What Is It to Be a Human Being?
As AI continues to evolve, it becomes increasingly vital that we transform human consciousness itself, so we can meet it as intentional stewards of an emerging world. The moment is real. The cost of remaining adrift or absent has never been higher.
What is needed to step into our humanness and divinity in the same breath?
Our personality is a disguise. Essence is what we really are, but the path from one to the other is conscious work. When personality is our master, we are living in rigid prisons and the limits are prescribed by societal norms. Only essence has genuine freedom.
As Anaïs Nin wrote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” Courage is required — to show up day in and day out and observe our thoughts, beliefs, actions, biases, upsets, and reactions, and bring love and kindness to these hurt places. The journey is long and treacherous. It requires grit and tests your faith until you surrender into complete trust.
And as the etymological meaning of courage is of the heart, we need to involve the heart and the body, not just the mind. We need three-centered awareness. Thought, feeling, and sensation must be brought into relationship. That calls for practice because we naturally lead with one of these centers.
As D.H. Lawrence wrote, “The human soul needs actual beauty even more than it needs bread.” Beauty is essential. We gravitate toward the aesthetically beautiful — spaces, places, people — and beauty summons love. To create beauty, we have to put effort and care into our environment, our souls, our food, our neighbors, our art, and much more. What we digest and produce is of utmost importance.
At the personality level, we see each other as victims or perpetrators. At the soul level, we are capable of pure, nonjudgmental, non-punitive love and self-responsibility. We seek to understand and heal through love.
Purity is not perceived as moral perfection but as a transparency of the soul. Nothing is hidden, forced, or twisted. We are able to reflect truth without distorting it.
Most human beings live far below their actual potential through the absence of genuine development. The Divine Individual has developed genuine will, genuine consciousness, genuine being, not as a spiritual achievement, but as the fulfillment of what a human being actually is when fully realized. In practice this means the capacity to choose freely rather than react automatically, to see clearly rather than through the fog of conditioning, and to act from one's deepest nature rather than from habit or fear.
To be a human being we have to be aware of what we are doing; be aware of others objectively; be aware of an open future; remember our true essence. It is a process, and it calls for patience and commitment. The guarantee is that there is an exit from every closed circle, from all captivity of the spirit.
Jesus himself reminded us: “I am the Door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” (John 10:9)
To ground these reflections, I continue to work at these steps. I bring awareness to everything I do in daily life, especially in relationship to others. How I show up is my duty. I see the world as a mirror that reflects me, not from an egotistical perspective, but from a self-responsibility one. That practice naturally creates awareness of others and opens space for less blame and more love.
I regularly run into my attachment to outcomes, fantasies, and emotional yearnings, and diligently submit them to God. I keep an open hand to what the future holds. To remember my true essence, I stay close to my philosophy and its main tenets: the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
It is worth mentioning that we have to learn to live in paradox: effort and surrender; will and grace; doing and being. These are not problems to solve, but tensions to hold consciously. Something else can enter when we do not collapse to one side, a third movement, subtle but real, that belongs to the soul. It does not erase the tension, but transforms it. It appears in the space we create through attention.
This is called the journey of the Hero and the Heroine for a reason. It tests your limits again and again, refining what is real. But once you truly taste it, there is no turning back into unconsciousness.
