Are we victims?
As a result of our illusionary separation from our physical world, events seem to happen to us.
The prevalence and apparent unfairness of pain, suffering, and evil acts, can reinforce a mind-set of life in a world gone mad, largely determined by people who are morally, ethically, and ecologically out of control. With this mind-set it is difficult to value our own consciousness, much less advance our own greater awareness and spirituality.
(From My Joint Mind:) There are many unpleasant aspects of our reality. These exist as consequential by-products of the countless choices made with free will in dualistic creation, not necessarily confined to Earth. Lives in the 20th and 21st centuries will experience cancer, automobile accidents, shootings. We will experience earthquakes, floods, tornados and hurricanes. We will bring into reality for ourselves experiences of pain and suffering.
(I believe I’ve been shot in a prison camp. I believe I’ve drowned at sea. I believe I’ve died 8 years ago in a fall in the Grand Canyon.)
We manifest these experiences to and for ourselves in order to form ourselves through our choices, to be unique, to be more and more of everything that we are inherently capable of being. We are placed into space time to make ourselves within particular time frames with their unique characteristics, both positive and negative. We manifest our selected paths to ourselves to understand and to learn how to be better creators.
In short, we experience pain and suffering because it’s part of reality on Earth in the time frame we have chosen to live in. There is no life lived without challenges.
This does not imply predetermination that precludes free will, or that an individual arrives on Earth destined to suffer or to create suffering in a particular way. The specifics associated with each person’s suffering lies within them, and trying to judge that externally will be inaccurate at best. Our choices about our own attitude can create more suffering, or can help dissipate it.
Rita said, “It is clear enough now! If 3D is to shape a soul, and the shaping is to be done by the presentation of opportunities to see one’s own characteristics as if externally seen, what would be the point of constricting the choices?…So, what I called a vector is established by the nature and purpose of your non-3D component – which, remember, includes you and all your strands and all the other “individuals” your strands connect you to, in a more active and equal relationship than you experience…Nevertheless, it is a fact that nothing happens to people without their consent.”
(John:) Given our complicity in creating our own reality, discussed in the previous posting, “Making Our Own Reality”, and the nature of polarities in our physical existence, does that change the impression that we reside in an environment where an impersonal, uncaring and unfair universe randomly causes things to happen to us? Does this help us understand “There are no accidents” and “All is Well, All is Always Well”?
Nevertheless, we experience some extreme polarities, and they are real even if we are not victims.
(Seth:) “You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences. You cannot say, “The poor are poor simply because they chose poverty, and therefore there is no need for me to help them.” This attitude can easily draw poverty to you in the next experience.” Seth Speaks
(My Joint Mind:) We are here to make ourselves and contribute to the changing of our greater being. We are here to open new avenues for creation. We are here to support others doing the same.
Only we can change our own mind-set, but in doing so, we impact all that we are connected to, including strands formed in earth time prior to us and strands formed in earth time after us, and all that they are connected to, which is everything.
The individual minds who are becoming enlightened are often invisible to the action, the rhetoric, the politics and the headlines, but they are “changing the world” from the inside out, which is the same way it’s constructed.
(From Frank’s posting on Hemingway just after the Paris disaster
F: I keep saying, we don’t have to keep descending into this labyrinth of fears and hatreds; we can still have our Star Trek future.
EH: Of course you can, but it gets created in increments, not in one fell swoop, imposed by The Federation. And it begins where all action begins.
F: In the human heart.
EH: Well, in individual awareness, carried like candles in the dark, seemingly unconnected and seemingly fragile and helpless. But it is only the disregarded that has the ability to overcome what looks overwhelmingly physically present.
Via John
This is an excellent post John thank you, and most of it makes perfect sense from the perspectives we deal in.
Yet, there is one area that I find very difficult to digest…where creation fits in to mass events like Paris where people get swept up and what role subconscious beliefs play when we are not aware of our Self and finally which part of us is writing the script that is not, as you say, predetermined yet is it?
If you drown at sea which you is choosing that experience in 3D? Do you know him and his purpose?
Perhaps this is why yogis talk about experience as grist for the mill. When you are connected to your greater self you do have more conscious choices available. However, when you are not aware or in close contact, aren’t you kidding yourself to say you choose, but rather your soul is choosing?
“Nevertheless, it is a fact that nothing happens to people without their consent.”
Say for example, all the babies being born now with microenchephalites due to the zika virus. Who or what aspect is consenting here? I guess this can be an interesting experience for a soul, but for a human it can be hellish.
I fear that this can look like one’s Soul is sadistic or at least beyond our comprehension to take on these ordeals for the sake of experience. I guess one just has to accept it goes with the territory and we are part of a huge play we are and are not producing?. Just mulling over a few areas of where we are versus where we are headed. thanks again.
Louisa, mulling over is good and I thank you for doing so, because if there were easy paths to THE “truth”, I haven’t found them yet. This represents a temporary place for me to stand on, and I am hopeful that it will lead eventually to even greater understanding.
I believe the drowning because of a very vivid dream I had in which I knew what was coming was necessary; but I do not know specific purpose in that case. It is my belief that there are as many purposes as there are souls (here I am using “soul” as the entity being formed, and “greater being” as the entity doing the forming/creating).
