Destiny Confronts us with Choice – choice creates destiny

There is no reason to feel robbed of choice by destiny, or to worry that the wrong choice will ruin our destiny. All choices accomplish our destiny. It is through the choices that we learn, and it is because of the ability to make choices that we come to this particular planet. It is our journey that sets up the situations in which we must make the choices and it is through making the choices that we reach our destiny.

One thing that we cannot deny is that there are many synchronicities in our lives. These synchronicities show us that there is a plan. There is destiny, which is a destination. However there are many ways to reach it. There are many rivers that empty into the same ocean. Those many rivers in our lives represent our choices. In every moment of our lives there are choices that we make, those choices determine the experiences that we will encounter on our way to our destination, but they do not change the destination.

Those synchronistic moments are destined points. Each path that we take, each choice that we make takes us on a journey towards our destination, however no one way is longer or shorter although some may be easier than others. This is where our free will comes in. We come here with certain karma and certain things that we must learn. We can learn them the hard way or we can learn them the easy way, each way represents a path that we take, but neither path changes the destination. If, for example one has to learn patience, one would be in such a hurry that corners would constantly be cut and experiences rushed through. One would be faced constantly with choices that would give the impression that there is always a way to cut corners and skip steps to get ahead. Each fork in the road would provide all that would be needed in order to take the easy way out. It would always be the most apparent option. That choice will always seem so tempting and so obvious.

Along that path if one takes the easy way there will always be traps, which will begin to appear as soon as one is too far in to turn back. Always ending up working twice as hard as would have been the case had the task been handled slowly and with patience from the beginning. One would notice at one point that this scenario exists and perhaps choose to do it the slow cautious way from the beginning, therefore changing the path from one that is difficult to one that is smooth. Thus now creating a path in which everything falls into place.

One may on the other hand continue choosing the apparent easy way believing that just changing one thing will make it right. However, each time there is one different thing that will go wrong because the destination is to learn patience. I always believed that I had to find the perfect job. I went from job to job never staying more than one year in any place. Each time I was disappointed to find that I was no further ahead than I was at the job before that one. Finally it dawned on me that it was not being in the right place that was the problem; not staying in one place long enough for growth to happen was my problem. When I committed to staying in the next place that I landed regardless of how much I wanted to move on, my life changed. This was a part of my process.

There are many lessons in our lives that we must learn and the paths that our lives take depend upon our learning those lessons. An easy life is not the birthright of the majority of souls here at this time.
We learn our lessons regardless of what choice we make. We teach what we are here to teach no matter what we do. We are each the student, the teacher, and the lesson. In spite of how we react to our lives on earth, our souls are learning. All of the lessons are predestined. It is through the soul’s journey that we meet each lesson. The journey is the lesson and each lesson is the adventure. We always get where we are supposed to go, even though many times it is not exactly where we planned to go. It is however exactly where we agreed to go before we incarnated.

The clock that we are on here is not a clock marked by seconds, minutes and hours; it is a clock marked by lessons, agreements and destiny. It does not matter how long it takes us to reach a certain point, all of the things that we consider wrong turns and dead ends are merely the places we had to go to get the tools and the emotional strength that we needed to move to the next destination.

There are special relationships that we are here to have. Most of them are not to be permanent, but all of them have a specific lesson within them for us to learn. We are never with the wrong person, each person allows us to perfect some part of ourselves. Each person in our lives reflects those things in us that we need to focus on. We come from one Source and we journey towards returning to that Source. While we are here on earth, we are learning that we are one. All of the souls that we meet, and all of the souls that inhabit the planet with us along with the ones who have left us here, are one.

People risk destroying themselves and their lives in order to “fix” their bodies to make them more attractive to others. They change their faces, blow up their lips, and vacuum out their stomachs to attract someone who will love them. But if they are attracted by the things that we do to change ourselves – it is the change and not us that matters to the other person. So the feeling of being unloved remains. If there is something about ourselves that we want to change for ourselves this is fine. Yet if we are changing our bodies in order to attract that special someone who will love us, we are missing the point. When we meet someone special we feel a sense of fate around the meeting and this is because it is a fated meeting. been a feeling of fatedness about the meeting. We can fix our bodies to attract other bodies, but it will never attract someone’s heart or soul. What I see around me are a million lonely Barbies looking for their Kens. When we work on the inside, on who we are, we will attract to us someone interested in who we are. That special someone will love us, that love will be love soul to soul. Even more importantly, that person is destined to be with us when we are ready, not ready on the outside but ready on the inside. There are many superficial experiences that we have and learn from. Yet what affects us on the inside, those things that touch our souls are the things that are in our destiny. We do not make them happen we can only grow to meet them, and make sure that we are prepared for them when we do.

Surviving a Crisis

The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.

Aristotle.

