Enlightenment – we have sought it forever! So, the “sweetness and light” brigade would have you believe that life is about lessons, Karma and ascension. We’ll it’s not! Life has no meaning or purpose other than to experience itself. It simply is. We, or our souls, reside in the realm of the absolute. In the realm of the absolute, there is only one thing: Love. Not the love that we refer to on planet earth. Our “love” is too complex and has too many variables. There is the love we have for a pet, or a mother or father, or daughter and son, or our spouse or nature. The love in the realm of the absolute is truly unconditional. IT HAS NO CONDITION. It has no ego and therefore will not judge right from wrong or white from black. Unconditional love has no ego and, therefore, no need. It simply exists. And since absolute and unconditional love is all that resides in the realm of the absolute, it has nothing against which to measure itself. So how does it know itself if it has no way of measuring itself? It does not.
Enlightenment and Love:
All souls emerge from the realm of the absolute and will return to the absolute. No soul can be lost, destroyed or “sold to the devil.” Imagine that the realm of the absolute is an endless ocean and each soul that chooses to incarnate is merely a drop from that ocean, returning to that ocean at the end of its journey – the supply of souls is never ending.
So we, as pure consciousness residing in the realm of the absolute, decided to create a place where we could experience that which we are not: Fear. And we, collectively with the creative force that we call by many different names, created a realm of the physical or earth. Earth is governed by fear and its primary fear is fear of death, so all emotions go under those two headings: Love and Fear. All other emotions form part of those two emotions. For example, under the heading of love, we have emotions like joy, compassion, humility, gratitude, laughter, etc. Under The heading of fear, we have emotions like hatred, judgment, criticism, hopelessness, etc.
We co-created the realm of the physical. All of us, together, who wanted to know who we truly are, co-created this planet called earth and earth is not for sissies. We set it up so we could experience the extremes of who we are not. We set it up so we could experience the hatred and the wars and the pain and heartache. For it is only during these extremes that we actively seek to return to our true selves. It is only when we are truly challenged that we seek a better way.
Most of us, who are at a stage where we can see the futility of violence and conflict, are at the end of our journey – not the beginning. It is only when we are on our way back to the realm of the absolute that we truly understand that there is a better way. And because we understand that we can live without creating so much pain and hardship, we learn to have compassion and develop a “live-and-let-live” attitude. But there are those who are only at the start of their journey; they have only just left the realm of the absolute and are only starting their quest to find out who they are not. Just as one cannot expect a grade two pupil to understand grade twelve calculus, so one cannot expect an individual who is at the beginning of their journey on planet earth to understand why we need to find peaceful means to settle our differences. Therefore, it is appropriate that when we are only at the beginning of our journey, we perpetrate some heinous acts. We were all once in this place of complete pain and utter hatred when compassion was still a concept that we did not really understand.
Spiritual Teachers
Many spiritual teachers will have us understand that we need to “raise the consciousness” of the planet and unless we reach a higher level of “vibration,” we will be left behind in some cosmic soup of nothingness. We are pushed to gain “enlightenment” – whatever that may be. I think we have just reached a stage where we have changed the vocabulary. We have taken old, dogmatic, religious concepts and given them new words without really gaining true understanding. We have taken concepts like heaven and hell and given them new words. We now call them ascension and karma, but the concepts are still the same. Karma implies that you will be punished; it may not happen right away, but it will happen. And ascension demands that we achieve a certain state of consciousness before we experience bliss. Is that not the same as heaven and hell? So we missed the point – again. So many masters have taught us that mastery is accepting that which we cannot change and asked us to love this planet and its people just the way it is. It is perfect in every moment – just the way it is. “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.”
Those who we now call “old souls” are under the impression that we need to change the focus of the planet, that we need it to reach a space of enlightenment. It merely means that they have almost completed their journey on earth and are preparing to go back to the realm of the absolute. They have come full circle from the realm of pure, unconditional love, to fear, judgment, hatred, violence, murder, rape, theft and back again, on their way to pure unconditional love. Yet they have lost sight of the fact that unconditional love has no requirement.
Having experienced the opposite of love and having lived many, many lifetimes, they are done with planet earth and perhaps ready to move on, to another planet that we also co-created, to live in peace and harmony and joy and to have those enlightened experiences they seek. But this is not the purpose of planet earth. It was created for us to experience fear and all its ramifications. Therefore, is it fair to expect the consciousness of planet earth to change and become more enlightened, simply because we have reached the end of our personal journey? I would say not. Let’s leave the planet and its consciousness just the way it is, so others may also come here and experience who they are not. Allow them the grace to reach the end of their journey in their own time – irrespective of how many lifetimes that may take them.
All the masters who have ever lived have taught us to accept this perfection – even in its imperfection. It is what it is. This is the planet where we experience the opposite of love and we experience it solely to know and understand that we emerge from unconditional love and to unconditional love we will return, if not now, then later.