Having Problems

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

OK, so somebody says something hurtful and it stings. Your feelings get bent out of shape and you fall into a downward spiral. Maybe you deal with the other person, maybe you don’t, but eventually you pull yourself together and find a way to keep going in spite of the offense. In any case, your focus is going to be on the event, on the other person, on what they said and on your shame. The other person has exposed a vulnerability that you routinely conceal. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an issue!Although you won’t like what happened, your pain doesn’t come from what they said, it comes from your reaction. They have triggered an old wound. Allow me to illustrate: If the other person said that you beat your horse, you wouldn’t like being talked about like that, but since you don’t have a horse, and you haven’t been around horses since you were a child, the other person is clearly out of line! The truth is obvious.However, if her criticism is that you are selfish or unkind or something of that ilk, it’s going to be a different story, isn’t it? Why? Because somewhere inside part of you believes that it might be true! Like all of us, you’ve been unkind and you’ve been selfish at times, so it is possible that she could be right! Besides, her criticism falls into a context where you hold a less than wonderful opinion of yourself, making you susceptible to almost any criticism!

The unfortunate thing about an event like this is that because of your previous woundings, you get wrapped up in your hurt and pain and miss a significant opportunity. Stand away from the situation for a moment with me, and let’s look at it from a larger perspective: You hold some false beliefs. In your mind you are not smart enough, you’re not pretty enough, you are too insecure, you are inadequate, your thighs are too thick, your butt is big, etc., etc. – the list goes on and on. You use these judgments to substantiate the larger belief that you are unworthy.

Fortunately for you, The Universe does not see things the way you do. When you look at yourself you see flaws and inadequacies. The Universe sees a wonderful and special being who does not know who she is and who sometimes gets caught up by her fears and anxieties and then later beats herself up for her “failings.”

The Universe wants to help you find the truth, but since it can’t send you a letter, which you would probably ignore, it does something even better. It recruits another person to bring this unfounded area into your awareness. The Universe will go to a great deal of trouble to wrench to the surface (painfully to be sure), this belief that you have needed to address for some time, but have been reluctant to face. Since you have not been willing to do this on your own, it has recruited “a volunteer” to rip the scab off your old wound in order to hopefully get you to examine your beliefs.

After you get over the initial discomfort, you find that these situations give you the opportunity to stand away from the event and look at what was going on within you that caused your reaction, because the two events – the other person’s criticism and your response, although linked, are really separate. We rarely look at our part and in failing to do this, we miss, as I said, a very special opportunity.

Look back for a moment at some of the difficulties of your life. After you scrape away the surface conflict, you will find that within each situation is an opportunity to address your beliefs. Without your belief, there would not have been a “situation” in the first place. There would have been nothing to “hook” you. You would have simply shrugged and walked away, hopefully, holding compassion for the other person.

The biggest reason we don’t take advantage of these situations is that it can be a rough process. It is also very difficult to move beyond the pain and the shame and feeling wronged. Recognizing this, The Universe continues to present you with opportunity after opportunity, raising the intensity until you finally get it. Sometimes it has to push you to your knees before you will surrender your beliefs, but The Universe will do whatever it takes. And it will be relentless! The sooner you realize this and embrace what is really going on, you will be able to release struggle and work with what is being asked of you. Or, as my friend Sylvia used to say, “Release struggle and flow with life.”

What’s In The Temple? (a poem)

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Ross Bishop

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring.
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about.
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable.
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow.
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing.
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth.
If she stands still it will catch up with her.
Pause with us here a while.
Put your ear to the wall of your heart.
Listen for the whisper of knowing there.
Love will touch you if you are very still.

If I say the word God, people run away.
They’ve been frightened–sat on ’till the spirit cried “uncle.”
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can’t name.
They know he’s out there looking for them, and they want to be found,
But there is all this stuff in the way.

I can’t talk about God and make any sense,
And I can’t not talk about God and make any sense.
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God.

I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God.
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur,
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death.
You see there the consequences of carelessness,
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived.
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh.

We don’t build many temples anymore.
Maybe we learned that the sacred can’t be contained.
Or maybe it can’t be sustained inside a building.
Buildings crumble.
It’s the spirit that lives on.

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart,
What would you worship there?
What would you bring to sacrifice?
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies?

Go there now.

~ Tom Barrett ~

Web version. Click here.

Hinduism, Yoga and Life

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

Like the other Eastern religions, Hinduism does not focus on the relationship with God, rather it emphasizes ethical and moral principles that improve the seeker’s relationship with the universe. It is the Hindu belief that this is what leads to self-realization.

Rather than proscribing a particular path to enlightenment, Hinduism honors individual differences by encouraging various approaches. Its focus is not on the path, but in the result.

According to Hindu belief, people pass through four stages in the development of awareness. The stages are: Pleasure, Success, Duty and Liberation. The first two stages, the quest for pleasure and the pursuit of success, are collectively known as “The Path of Desire.” The third and fourth stages, acts of service and the quest for liberation, are known together as The “Path of Renunciation.”

