There is a reason for suffering on this planet (I wish I could look you in the eyes when I tell you this, because it is beautiful for me to see your reaction when this sinks in, but as you are not likely someone I shall have the opportunity to tell about this In Person while watching the intensity in your eyes, still I trust you will allow yourself to feel your real emotions when you read this post, because as you read it you will realize this is not something I'm coming up with and you're going along with; This is something you are remembering. It's coming back to you! Right now! Hallelujia!) and it is this: There is something about inescapable pain that changes your soul in a way that NOTHING else can. You know I'm right because you have felt real, intense, inescapable pain. Even if your own life were ostensibly "easy-peasy" (and no-one's truly is) well there is still an inescapable, COLOSSAL lahar of need constantly threatening to overtake you. If you don't protect yourself then your bleeding heart is bound to "give everything away" to quote someone I saw on YouTube. It's like how even though you shouldn't swim up to someone who is drowning because they will push down on you in their panic to push themselves upward, still few of us, I think, could endure watching someone drown without trying to do something about it. It's why there are so many multiple drownings. So instead of "trying to save everyone" sometimes the best you can do is not need to be rescued yourself. Sometimes we can't even manage that. We gotta budget our resources. That doesn't make us bad. You do what you can about what you can, and you recognize when there is nothing you can do, and you let it go. We can honor the pain and sacrifice of everyone else's Lives by proceeding to be as bravely loving and honest as we can, and by being grateful for the inescapable sorrows that are in our path for us to grow from. Long term endurance of internal agony is the only thing that could possibly motivate us to GROW! To escape the confines of comfort. It's easy to fully and unreservedly Love another Celestial Being that will never be capable of harming another Conciousness. Once we understand that assaulting anyone is an affront to all. If we had chosen to stay comfortable then we would never have reshaped and reformed ourselves over and over as we learned very hard won-life lessons from every suffering we ever endured. Suffering is what your Soul needs to embrace in order to accomplish the big, main goal, the whole enchilada, which is: To learn how to Love each other even when our self-preservation reflexes tell us to shut out Love forever. We have to learn how to Love through and past the most heinous of offenses. Do not interpret this to mean we should not take safety measures when encountering a fellow Soul traveller who has malice or mischief in mind. Your Soul gains nothing by your Earth self "self-harming," by the way. No points for masochism. I mean, there are no demerits for it, either. You do you, Boo. But it's the "I'm powerless to do anything to relieve myself of this excruciating pain that is consuming my every nanometer" type of pain that really gets us there, to that place where we are finally willing to change; willing to let go of the versions of ourselves that we worked so hard to build into a quasi-believable, semi-coherent narrative. Those versions of ourselves that we cling to with our every fiber of strength until we are able to cling no longer. When we finally accept that we are ultimately: utterly and thoroughly powerless... over everything that truly matters, and that we can never do anything that will guarantee that we won't have to feel pain (on the contrary!) Once we've got all that going on and yet we persist at being brave enough to love despite it all, knowing it will hurt! Well, that's when we have truly learned how to live. That's when we have shed that pesky desire we humans are afflicted with to be all-powerful again, like we kinda sorta remember, way back in the cobwebby part of our Inifinite Knowledge Catalog, inside an locked computer for which we currently misremember the password. We're not sure how to accomplish our Purpose here. It's trail by Braille, my friend! We are brave souls who KNEW what we were in for and chose to do it, anyway. Only when we accept the impalatable, then have we achieved the impossible: WE HAVE IMPROVED on GOD! TA-DA! You don't believe me.
How could it possible for YOU or I to improve on Absolute and Total Perfection?
Here's how: God is "All of Creation, Everything That Is, Was, Or Ever Will Be" right? Sure! But don't forget, God is also (and far more importantly, let's be clear): LOVE. The Pure, Unadulturated Good Stuff.
So what's better than Love?
Stronger Love. Concentrated Love!
But what, pray tell, transforms Standard Issue Love into the Deluxe variety?
Having learned how to Love through the deepest pain is what'll do it for you, in my experience.
