"And then, somehow, it's Wednesday..." is what I thought to myself when I realized the Monday email that I send out weekly to my email list still wasn't sent.
My next thought was, "Oh, I can use this as a perfect example of the practical application of this spiritual teaching that I am a lifetime student of, the Science of Mind."
Off I went writing this week's email.
"Blah blah blah supposed to go out Monday. Blah blah blah it didn't. Blah blah blah life happened." -SCREECH- Crap! I just did that thing!! That thing that so many of us do when we want to be spiritual... but not really. I USED JARGON!! "...life happened." Aaaagghhh! What does it even mean...?
"I don't even know what I mean. How are they supposed to know what I mean. I can't send this out," I thought.
It is absolutely true to say that life happened this week... but when is it not? It would be silly to think that there are times when life isn't happening. And yet, most of us know what is meant when someone says "life happened," and usually this is in reference to a series of events that are perceived as negative and somehow out of our control. It's a bit of a mouthful. It might just be easier to say that "life happened." The crazy thing is the events this week that caused my tardiness weren't even things I would categorize as negative. It was just regular life. And that's when it hit! Damn, there are still times when I separate spiritual parts of my life from nonspiritual parts. Nice little categories: studying, spiritual; baseball, not spiritual. To separate the purposeful aspects of life from the "life happens" parts of life is to infer that there are parts of life that are somehow separate from everything else and in some way not working in our favor. This is when we turn to what we know; to truth. We live in a creative universe, not a destructive one. Everything must be working towards creation. We have freedom of choice (free will) within this creation, yet no matter what we create the end result is always towards more creation. In other words, we have the freedom to screw things up for ourselves, or at least create a situation that appears to us individually all screwed up; at the end, we are still faced with the summation of our choice(s) smacking into the laws of the universe resulting in the sometimes painful task of course correcting ourselves back towards creation. Other times, it is a gentle nudge or even a pat on the back.
That all sounds great right now, but that is not what I was thinking a little while ago. However, it is this exact process I just mentioned that allowed me to work through my experience to find how even my ego that wanted me to take the easy way out and come up with a single-cheeked-excuse is still working in my favor. That jargon slipped in because I didn't want anyone, including the self-reflective aware version of me, to know what I really meant.
Needless to say, the email got rewritten, but on some level I did know what I meant. Taking the time to stop and think about what I was saying I realized, I meant I can't send out this Monday email on a Wednesday without a really good excuse why I am sending this out on a Wednesday, because everyone will see that I'm a hack. And that was pretty much the full thought as it came. Thank God our brains are as slick as they are, that I didn't have to face that uncomfortable truth (read sarcasm). Well, not quite. In truth, this is the practical application of any authentic spiritual path. Yes, our minds are slick. The mechanisms that my mind has put in place throughout my life to protect me says, "Hey, look over here," without bothering to include the thing it wants to distract me from: the uncomfortable truth! We all have this, and our minds are so good at protecting us that most of us remain completely unaware that it is even happening. That function of the mind is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. That is its job. The rub is, we often out grow the need for the protection without even realizing the mechanism is in place.
With a basic awareness of the existence of these defensive mechanism we can easily see how each one of them - the ego things that so often get such a bad rap - is actually working in our favor. As we mentioned before, we live in a creative universe. That means that everything thought, action, reaction, belief, and ego defensive mechanism is working in our favor. This may seem counter intuitive, yet every single time we are faced with a reaction to something we are being given the opportunity to redirect ourselves back towards the direction of creation. Our reactions, while initially protecting us from danger, are now the exact signals we require to point us back the right way. In other words, the ego mechanisms that we developed from a very young age, that form our personalities and character traits, are also going to create the exact situation that we require to turn out deepest wounds into our greatest attributes. The tools of adaptation that you learned as children become a comprehensive set of skills that uniquely qualify you as an adult to pursue the passion that has been growing in you your whole life.
My desire to live authentically has driven me to strive to look past jargon and say what I mean and mean what I say; to do what I say I am going to do. This week I did not get to do what I said I would. I would like to own that, correct it as soon as possible and hopefully demonstrate how that desire continues to drive me to look deeper and continue doing that work.
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