There is absolutely nothing in life on earth that I don’t find wonderful and sacred, while I sometimes also find it excruciating. That’s primarily because I don’t consider myself a human being. I am a soul, as are we all, an expression of the essence of the universe, a fingerprint of the reality that is God, hence at one with God, engaged in a process of evolution over innumerable incarnations to the point of complete conscious realization of that oneness, a process that every soul travels. A human being is temporary; a soul is eternal.
So far as I can tell, the universe is designed to facilitate this process in every single scintilla of so-called worldly experience, from the profound harmony elicited by a once-in-a-childhood attunement with the Earth Mother’s depthless vibration of unconditional acceptance, to the nuclear rage triggered by a fly in our soup. There is nothing we encounter or experience that doesn’t, sooner or later, in this incarnation or a future one, serve our awakening to our True Self.
Realizing what inhibits enlightenment is just as valuable as realizing what nurtures it. Michael Jordan missed 50 percent of his shots. If you asked him what was more valuable to his evolution as a player, the shots he made or the shots he missed, my guess is he would say they were the same because his goal was to become great, and all shots were his teacher.
Every breath is the same to me, every experience, every person, every worldly-world event—whether born of ignorance or wisdom, for both are servants of our awakening. There are all sorts of experiences I would choose not to have, if such choice were an option, but I don’t dislike any experience that comes my way, for I consider it my sacred teacher, serving my awakening, even if, at the moment, I’m wracked with painful wonder at how I could have been so oblivious to the price of a certain choice..
Perhaps the most challenging obstacle to spiritual evolution is the belief that we are human beings rather than a soul inhabiting a human shell so that we might have experiences that, in their human challenge, serve our soul’s realization. For many of us, one almost insurmountable example of that challenge is that we find our human death real rather than an illusion, since our True Self, the soul, being eternal, never dies. That no one has ever died is one reason I find the spirit of the universe to be playful while also loving and deep.
Even though I’ve cracked the nut of knowing I’m not a human being, living that realization ever-increasingly demands the beautiful practice of being fanatically positive, focused on God Alone. It is a practice with seemingly endless opportunity for expansion as I grow my ability to see and hear and taste and touch literally everything as God: God as you, God as me, God as a peanut butter sandwich, God as Trump, God as Jesus, God as my shoes. Not to mention God as special friend, saint, teacher or guru whose wisdom and commitment to our awakening provides a unique gift of illumination on our journey to Oneness.
Amen!!