How do you relate to difficult circumstances? Humanly, most of us default to feelings of sadness, anger, anxiety, and fear. What is the relationship between the events and a person's experience? Our ordinary surface interpretation would say that the events caused our experience, wouldn't we? It seems relational, logical, and symbiotic. This makes no allowance for any alternate causation. But the fact is that we never directly experience the world around us. All we ever know are the contents of consciousness, the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that appear in our mind.
It is so easy to turn outer events and circumstances into stories with meaning for us, that then takes the place of the "facts." So what can we do when life gets really hard, and there is no ready fix in sight? How can we manage our inner world so that we are not victims of an awful story?
Our forgetful self, the part of us that feels cut off from God, tells stories that bear witness to lack, personal limitations, and isolation in our own private hell, facing seemingly insurmountable challenges of life. In this story, we are victims of the world. Events and others are seen as against us. Life is a battleground. We feel like strangers in a strange land.
Wisdom calls us to mindfully re-examine the stories we have been telling and calls us to reconcile what has appeared, with the Truth. It is more than getting the facts straight to decide if a story is worth repeating. It is the context in which we remember the story, the macro perspective that can give transcendent purpose to the events in our lives. When the story we tell is life-affirming, rife with hope, meaning, possibility, and connection, its re-telling can liberate us from our suffering.
This story was alive and well at the time of Jesus' ministry. He would frequently remind the people that there was another viewpoint worth considering. Repeatedly Jesus said, "You have heard it said ___(conventional wisdom of the time) but I say to you___(The greater truth) He invited the forgetful people of his time, which is equally applicable to us today, to see from an enlightened perspective.
Jesus modeled the dual nature of being as he fully embraced his humanity, and fully expressed his Spirit. Such an inclusive perspective encapsulates the parallel purpose as described by every spiritual master; being in the world, present to our physicality, human needs, honoring our embodiment, people, circumstances, and conditions, while always seeking to realize, experience, and express the Greater I, that I am (we are). It is the path of being fully human and fully divine, walking in partnership, in which the human stuff is a vehicle through which the Divine is expressed.
As a master teacher of Life, Jesus was aware of the human condition and was compassionate to those who suffered. His ministry constituted both human perception and spiritual vision. He had a personal, transformative relationship with God. He awakened to discover an indwelling God, that good is everywhere present, that the Spirit of the living God indwells everybody, and there is a power in us that overcomes anything. The only truthful story going on is that Spirit is seeking to reveal itself; that our souls are here to heal and grow. Every other story is just a human interpretation of a sacred event.
May we know the deeper Truth that is ever-present, and openly available to be our sanctuary in every moment no matter the appearances in our lives.
Peace and blessings,
Larry
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