I have gained insight about my own personal “unpleasant” experiences, and they had to do with opening an alternate path or direction for me.
My confusion is reduced when I am able to stop thinking of myself as separate from my greater being. We simply are the same being. So it is me, all parts of me, making these choices, but I also am forming an independent perspective out of myself and want the experiences and reaction choices to be “pure”. One part of me is not imposing events onto another part of me.
Also, I ask myself, how could I ever be whole, if I never experienced unpleasantness? Duality has to exist to create anything and maintain balance.
I believe you can learn for yourself your own purposes for “participating” in unpleasant experiences, but you will not be able to understand or put meaning to the plight of others, such as the babies.
John
“Only we can change our own mind-set, but in doing so, we impact all that we are connected to.” Mulling this over it feels both alarming, thinking about the consequences of my own internal choices, and also comforting, to know that they matter.
That’s life. Alarming and comforting.
Thanks John, Rita, and all. Something came my way only a couple hours ago that seems apropos:
Carlos Castaneda, wrting in his Magical Passes: The Practical Wisdom of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico: One of the most annoying feelings I ever felt was caused by the fact that don Juan Matus, although he could have been my grandfather, was infinitely younger than I. In contrast, I was stiff, opinionated, repetitious. I was senile. He, on the other hand, was fresh, inventive, agile, resourceful. In short, he possessed something which, although I was young, I did not: youth. He delighted in telling me repeatedly that young age was not youth, and that youth was in no way a deterrent to senility. He pointed out that if I watched my fellow men carefully and dispassionately, I would be able to corroborate that by the time they reached twenty years of age, they were already senile, repeating themselves inanely. “How could it be, don Juan,” I asked, “That you could be younger than I?” “I have vanquished my mind,” he said, opening his eyes wide to denote bewilderment. “I don’t have a mind to tell me that it is time to be old. I don’t honor agreements in which I didn’t participate. Remember this: It is not just a slogan for sorcerers to say that they do not honor agreements in which they did not participate. To be plagued by old age is one such agreement.” … On one level, I repudiated with all my might the nonsense don Juan was verbalizing; on another level I could not fail to notice how accurate his remarks were. Don Juan was old, and yet he wasn’t old at all. He was ages younger than I. He was free of encumbering thoughts and habit patterns. He was roaming around in incredible worlds. He was free, while I was imprisoned in heavy thought patterns and habits, by petty and futile considerations about myself, which I felt on that occasion, for the first time ever, weren’t even mine.
Earlier I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism: “Whereof one canot speak, thereof one must be silent”
Thanks Don.
Remarkable how the serendipity works in these days. It is some books by C.Castaneda in my home likewise.
I have received a book by J. Krishnamurti here the other day, titled “Total Freedom” – the Essential Krishnamurti.
Of course I had heard about him before, but never have read any books about him at all.
And my eyes fell upon this:
“What is the good of learning if in the process of living we are destroying ourselves?
“As we are having series of devastating wars, one right after another, there is obviously something radically wrong with the way we bring up our children. I think most of us are aware of this, but we do not know how to deal with it.
“Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a fundamental change in ourselves. The individual is of first importance, not the system; and as long as the individual does not understand the total process of himself, no system, whether of the left or of the right, can bring order and peace to the world.
“Without understanding the whole complex being of man, mere reformation will bring about only the confusing demand for further reforms. There is no end to reform; and there is no fundamental solution along these lines.
“Authority, as “the one who knows,” has no place in learning. The educator and the student are both learning through their special relationship with each other, but this does not mean that the educator disregards the orderliness of thought. Instead the educator and the student sharing the freedom of thoughts between them, following the same line. And both learning from each others.
“The fullest development of every individual creates a society of equals.”
Okay, here again it is stressing the importance of “self-insight.”
Best wishes from Inger Lise on a rainy Sunday.
Don and Inger,
Thank you for bringing these timely thoughts. It reminds me that what we are learning may be new to us, but it’s been said before many times in many ways.
John
Yes, thank you John, I agree !
Such as the one reading by Edgar Cayce: “Know Thyself to be Yourself yet One with the Whole.”
But it is obvious any biblical scriptures have fallen on stone-ground throughout the centuries, and nowadays nobody listens to the old-fashioned stuff.
It is very scientific likewise (atoms & Molecules, the building of formations of cells in the universe), because it is all about electrical currents and wavelengths (the vibratory scales…some say it is like notes making music).
I recall that Edgar Cayce once said God is electricity as an analogy, but not in the term we are used to thinking about it of course.
Well, the question is – hmm, which wavelength each of us feeling attracted to be with at any time obviously – or, which Mind-Set.
Bliss & Blessings (a choice of Mind), and smiles, Inger Lise.
P.S. This morning woke up with Norwegian Fairy tales in my head. My late dad was an excellent storyteller about the living nature about us. My childhood was but one long Fairy tale, but I am not quite sure if it was at all very good for a child to believe the whole world was a fairytale ? As soon as you become a teenager everybody is laughing at you and calling you NAIVE and dumb.
And soon enough I learned to shut my mouth.
Well, we are glad you have learned to open it again!