In the first stage, the quest for pleasure, the Hindu approach differs from many other religions that encourage the moderation of pleasure, or in some cases, prohibit pleasure altogether. The Hindus have a different, and, I think, far more enlightened, approach. They maintain that if pleasure is what you want, it is unwise to suppress the desire for it. Hindus encourage devotees to pursue their desires fully, intelligently and within the basic rules of morality, but fully, nonetheless.

Regarding the second stage, the pursuit of success, the Hindu deal with it like they do the pursuit of pleasure. So long as any one of the three aspects of success: wealth, fame or power, are active within the seeker, they will obstruct deeper spiritual explorations. The Hindu are careful not to judge success, after all, success provides livelihood with dignity and self-respect, but Hindus also recognize its inherent limitations.

The Hindus learned long ago that anything connected with desire – pleasure, fame, success, self-gratification, wealth, power, etc., is guaranteed to bring a person to grief. First of all, the cravings associated with desire are fleeting and transitory. Everything in the sensory world has a beginning and an end, and every gain is unavoidably linked to its loss.

Secondly, the drive to fulfill desire is insatiable. This is because desires do not address real wants. There can never be “too much fame,” or “too much wealth.” This sends the seeker on an endless quest to satiate what is an unquenchable thirst. The Hindus have a saying, “Trying to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire with gasoline.”

Westerners have been taught to believe that people with money and worldly success are happy. The Hindus learned long ago that people who pursue these ends inevitably end up unfulfilled, empty, exhausted, alone and in pain. And after the expenditure of an incredible amount of effort, they inevitably end up dissatisfied.

In dealing with the seekers of desire, Hindu wisdom maintains that to deprive people of the joy of their worldly pursuits is to only make them angry and frustrated. It is like taking a toy from a child. The Hindus know that children outgrow their toys in due course just as adults who pursue pleasure will eventually become frustrated with their pain and emptiness.

It is far better, the Hindus maintain, to allow the individual to come to this realization by themselves rather than pressuring them to conform to some arbitrary standard of socially acceptable behavior. So, Hindu teachers urge people to “go for it,” knowing full well what the end result will be. Their guiding principle is, “to not turn from desire until desire turns from you.”

The lessons of many years of experience have taught them that until the individual extinguishes their own inner fires, dangerous and potentially destructive embers remain smoldering within.

The Hindus also recognize that the struggle with desire is a very important part of each person’s learning process, and to pressure them to conform before they are ready to release the pursuit of pleasure only distracts the individual from the important task of learning and growth. And it also sets the authority figure up as a target for the individual’s frustrations.

Experiencing the inevitable failure of the pursuit of desire (pleasure and success), Hindus have found that people then naturally turn to acts of service. This is the third stage of the path to awareness. Since the pursuit of desire has proved to be universally unfulfilling and unrewarding, people then reach out as they seek something greater than themselves. Essentially the “will-to-win” of The Path of Desire becomes transformed into the “will-to-serve.”

Although acts of service produce notable rewards such as the gratitude of the community and also engender personal self-respect, these are still insufficient compensations for the deep inner longings of the soul.

Frustrated by the pursuit of pleasure and ultimately unfulfilled by service, seekers reach the limits of what can be achieved in the physical world. A person typically then turns to spiritual pursuits in their quest for greater meaning. But this is difficult to realize as long as worldly concerns and desires compete for the seeker’s attention. This is why, in Hindu belief, it is necessary for the individual to extinguish their worldly concerns and ambitions before turning inward. It is only then that the individual is free to pursue the truth.

Having experienced the limitations of the material world, seekers will then typically renounce their connection to it and seek to free themselves in order to explore their spirituality. And with this comes the realization that what they have been searching for was within themselves the whole time. This is the fourth stage of awareness. It is at this point that Hinduism guides individuals to the three things they feel we all really want: Being, Knowing and Joy – collectively known as liberation.

It can be argued that Western society is like a seeker moving through the first stages of Desire. The hallmarks of Western society are materialism power, wealth and fame with their resulting pain and feelings of inadequacy.

And like the Hindu seeker, Western people are starting to realize the inadequacies and limitations of a culture based on greed. More and more people in the West are turning away from unbridled materialism in order to pursue goals of service. And if what the Hindus believe about human development is correct, our culture will eventually mature from acts of service into the pursuits of Being, Knowing and Joy.

But, as with any major social change, this transition is bound to be messy and turbulent, as we can see in the present struggle over health insurance reform, and as we witnessed in the struggles for racial and gender equality that preceded it. But the die has been cast. Change can be delayed, but it is inevitable.

Why Am I Here?

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

People are often confused about what they are supposed to do in life. That is largely because we Westerners are so accustomed to living on the outside, in deference to the needs of our inner selves, that we lose sight of why we are here. We focus on our jobs, relationships, health, income and families, and with our intention firmly fixed on external concerns, we forget that life is an inner, not an outer, journey.

