Deep Spirituality – Understanding the Apparent Contradictions of Life 1

In this post I am speculating about our life purposes based on extensive readings about the great beyond.  There is much evidence what this looks like from many sources of science and various spiritual traditions.  But it is a much more complex realm than we could ever imagine with our human minds.  What I offer here is merely my summarized take on it all.  If you read the previous posts you already know that I think we live in a simulated reality.  As such we are born into this life to experience it and learn.  We all like to think we have a mission to save the world, and that is a noble thing, but needing a ‘mission’ is an ego thing.  Don’t get me wrong, you may indeed end up in this lifetime being a great savior, but if that is your drive then you are living egoically.  Analyze your life and you will still see big buried personal issues you have not addressed.  We are not here to be life guards and to save everyone.  We are here to work on ourselves – nothing self-centered about that.   When you find that peaceful, compassionate, and Loving center within yourself, you will also radiate that out to others naturally.  You will also then recognize the illusion that is this world.  William Shakespeare seemed to understand this, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

When we go to see a play, where there is a good guy and bad guy playing on the stage – take Shakespeare’s Macbeth for instance – what do we do when the play is over and the actors take the final bow?  Do we cheer the actor who played McDuff and Boo at the actor who played MacBeth?  If they played their parts well, we would applaud both their performances – after all no one takes seriously that the two actors were really MacBeth and MacDuff, which were only the roles they played that time around.  In the next day’s stage performance, they might even switch roles to broaden their acting experience.   All those dichotomous experiences are just that, experiences.  There are no right or wrong choices – only choices made second by second everyday.  Some choices are mundane (like getting a coffee) while others may be life-changing (emigrating for instance).  But you must make choices.  To try and negate a choice is still to make a choice in itself.  You always make a choice, even if it is to stay in a rut rather than climb out – you choose the outcome you will accept and which you would rather avoid for whatever reason.

Why does it seem like the harsh ‘bad’ people get all the breaks while bad things happen to good people?  I often hear and read about what kind of God would allow war, famine, pestilence, and all the nasty things that life can throw at people.  If you only look at life from the one snapshot of the one life you are currently experiencing you miss ALL the other lifetimes a soul lives where karmic learning is taking place.  Karma is NOT comeuppance for deeds done in a past life, although what you did in some past life is the reason for the current lesson you may not be appreciating at this moment.  Like most of what we do in life, we assign dichotomous labels like Good-Bad, Right-Wrong, Fair-Unfair, Just-Unjust, Guilty-Innocent, etc… You do reap what you sow, but not in the way you think.  You cannot hurt a spirit.  You can’t really hurt a body since it is an illusion created by your consciousness, but when you are wrapped up in your illusion, that hurt feels oh so real doesn’t it?

When you stop complaining ‘WHY life is so awful to you,’ and change it to ‘WHAT am I meant to learn from this situation,’ everything starts to change.  You remove the victim mentality and become the observer of what is happening.  It may not be a pleasant experience you are going through, but you will see it through loving eyes and understand it from a more neutral perspective.  When Viktor Frankl was suffering through the Nazi concentration camps, he retained his humanity, and forgave his captors.  He understood he as only playing a part in that brutal scene of life and that the learning was tied to a greater understanding of himself as a spiritual being.  Imagine that you may have had several past lives as a brutal warrior in ancient empires waging war and killing hundreds of men, women and children of opposing empires.  Now consider you were born in Europe before the Second World War and found yourself in a concentration camp.  If you could see those past lives you might recognize the lesson you were now learning from the other perspective.  You wouldn’t judge it, but merely experience it.  Now I am NOT trying to say that we ought to accept such horror, indeed, I would advocate that we show compassion, Love and Understanding for those who would try and inflict such horror on others.  “Forgive them for they know not what they do” and then show them a more loving and compassionate way to live by example.  Apparently we cannot choose the situations we experience, for it seems we bring these lessons to ourselves from a soul level in order to learn!   But we can choose how we respond to life’s apparent hardships. Just like the anguish that MacBeth endured in the play, it was just that, a play in which the character had to express great harshness.  The problem with this stage metaphor is that in a play the script is written exactly as it should be spoken.  In this life illusion, we are expected to do IMPROV.  There is no set outcome, only what we ‘feel’ deep within us is the correct action that matches the Most Benevolent Outcome for all concerned.  For some that outcome may be a harsh lesson from our physical perspective.  Our emotions are a direct connection to our soul selves.  When we trust our intuition, we ‘know’ the correct action however absurd it may seem.  To Be Continued……..