless we drastically do things differently. Everything.
We can’t reason this through science or through religion. They both keep us stuck by their own laws, their own inertia. We must break through to a new level of being, of awareness; of throwing a good number of our opinions and beliefs out the window. And walk upright in the wondrous state of sheer, incredible, unknowing wisdom. Deep down inside, we know what to do. We can’t afford to live like we have been anymore. This is the wonder of life. Of acknowledging that we are visitors here, and we aren't entitled to anything more than our own life. This isn't about what we want out of life anymore. It's about what life needs out of us in order to continue.
We must allow the souls of the next generation in. And they won’t arrive simply because we want them. They need to do a little bit of work on us first. It has begun.