This has been said in many ways, but when you peel away all the intervening layers, what it all comes down to is that the purpose of life is to lose the fear of surrendering. That may seem simplistic, but in order to truly surrender, one must release the ego, and that is where everything bogs down.

You assume that if you give up control and surrender, you will be cast into some sort of endless, meaningless eternal oblivion. This is not accidental, nor is it coincidental that every human holds this same fear. This is the consequence of the feelings of abandonment we all felt when we “separated” from the Creator to come here.

At one moment you were nuzzled comfortably in the bosom of the Creator, and although ignorant, you felt safe. And in the next moment, you found yourself cast out of the nest, lost in the endless expanse of the cold and unforgiving universe. You had lost your security and felt rejected, unsafe and abandoned. And suddenly there was a “you” separate (or at least feeling separate) from God. This was the origin of your ego.

Your assumption at the time, although incorrect, was that you had been judged unworthy and tossed out. This was not an accident. It was intended. Under the circumstances, your feelings were both inevitable and predictable. The state of your consciousness prohibited you from seeing the truth, so you were bound to take these events personally. And because of that, you fell into the Mother of all Misunderstandings.

Fortunately, life is not about becoming something different than you already are. Life is about learning to feel safe so that you can let go of the ego and allow your true self to emerge.

You are a child of God, but you don’t know that yet. You are a part of the God-consciousness, and although you can feel unworthy, unlovable or a hundred other self-limiting things, you cannot be any of them. You are already the magnificent being you are “becoming.” The evolution that is taking place is not in who you are, it is in who you think you are. The change will be in your consciousness, in your awareness.

Coming to earth meant that you would eventually challenge the Misunderstanding and come to learn the truth about yourself. But today the Misunderstanding sits at the core of everything you do. It is why, aware of it or not, you feel unworthy and unlovable.

Your feelings of unworthiness have only a modest connection to the events of the present or even your past lives. Your life experiences reinforce those feelings, but in most cases, life events simply do not have the potency to generate the intensity of feeling you hold around the issue of unworthiness.

Feeling separated from The Creator, you became aware of a sense of “difference.” There was now a “you” and a “Him,” and now you were not feeling the love and comfort you had experienced just moments before. Once you invest in the concept of “you,” something is created that must be defended and protected. Now “you” could be hurt, as you had just “learned” from your experience of the separation.

Responding to “your” feelings of abandonment and unworthiness, you experienced fear. Thus it became necessary to create ways to protect yourself. The problem is that there is no real “protection.” The best you could do was to hide out in your ego. It did not provide protection, but gave you the illusion of it. It allowed you to limit your emotional exposure. Pain and anxiety became accepted parts of life. Today you work hard to avoid rejection and the insult that comes with it.

Today part of you does not move in harmony with the rest of The Universe. This is not because of who you are, but because of what you believe. Your beliefs cause you to experience fear and prevent you from remaining centered. When challenged, the ego-beliefs you hold (primarily about yourself) pull you off center. They move you into fear and limit your ability to respond from a place of compassion. This is the part that you and the Creator decided that you should resolve through coming here (and yes, it was a mutual decision).

Learning the truth is what sits at the core of your earthly experience. This “awakening” is why you have come here. But until you learn the truth, there will be a “you,” separate from God, that needs to be protected and defended. This is what led to The Misunderstanding ion the first place. Now, the really interesting twist in all this is that it is something of a setup. Since you cannot possibly be unworthy, your journey can only have one outcome! No matter how you bounce off the walls and create grief for yourself, there is nowhere for you to go but home. You must eventually come to know the truth.

Holding on to your beliefs mean that you will experience pain, and even the most stalwart amongst us has a limit to how much pain he or she can endure. Eventually even she will give up and surrender. And we must remember what she is surrendering to – she is giving up the ego’s ways to live in God’s truth.

When you grow tired of the pain created from living in your ego, you will eventually shed it and your beliefs and chose to stand in the light of truth. And as difficult as the process is sometimes, without the pain you would have little motivation to change. The desire to avoid pain and live in peace are guaranteed to bring you “home.” Because of this, the Creator knew that you would eventually find your way back. There is no other way that things can turn out! There is nowhere else for you to go!

The Ego
You are a child of God, but you don’t know that yet. You are a part of the God-consciousness, and although you can feel unworthy, unlovable or a hundred other self-limiting things, you cannot be any of them. The saving grace is that you are already the magnificent being you are “becoming.” The evolution that is taking place is not in who you are, it is in who you think you are. The change will be in your consciousness, in your awareness.

In it’s most basic form, the ego creates a sense of “you” which is different from your sense of “them.” This differentiation provides a wedge that can be used to create a sense of separation. The ego either makes others “less than” us by giving us a false sense of superiority or makes us “less than” them by creating feelings of shame, inadequacy or guilt.

Either way, you use the feeling of separation to find “reasons” to hold back and not risk being close. It gives you a myth of insulation from the vagaries of life. You can blame others, rationalize away an insult or in the alternative, beat yourself up, creating separation through self-debasement. But, ignoring the long-term implications (which it does), the ego provides a crutch to help you get through difficult moments.

