What is a Next Level Human?
Could Our Suffering Be Our Greatest Contribution
Life is Dukkha. Dukkha is an ancient word from Sanskrit that means suffering, difficulty or pain. It is often a difficult thing for some people to want to admit. Most people do what they can to not think about suffering. They would prefer to avoid it. The simplest way to explain a Next Level Human is through suffering. They are people who do not deny the hardships of life, but rather seek to use them.
In your life you will feel loneliness. You will likely be betrayed. You will have your heart broken and break someone else’s. You will deal with shortcomings and insecurities. You will confront fear and failures. You will feel the sting of cruelty. You will watch someone you love die. You may witness evil and barbarism. You will see injustice. You will deal with illness. You yourself will one day perish.
If you and I sat across the table from each other one thing I would know for certain about you is that you have deep pain. I would know because you are human. I could also tell what type of human you are by the way you bring that pain to your interactions with me.
Has it made you more bitter and angry? Has it made you more fearful and entrenched in destructive beliefs? Has it caused you to not question the morality of people you support and hide behind the stories of your cultural upbringing? Are you afraid? Do you seek to compete or collaborate? Does my success make you feel threatened or inspired? Do you value money and power or do you seek meaning and purpose.
Some people get hurt and turn it into more pain and suffering for others. They take the suffering they encountered and pass it on. Others, simply delude or distract themselves doing the best they can to ignore and deny the pain. And then there are those who decide to use the pain to learn and grow themselves as well as heal, teach and evolve others. The Next Level Human is the latter.
Next Level Humans don’t deny their pain. They don’t ignore it either. They choose to use it for good. They look for the lessons in it. They become emotional alchemists turning pain into purpose for themselves and team human.
How do you do that? How do you become a Next Level Human? By understanding something about where you come from.
The Cave Of Humanity
Imagine you are walking alone in the woods, and you come upon a cave. You peak inside. It is awe inspiring, one of the most beautiful things you have seen in your life. There is an otherworldly feeling to the place, a magical quality. The ceiling of the cave looks to be solid rock with three different types of stone competing for space. Each style of rock has its own quality and hue. There are periodic openings to the forest above. The sun spills through these gaps and projects the perfect light into every corner of this majestic place.
In the center of the cave there is a large pond. As you step into the cave to get a closer look, you notice myriad ripples radiating on the water surface almost like a light rain falling. On closer inspection you notice it’s not rain at all, but rather fragments of the rock face above breaking off and falling into the water. Each small pebble tumbles down at what looks like different speeds. Some dart down like bullets piercing the water. Others tumble awkwardly landing in heavy thuds. A few seem to linger and float taking on a cascading quality until gently kissing the water below.
As the rocks descend, they come alive with color. The sunlight intercepts their unique trajectories, ricocheting off them creating a reflective light show. To your eyes it looks like some weird mix of fireflies, rainbows, and shooting stars.
Then there is the sound. The meeting of liquid pond and solid stone generates a symphony of thuds, splashes, tinks, claps, hisses and dings. Your ears are greeted by ethereal harmonics that ping pong back and forth across the cave walls.
The three types of falling rocks each vary in their chemical composition. As a result, the rock face above glows in varying hues. You can see a toxic looking yellow with black flecks, a dull brown and a smooth granite with platinum glints.
That’s why the falling pebbles reflect light the way they do. It’s where the light show in the air is coming from. Their unique chemical compositions cause light to reflect at different angles and produce different colors. The bigger they are the lighter they catch. That’s why some seem to glow green as they fall, some look like they are burning and some sparkle. It’s why some seem to move slow and others so much faster.
It is also part of the sounds you are hearing. Hisses, gurgling & bubbling from water reacting with metal add to the colliding sounds of stone meeting liquid.
The water is alive with movement, reflecting light, absorbing and emitting sound and dancing to it all. Each type of stone brings a particular quality and energy to this environment.
What you don’t see and hear is what happens once those rocks begin to sink to the bottom of that pond. When they enter the lake, they influence how clear and clean it is. As they integrate with the water, they influence its nature, color and chemical composition. Some stones make the water more acid, slimy and toxic. Other stones filter and clean the water while imparting growth enhancing minerals. Some stones turn the water brown making it more thick, muddy and viscous.
If you stand in that cave for only a few minutes you will not see the cumulative effects but return 10 years later and you will understand which of these three types of stone exerted the most influence.
Now suppose you leave that cave and return a decade later. Now things are completely different. Perhaps this time, you would be met with a piercing odor that burns your lungs and feels unhealthy to breathe. Maybe you see a slimy green mud puddle of toxic sludge has replaced the pond from your memory.
It would be no surprise what happened would it? The toxic yellow and heavy brown elements of the stone ceiling started to dominate. The other stones exerted less influence.
The reverse could also be true. You could step foot into that wooded cavern and see its beauty had been magnified even more. Perhaps now there are birds and frogs delightfully adding to the music and a clean, pristine air dominates and revitalizes you with every breathe.
Again, it would be no surprise which types of stones were falling from that rocky sky dome.
Why am I talking about an imaginary mystical cavern and three different stones falling into a pond? I wanted to help you generate a strong mental image to anchor too. Because I want you to now consider that the birth of a human is like a stone being dislodged from the roof of that cave. Let’s call it “the cave of humanity.”
Imagine the chemical nature of those falling rocks and their interaction with the light, oxygen and sound waves before reaching the water below is like childhood. It’s analogous to your genetics, parental interactions, other kids, adverse events and all those early childhood exposures, good and bad, during those early years of growth. A stone approaching that water is like a child getting exposed to the world.
