The Gods pity us. The Gods envy us.

A letter to my seventeen year old self.

This is, I think, the most fun I’ve had writing an essay. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my teenage-hood. This essay is really a tribute to my teenage self and my first philosophical inquiries. I wrote this at 2am eating cookies in the kitchen thinking about that girl. It’s pretty wild and parts of it might not make total sense - but I think that’s perfect, because that’s what she was - pretty wild and trying to make sense of it all. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Love, H x

---

This essay is really a letter to my seventeen year old self. Because it answers a question I asked nearly 20 years ago, sitting on the roof of my parents house, smoking a spliff and talking to God. 

I was a deeply troubled teenager. I was extremely introspective and philosophical. I was consumed by the big questions of existence like - Why are we here? What’s the meaning of life? I was also deeply insecure, I mostly hated myself and felt constantly inadequate. The combination of this meant that at a spiritual and emotional level I was in deep pain, most of the time. 

At the same time, I was really alive. I wanted to experience everything. I was pretty fearless. I travelled the world. I partied. I dated. I had friends from all over. I explored everything I could find to explore.

It was both a deeply painful and extraordinarily full time of my life. Adventure, experience, pleasure, deep existential pain - I think I really lived out the possibility of the teenage experience, all the way. Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll (except it was more Drum & Bass and UK Garage).

At night I used to crawl out of my bedroom window to sit on my roof, look at the stars and speak to God. I would ask questions like “what is reality?” and “what happens when we die?” and then I’d listen. 

One school holiday, my friend Dave had just got his driver's licence. He used to pick me up from my house and we’d drive up to Hampstead Heath, sit in his car, get high, listen to Drum and Bass super loud, bop our heads, laugh, generally have the best time - then he’d drop me back to my house a couple of hours later. One night after he dropped me home, I climbed out onto my roof just to look at the stars, and I remember feeling the profound polarity of this strange dichotomy that was my life -  the simultaneous dance of deep pain, punctuated with regular moments of extreme pleasure. How it could be so ecstatic and so deeply painful to be in a human body. And I remember looking up at the sky and thinking “I wonder if the gods pity us or envy us?” 

Nearly two decades on, for my sweet seventeen year old self, here is my best answer. 

-

The time is 3rd century BC, the place, Ancient Greece. 

In an unnamed kingdom, a king and queen had three beautiful daughters. The youngest, Psyche, possessed a beauty so great that people began to compare her to Aphrodite. One day some began to whisper that she was even more beautiful than the goddess herself.

Psyche's beauty attracted people from all over distant lands to give gifts and offerings. People began to worship her as if she herself was the goddess of beauty, and over time Aphrodite's temples became neglected. 

On learning of this, the goddess was outraged. That a mere mortal was being worshiped over her. Unacceptable. In a jealous rage Aphrodite, ordered her son, Eros, who had the ability to make anyone fall in love with the strike of his arrows,  to travel to earth and make the girl fall in love with a vile and hideous monster. Unfortunately for Aphrodite, as Eros shot his arrow Psyche awoke, and Eros accidentally wounded himself with his own arrow and fell in love with her.

I love this story (and it’s equivalent from the Roman canon - with Venus in place of Aphrodite and Cupid in place Eros). But I have often asked myself, how a mere mortal could be more beautiful than a goddess, the goddess of beauty herself. Recently I have concluded it was actually Psyches imperfection that made her even more attractive than Aphrodite. Some small flaw or unusual trait a unique mark of her humanity, that made her inexplicably beautiful. 

Let’s not forget in the early '90s, there were plenty of teen girls who drew Cindy Crawford-esque fake moles on their faces in effort to look sexy and do Beyonce’s chubby ankles not make her even more perfect? 

In our imperfect humanity,  the gods envy us. 

Rewind back 500 years and in Lamentations 3:22, Jeremiah tells us “it is because of the Lord’s loving-kindness that we are not destroyed for His loving-pity never ends.” (Lamentations 3:22)

As the Old Testament would have it, so fragile is our humanity, prone to sickness and sin, that if it were not for God’s love and pity we would be damned. 

In our fragile humanity the gods pity us. 

-

To go deeper into this inquiry, I need to explain what I mean by “god” and what I mean by “us”. 

It is my view that the allegory and mythology of our great historic and religious texts point us towards (capital T) Truth - as in that which actually is. They are hugely valuable and I am not sniffy at all, like some spiritual seekers, about conventional religion. 

That being said, in my view, these texts are not to be read literally and certainly not as a set of instructions to outsource our sovereignty to. Instead they are maps of meaning enshrined with codes that point us back to the Truth that is already within all of us. 

Which is..? 