The ego manifests through belief: “I am better/worse than her.” “I am beautiful/ugly, smart/stupid, etc., etc. It doesn’t really matter what “it” is, so long as it can create a difference that the ego can use. And although a belief may contain an element of truth, beliefs blow everything out of proportion so that your rationalizations will hold up and can pander to your fear. (Remember, beliefs are different than Truth.)

You may be overweight, and this is factual, but to create a belief that you are therefore a bad person, if you think about it, is just plain nuts! Yes, there are issues that you need to address, but these do not make you an unacceptable or substandard person! But, seeing yourself as bad does distract you from having to address the deeper pain that caused you to put on the weight in the first place. And that takes us back to your relationship with The Creator.

Adam and Eve

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

After the six days of creation, Adam and Eve is the first parable in the Bible. It is the opening story that sets the context for the next 1,600 pages. The remainder of the story is to be told through the evolution, conflict, growth, trials and development of humankind.

We enter the story after Eve has been created and she and Adam are living in a garden God had planted for them with every tree that was “pleasing to the sight and good for food” in the East end of Eden. “Edin” by the way, was the Sumerian name for the plain of Babylonia. The Bible tells us that there were no other trees or bushes on earth at this time, so we know that Eden was a special place, created for a particular purpose.

Although they live in paradise, Adam and Eve are unaware of their circumstances. They are described as “innocent,” “naked and not ashamed.” Their nakedness and lack of shame is the representation of spiritual innocence, a naïveté, or as the text puts it, a lack of the “knowledge of good and evil.” This is the undifferentiated and unaware state we were all in prior to our “expulsion” from Heaven.

Adam and Eve live from the fruit of the trees in the Garden. Throughout the Bible, fruit from trees is used as a metaphor for both good and evil. Of all the trees in Eden, two trees were special: The Tree of Life and another in the center of the Garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Interestingly, little is said about the Tree of Life, and this in itself, should be considered significant.

God warns Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Eve had not been created yet.) God says to Adam, “. . .for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”

First we have to ask, “If God didn’t want Adam to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, why did He put it there, especially around these somewhat naïve and unaware humans?” And if it was a dangerous tree, doesn’t it seem strange to give it special treatment and give it the most honored place in the center of the garden? This presents us with several significant anomalies. And in parables, anomalies tell us not to take the situation literally but to look for deeper, more symbolic meaning.

The parable presents us with several significant anomalies. If God didn’t want the whole business taking place, why did he not prevent it? It was clearly within His power to do so in any number of ways. We must infer that God intended these events because they would serve a greater purpose. God knew that Adam and Eve (humanity) would disobey His wishes, and He is setting them up to fail. Not because He was uncaring or unkind, but because God knows that ultimately this will provide humanity with its most valuable learning experience. We learn when we fail. It is our most powerful teacher.

God is also being careful to honor Adam’s (humankind’s) free will. If humankind is to learn this lesson, it must do so openly and freely of it’s own accord. Notice though, that God pays very careful attention to what takes place. Humanity may be operating from free will, but it will never far from God’s love care.

Eve has received a good deal of condemnation for humanity’s “downfall,” but obviously, there is a lot more going on here. If God knew that Eve would believe the serpent, which He had to, why did He not intervene? Or, why did He not simply stop her? Why did He not swoop in at the last moment and stop Adam? With all these options, we know that God not only knew what was going on, but that he intended it to happen.

When God warned Adam that, “. . . the day that you eat from it you shall surely die,” we know that God was not speaking of physical death, since he and Eve ate of the fruit and survived. Notice that God did not say something like, “If you eat from the tree, I will smite you.” So, since the fruit wasn’t deadly and God did not destroy them, what was going to die? We are faced with another, most significant, anomaly.

In the parable, the serpent does not suggest that Eve eat the fruit. The entire conversation revolves around learning to distinguish good and evil, a “power” that God possessed. What the serpent says to Eve is very telling. He says, “For God knows that in the day you eat from it (the fruit of the tree) your eyes will be opened, an you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent knew God’s plan! He was in on it!

There is an often-overlooked sentence in the original text. When Eve saw the tree she also saw that it “was desirable to make one wise.” Adam and Eve were being lured by the promise of absolute freedom and wisdom, i.e., the ability to become gods, or at least, god-like. They would have no boundaries except those of their own making.

The serpent has suffered great abuse by fundamentalist interpretations of Genesis. In these interpretations, the serpent was the agent of Satan. But Satan does not appear in the original story. Remember too, that this was paradise, and there can be no evil in paradise, unless God wills it.

If you consider the name of the Tree, what does it mean to “know good and evil?” “To know” in the context of the parable is to have knowledge of, but this is not book learning, it isn’t theory. It is the gritty knowledge that comes from life experience, such as to “know” suffering or to “know” through an intimate connection.