Research in childhood development shows we humans begin to become conscious at around two years old. Then we have to wait until we are 5 or 6 before our sense of self versus other is fully integrated.
It takes the end of adolescence, our early to mid-twenties, to completely assimilate who we are separate and apart from our friends, siblings, peers and parents. Our interaction with family, schoolmates, culture, stories, experiences, pain, hurt, suffering and the rest is like one of those stones interacting with and being intersected by the light, oxygen, sound waves and wind as it falls through the air.
We might think that positive experiences prepare us for a positive and productive entry into the sea of our lives, or that negative experiences, make that entry more difficult and trying. But that would be an over simplistic, culture-level way of looking at it.
The Next Level way of seeing it is that all those experiences are neither good nor bad. It’s what we make them mean and how we choose to use them that matter. To a Next Level Human the fault is in missing the opportunity to grow, master our unique expertise and contribute positively in a way only we can.
If we use what we are given to grow ourselves and others we are choosing the Next Level path. If we add nothing of value, or worse, choose to sicken the universal pool of knowledge with narcissism and greed, that is the only real “sin”
It’s during the childhood and teen years that we develop much of our discreet nature. This is why those stones reflect light the way they do. They are each unique. So are you. Your story is different. Your personality is singular. Your life circumstances are one-of-a-kind.
By the time you “hit the water,” you are tattooed with the ink of your suffering, your desires, your talents and skills, the way you see the world and the people who influenced you for better or worse. These five elements come together to form something only you possess. It is like a painting that has never been painted. It’s a spiritual fingerprint.
The 5Ps of purpose
Think of it as five Ps that impact the quality of your life: your People (the other humans who have hurt or helped you), your Passions (your varied & changing interests and what you desire and enjoy), your Powers (your talents and what you excel at), your Personality (how you think about, see and engage with the world. Your perceptions and perspectives) and most importantly your Pain (the hurt, suffering and anguish that has been yours alone to bear)
Your People and your Personality deserve special mention. These two elements are more under your control than you think, but often we assume we are at their mercy. You get to choose who you spend your time with. You have the ability to reconsider your perspective.
We are not islands unto ourselves. Whether we like it or not we are impacted by our social surroundings. We are like sponges, often soaking up the good or the bad that others emit. As children we may not be able to choose the people who influence us, but as adults we can.
Likewise, how you see the world can be altered. Children are not aware of the stories they have been told, stories they believed without questioning them. These include stories about others. Stories about yourself. How you see yourself and the space you occupy in the world. Are you capable? Are you weak? Are you worthy? Who told you these stories and did you believe them and internalize them? Are you aware how these stories shade everything about you?
Personality, because it encompasses your perceptions, may be the most important P. It makes a huge difference. Do you see life as happening to you, or do you see yourself as happening back to life? Are you a victim of your circumstances or a creator who is able to use the random, and sometimes cruel, nature of life to your advantage? Research hints that the number one determinant for success in life is your ability to turn fears, failures, setbacks and suffering into life lessons that fuel personal growth.
These five Ps (your people, powers, passion, personality and pain) are what you bring with you as you collide with the “pool of life.” These are the pieces of your own purpose-driven jigsaw puzzle. You get to decide how to assemble these pieces and what they will mean to you and the world you influence. How will you impact the pool of life?
You might think I am talking about Destiny; I am not. Destiny suggests something outside yourself. Fate suggest you will arrive somewhere without even trying. Life does not work that way. You are not living in a fairytale.
Think of the five Ps more like a car you have been given upon your graduation from high school. You have the vehicle, but you still have to fill it up, keep up with the maintenance, climb inside and decide where you will be going and what you will be doing.
That last part is where choice comes in. You ultimately have to decide what you will do with what you have been given. Some people call this “finding your why,” but that gets it all wrong. Your why is not something you stumble upon. It’s not something your family or social tribe can hand you either, although many will want to. This is something that must be chosen by you and then willfully created from that moment on. It’s a living breathing evolution and you must own it.
These five Ps are the building blocks of Purpose. You don’t discover your purpose all at once, you choose it and that decision triggers its evolution. It’s not destiny or fate. Your life path up until this point can certainly help with your decision. But in the end, you must choose how you will assemble and use your Pain, your Passions, your Powers, your People and your Personality. If you are in touch with your purpose, you will understand these different elements must be used and combined in a way that makes a difference only you can manifest.
When your stone strikes the pool of life it’s impact depends on what you choose to make your life mean; how you decide to matter. The fall from the ceiling to the pond is life before that choice. The journey from water surface as you sink to the lakebed below is the time you have left on this planet. Long after you have sunk to the bottom and your time is settled, your ripples will still be influencing the water above.
Will those ripples lift others up, inspire and heal? Or will your contribution generate negative waves of destruction that crash into others & sink their own quest for purpose? Will your contributions have a purifying effect that lasts long after your own journey has ended? Or will you muddy the waters adding nothing the world can use? Will you make it all about your needs, your pain and what matters only to you? Will your stone of life leave a slimy, toxic stench in its wake? Or will you leave behind pristine air and positive ions that charge all who come later?
You and you alone are responsible for that choice. You can use your time to seek power and status, or you can create a life of meaning and purpose for yourself and others. That choice, and the actions that follow, determines what type of human you are and what type of person you will become. A Next Level Human chooses to grow themselves and evolve the world in the positive ways only they can.
There has never been another human like you and there never ever will be again. You have a job to do. That job is your purpose. To a next level human, life is about what you can give to the world, not what you can take from it.