by Marilyn Muir, LPMAFA
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Just about the time you think you are getting a handle on your spiritual development, the universe hands you a conundrum. This may be something you would like to avoid but cannot, something that offends your sensibilities but needs to be faced. If you feel confronted by such an issue or you find yourself wrestling with one, pick it up, look it over, and see what you can learn from it.
Examples of “offend your sensibilities” might be negative people or negative experience. We all know them, people who just cannot see the bright side in life, those who must rain on your parade, those who feel and act as if they are the only important element, bullies, anti-social or just plain mean individuals. History has a long list of “bad guys” and I am sure you have a few on your personal list. The dialogue usually sounds like “let me tell you about my….” spouse, in-law, boss, neighbor, child (fill in the blank) – we all have run into problem people.
There is one more people example I just cannot ignore, that from which legends of vampires stem. There are those people who drain your energy. Just being near them or listening to them on the phone leaves you exhausted, cranky and at times depressed. They pull you down. Whether they do it knowingly or unconsciously does not matter, because when you encounter them, they drain your energy. For me, they are psychic vampires. You do not avoid such people because you cannot avoid your spiritual lessons for very long. You must deal with all lessons the universe provides because they will be repeated as for long and as many times as necessary.
The same is true of negative circumstance such as crime, war or catastrophe, to name a few. It is important to remember that personal perspective plays an important role in these judgments. For example, in a war one side’s hero is the other side’s villain. Since we are here on Schoolhouse Earth to learn, to grow and develop ourselves, we form personal opinions or make personal judgments on the right or wrong of a person, an issue or an experience. Nowhere is there a document signed by the Almighty that says you are right all the time on every issue. Examples might help understand there is a dilemma inherent in both negative and positive experiences.
Imagine a scenario where you encounter a person who has wandered in from the wilderness, hungry, thirsty, exhausted and desperate. Your first impulse is to give them food, water, shelter and medical assistance. This is a good and kind impulse and the desperate person is quite grateful… until they realize that you have supplied them with something that offends their philosophy or deeply felt belief system. You would think they would be grateful just to survive, would you not? However, perhaps you have inadvertently compromised some really important issue and they, in their desperation, have morally “sinned” against a deeply ingrained belief. How will your kind gesture be viewed in this new light? You can see that even the intention and action of a good samaritan may sometimes go awry giving credence to the old saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
We learned a terrible lesson during World War II with the holocaust and the loss of millions of humans because an egomaniac thought he had the right to “do as he willed”. Even now, there are the nay-sayers and deniers of that awful period of human history. Perhaps we needed a really huge wake-up call and we did get one. Why? Because we needed to learn and evolve and the genocide of World War II was a really important lesson. Denial of what we experienced and learned would minimize or defeat that lesson. That would be a shame – millions of victims and the lesson remaining unlearned. However, as I mentioned in previous articles, the Universe has all the time it needs to teach us our lessons. The Universe just has to repeat those lessons that slip by our understanding. I shudder to think of that particular repeat lesson. Unfortunately, genocide does still occur in this world so we must still be learning that lesson.
As we grow and develop spiritually, we need to develop a broader view of life and living, one that allows for more than our own personal opinions, a more diverse view, and less judgment calls. We need to embrace the knowledge that the universe wastes nothing. Energy turns into matter and matter turns into energy; nothing is ever wasted. Such things are merely re-circulated as another form or experience.
If you believe in a single creative universal principal, whether that be a deity or a concept, then everything that exists lies within the body of that One, is formed from that One, cannot be taken from that One or lost to that One. That includes everything we like and everything we do not like, no favorites. It does not matter if our dilemma is people, circumstance, issue, or experience. All came from the One, all exists within the One, and no single thing can be separated from that Oneness. That is what at-one-ment really means and it is at-one-ment that we are spiritually seeking.
Everyone and everything are fragments of the Creative Principle behind the manifest universe, regardless of the label we use. All was conceived by that principle and developed from the Oneness that is the Creative Principle. Good, bad or indifferent it is all one thing. Why? Because there is no place where God is not. It cannot lose itself. It cannot find itself. It cannot waste or throw away a part of itself. Why would the One allow a fragment of itself to be lost, destroyed, or to become non-existent? That is simply not logical. I find it difficult to believe in a Deity or a Creative Cause that is frivolous, nasty or illogical in nature.
If that Deity were to throw a piece of itself away, where would it go? As I have said previously, there is no place where God is not. The supposedly thrown away piece would simply land somewhere else within Creation because there is no other place for it to land.
What we see is what we get, good, bad and indifferent, and that includes the unnamed but very well-known egomaniac I mentioned. That was hard for me to fathom initially, but I worked my way through it. Sometimes the spirit of the Creator that is inherent in every person and every experience is wearing a very good mask.
Of course I see people or experience that I do not like and I can be very vocal about it. But if I am a spiritually developing person, I must attempt to see beyond that impasse as soon as I am capable. I must remind myself that in all experience I am witnessing the Creative Principle in all Its manifestations, even the manifestations I do not like. I must seek to broaden my view and my perception. Do I do that perfectly every time? No. The Universe gives me all the time and all the lessons I need to grow and to enlarge my understanding. Do I want to learn the lesson once or multiple times? I prefer to work on it constructively and consciously whenever possible. I do realize that awareness is a tricky thing when we have strong opinions and reactions.
I am a work in progress. You are a work in progress. We encounter experience and we do our best to handle it; sometimes we do that well, sometimes we do not. But we always have the advantage of hindsight to mull over what we learned. The experience itself has its own value but there is also great value in pondering the meaning behind the experience. Our conclusion as to the experience and our ponderings are what we take forward as consciousness. As you work on your developing spirituality, remind yourself at pivotal moments: there is no place where God is not.
Published on EZine online April, 2010, republished with slight editing.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.