Well since this is a devotional letter to my teenage self, who so desperately wanted to know the answers to questions like - why are we here? and what is reality? - for her pleasure, here’s a seriously abridged version of my perspective on what is actually going on around here. 

This understanding is abstracted in part from my study of the world’s wisdom traditions but mostly from my own direct experience with what I can only describe as the everything that is. I have experienced this deep and transcendental is-ness repeatedly over the past decade, through my work with sacred plant medicines like ayahuasca or during deep states of mediation.

Let me prepare you here that this is about to go pretty far out into the cosmos and far deep into the centre of my knowing. If you’ve journeyed with plant medicines or touched altered states of consciousness through meditation or other spiritual practise, I am sure you will recognise your own direct experience in my words. If this is all new to you, let’s ride!

I will tell it as story, because that’s the only way I can translate it from the deep knowing in my soul that has no words, into words that can be understood whilst retaining as much of the Truth as is possible when things move from soul to mind and then from mind to pen. 

Here goes. 

–

In the beginning there was only one - Source. Source was everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. It was time and space; gravity and electricity; animals and plants and humans; body and mind, kindness, love, jealousy. It is this word and this word and the eyes you are using to read this or the ears you are using to hear this. It is every thought you’ve ever had. Literally anything you can conceive of and then everything that you can’t. 

It is the energy that runs through everything. The one that runs in each of us and runs in every single one of our ancestors and will run through every descendent for infinite time to come.  

It is the spark that creates the first cry of a newborn baby, the seed that sprouts into a plant, the breath of life that animates everything that is. 

It is everything, everywhere, all at once. 

I call this energy Source, because that is how it has presented itself to me. Some might call this The Universe, Consciousness, God, Prana, Life force energy, or simply Life. It’s all the same. 

Source is everything. And it is perfect. Eternally harmonious, balanced, whole. 

It is pure bliss. Nirvana. Totally complete in every way, because it lacks nothing. 

One day Source desired to know itself more deeply. In order to do this it had to forget that it was - everything. Because everything cannot know itself more deeply because its knowing is inherently infinite. And so it fragmented into different parts. It incarnated as mineral, plant, animal and of course human. 

In human it incarnated as mind so that we could have the conscious experience of being separate and unique, and as body so we had space to house our separate consciousnesses. To be, individual little selves, living individual little lives. 

And it created this human reality - the realm of contrast. For it is only through knowing what we are not that we are able to know what we are. Day exists because we have night. Life exists because we have death. We can feel cold because we know warmth. We experience love because we know apathy. The human realm (that which we you and I are experiencing) is the realm by which we can know ourselves, because every single possible expression can be experienced. And it can only be experienced because it exists in polarity to that which it is not. It literally needed to split, to know itself. 

But of course Source was still whole, and forever knew itself as whole. But it fragmented a part of itself that forgot. 

Think of it like a dream. When we go into a dream we have no sense that we will wake up the next day, in that moment the dream is all there is. But we always wake up and come back to “real” reality. 

We will eventually wake up from this dream - the one that I am me and you are you, and we are separate. Whether we wake up through death or through the practise of awakening in this life, we will eventually return to the remembrance of who we really are - one unified, energetic. Or for the scientific mind identical, vibrating strings of energy. 

But while in this dream, because each person alive on this earth today is infinitely unique, Source gets to experience every possible manifestation of what it means to be human through each of our lives. Through each of our lives the whole knows itself more fully.

Whilst I have told this as a linear story for ease of understanding, this is not happening over a linear time span but simultaneously in the eternal Now. Everything, everywhere, all at once. And there are undoubtedly multiple other realities and “realms” running parallel to this human reality that we know of that we have no understanding of (aliens, angels, spirits and beyond). What we might call the multiverse, but all of these universes run on the same principle - Source experiencing itself more fully. 

And what is the difference between Source as I conceive of it and the “gods” we find in the Greek, Roman, African, Norse, Hindu etc pantheons or in classical religion.  It is my view that these many gods are the many ways the human mind understands Source, it is the way we can grasp on the bigness of it is by separating it in our mind into aspects. So whilst we might say that there is a “god realm” in between the human realm and Source, this realm really only exists in the human mind. The many gods are not actually separate from Source, they are not even the dream. They are just Source looked at from a different angle. Like how on certain nights the moon appears to be partial (half or crescent) but it is of course always the same, full, moon, we can just only see part of it. 

—

So back to my original question - do the gods pity us or do they envy us 

Look at the world that we have created as humans based on the belief that we are separate. That we are these separate little selves who need to “get ours”. The war, poverty, hatred. The separation within ourselves from the insecurity and inadequacy and constant need to be better because we feel we are less than the other. And bodies that are literally engineered for self destruction in, if we’re lucky, 100 years.  