My son has a close friend TJ. I had noticed his father at different school functions. Jerry was blind and had one leg. His attitude was so completely at peace with his situation that I thought he must have spent most of his life this way. After all, how could anyone seem so happy unless he had had a lifetime to adjust to such tragic circumstances?

I learned that it had only happened a year and a half before. I was shocked that such relatively little time had passed and that everything was so normal. This caused me to look back over my life and the many crises and tragedies I myself have had to face and I found that the only thing I had to regret was the length of time I spent on self-pity. Regardless of what we go through, eventually, we must face that moment when it becomes necessary to evaluate the living of our lives and not our lives themselves. You see, we have no control over what happens to us, but we do have control over how we react, and how we react could possibly determine the quality of the rest of our lives. Although it may seem difficult to control a reaction, reaction is a function of the lower mind. It is a habit. I had my hair pulled when I was a child so as I grew, anytime someone reached their hand in a way that appeared, to me, to be coming towards my head, I would flinch and pull back. Once I became conscious of this reaction, I began to do it less and less, first intentionally, and later not reacting became a habit. It took time to build up our reactions and it will take time to change them, but they can be changed.

We are each being faced, right now, with some form of personal crisis, within a national crisis within a world crisis. At this time, as perhaps at no other, it would be difficult to find one individual on the planet who is not at this time dealing with a crisis. We, in this country, are dealing with the effects of the Iraq War, the destruction caused by the climate changes, and our evaporating economy, while at the same time every individual is dealing with some form of personal, political, financial, racial or religious crisis. So, it helps to know that we are not suffering alone but have actually joined the suffering of mankind.

Putting it in this perspective, we must rise above our personal situations and understand that this is a time of change in the universe. There have been unprecedented increases in the sunspot activity in recent months. The atmospheres of various planets including our own have been going through drastic changes. We have just entered a new millennium, but with all things being synchronistic, we can say that the entire universe is also entering a new era.

For change to occur there must first be a period of breakdown; logically, there cannot be a breakdown without chaos and crisis. That which is not built to move to the next level must be transformed. The beginning of the last millennium was dominated by the advent of Christianity. The first years of breakdown and realignment of previously held beliefs were difficult years. They were not easy years in which to be incarnated, yet many souls chose them for their growth.

I read a book, “Life before Life<!–[if supportFields]> XE “Life before Life” <![endif]–><!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>“, by Helen Wambach which is now out of print, in which she, during the course of a few years, regressed over one thousand people from all over the country, to the time before they were born. She asked each person to find out the answers to a list of questions, one of which was why they chose this time to be here. The overwhelming reason was that this is a time of so much change and chaos on one hand, and so much available spiritual knowledge on the other, that it offers each soul the rare opportunity in which to fit many lifetimes worth of growth.

When life doesn’t work the way that, we planned or hoped it would, we can’t sit around until we rot; feeling miserable because we were given lemons. We just have to make lemonade. Sure, it is never easy, but the history of the world and the history of our own lives tell us that this too shall pass. And when it does, it is important that we have not wasted this valuable time in self-pity. When God closes one door, He opens another. It may be a struggle at first to face a new door, but it is worth the effort. For every pain, and every heartache there is a seed of equivalent benefit. If we take this as an opportunity to move to the next level, we will find that many of us are being given an opportunity to recreate our lives in a way that we never before believed possible. For so many years now I have been living under an cloud of debt. In the past few years I have felt like the commercial where a couple want to move their house is hovering over their heads. It has been a constant panic, will we lose the house, the cars, and the insurance – or even, will we eat. I constantly fear that I will exhaust my reserves of faith if this goes on much longer. Then, as irony would have it, Easter Sunday my husband walked outside to find that both of our cars had been repossessed. I was initially distraught, I felt violated, lost, and how could we work without transportation? I just felt that this was the domino that would knock the whole building of dominos down. And it could have, no car – no work – no money – no home. But, a funny thing happened after the shock wore off – I felt just them most exhilarating sense of relief knowing two more payments that we could not afford to make were no longer hovering over our heads.

Just a few years before this, I was in the same position only this time I was renting and six months behind in my rent. I had this moment – you know – a movie moment when everything stops in mid-action, and I said to myself, ‘I have done all that I can do, I have tried everything that I can try, if we lose everything and end up in a shelter – it will be God’s will, and we will all learn what we arrived at this experience to learn and climb up from there.’ In that moment there was an energy shift in my life. A crisis can last ten years, or it can last ten minutes. It lasts as long as we remain in crisis mode and ends when we enter acceptance that what is – is, and move on to plan b – or at least to formulating a plan be. Anything that we do, that is not wallowing in the approaching trauma or existing trauma will shift the energy. I shifts from what was or will be lost – to what was or will be gained. Acceptance is the train out of suffering. It is the open door that allows new air to come in. Above all, acceptance allows us to realize that we are in good hands – always. And nothing happens that we did not choose before we came – and for the highest of reasons.

