It seems that no matter how much we work on ourselves, there is more stuff to deal with. When a family moves after living in the same home for many years, and all the closets and junk drawers have been emptied, the thought is often spoken with some amazement, “I didn’t realize we had all this stuff!”
When you’ve been to confession, gone to meditation retreats, worked the 12 steps, gotten your psychotherapy, and you’ve exposed your issues at growth workshops, and worked hard on your personal development year after year, you might think you’ve given up your psychological garbage. But think again. You’ve still got stuff.
If you’ve done all this work on yourself, you may find that you have less emotional baggage to deal with, and maybe you know what to do with it now, but it is a rare person who can give it all up. An interesting thing about life is, if you stay involved with it, it will show you where you still need work. You could isolate yourself and pray and meditate and have blissful experiences of unity and attunement and think that finally you have arrived, and then you might go home to deal with some family issue, and it would become clear that, nope, there is much more to do. The closets of your psyche still hold fears and attachments long unused, but still in their original packaging.
Reincarnation theories usually suggest that if you don’t deal with your karmic refuse this trip, you will come back to deal with it later. Those theories also give some high estimates of how many lifetimes it may take before you are ready to pass to the next level of existence. When some sage says it is going to take 100,000 lifetimes to release us from the bonds of karma, most of us are probably hoping we can get in the express lane. How many lifetimes might it take to work through that impatience?
The point of telling us that we have an incredible number of lifetimes to work through our stuff is probably to help us have patience, to just deal with what we have before us without deluding ourselves that we are just short of the finish line.
Each stage of human life holds its unique challenges. If you get through your teens, you get to deal with the issues of young adulthood. You get that figured out and you must handle middle and old age with their special trials. Most likely though, as you enter late middle age, you are still working on cleaning up debris left over from childhood. Just as housework and gardening are never really done, our work on ourselves continues. Each day we deal with new challenges, and maybe we clean up some old messes. If we are attentive to the process, we can be working on the deeper layers. We can clean out the closets of our psyche and we may find things to get rid of, but we may also find treasures under a coating of dust.
© 2002-2014 Tom Barrett