A Conscious Conversation on Judgment & Control
by Kym Kennedy
Lately I have been pondering why despite all of my studying of spiritual topics things are not always joyful and fun in my life. You know, I have the vision boards and sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I have attended workshop after workshop on all sorts of mind manipulating topics. I have walked on fire and sat in sweat lodges… still….. sometimes life is good, and sometimes it just sucks! I have gotten some things that I wanted and some things I haven’t come close. I been surprised by some great things and sorely disappointed by others that came out of nowhere.
Of late every book I seem to have picked up, including the widely revered “A Course in Miracles” is telling me that the world that we live in is not real, but that it is all an illusion. Okay so when I first heard that some time ago, that was just too big for me to wrap my mind around. What is unreal about my body, my home, my family and friends? How could all of that not be real?
Still grappling with the concept I decided to suspend disbelief and ask what if it was all indeed true. What if what some say is true that we are here as a part of Spirit’s consciousness. The part that wanted to experience itself as the opposite of what it truly is. Of course I believe Spirit to be all powerful, abundant, pure love, peace and joy. But when we are in the Spirit world we can’t really know what all that feels like. If you are love, do you know what that feels like if you have never experienced anything else? We know what love feels like here on Earth because we know what it feels like to feel its opposite. We know how to be in fear, anger, shame and even apathy. We know about heartbreak and abandonment. In the Spirit world we relate to love and joy like a fish relates to water, isn’t that all there is?
So in an effort to experience that that we are we, being infinitely powerful, created a world called planet Earth and we incarnate in this world of duality so that we can experience the opposite of who we truly are. Here, everything has an opposite. Up has a down, left has a right, high has low and under has over. Love has fear, joy has sadness and peace has chaos. All of this is so that we can experience the opposite of who we are. I would venture to guess you have experienced some of those opposites yes? Who among us has not experienced sadness, hurt, anger, fear, humiliation, resentment, or lack?
We do a good job of assuring that we get to experience some of all of the above during our time here and the way we do that is by writing out the script before we come. Yep, I am here to end the debate of whether our lives are pre-determined or not. I am saying that they are. We plan it all! We choose are parents, our children and our spouses in advance. We decide where we will be born, what race we will be, what work we will do and where we will live.
Once all of our souls meet and agree to our script and our roles we enter our bodies and purposefully drop the veil of remembrance so that we can experience it all just as unaware as we are when we sit down to a movie. We know that whatever happens we are just experiencing something that we created for our own enlightenment and that nothing that happens is really real, or dangerous. It is just as believable though as any play or a movie, but much, much more so because we are using all the power and creativity of Spirit to create this world so things really do appear and FEEL authentic! Yes and that is exactly what we wanted.
Now despite how weird this all sounds, to me it is such a relief! Knowing that my life IS pre-determined takes a heck of a lot of pressure off of me. All of the things that I have judged over the years as “mistakes” were part of my life’s plan. All of the challenges, the chaos and drama… scripted! All of the failures and disappointments… planned!
Yes our souls have a plan to experience the opposite of who we really are, and get this… for the fun of it! Yes, fun. The same way otherwise sane men suit up each Sunday with helmets and pads so that they can bang into each other in pursuit of a leather ball… for the fun of it! For the same reason that decidedly normal people leave their warm homes and climb to the top of snow-capped mountains in frigid weather, or others race cars in circles at blinding speeds or jump out of perfectly safe airplanes. While less challenging, some folks ride roller coasters, or bungee jump. I have even personally gone zip-lining over the Costa Rican rain forest, snorkeled in the ocean miles off of the island of Maui and driven right past lions on an African safari, again all for the fun of it!!
If you think of the real you as an infinite being capable of creating any experience you could possibly dream up, what “game” would you create? I think that the game we know as our lives, full of the drama of divorce, bankruptcy, illness, crime and “death,” sounds on a bigger scale as thrilling as any of the games we have come up with in the limited version of ourselves, including boxing and bull fighting and fencing. We do it all for the thrill of it, for the emotional charge we get, not unlike why we watch horror and suspense movies.
If we would get that it is all planned for that thrill and that we really can’t control what is going to happen next (I know, for New Age folks this is pure blasphemy!) I think we would be able to relax and enjoy the ride. One of my teachers at Inner Visions Institute for Spiritual Development told me once that life is like riding down a river. We are going to go down the river and it is up to us if we glide down it smoothly or if we go down it kicking and screaming. We can try to swim back up the river and we will tire and float down, or we can try to swim over to the side but it is too big and we will tire and float down, or we can choose now to just float down the river.
We are playing a huge cosmic game and the truth is that there is no death, there is only the thrill we are taking ourselves through, because we can. The only part of this game that we can control is how we react to the twists and turns we have created for our lives. We can judge it as wrong, bad, sad or any number of things that steal our joy. Or we could just observe the play for what it is a play. We get to choose to accept what happens for the sake of the experience of it and know that it is all a part of a perfect plan that our higher Self is monitoring and directing at all times.
Now I know that this sounds incredulous, but I for one much prefer letting go and letting God for real, to judging every other thing that happens as BAD! I am choosing to stop worrying about tomorrow, or what “THEY” think, or stressing over what I am to do next. If something is meant to happen it will and I will be happy to wait and find out what that is going to look like. When that something does happen, I will try not judge the outcomes as either “good” or “bad”. It is what it is and it is what my soul chose to experience in this lifetime as did every other soul make the choices that they have made. Never again do I have to pity myself or others. Never again do I have to fear anything, as it is already decided and done in the mind of Spirit. No matter what “it” looks like, I am trusting that I am safe and will soon return to the real me… who knows and knows that it knows that I am a powerful, abundant, joyful being of love and light. The more I acknowledge that truth to myself daily, the more that part of me shows forth in this lifetime.
So the choice that I have is to judge and try futilely to control everything and everyone around me, or to just love my life the way it is and relax in the peace that that stance brings. Though this is still new to me, and so something of a challenge that requires a LOT of practice, I choose peace, love and joy by releasing judgment and control. Maybe you’ll try it too.