Admitting to ourselves we are powerless to make permanent changes in ourselves is the true beginning of rising above all that troubles us about ourselves; for any and all such unadorned confession is the invisible entrance into another, higher order of being that is transcendence itself.
Learn to Welcome the Strange and Wonderful Goodness in Challenging Conditions
There do come to us in our lives, for any one of innumerable possible reasons, certain conditions that challenge the very fabric of our being. Certainly, none of us would think to ourselves, “I wish upon myself these difficult circumstances,” and yet the truth is it is through and because of these same unwanted moments that we are granted the opportunity to meet parts of ourselves that would otherwise remain invisible for the extent of our physical existence.
There is no “magic” — no individual or so-called asserted “powers” — that can transform your life back to some preferred condition you may have enjoyed in the past… and this is as it should be. We are not intended to “return” to who we have been, but to use whatever happens to us as a point of inflection — a moment where forces meet to produce possibilities that exist in no other way for us in that same moment. What is created out of these encounters of what I call “the truthful kind” all depends upon our willingness to see the good in them.
Let me share a few ideas with you about this strange and wonderful kind of spiritual goodness that seems to arrive wrapped in a wrathful way.
1. It is good to know that nothing in this world — or that we can imagine — is permanent, for in this understanding we are liberated from attachments (to relationships, possessions, and of course, our bodies), which in turn frees us from false dependency with all of its attending fear.
2. It is good to discover that who we have always taken (thought) ourselves to be — the images, the imagined powers — is not who we really are, even if it comes at the cost of having to lose the same without knowing what will replace it. These kinds of discoveries open the door to a relationship with what is true and everlasting about our essential Self.
3. Nothing is more valuable than being handed a set of limitations that produce, by their very presence, the necessity of releasing ourselves from our own painful demands that life be and do as we insist. In this way, we are introduced to the possibility of meeting life without wanting anything imagined from it, which is the same as being in relationship with a life that has no limits because we haven’t created them through our unconscious desires.
There is an ancient truthful idea that says something like, “God never takes anything from us without giving something greater in return.” Our task… yours, mine, and every sincere aspirant to God’s life, is to prove this truth to ourselves, for by it, and through it, we are indeed set free.
Image courtesy of: Photo by Hasmik Ghazaryan Olson on Unsplash