This insight makes stress a little less terrifying. Since we can say that ‘after all it is a game that Nature plays with us to make us strong’, not only as an individual, (for an individual may break under the duress), but as a race. This brings us naturally, to the third level of understanding stress — the psychological one. At the psychological level, we may say that all stress is a challenge and an invitation. An invitation to assimilate all that we regard as not ourselves. We are, psychologically, as if closed, shut up in a small and narrow hole or prison of our own making. The bars of the prison are the so many conditions and conditionings we have put in between us and the delight that actually governs the world. We are as if, challenging the vast to enter into the little test-tube of our life. No wonder things crash and break to liberate us from the black-hole. And we call it stress!
All life is essentially one. To speak in terms of the latest ‘systems theory,‘ we may say that all living beings are open systems. That is why, living forms grow and evolve! There is a constant interchange of forces through sense and skin, through sight and sound, through thought and feeling and will. We are only one narrow centre through which the universal forces move. We have to learn, or rather we are led to identify with a whole range of forces of which we are hardly aware. All stress, becomes to this view, a stress of consciousness to grow and expand, to assimilate and integrate, to recover consciously once again the wholeness that always exists. In other words, psychologically all stress is a means to arrive at the perfection of oneness in each individual! It comes to widen our frame of reference in which we customarily move and habitually live. The wider the frame, the lesser the stress we perceive and experience.
A corollary to this would be that all stress is essentially liberative. It points towards and attempts to free us from a narrower mould. If the mould is too rigid, it sometimes does break under the duress. The consciousness imprisoned in such a small and rigid frame is released at the cost of the form itself. At other times, the consciousness escapes psychologically or widens, heightens and deepens its self-awareness and progresses therefore, in the same body as a result of stress!
In either case stress then becomes the stress of a new birth — a birth into a greater and larger state of consciousness; a birth into a greater freedom of the self and the spirit. We may also add that all illness then is an attempt of Nature to work out a greater equilibrium and perfection. All that resists and fails to respond falls ill. That is why illnesses increase during periods of great transition and social upheaval. Stones do not grow. They do not fall ill either! Living beings grow and the price they pay for life is disease and death. When we have learned to live and collaborate consciously with the evolving forces in Nature, then illness and death can disappear.
This of course is self-evident in the evolutionary chain. We see the fact that organisms evolve through a series of challenges.
The stress, as if, brought out from within them a greater potential, latent but unmanifested. The result is a new emergence, a new form, new faculties and a more powerful action. This aspect of stress as having a positive side is now being recognized the world over as ‘eustress’. It is one of the means to grow and develop (though neither the only nor the best one). We can then move away from the killer mask of death to an evolving force of love that heals the pain of separation in the gulfs of creation.