"Harden not your hearts" is one way I've heard it said.
So what is the reason some people seem to have lives saturated with pain and loss? It's because those Souls are interested in getting back to God's Sweet Embrace as quickly as possible. They want to get all their Soul Growth done yesterday. Not everyone enjoys video games. To them the illusion of separation from Creation is simply unbearable, so they Rip Off The Band Aid, so to speak. Someone who has a mild, pleasant life of relative privilege (no one totally escapes pain; it dishonors anyone to dismiss the pain they suffer exactly as potently as we do.) People who glide through life here with everything handed to them are exactly no better nor worse than any of the rest of us. None of us will escape one particle of what we signed up to experience. On the contrary, those of us who are too used to being In Control of everything might have a harder time giving up the struggle to maintian that narrative of Control than someone else, who, say, might appear to approach it more gracefully, with genuine satisfaction. How do they do that? How can I do that? How can I cajole my higher self into providing me a bit more explicit guidance with regards to what exactly it is that we have to do to move past this illusion of separation from Source? Perhaps we simply must outgrow this sandbox. By finally learning that Loving everyone as bravely and honestly as we would wish to be Loved ourselves with absolutely no preference for our own comfort over anyone else's because when one of us suffers, we all do. We are all Soulmates. Anyone who influences your life in any way is a Soulmate. Some closer than others. No one in the multiplex of universes can hurt your Soul in any manner. We wear our temporary human Earth Dwelling constumes explicitly for the opportunity to undergo truly meaningful growth. People who are real stinkers to one another on Earth may have simply chosen to take a much much longer path (a more circuitous route if you will) toward reunion with Our Creator. Which is fine. There are no mistakes. Everything is a Life Experience and we came here to Experience Life. (Which often kinda sucks, if you hadn't noticed.) It would be really swell if we would all learn to be nice to each other but it could take millennia or more to get there, and in the meantime we will continue to learn. For as long as it takes. We WILL experience and ultimately accept the inescapable pains of life before any of us will move on. Most of us have plenty of opportunities and practice developing this elusive virtue "Acceptance." Because there is JUST SO MUCH PAIN to go around. Oof. Before we forget the topic of real Earthly stinkers... If we use our Free Will to behave in life like some kind of megalomaniacs or allow ourselves to become torturers or exploiters, or who pathologically love money more than treasuring and sharing the beautiful world we inhabit and each other; basically if we act like any of those, well then we shall simply return over and over in endless incarnations until we finally are willing to accept our powerlessness, and LOVE in defiance of it. Or if we're clinging too tightly to the traumatic indoctrinations some we may have been raised with, then after our Life Review, once we are finally REALLY aware of the true nature and extent of pain we served up upon others, some of us may even despair that we led our lives so devastatingly poorly, that we were somehow so bad in our own mind (not in the judgement of some kind of sky daddy, by the way) that when we pass away, we could end up in H-E-Double Hockey Sticks. But that's only possible because our minds were conditioned to thinking that "people who are bad go to Hell" And then we get so caught up in feeling guilty that when we have our life review and truly grok the nature of the suffering we put others through (because we will experience it, first hand, in all its despicable detail) and we will feel so terrible, so embarrassed about our misdeeds in life, that we sentence ourselves to punishment. We genuinely have revealed to us the depth of absolute devotion that we have to ALL of our Soulmates, and when we understand the pain we caused others then we cast ourselves into Hell. Well, if that's what happens to you, then the good news is that it won't last forever because you are simply not allowed to give up on your Soul Contract. There is nothing you can do to get out of it. So we can wallow in Hell for as long as we want, but whenour Soul is ready to rejoin the hustle and bustle of producing the Soul Growth we came here for, then it's back into action with another incarnation. Doggedly determined to do better. So it's in our control. We can Love each other unconditionally, or we can get recycled until we do. Getting reincarnated isn't a punishment, I want to be clear. I used to tell my foster kid that life can be like crossing the Grand Canyon, and I was hoping to do everything I could to make that crossing as easy as possible for not only that kid, but everyone I know. So I work to build a bridge across that I can offer to anyone who wants to make use of it! Yay! Horray!