We’re not talking about general knowledge either, but specifically the knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil are products of the ego. Notice also, that these are opposites. The ego works through the creation of difference. To make one thing “good” and another “evil,” is to engage in the creation of difference. Distinctions like this do not exist in the God Space. In the God Space, things just “are.” God does not make good trees and bad trees, He just makes trees. So to “know good and evil” in the parable, is to live from the ego in a world of conflicting and competing opposites.

Blind obedience is fine for sheep, but you don’t learn very much other than it is a pleasant state. Each time Adam and Eve chose not to eat of the fruit of the Tree, they didn’t learn much. The lesson is clear that God does not want a bunch of obedient (blind) robots that merely do His bidding. God wants humans to follow His guidance not because He decrees it, but rather because they have decided for themselves that they want to live as He has taught us. In the parable, God is setting humanity up to be expelled from Eden so that people will eventually decide, on their own, to return. How would this happen? Humanity was about to break God’s law and suffer the consequences.

This scene brings into focus the essential dilemma presented in the parable. The only way for humans to reach enlightenment is to first leave the association with God by disobeying His teachings. Bereft of God’s guidance (God’s banishment from Eden), humans are then forced to live from their egos. Although living from the ego does make humans self-aware, the limitations of living from it (fear and pain) are undesirable and ultimately untenable. Enduring the limits of pain, humans will eventually be confronted with a difficult conundrum: to continue to live in the ego and experience in pain or surrender the ego with the attendant loss of self, in order to rejoin The Creator in the state that Nisargadatta Maharaj referred to as “undifferentiated consciousness.”

As the serpent predicted, when Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, the scales fell from their eyes and they lost their natural innocence, illustrated earlier by their shameless nakedness. Now they felt naked. They felt ashamed. This is the creation of the self, of the ego, and it marks the “fall” of humankind as we desert the God Space to live from the ego.

The ego space and the God Space are incompatible. You cannot hold both at the same time. In the presence of one, the other must “die.” The “death” that God spoke of to Adam from eating the fruit is the death of the God Space within us when we move into our egos. It is a spiritual death. [It also refers to the "death" of the naïve innocence that shrouds the minds of the unaware.]

The next scene tells us more about God’s intention by the way it unravels. God says to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” Our first reaction is, “Wait a minute! He’s God!” He doesn’t have to ask where anyone is, He knows! But Adam and Eve are hiding out in the shadows from their shame and guilt. “Aware of their nakedness, Adam and Eve made coverings of fig leaves, and hid from the sight of God” in the shadows. The shadow is the realm of the ego.

How do you hide from the “sight of God” who sees and knows everything? You can’t, but you play the adult version of a child’s “peek-a-boo” game. If you hide from God by living in the ego, you can pretend that you are unseen, so that you do not have to take responsibility for violating God’s teachings. Hiding out in the shadow is the ego refuge you take because of the mistaken beliefs (created by the ego) that you are “less than,” “unlovable” or “unworthy.” They make you hide from life, from other people and most importantly from yourself, i.e., “from God.”

Your beliefs of unworthiness and unlovability began at the time of “separation.” Today you believe you are unworthy and unlovable because you felt “cast out” of heaven (i.e., Eden). Being unworthy, you hide from God and His teachings and attempt to survive by living through your ego. It is not a very satisfying existence.

So, in the parable, God is about to banish Adam and Eve from Eden. In a common mistranslation God says, “Cursed is the ground because of you;” which scholars have taken to mean an overall curse on humankind. But a more accurate translation tells us that God was only referring to the land of Eden and that Adam and Eve were not welcome there. We must note that God does not curse Adam or Eve. He moves them out of Eden into the world where they will have to struggle to have their needs met.

Adam was going to have to work the fields (i.e., grow crops), “And you shall eat the plants of the field;. .” and could no longer just go up to a tree and grab some “fast food.” God said, “By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread, . . “ Eve was given the pain of childbirth. But, God does not refer to what they have done as a sin. Nor, interestingly, does He deprive them of their newfound awareness.

In fact, God responds to their disobedience, not with wrath, but with mercy and grace! So again, we are confronted with an important anomaly. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.” These are hardly the actions of an angry and offended God. The plan is unfolding exactly as God had intended.

The Lord then says a very interesting thing, “Then the Lord God said ‘Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now he might stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever –.” In eating the fruit, humankind had become like God, knowing good and evil; but humankind had not yet learned to move beyond the ego and as such, represented a risk to the rest of creation. Every day we see the damage created by people who live through their egos. We see children abused, families torn apart and nations thrown at one another because of the blind ambition of some delusional leader. We could surmise that Adam was not being punished by being expelled, but rather that in his ego state, he represented too great a risk, should he become immortal.

Omissions in parables are important. And we should note that although Adam and Eve had eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they had not eaten from the Tree of Life. Why not? They had already broken the rules and had not died, what’s one more piece of fruit? Eternal life? That is a pretty big incentive, kingdoms have been lost over it, and yet Adam and Eve did not partake. This is conjecture, but given His later actions, it is clear that God would have intervened. Humankind was not yet ready.

