Helping?
Circumstances will always humble you, life will make you feel foolish and suffering will always find you, this is not a bug of life but a feature that we do not fully understand yet. Thankfully, we are not meant to face these things alone, they are the stimulus that encourages us to grow both internally and towards each other, hardship is the mud that glue communities together, that is one of the purposes of suffering to give us a common enemy and problems to work together to solve. It is also there to develop our character, suffering is the winter that hardens us for the spring ahead, whilst flowers need no instructions to grow towards the sun, we on the other hand are more complicated creatures. We get to chose how we react to suffering and we are capable of more than reaction. We have greater capacity, more freedom of action and as such we are able to delay gratification, we are able to choose to suffer for a greater purpose and deny our natural tendencies, we are able to sacrifice immediate pleasure to gain a stronger and better position later, though not everyone makes that choice, mostly because they do not make a choice at all.
Even when well used, our capacity for sacrifice in not without its problem, the line between what we give up and the gain that we want is not always a straight line, we can be deceived. We are also capable of tangling ourselves in confusion, we are able to believe in illusions as well as truths, the difference between them can be obscure, at least from some life situations or thought traps that we happen to find ourselves in at this moment. We are able to believe in the illusion of self, achievement and status, that things and money can buy you happiness rather than accepting them as merely being incredibly useful tools for the avoidance of negatives in our lives.
Whilst we should be in no way minimised how useful money can be, it is not a genie in a bottle that grants us our every wish. Many of the greatest things in life can not be brought, they have to earned and worked for in their own right. There is no amount of money that gives you the ability to read, you have to learn it, in fact most of us made a five year learn it for us and we should be grateful to that child who did the learning for us. It is sobering to ask what are we learn today for our future self which matches the efforts of that five year old version of us, and if not why are we less giving to our future than a five year old.
Though even if we try to ignore our future self, we are fortunate that life itself is such a relentless teacher, it refuses to give up on us, it will teach us the most important lessons whether we want them or not. If you have not learnt to accept suffering from the point of view of the observer, it will find a thousand different ways to infiltrate your mind. If you have pride it will find a way to humble you, if you are attached to achievement it will keep giving you more ways to achieve that never quite satisfy you and if you are reactive it will find every possible way to annoy you. The common thread being that it will force you to grow as a being of consciousness, whether you want to or not, and if you do not, it will keep on increasing your suffering.
And if there was no way out of this trap, you would have to come to the conclusion that life is but a cruel joke, and that the gods are truly angry at us, and have conjured up the most cruel form of torture. However there is a hidden kindness, a lesson to be learnt that liberates us and makes the journey worthwhile, and it is available to us at any moment that we start allowing the resistance in our lives to start guiding us, instead of us repeatedly fighting against it with the same painful result. Acceptance is the key, fully accepting the moment, your life situation, what resistance you are experiencing now, accepting without expectation or reaction, accepting suffering with the same grace and ease that you accept joy and most of all accepting not just that you do not have to do so on your own but that is fundamentally impossible to do on your own, that you need help.
You do not have to wait for your breaking point to turn somewhere for help, you just have to at some point accept that you can not do it on your own. Which can be difficult if we are suffering from our illusions, you may feel that you are strong now and have been for most of your life, but that is an illusion that is only true for a temporary period, weakness is a fundamental part of life, you could not even appreciate the moments of our live where we are strong without the periods of weakness that we all past through not just at the beginning and ends of our lives, it is hidden under the surface throughout our lives. Live has patience, it teaches you how to be completely helpless at the start, you can learn the lesson then, but if you do not, it will wait to teach you it again later at the end, you need help, we all do and that help is always available to us, we just have to ask and accept that we need it. Some may call it God, source or collective consciousness, but it is without doubt external to us, and it is provable only by self-experience, you have to experience it by accepting your fundamental weakness and asking for help, through prayer or meditation.
There is a underlying arrogance and fundamental mistake in the statement that “I can do and achieve anything I put my mind to”, it is not to say we should not take full responsibility for our lives, actions and who we are, the nature of our character. We should do everything that we can, when we decide something is important, that is worth pursuing a goal and we should give ourselves every opportunity to do so, that is not to say that we should not be humble and recognise that alone we fail, that there is not a God-given purpose that is ours alone to fulfil. We are the servants of greater consciousness, whilst also being an indivisible part of a greater oneness and when we try to take on burdens greater ourselves we will be crushed by them, we are not Hercules who carries the entire world on his back, we are the ones being carried and all we can do is lighten the load by coming into alignment with our nature and common purpose.
It is in the acceptance that we are merely a small part in greater whole, and by being part of something larger we are able to carry the greatest weight, the weaker we are the easier it is for the greater whole to flow through us. When we are not a source of resistance to the universe manifesting a better reality for all of us, when we do not try to take ownership of ideas and actions that help the world, we are getting out the way of those actions taking place. When we stop trying to pretend it is all us, we are able to come into alignment with unlimited power and intention, the ability to change reality and change the story of the world around us.
And the power of acceptance is available to you at any moment through the simple act of asking for help, not asking for things, money, someone else to take on the responsibility of the task that is in front of you or simply passing work on, saying someone really ought to do something about this and then doing nothing in the hope that the Angels will pick up the slack. If there is a job in front of you that needs doing there is no reason or excuse in the world for you not to do it. The help you are asking for is to be provided with the energy and resources to do the task in front of you, to be fully aligned with the purpose of the task and to be able to give it your full attention and awareness. You are asking the universe to help me help us to help everyone.
And without hesitation I will say that I need all the help in the world, so if you want to help me help us to help everyone, please do contact me with advice, comments, ideas, questions, basic misunderstanding of grammar, projects that excite you, because I think that we all need all the help in the world as well, I hope by helping me I end up helping you and we all end up helping everyone, and thank you in advance.
