9: Facebook Therapy

9

Facebook Therapy 

          Has anyone ever stopped to wonder why life is always teaching us lessons? What is the point of all these lessons? That’s today’s spiritual musing… 

I had an experience the other day that prompted this spiritual musing, which will be my point of entry; but I don’t want to reveal this experience just yet. Suffice to say that I learned a lesson on Facebook that made me more sensitive to another person’s feelings; which leads me to ask: is the point of life’s lessons to make us more sensitive human beings?

My answer is an unqualified YES. That’s why I wrote Why Bother? The Riddle of the Good Samaritan. This was my answer to Christ’s teaching of eternal life. I wanted to know why the Samaritan stopped to help the injured man by the side of the road when the Priest and Levite walked on by; and the answer that I came to was that Jesus was teaching us about the self-transcending power of love with his Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that life has purpose; and let’s further say that because we don’t know what this purpose is, life teaches us lessons so we can become aware of life’s purpose. The question then becomes: what is our purpose in life?

After all, we are all a part of life; so life’s purpose would be our purpose. But we are all individual souls with free will; wouldn’t this imply that we all have an individual purpose commensurate with the collective purpose of life? And wouldn’t this mean that if we knew what our individual purpose was we would become aware of life’s purpose?

If I were a poet I would draw an aphoristic insight from this perspective, and it would be something like this: to know ourselves is to know life. And, conversely: the more we know life, the more we know ourselves. Does not this imply that life teaches us lessons so we can know ourselves better? But because we are all individual souls with free will, the lessons that life teaches us are for our own good and not another’s, as such; and this begs the question: what is our own good? What is it exactly that life wants us to learn? That’s the real question… 

I was a seeker for many years, and I studied and lived many paths, starting with Gurdjieff’s remarkable teaching of “work on oneself,” and I was one of the fortunate thirty birds in the Sufi allegory The Conference of the Birds that found his way to God; so I have my own answer to the imponderable question of our own good, and as improbable as it may seem to the uninitiated, our own good is the divine nature of our core being.

In my long and arduous quest for my true self, I came to the realization—it was more of a gnostic awakening, actually—that we are all sparks of God, or immortal seeds if you will; and that our purpose in life is to grow and evolve in our divine nature until we become aware that we are one with our Creator; which makes life the medium and the way to our true self—the same conclusion that Carl Jung came to in his quest for his lost soul, as he tells us in The Red Book, the remarkable chronicle of his confrontation with the unconscious: “This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine. There is no other way, all other ways are false paths.”

If this life is the way to our true self then, as Jung and I came to realize, it would follow that life teaches us lessons for the purpose of bringing us closer to our Creator; and because we are all individual souls with free will, the lessons that we have to learn are specific to our own nature—like the lesson that I learned on Facebook the other day.

But before I relate this simple lesson—so nuanced it was one of the most poignant little lessons of my life—let me address the mystery of our nature, which took me most of my life to resolve, because it speaks to the paradox of our free will and life’s purpose.

We don’t invite the lessons that life gives us; or so we think. “Why me?” we cry forlornly, in the despair of our new life lesson. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?” another person asks, which is much closer to the mark—because life’s lessons speak to the choices that we’ve made in life, which in some teachings is called our personal karma.

I’ve spoken to this issue of free will and karma in other musings, so I need not expound upon it here; suffice to say that the more life we experience, the more clearly we discern how life works—which we find expressed in many of life’s wisdom sayings, like “what goes around comes around,” and “you get back what you put out.”

          We have free will, then; but the choices we make create karma, and karma becomes our personal destiny. But because we are all immortals souls whose purpose in life is to grow and evolve in our own divine nature, our karma often inhibits our spiritual growth; and that’s when life teaches us the lessons that we need to learn to bring our karmic destiny into agreement with our spiritual purpose. In a word, we are free to choose what we want; but if what we want inhibits our spiritual growth, then the merciful law of life—“the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call divine”—comes into play to reconcile our karmic destiny with our spiritual purpose; hence the reason for life’s lessons.

So it seems I needed a lesson in sensitivity… 

I read a posting on Facebook. It was a Photo posted by a man who every now and then spills his angst on Facebook. The commentary went like this: “Yes, I am a strong person, /but every now and then /I need someone /to take my hand and /say everything will be alright.” He was referring to his loving wife, and his close personal friends responded with kind, sympathetic comments; and though I am only his Facebook friend, I commented also.

I checked his post later on and noticed that he had given a “Like” to all the comments but mine, and during the day I reflected on my comment and got the strongest feeling that I had violated this man’s personal space. Not that my comment was unsympathetic, it just seemed like I had walked in on a very private moment that he was having with his close personal friends, and my comment now felt like a profane intrusion; so I went back on Facebook and deleted my comment, and this resolved my uneasy feelings.

It bothered me that I felt uneasy about my comment, so I turned the problem over to my Muse—a technique that I’ve learned to cultivate with years of creative writing; and before I knew it, my unconscious produced an image that put my uneasy feelings into perspective: in my mind’s eye I saw my Facebook friend on a therapist’s couch unburdening his anguished soul, and his close personal Facebook friends were his support group and therapist.

Our creative unconscious gives us symbols—in dreams and in our waking life with images that just pop into our mind—to help us make sense of life; and the image of my Facebook friend unburdening himself to his close personal friends explained why I felt uneasy about my comment, because I had intruded on his private session of Facebook therapy.

And to confirm this insight, another image popped into my mind: a man is walking down the road to Jericho and stops to watch the Good Samaritan helping the injured man by the side of the road. Instead of helping the injured man like the Good Samaritan, he merely says a few sympathetic words and continues walking by; and that’s why I felt so uneasy about the comment that I had posted, because it lacked the sensitivity of the Good Samaritan and did not appreciate how much my Facebook friend was hurting.

As public as Facebook may be, the pain and hurt and grief that people share on Facebook has to be respected for the healing grace that comes from friends who really care; and as innocuous as it may seem to be, my Facebook experience taught me a lesson I’ll never forget because it made me a better human being in my newfound sensitivity.