Notice, that God does not remove the tree nor does He destroy Eden, which he could easily have done. For example, He would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah a few pages later and moves the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem after that. So, destruction is not inconceivable here, and yet, He does not destroy Eden. “So He drove the man out; and at the east of the Garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Humankind’s eventual return is part of the plan! So, instead of eliminating Eden, God guards it, we can presume, until such time as Adam and Eve/humanity are prepared to renter it – sans their egos. The return represents the eternal grace granted to all those who surrender their egos and chose to live in the God Space.

Later in the New Testament, the Tree of Life returns to us. In Revelations, John saw in his vision, a throne, a river and a tree. The throne was “the throne of God and of the Lamb,” the river was “a pure river of water of life,” and the tree was “the tree of life.” But the Greekword John used for “tree” was xulon, which is the word used for dead wood or timber. It is the word used in the Bible to describe the cross. The normal Greek word for living wood in the New Testament is “dendron” (from which we derive our word “rhododendron” i.e., “rose tree”).

Consider that what we are being told is that the road home – the tree of life, is through the cross. Not the Christian cross, but Christ’s cross. The profound message of Christ’s life is that it is possible to live on earth from the God Space and that although others may be threatened by those truths, and even if they persecute you for it, it will not ultimately matter, because living the way Christ demonstrated is the road home.

The task before each of us is to return to Eden with the conscious awareness of who you truly are. Your “learning,” the understanding you will gain, is the crux of the transformational process called enlightenment. When you comprehend who you really are, your beliefs, fear and anxiety will naturally abate. When you stand in the God Space, you realize that there is nothing real that can ever be harmed; therefore there is nothing for you to fear. Making the trip with grace is determined by one thing – your ability to open to life in every moment, in every situation.

Learning From Failure

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

You know your failures. They are vividly (and painfully) etched into your consciousness. There is a reason for this and we’ll talk about that in a minute.

We are here to learn and grow, and the primary way we do that is through failure. Success is wonderful, but you don’t learn as much from it because success largely reinforces what you already do well. Failure on the other hand, is the product of stepping into the unknown, trying something new, taking a risk.

Learning new ways to think, believe and behave is the essence of being human, and the way we learn these things is through trying and failing until we get it right. So, although the process is difficult and painful and there are strong social prohibitions against it, failure is the essence of being human. As the cliché goes, “Good judgment comes from experience, which comes from bad judgment.”

Experiencing a failure is a good deal different than being a failure. Falling down doesn’t make you a failure, but staying down does. If you were perfect, you wouldn’t even need to make the trip.” The “secret” is to learn to work with and use your failures to grow from instead of just suffer through. So, the crux of the issue around failure isn’t failure per. se. The real issue is what we do with it. And as Ram Dass said, “The whole spiritual journey is a continual falling on your face. And you get up and brush yourself off, and you get on with it.”

Every life situation presents you with a range of choices. Within those options will always be one good response. That choice will be the one that moves you to greater compassion. The other choices are less than ideal because they will be expressions of your fear. And because of your fear and anxiety, you are often not in a position to take that one good option. Being compassionate in a challenging situation often leaves us feeling too vulnerable and exposed. So we make less than ideal choices to pacify our fear. We hold back. We don’t choose the best partner, don’t go for the brass ring and don’t stand up for ourselves if it might cause problems.

There is an interesting thing about these “less good” (fear-based) choices. These choices come from your beliefs especially about yourself. The thing about beliefs is that they cannot be true. Only the truth is true. Based in untruth, your “less good” decisions are guaranteed to create tension within yourself and in your relations with others, leading to inevitable failure and pain. So, when you make a decision based upon the belief that you are unworthy, you create a disturbance in The Universe.

The Universe cannot tolerate a disharmony, and so it must apply pressure until you come to terms with the false beliefs you hold about yourself (until you come to know and accept the truth). And until you do, the part of you that holds those beliefs and that drives your decisions, is going to be an ongoing source of difficulty and pain. Making “unhealthy” choices, the result will be pain, despair, discomfort and frustration. It has to be this way.

Failure is The Universe’s way of putting your limiting fears and beliefs in your face and asking you to change them, and the pain of failure is what motivates you to change. So, failure presents you the opportunity to move beyond your beliefs and discard them. It is an opportunity for learning and growth.

Sometimes our anxiety is so great that we do not see situations as they really are. This is a safety mechanism designed to keep us out of situations that seem unsafe. The pain of failure is also The Universe’s way of guaranteeing that you won’t go through life trashing everyone you have issues with. The pain and blowback would simply be too intense.

When it comes to failure, we serve a number of masters. We receive a great deal of pressure from our families, society (school, church, etc.) and especially our employers not to fail. In Western society, a slacker is a pariah. People who engage in the arts or spiritual pursuits are not considered to be “productive.” Today a mother must also have a career in order to be considered successful.

America’s city freeway underpasses are littered with society’s “failures.” And when it comes to ourselves, influenced by societal values, we sit in judgment of our own performance, often judging ourselves very harshly. We rarely give ourselves credit for our successes. But, what does it really mean to fail? What really is success?

In Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob Cratchit work in the same world but hold very different values. Each brings significantly different values to the story. Scrooge was the successful businessman, Cratchit, the compassionate humanitarian. So who was the more successful?

The power in Dicken’s story is Scrooge’s transformation from self-centered, greedy, resentment-filled miser, to a more enlightened, compassionate person. It is that transformation that raises human endeavor to the level of compassion and keeps a person from becoming what could be called a failure.

Consider this example: Assume you are not feeling good about who you are. There is a world full of prospective partners out there, but because of your beliefs (your damaged self-image), you’ll rule out the healthy people. You know that those relationships would ask you to take emotional risks that you aren’t prepared to take. So instead, you choose from the “B,” “C,” or “D” groups. You will seek out someone who feels damaged as you do. They are safer.

So what happens? Your unresolved issues must inevitably rub up against theirs, creating conflict and leading to the creation of resentments. That conflict is The Universe’s way of letting you both know that something is amiss.

So, having passed on the really good choices, you now have three options: bury your feelings and suffer through a dysfunctional relationship, bail out or learn and grow from the experience and let the relationship go wherever it needs to. If you decide to work on yourself, sometimes your partner will chose to grow with you, which might keep the relationship together. Otherwise, as you grow, you will likely leave the relationship behind, which is different from simply bailing out without learning anything.

The whole point of this experience is that through failure, The Universe has given you an opportunity to learn about your fears and beliefs and transcend them. So, yes, you will have experienced a failure. It happens to all of us, it is inherent in the process of growth. But, since you must fail, it is wise to try to fail intelligently and learn from your experience. On the other hand, if you have not learned from the experience, then you will have dug yourself a deeper into a hole. You will be doomed to repeat the pattern until the pain gets so intense that you are confronted with a crisis that leaves you no option but to change.[i]

Our culture has turned the business of failure on its head. Greek warriors were told to either carry their shields home or be carried home on them. Failure was not an option. Roman civilization was built on power, endurance and perseverance, qualities that served colonizing powers as late into history as our own western expansion.

As far back as the 1500′s, Western society was well on its way to the worship of the successful – the rich and the powerful. Protestant reformers such as John Calvin and the Puritans who came after him, embraced the concept of “the chosen people,” i.e., the successful, the industrious, the rich. Calvin declared that the Puritan God loved the rich more than the poor and that wealth and success were signs of divine favor. This was religion tailor-made for the age of industrialization. Darwin’s theories of species dominance would propel these concepts well into the 20th century.

In our own culture, wealth and power have come to mean success. In many cases of financial “success,” people have only learned to persevere through challenging circumstances. And although the church has been left in the dust, these people still cling to the Puritan ethic and plow through life, efforting through everything they do.

Sometimes wealthy people find real success, but more often than not, they don’t. While they bore large holes through life with their hard work, they often learn little, even when they “succeed.” They tend to live on the surface, and while they are very good at making a living, they are generally not very good at making a life. Used for the right reasons, perseverance is a wonderful quality, but for many of these people, it just sets them up for a painful train wreck in the future.

We seem to assume that successful people are somehow gifted, that they come out of the gate, unblemished. Success is either in their genes or came by osmosis by attending the right prep schools and colleges. We have been taught that people who are well educated or make a lot of money are somehow superior.

Learning from a failure is a good deal different than merely experiencing it. It is easy to get knocked down. When you meet a truly successful person, he/she will be able to illuminate his/her path to success through the various failures that preceded it. The difference is that these people learned from their experiences, got back up, brushed the dirt off and went on embracing a different view of themselves and the world.

There is another group of people who fail, it seems, at everything, and what is worse, they learn little from their experiences. For them, failure confirms the dreadful image they hold of themselves. Being a failure might seem easy; but actually it is not. Being a failure requires a great deal of work and personal energy. As someone said, “To be a success you have to work hard for about 20 years; but to be a failure, you have to work about twice as hard.”

There is a third group of people who get lost in analyzing and intellectualizing everything, trying to “understand” their way out of the box. The intellectual approach doesn’t work, but does distract them and keep them from having to address their pain. Then there is another group who are simply too afraid to try. They lose themselves in work, or drugs and alcohol, and are afraid to look up and even consider the light.

It is the unwillingness or inability to learn from experience that separates failure from success. There is little value in the punch-drunk boxer who gets back up after being knocked down in order to endure more punishment. Until he learns from his experience, all he gets from life is pain. The fancy-dancing boxer with the great footwork isn’t likely to get as hurt, and although he may look great and stylish in the ring, if he does not engage, there is little beneath the show. He is not likely to learn much from his experiences either.

Then there is a third fighter who has learned to maximize his talents, whatever they are. He has practiced his skills and learned from his defeats. (People often fail to see this hard work aspect of the process.) He may be fast, he may be slow, but whatever he is, he comes at a challenge with the integrity of his beingness. He engages. He may not always win, but don’t bet against him.

You have had your failures. We all have. The question is, have you learned and grown from your experiences so that you won’t have to repeat them? That is what separates success from failure.

