Life Is Like A Bowl Of Cherries

by May Hart, guest writer

Cherries are seductive, juicy, and deliciously sweet. How can we not become enraptured with the flesh of this fruit? For making jam, I recently learned that there is a painstaking process of removing the pit/pip from each cherry. Otherwise, you might bite into a piece of your morning toast and jam and wind up with a hefty dentist bill. Picture three giant bowls of cherries and you need to squeeze the pit/pip out of each cherry. When you squeeze one it squirts red juice onto the nearest obstruction. It is a delightfully messy and deliriously long process.

While partaking in some cherry pitting in Asturias, Spain, I began to make a connection between cherry pitting and the process of “self”-awareness. I have been learning about the nature of the human+Being while living on this farm. Human+Beings are a divine connection between a body/human and a soul/Being. The fleshy body is what remains after the soul/Being departs upon death of the human. One of the great mysteries of life is: What happens to a soul/Being after death of the human?Cherry pitting can give us some insight into this phenomenon; not just into the death of a human, but insight into the death of our identification with the “self”. The human+Being that we see with our eyes is like the cherry fruit. The cherry fruit is whole, it is a combination of flesh and cherry pit/pip. When we think of cherries we often think of the sweet, juicy flesh and all of the desserts, juices, and jams we can make with it. We often forget about the pit/pip. The pit/pip is the treasure box of knowledge about the cherry tree. One pit/pip can grow a whole tree, which gives millions more fruits with pits/pips that can grow more trees. The pit/pip represents the eternity of the cherry tree, and we discard it! We forget about it! When we see the cherry we don’t see the pip, as it is hidden from view, but it is there inside it, just like the Being is unseen inside the human.

Likewise, we see the fleshy human body and we become confused and think that it is the whole human+Being. We become so identified with our bodies and the story of the “self” that we obsess about ageing, sex, how we appear to others, being “some-body”, and our illnesses and injuries. We forget about the soul/Being, which makes us who we really are, and, more importantly, connects us to the Great Spirit/God/ the Oneness.
The soul/Being lives on after the human dies. Identifying with the human means that we live most of our lives not knowing or understanding who we really are as Beings. Pitting cherries is like the process of discovering our soul/Being. We piece together our Being one pit/pip at a time, like finding little gold coins until it makes up an overflowing box of treasure. Truth leads us back Home; back to our souls/Beings and back to God, Who is a spirit-Being, not human.

We add up each Truth we find until we start to understand the bigger picture. How do we know when we have found a Truth? It resonates with our whole Being and we know it to be True. For example: “Love conquers fear” and “We are stronger together than separate”. We find these Truths, add them up, and eventually…we discover the Truth that we are not our bodies/humans, we are not the story of our “selves”, and that God exists.

The marathon of pitting thousands of cherries and the red, messy juice that squirts everywhere speaks to the process of discovering Truth. It takes a lot of hard work, concentration, focusing, patience, determination and stamina; a lot of trial and error, to minimize the mess we make getting to it. The juice that is created after separating the pit/pip from the flesh is so utterly sweet, it is like an elixir. The cherry elixir, accumulated drip by drip, is a reward for the great effort of removing each pit/pip. Like the truth is an elixir for our Being and finding out who we REALLY are – Spirit-Beings, not clumsy, smelly, selfish humans.

When we begin the process of discovering our soul/Being, we simultaneously begin to let go of the “self”. We realise that we are not our human or our human’s story. It is painful but ultimately rewarding. As we let go of attachment to our selfish desires, agendas, addictions, material possessions, and stories, we make room for divine Love to enter our Being. Letting go of attachment includes observing the mind (which is rooted in, and needs separating from the human “self”) through meditation and distinguishing the human’s thoughts from the Being’s thoughts and then letting the human selfish thoughts go, dismissing them. We can then make room for God in our lives. When we discover the Truth of who we are, souls/Beings within a human body, we can begin to align our lives with God our Maker, our Guide, and our Friend. In exchange for “self”-sacrifice, the elixir is the gift of an eternal Life connected with God.

King of kings’ Bible – Genesis 2:7 And the “I AM” God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became alive and was given a soul [spirit Being] (human+being).

King of kings’ Bible – Surah (The Holy Koran) 15:28-29 Behold! Thy Lord said to the (fallen) angels: “I am about to create man, from sounding clay, from mud moulded into shape; when I have fashioned him (in due proportion) and breathed into him of My spirit, fall ye down into submission inside him.”

The shortlink to this article is https://wp.me/p2TF2i-XN