But I also emphasized to this brave young Soul that it is every person's individual choice whether to go for the route that seems steady and safe, or for the route that involves climbing down, hand over hand with no safety net and no ropes. There's nothing wrong with either approach. In one approach you get to the other side quickly and can go about your other business.
While in the other approach your hands will get cut up, your muscles will cramp and your body will lockup in the fierce cold of a deserty Winter wind, but you will spend some real, quality time deeply understanding yourself, seeing some unbelievable views that there are no other ways to attain.
Anyway, back to Separation from Source: that's just an illusion! How could we possibly be separate from our God? We are MADE OF HIM. (Or her. It's silly to personify All of Time and Space and Matter and Anti-Matter, and Dark Matter and Everything We Don't Know About Yet, but there's a lot that's silly about how our brains work! We're best off giggling to ourselves about our silliness, rather than fight about whose silliness is better or worse than whose, right?)
We are NOT separate from God.
But the illusion sure is persistent, isn't it?
Well, it wouldn't be a very good play if the set design and all the other actors were unbelievable, thusly preventing you from "losing yourself" in it.
So, instead of pretending for each other we decided to give ourselves amnesia when we came down here! The growth we can attain here is abundantly "worth it." We never would have cleaved off the Main Chunk of God if it weren't.
Though indubitably difficult we never could have inspired ourselves to CHANGE so meaningfully, so profoundly, as when we embrace our inescapable pain, welcome it into our lives, and thank it for the role it is playing in our most vital Personal development.
But don't go jumping off garage roofs to find some pain to be morose about. That's just jackassery, not growth-inducing. Unless maybe it is. I only shattered (I'm being a little dramatic) my collarbone by losing control skateboarding down a ramp that was beyond my ability levels in the Local Skate Park on night during an impromptu rave that sprung up in that very Skatepark's mid-shallow pool area. Is it jackassery if I only did it once?
What do we all want more than anything else, ever, ever, ever if we could have ANYTHING?
We want to be lifted up and held aloft by GOD and see him look proudly at our beaming faces and hear Him say "You are Perfect. You are my Favorite. You did a Great Job in Life."
Because what is our deepest fear?
Well, I'd wager YOUR deepest fear is the same as mine: that I have taken this beautiful, precious, perfect gift of a life, this immeasurably valuable and pure and rare and irreplaceable unique, Concentrated Essence Universal Love and I've ruined it. That I've sullied it. That everyone else has taken their gorgeous, iridescent, radiant souls and created masterpieces out of their lives, while I'm stuck there, just pretending to have Faith that everything will be okay, but secretly terrified that I didn't do anything right.
Well, fortunately whenever we're brave enough we can let go of that deepest fear!
We knew we had to make ourselves experience Genuine Powerlessness in order to experience The True E-Ticket Ride! So we made our commitments to the Roles we agreed to play here. The inevitabilty of ourselves Experiencing and Inflicting pain on others during our Earthly existence is simply the cost of the Ticket. We negotiated those agreements ahead of time. It's all play-acting here in a Sandbox where it just feels SO REAL. But there is with no exception, not one single exception, NOTHING that that can happen to your Soul during life on Earth that can tarnish or diminish your Perfect Magnificence. The only changes to a Soul that are possible are growth and improvement, but those do co-occur alongside the inescapable pain they bravely pledged themselves to endure to make themselves uncomfortable enough to WANT to grow and change.
Guys there is so much more, but it's late and Self Care dictates that I prioritize my sleep. Failing to achieve adequate sleep is a powerful trigger of mania or hypomania, so it's important to my overall stability to go to sleep now. But don't worry; I'm not going anywhere.
Pardon all typos. I'm doing my own editing as we go and we all know how well THAT works out. I'll do sneaky edits if any of the typos are genuinely distracting or if I find something is being widely misinterpreted or whatever, then I might edit this stuff. But don't worry; everything on the internet is on the Wayback Machine these days, so there's always all kinds of backup copies! Yay!
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