I asked for…

I asked for strength…. and was given difficulties to make me strong. I asked for wisdom…. and was given problems to solve. I asked for prosperity… and was given brain and brawn to work. I asked for courage… and was given danger to overcome. I asked for love… and was given troubled people to help. I asked for favors… and was given opportunities. I received nothing I wanted… I received everything I needed.

From “The Analects of Confucius” – a philosophical translation, by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont

IS FREE WILL AN ILLUSION?

One of the phrases that we hear and say a great deal in metaphysical circles in “This is all an illusion”. Although it sounds good, it is not something that we are able to really incorporate into our consciousness because it is so fundamentally opposed to our experience. And though we may be temporarily soothed by the idea of it, the feeling vanishes the moment we bump into a part of that illusion, like a wall, and get a concussion on another part of the illusion – our heads. For most of us the idea that our experience is “all an illusion” is filed away somewhere with God, another idea that, for most of us, is firmly implanted in our belief system but very much disconnected from the reality of our daily lives.

If this is an illusion, why does it hurt so much or feel so real? Why can’t we just affirm it away? In a movie, which is for all intents and purposes an illusion, when one of the characters – another illusion is shot by a bullet – another illusion, the character dies – another illusion. There are two layers here. There is the layer of the actors or the soul who is assuming the role of the character – the illusion who dies. Within the movie, nothing is an illusion. When the actor – the soul – steps out of the movie, or the life in our case, it was all an illusion. A good actor will feel the pain of the character; he will feel the joy of the character which is what makes his performance believable. A good actor is very sensitive, just as a soul is. When the actor leaves the role, he has to re-enter his own life – his own role in the greater movie that is life. This reorientation often takes time. When a soul leaves a life, that soul too has to re-enter its essence, after absorbing all of the experiences of the life that it has just left. A character in a movie or in a play follows a plot, acts or reacts in a way written by someone else. So, in order to react naturally the actor must inhabit the part. We souls inhabit our personalities and so we are able to act and react according to the character that we come to play.

An actor becomes the character, so convincingly. that we are able to anticipate what he will do or say next because we believe him. We may know that the actor is acting and that the words have been written by someone else, the cues given by someone else, yet we feel and experience what the characters are going through. Although the choices that each character is making have been predetermined by the writer, we know that those are the choices that this character would make. Even when the character surprises us, if the actor did his job and writer did his, we can review the movie and see how this unexpected action could have been predicted. This is free will. These characters are predictable because we understand how they are motivated. Yet, does our ability to predict their choices deny the freedom of their choices? No, they are free to choose. What is predetermined is the point from which they view the world at the time that God or the Universe places the choice on their path. How often do we say, “I did that based on what I knew then”, or “If I only knew then what I know now”, or, “The person I am today would never have done that”.

Imagine being in a room, facing a wall and from your position, you can see the wall in front of you and from your peripheral vision you can make out the walls on each side, right and left of your position. But from where you stand, there is no door. Now, the position that you are in places you on a wheel, like a clock gear, that will slowly turn you around. However, right now you only see walls. You are facing twelve o’clock. There is a door at the six o’clock position, but you won’t see it for six hours. Now a voice enters the room and says, “You are free to go”. Is it an illusion that you are free to go? No, there is a door. But from where you stand, there is none. In a story, the character has free will and, we can anticipate that characters actions. We have free will, and our choices are predetermined. They are predetermined because our visibility of available options is really limited to one, at the time that the Universe presents the choice. There may be ten puzzle pieces lined up before us to choose from, yet, the experiences, the beliefs, the impressions of the world that we have accumulated up to that moment sees only one perfect fit. Because there is only one, it is the one that our soul has chosen to best experience the lessons we need to learn.
We have to remember that we come here to learn and to grow. In order to do this, we have to set up a lesson plan.

Our lessons do not only come from where the choice leads us on our path, but also from which choice we make, and how we arrived at that choice. We are here to expand our view, and to learn to see from our hearts. Most actors take roles for a purpose. Many take roles which allow them to stretch, to grow. Free will is not an illusion, but in a way, the choices we make are. They are the lessons; they are the set-up for our growth. They create the plot within which the actor acts. As we learn from each choice, our view expands; our abilities grow until we are in tune with our hearts. When we are in tune with our hearts – we are in tune with our souls. When the soul has mastered the personality, its view is no longer limited. It then sees through the eyes of the creator of the path. The dreamer has mastered the dream, so it is no longer a dream; the actor now writes his part, so he is no longer limited by the existing plot. Illusion vanished and all that is left is one Will in tune with All-That-Is. To enlighten is to light the path so one may see the way. It really has never been a question of whether or not we have free will, the question is, how much we really see of what our free will is acting upon. This is where growth lies.