by Ross Bishop
In Part I we looked at our worth from the human perspective. Things look a great deal different if you consider what’s going on from God’s point of view.
This will be hard for some of you to hear, but everyone gets the life they need in order to advance their spiritual development. If you didn’t have a great deal of work to do, you could choose a life of minimal struggle. Others needed to do more work, so they chose lives that offered more conflict. And then there are those who, for whatever reason, chose to eat the whole whale in one sitting.
And how does our spiritual development advance? Through the resolution of conflict. So, all that struggling we do is purposeful, but not for the reasons we usually think. Consider for a moment what conflict is. When you are at peace, there are no struggles. You deal with things as they come along. You can even get angry, but it’s honest anger – “I love you enough to tell you that you hurt me.” When we create conflict and struggle, it is because our beliefs (fears) set us up in opposition to Universal Truth. We react from fear rather than our natural compassion.
The Universe says “Love one another.” “Your fear says, ‘I don’t like his politics. I think I will shun him.” And that creates conflict and tension, which are “bad,” except that your withholding is the very catalyst that will eventually drive you to give up your beliefs, surrender your fears, accept Universal Truth and move closer to harmony – regardless of his politics!
It is through the resolution of conflict that we release our beliefs and grow spiritually. And spiritual growth is what we are here for! Yes it’s a pain in the butt! As the Buddha said, “Life is pain.” And we often pay one hell of a price during the process as we cling to our fears and beliefs (we can be pretty stubborn – and persistence is a wonderful human quality when used for the “right” reasons).
Let’s take a couple of other examples. Let’s say you and your partner are about to have a disagreement. Now, if you are at peace and holding center, you can hear him out and search for resolution – even if one of you is completely off base. But, if your ego is threatened, you will retreat into defensiveness, argue, blame, shame – you know the routine. The thing is that your reaction really has little to do with the situation at hand, it is an expression of the fears that come from your unresolved childhood wounding.
As a second example, let’s say that you have caused someone else emotional pain. The conflict you feel will be from your conscience – your inner sense of right and wrong. You may have even been right, but the way you went about it was hurtful. Whenever you think of them, you feel badly.
Now in both examples, one of two things is going to happen. Either you will realize the error of your ways, move to the center, find your natural compassion and find resolution, or you will retreat back into your cave of defensiveness, stuff your feelings, create stress with possible physical consequences and in general be miserable. What makes this so interesting is that eventually you’ll get sick and tired of doing that, realize the error of your ways, move to the center and find resolution. No matter where you go, the only way out is through your compassion. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY!
Remember that earthly existence is really a closed bubble. When you leave, the only thing that you will take with you will be your spiritual development and your love. Everything else – all the stuff we struggle about will remain here. That’s why, 2,500 years ago Lao Tsu taught:
Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
You can postpone the inevitable, and make the journey far more difficult than you need to, but eventually The Universe will win. The “game” is set up that way. You are enrolled in a school where everything ends up being irrelevant except for your love and the development of your soul.
You can try to game the system – people pretend to be more spiritual than they really are all the time, but it never works. They eventually crash and burn. Think for a moment about doing something totally out of character, not just a fantasy mind you, but something totally alien to your true self. You can’t do it. Soldiers who try end up suffering from PTSD.
OK, so here are your options: Find compassion, move to a peaceful life and live in harmony with the rest of the universe. Or, hang on to your fears and beliefs, struggle, create stress and possibly disease for yourself, come to a crisis, eventually surrender, find compassion, move to a peaceful life and live in harmony with the rest of the universe, just as you would have done in the first instance, but with a lot more trouble and stress.
The choice is yours.
copyright©Blue Lotus Press 2019
