Month: March 2017

You exist. If you explore that sincerely enough, past all of your beliefs, you will become aware that your fundamental nature is pure, worthy, and good. You just are something that is, unto itself, wondrous!

When you as a conscious awareness decided to come into this experience of limitation, it did not fundamentally change what you are. You committed to being seemingly bound to having the human experience. Meanwhile then, within that experience, it was fully understood that you would make choices. It was known that you would have to make very difficult choices, and often those choices would be made under ignorance, fear, or duress. It was known that you might act out of selfishness or cause others pain. Even now then, everything you’ve ever done is understood. “All That Is” fully understands everything, and so the reasons for your making imperfect choices are always fully understood.

Does that mean you should be selfish or cause others pain? No, of course it doesn’t, not at all. You’ve come here to experientially grow so that in fact you can be more effectively loving, more selfless, more fearless, more powerful for the good. You’ve come here to actually experientially learn not just how to perform loving actions, but how to be more loving within a rich context. Selfish or fearful choices do not fulfill that purpose, are not in alignment with your true nature, and often lead to one eventually having to experience certain challenges so as to grow past that selfishness or fear.

But never-the-less, there is nothing you can truly do wrong. All of your choices, even the “sub-optimal” ones, are understood completely for what they are. Your fundamental nature cannot be less than wondrous, no matter what may happen in the play of life. And God always, always loves and completely accepts you with a profundity that is beyond imagining.

In Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations With God,” Neale is told this too. He responds by asking, “if there is no punishment, then what prevents people from doing bad things to each other?” And the response came, “do you need punishment to not do bad things to each other?” Perhaps many of us on Earth do currently need to believe in consequences to prevent us from harming others, because that is “where we actually are” in our own development.

And yet when we are ready, it can be profoundly meaningful to relinquish the fear of judgment and to embrace the unimaginably deep and forgiving love that exists for us! For when we know that love, we can act out of gratefulness, out of true deepest desire to do good, rather than out of fear of punishment. We can drop guilt and shame, and allow ourselves to shine bright, knowing that we are always completely loved and accepted- no matter what!

True personal growth is not done in the intellect, or through action itself. True personal growth is a change in one’s very being. While “right” ideas and actions do emerge from that, they are not growth in themselves.

It is the quality of our intent that must grow, not the correctness of our ideas. Like dream settings, ideas and environments change. What remains is us– the consciousness that experiences those things, and the quality of its ability to make choices from love rather than fear.

Too often we believe that we are growing when our ideas change, or when we do certain things, or when our circumstances change- when in fact what matters is when we change. The forms that we play with (ideas, sensations, objects, circumstances, beliefs, and even bodies) are temporary; but improving the quality of our intent itself is growth that endures beyond all of the form.

Thus rather than finding new ideas or simply performing some specific actions, we must strive to actually BE more loving! We must strive in every choice to accept personal responsibility, to face our fears, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and to put others before ourselves. If we truly pursue that every day, we will fulfill our purpose for being physical.

Imagine for a moment that you are absolutely free and absolutely powerful. Imagine that nothing can limit you, nothing is impossible, and nothing can thwart your every desire. Imagine you are everything, you and those that are of you are all that is. How would one, in such a state, truly create and expand? How would one in such a state be able to choose something even greater, be something even greater? If absolute freedom were already yours, how tantalizing would it be to have the choice to experience a true challenge, so that you could fully personally know unique contrast, deepen your experience, and in so doing, become even more? How exciting would it be to be able to experience a new level of limitation, that you could once again see how well you could exert your incredible powers of choice?

What would it be like to be so free, that you could choose to be constrained?

This is what we really are. We are really limitless, absolutely free beings. In absolute freedom, we have chosen to participate in a truly incredible experiment to push the very boundaries of freedom and expansion: we have chosen to forget what we truly are for a while, and be mortal beings on Earth.

From the perspective of man, the choice to be frail, challenged, powerless, and decaying can seem almost impossible to comprehend. But from the perspective of spirit, having the opportunity to actually experience those things, and actually impact others while they are on their own rich journeys, is an incredibly profound gift. How much greater of a gift could be given by the Creator to spirits who are already absolutely free than the ability to fully experience contrast, that they may in fact exercise their freedom even more, actually be more than they once were, and learn to express the LOVE that they really are in new and very real ways?

“Us versus them” thinking currently prevails in our society. Because of the physical rule-set of our reality, life on this planet evolved in a “kill or be killed” environment, and it was physically beneficial to ensure that one’s self and one’s group succeeded even at the expense of other individuals or groups. Our cultures enshrine the importance of supporting one’s group, whether it be a tribe, a sports team, a nation, or- especially- one’s family.

And yet, where we truly come from, we are all family. We are intrinsically connected to one another. That statement is not just a nice sounding platitude- it is a statement of actual fact. The spirit is fundamental. Spiritually, all of us are a part of one incredible whole. We are all not only connected- we are a part of one another!

This is true no matter what role we temporarily come and play on Earth. This is true of every single person we meet. The cashier behind the register at the grocery store, our best friend, the person collecting our trash, the worker in China who made our clothes, even the next door neighbor’s dog – we are a part of one another.

Thus we do not need to differentiate between “our people” and “other people.” It may have been natural to do so in the context of our long history on Earth, but it is not fundamental to what we are. Our true nature is one of love! In fact, we have come here to this place partly so that we can explore what that means and to learn to truly love everyone more fully, even within a rich and challenging context. That means learning to genuinely love and accept others even when they are not a part of our immediate group.

The next time you interact with someone that seems like a stranger to you, take a moment to be present with them, and try to peer into what they really are. Can you drop all of your preconceptions, all of your identity labels, and truly see them? Can you sense that you are indeed connected to them? Can you feel the wonderfulness of their unique presence? If you look close enough, past all the ideas of your human mind, you just may sense their brightness, and it will speak to something in you too. For none of us are truly separate from each other- we are all family!