Human Becoming

Comment now » // March 15th, 2010

A close friend of mine recently mentioned this phrase to me: we are often Human Becomings rather than Human Beings. Those of us who are interested in personal growth can get caught in the trap of relentlessly trying to become something different than what we are. Meditation teacher Tara Brach addresses this beautifully in her book Radical Acceptance. She says that one of the deepest expressions of suffering is self aversion, a part of what she calls the “the trance of unworthiness”. When we feel unworthy or unlovable we fall into a cycle of constantly trying to improve ourselves in order to be worthy, completely forgetting that we are perfect exactly as we are.

As with everything, cults take this trance of unworthiness to an extreme. The relentless pursuit of self-perfection that occurred in the cult I belonged to helped to anchor a sense of worthlessness inside me that took me years to unravel once I’d left the cult leader’s influence. Wanting to improve oneself sounds like a noble cause, however the central premise it relies on is that we are flawed. And our cult leader made no bones about the fact that to be near her and to be worthy of serving the “God” she said she spoke for meant that we had to be perfect. Naturally none of us could ever achieve perfection (especially because she constantly moved the target we were aiming for) therefore we lived perpetually in a state of self-denial, self-torment and self-loathing. This created powerlessness, which I suppose was the guru’s objective. Powerless people don’t think or act for themselves.

“If only I were different/better/more then God would love me,” I’d think to myself. I was perpetually seeking God’s approval and, perhaps more immediately and importantly, that of my guru. It never came.

And though she, the guru, spoke of “God’s unconditional love” I also heard her saying, more than once, that God had rejected or “turned His back” on people who had left her little enclave. It took a while (ok, years) for this hypocrisy to sink in with me, but once I saw it, it was one of the things that enabled me to leave the cult. God cannot be unconditionally loving and also “turn His back” on people. That just didn’t make any logical, emotional or moral sense.

So I left the cult, ten years ago now, and have worked hard to break the habit of being a human becoming. I learn more about being a human being every day and live with the peace of knowing that if God wanted me to be different than I am, he would have made sure that happened.