TRIALS 1

p.260-262

OK,  we again dealing with one of those “create your own reality” things. This chapter continually reminds us that we create our own trials. ARRRRRRGH!

I don’t like that. I would much rather blame fate, God, the devil. It seems so much easier not to be responsible.

There are a few points here I think would be worth exploring as we delve into this chapter. The first principle is IT IS OUR SOUL THAT IS CREATING and the soul only creates in order to grow. We might not be consciously aware of this principle all the time and it might not appeal to our emotions, and we are certainly not going to understand it all the time either.

The simplistic metaphor I use is this: Imagine that before you take on a body, your soul, which is in line with Spirit, creates an agenda or curriculum which will guide it (and all other beings as well) in letting go of separateness and moving more and more in alignment with Oneness. So there are goals to be met and lessons to be learned on Planet Earth. How these goals are reached and how these lessons are presented are not set in stone, so the soul will seek out ways and means to get the job done. All of this is well beyond the comprehension of our intellect, and also well beyond our sense of earthly fairness.

So let me share one of my life experiences. Looking back, part of may path was to develop alcoholism—and RECOVERY. Just looking at myself as an individual here, I can see that this process of addiction and recovery has been and continues to be a huge blessing. In essence, this process has been a continual part of my spiritual awakening. So there is an obvious individual learning here, but our teaching here goes way beyond the individual. How many people contributed to this recovery? How many generations of people who are touched by so many others have been a part of this healing? 

Do you get a sense of how mysterious this can get? 

Or take something present. Pretty soon I am going to be scheduled for knee surgery. Sure there are many lessons for me here, some of which are: I am not my body; take better care of myself; be patient; learn how to let people help me(as I hobble around for a while), etc. But at is only one small pice of this whole e deal. Think of how many other people are involved with this whole process, doctors, nurses, rehab specialists, other hospital staff, insurance companies, people who make knee replacements, people who make rehab equipment—all these people have families, they will all be making the effort to go to work each day, and each one of them has their own “stuff” to take care of. So even though I think I am the central character of my little play, thousands of people are learning their own lessons from this one little piece of  life. 

Even though I agree, I am the one creating the ways and means of my learning; it is never really only an individual  event.

Another piece to all of this is a maxim from ACIM: “YOU CAN EITHER LEARN FROM PAIN OR FROM JOY.”

None of us would choose to learn from pain deliberately. Sometimes, however, we are unaware or reluctant to accept and work with what is right in front of us. 

Let us remember this-- our soul has only One purpose, and that is to drop all illusions of separateness, and it will be forever insistent in its quest. So when we refuse or ignore a lesson in our path, it will come back again, perhaps more insistent than it was before. The process is neither a curse nor a blessing, it is just the way of things. For instance if I do not learn long division (or whatever they are teaching these days) in the third grade, as I progress in school it is going to become more and more difficult to “fake it,” and I am going to run into more and more difficulty with math until I finally take the plunge and learn it, but learn it I will, because it is necessary.

I recall Ram Dass was ranting and raving about how unfair life was, and how if only the universe could be run his way how wonderful everything could be, and he was confronted by one of us teachers who said, “Ram Dass, you are in school. When are you just going to decide to take the curriculum! (instead of fighting it, ignoring it, or continuing to let your ego try to compose it?)

“What a trial really is is a set of circumstances that has been designed to light you up in order for you to dismantle the behaviors that created it to begin with. So if you have a certain kind of crisis in your life, you can put money on the fact that it may have been created by you, at a higher level, to move you beyond those issues that originally created it. We will tell you that when these things happen, your journey has an opportunity to take a jump-start. It really is like you can take a big leap forward.”

“So suddenly you are faced in consciousness with a situation that you would fear, and you can go into fear, and you can go into victimhood, or you can go into anger, or you can go into anything, but that’s actually not going to sort you through the next stage of the requirement for your growth.”

Be at peace, and may all beings be at peace.