Humanity is enormously fragile. It is this fragility Jeremiah refers to when he tells us that if it were not for God’s pity we would be destroyed. 

Of course the gods pity us. This fragility, this confusion, this separateness, this forgetting of who we truly are makes the human condition a deeply tragic plotline. 

But it is actually the fragility and the messiness of life that makes it worth living. 

The fragility - without death, life would not be the precious experience that it is. It is our very knowing that this is not forever, in fact not very long, - that makes each day matter. 

And the messiness. The brilliant teacher Carolyn Elliot, has described the human realm as the red light district of the multiverse. It is the place where we can come and do and be anything. It’s where we get to experience every crazy, funky, messed up thing that could possibly exist. It’s where we make mistakes, and struggle to learn lessons, and trip and fall and feel pain - oh so much pain! Over and over again. 

And on the flip side we also get to experience the ecstasy of the very very “good” stuff, which *remember* only feels very very good because we have an experience of what very very bad is. We get to experience a piece of music that blows our mind for the first time, we get to have sex with someone we deeply love, some of us get to create life in our bodies then birth it into the world through a magical portal between our legs. I mean - literally wtf. This level of bizarre beauty only exists in contrast to that which is not that, the mundane, everyday that is also this life. 

The very fact that we get to come and experience (and be) all this extremity and polarity is the whole point. The fact that we get to be imperfect and flawed and in agony is deeply enviable to that which can only experience perfection. The fact that we get the privilege of knowing that we will die, is something that the infinite longs for. 

This is humanity. A totally messed up, painful, beautiful temporary experience that we will never have in this way again. So profoundly precious, most of the time we can’t even conceive of just how precious, when we are in it. 

This is the tragic irony of the spiritual path. We are here to remember that we are all One. We dedicate our lives to this remembrance. And in the end, the whole reason we came here in the first place, was to forget. That we are and have always been - whole, perfect, infinite. And to experience the messy, confusing, gross, delightful, ecstatic, separated experience of being in a human body. It’s basically a Shakespeare tragedy! Such tragic irony that I have no doubt the trickster gods get a delicious kick out of.

I had one of the most human mornings a few days ago. I woke up to Ocean screaming as he woke up from a nightmare, he promptly smacked me in the face and said “no crocodile” then proceeded to insist we got out of bed at 5.30am because “morning mummy, ge-up”. Later that morning, I could smell this sour smell from his room. I eventually found a rucksack with three rotting bananas and an accoutrement of flies and maggots. And I thought - being in a human body is so gross. After disposing of the bananas and maggots I put on some jazz music and a few seconds in, the bassist hit this chord that was so gorgeous and dirty it made me involuntarily screw up my face into what we used to call a bass face, a face that only seems to get invoked by a certain timbre of soulful bass, the type you hear all the way through your body and it just feels like warm honey on a summers day in 1970s New York. And I thought - this feeling, what an incredible privilege to be in a human body. 

And I remembered that question from my seventeen year old self and I laughed because I had an answer for her. 

And it is funny because as this essay has been percolating in me the last few days, I’ve been feeling so close to my seventeen year old self. And I realise that part of me envies her. 

I look back on that time of my life with, if not pity, so much sympathetic compassion for this sweet, vulnerable and totally lost younger version of myself. 

But now, I see that I also kind of envy her a bit. 

She was so raw, open, chaotic, messy. She felt everything, so much. Everything was new and intense. Now here I am approaching my forties, with all the wisdom of a woman and mother and of someone who has spent a decade in deep spiritual practise. I have all the tools I need to meet any situation in life with a degree of grace and acceptance (although of course I’m not always able or don’t always choose to do so!). And truth be told that is a beautiful way to live. But… part of me misses the rawness of that teenage period. How ungraceful it was, how unrefined. It was just a crashing rollercoaster. And that is just so… human. 

And I see this beautiful parallel between the Gods and Us and between my Elder self and my Younger.

Ageing is literally the process of walking back to Source. And for those of us on a path of awakening in life, as we get older and wiser, we realise we are both human and divine. Spiritual beings having a human experience. And as we get closer and closer to the home that is waiting for all of us, in death, to walk with Gods again, we remember that we are and always have been - perfect, whole, infinite.

And that is so beautiful. But there’s something about that pure humanity, that complete forgetting of our youth. It’s something so special.

It’s why we came here in the first place. 

So to my sweet seventeen year old self - my answer for you,

The gods pity us and they envy us. 

Just as I do you. 

I love you. 

Me at 16

PS: Of course Beyonce doesn’t’ actually have chubby ankles! (I don’t think) - but how many of you checked? Ha! When I invoke the Gods, Anansi (a trickster from African folklore who was a main feature in my childhood bedtime stories) always finds his way to me. 😜