Excerpt - Shadow: Your Life Is Perfect by Shaman Ross Bishop

Your Life Is Perfect

By Ross Bishop

I promise you there will never be a moment
when you look back at life and say,
"That was silly."
You will say,
"That was love seeking to know itself."
Emmanuel{1}

It may be hard to believe, but your life is perfect. {2} Your life - the people in it and the events that occur - is an exquisitely structured process designed to move you toward Mastery. Perfection is not, as you might have hoped, like a placid, calm and serene pond where only gentle breezes dance across the glassy surface. That is ultimate perfection. It is a wonderful and most desirable goal, but the achievement of that placid, calm existence is not a calm and peaceful process. By its very nature, change is disturbing and unsettling. From God's point of view, the process of perfecting creates opportunities for us to learn and grow. And that means that there will be waves on the pond.

You might not always agree in the moment, but over time you will come to see your life as a succession of perfectly crafted challenges to those places where you do not move energy easily. The trick is to remain free of the emotional entanglements that catch you in the circumstances of the moment and not miss the larger learning opportunities. Some people's ponds are always in turmoil, and although they are presented with opportunity after opportunity to learn, they are so caught up in the tumult that the lessons elude them. They lose sight of the larger agenda. God's view is of the long term; on the growth of the soul through lifetime after lifetime of experience.

The principle of perfection holds that our lives are exactly as they need to be. As Emmanuel points out, "Who you are is a necessary step to being who you will be. . .."{3} That is not always clear to us because we are in the pond, trying to stay afloat. Once you raise your view up above the waves, the larger picture becomes clear. In each moment the Universal School presents us with exactly what we need to move toward Mastery. The lessons are exquisitely crafted and perfect. We are never given more than we can handle, and we are always presented with the things we are ready to learn, although it does not always feel that way.{4} As Winston Churchill said, "I am always willing to learn. I do not always like being taught." Since the universe has a compassionate interest in our growth, it simply provides us opportunity after opportunity to learn. The choice is always to release the attachment to fear and move to the realm of the higher self, in other words, to shift perspective. Thomas Merton wrote:

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love.{5}

Traditional science holds that we are dropped here randomly, like dice out of God's great gambling tumbler. According to science, life and its events are random occurrences, the result of chance interactions. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a plan for each of us, for humanity and for the planet as well. Obscured from view by necessity, that plan will become more apparent as we move into the early years of the 21st century.

THE COSMIC BICYCLE

An interesting analogy might be to consider that the Creator wants you to learn to ride the bicycle. You can read all the theory books about bicycles and bicycle riding, but at some point fear must be faced head-on and the task confronted. Since you do not know how to ride, you are going to have to "learn." And as with any learning experience, a certain amount of failure is necessary to the achievement of Mastery. When you swerve left when you should have swerved right you will probably fall, and hopefully, learn. And that is the challenge. If you stay "stuck" because you have made a mistake and fallen, and decide that as a result, you are an inadequate being, you inhibit your natural ability to learn.

Failure is one place we get caught in the difference between God's perspective and our own. God sees life as a place for learning, that is why he created it. Learning anything - walking, talking, riding a bicycle and especially living, requires learning. Learning, in turn, demands failure. Learning also requires the willingness to fail. I call this "smart failure" because you learn from it. When you first learned to walk you were down a good deal more than you were up. When encouraged and supported, you learned - learned from what? Your "failures" and your "successes," of course. Eventually you developed the skills necessary for walking, but in all likelihood, you learned a great deal more from your failures. Learning comes from imperfection, which is the human condition. Imperfection creates the conditions, i.e., the opportunities, for learning. There is an old saw that goes "Good judgment comes from experience, which comes from bad judgment." As Emmanuel says, "Do not weep for the limitations that you see existing in your world . . . where would there be an opportunity to learn, if not in a world of imperfection?"{6}

If you had been condemned and criticized every time you fell over, you would have not only made less progress, but you would have had a terrible experience. You would have felt badly about yourself, and your desire to explore new and unfamiliar realms would have been quashed. This creates "dumb failure" because it significantly restricts one's ability to grow. Incidentally, it is even worse to have no one there at all as you attempt to learn. Condemnation is actually easier to deal with than abandonment. The task for our caretakers is to encourage us to learn and to see to it that our failures do not harm us. It is their job to make learning safe and rewarding. It is also their job to help us understand what failure is about, and how to use it. This kind of guidance helps us to approach life fearlessly so that we do not contract when faced with unfamiliar circumstances. It also helps us to accept failure when it comes. And, it will come. Unfortunately, we do not prepare parents for their job. No one taught them either. There are many parenting skills that could be taught. It is unfortunate that we do not do so.

Learning to approach life fearlessly is the secret to creativity. Risk and failure are essential parts of the creative process. Charles Kettering the former Chairman of General Motors and a successful creator in his own right, said this about failure:

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a new employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

JUDGEMENT

Being imperfect does not mean that we are just not good enough, that we have not made enough effort or that we are not ready for the higher path. We may not have dedicated ourselves to our inner development, thereby creating lives of bumps and potholes, but the universe does not condemn us for our imperfections, it welcomes them. They are the fertile ground in which it will sow the seeds of change. It has been said thousands of times, but needs repeating that "God does not judge." God is trying to help us learn to walk. He knows it is a difficult process. After all, he created it. That is why he continues to give us opportunity after opportunity to learn. He constantly encourages us not only to walk, but to run and eventually, to fly.

The Old Testament and the old Christian or Judaic image of an angry or vengeful God sitting in judgment of his subjects was a terrible misrepresentation and manipulation of the truth. The men who wrote the Old Testament only saw the darkness, but they did not, perhaps could not, see the larger picture. This dark view of God was perpetuated by societies and religions that ruled through fear and intimidation. Christ taught that God is a God of love, not one of judgment. It was because he taught God's love that he threatened the Pharisee's power and was crucified.

It is man who has made God in man's image. We project our anger, frustration and pain onto God and assume that he will act toward us as we do toward our fellows and toward him. God does not have our anger. He simply gives us opportunities to learn and grow. There is never judgment., just another opportunity to learn if needed. Yes, people suffer and yes, there is pain, and it always feels unfair, but if you look beyond the immediate, there is also always an opportunity to learn.