Unraveling the beliefs that sit at the core of our decision-making that inhibit our life choices, is the secret to becomming successful. I searched for years to find the best process for healing my own inner woundedness and I found it in the shamanic journey process, something I write about in my books, Healing The Shadow, Truth and Journey to Enlightenment. These can be found on my web site www.rossbishop.com, or from Amazon. The journey process itself can be found on the CD, Shamanic Journey, which is available from the web site.

[i] Sometimes we are hurt by the decisions or behavior of others, but that is a different circumstance, beyond the scope of this article.

Affirmations

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

There is a great deal of confusion about the subject of affirmations and the “Law of Attraction.” People have been led to believe that if they just align their intention they can have almost anything they want. (The down side, of course, is that if it doesn’t work, they are not doing it right.)

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it holds a certain amount of truth, providing shelter for its proponents, but at the same time, many of these theories (purposefully?) fail to take into consideration the larger issues involved, which often invalidate personal desires.

The first of these larger considerations is that the place within you that holds your real power, your wounded inner child, wants nothing to do with being at peace or losing weight or the thousand other things you the adult, might desire. She is in pain, afraid and alone and she is not about to let you sacrifice the comfort she gets from ice cream or let down her defenses long enough for you to be open with your friends or take the risk of having a real relationship. She holds all your power, and like it or not, until her wounds are healed, you aren’t going anywhere, affirmations or not.

Secondly, and related to the above, The Creator has set a learning task before each of us. And that learning task, in the short term, usually sits in opposition to the things our egos want. The reason it is contained in the above is that the foundation for our learning is established through our childhood experiences.

We want peace, contentment, abundance and satisfaction and The Creator wants us to surrender our egos in order to live as He has encouraged us to. But we are afraid to do that. We want the payoff without making the sacrifice necessary to get there. I don’t mean to sound like some fundamentalist wing-nut, but God has clearly said, “You can have all these things and more! Surrender your ego and come to Me (live in the God Space) and they will be yours!” He has promised this to us!

The problem is that we aren’t (yet) ready to surrender being “Me.” We fear the loss of self, the loss of control that is necessary to surrender and to live as Christ or St. Francis did. We feel as though we have so little already, and that we are being asked to give even that up. We have been taught to fear poverty and turn from living a simple life. We want stuff! We want cell phones and texting! Facebook and Twitter give us a sense of connection in an impersonal world! We are terrified of the prospect of being left out in the cold with only our faith to comfort us. We do not believe that God will take care of us, and we’re not about to find out!

The problem with not surrendering is that it leads to pain. It must. That is the way the world works. The pain comes in many forms – a lack of abundance, feeling unloved and alone, inner turmoil, depression, illness or disease and a host of other forms. These troubles are the consequences of an unsurrendered life.

Pain comes from being in resistance to what God has asked of us, and this is where affirmations and the “Law of Attraction” fail. The Universe is not going to let you off the hook when you have refused what is being asked of you. And many of our affirmations and prayers have exactly that quality. We say in effect, “Release me from my pain or my burdens–––.” Or, to paraphrase: “Give me the good stuff (like peace, abundance or joy) so that I don’t have to make the personal sacrifices necessary to let go of my ego.”

We want to dodge responsibility for our lessons. But God is not about to let us do that, simply because it would only make things worse for us! Until you change, you are only going to continue to accumulate pain, and jumping into abundance, for example, is a guaranteed way to create a train wreck. Read the stories of people who have won the lottery. By and large, their lives have turned into unmitigated disasters. You, of course, would do things differently. . . .

Now, so long as what you desire does not interfere with your reason for being here (to learn to release your ego), you are free to do whatever you wish – have abundance, live in peace, etc. But, many of these desires are ego based and therefore present a slippery slope.

But, the interesting thing is that once you release your ego, you’ll have everything you really desire – all automatically! You won’t have to do anything! And, until you release your ego, these things can be pretty difficult to come by, affirmations notwithstanding.

So, the one affirmation you could make that makes perfect sense, is to bring yourself into ego,alignment with the God Space, in other words, to release your ego. What does that look like? Get out your Bible and read how Christ taught us how to live. If you are a Muslim, read Muhammad’s Qur’anic passages written in Medina before he moved to Mecca and turned away from God. If you are Jewish, you have Moses’ teachings and all the other prophets to study. If you are a Hindu, read the Gita. If you are a Buddhist, study your Sutras. My point is that the “how” has been with us for quite some time.

Seeking Truth

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

Seng-ts’an lived in the late sixth century, and was the third patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China. He wrote a famous poem blending Taoism and Buddhism in which he said:

“Do not search for the truth;
just let go of your opinions.”

He also wrote:

“The great way is not difficult
for those who are unattached to their preferences.

Let go of longing and aversion,
and everything will be perfectly clear.

When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction,
heaven and earth are set apart.”

But how can you find truth if you do not seek it? We have been taught that we must work for what we get from life. Western culture teaches us that if you don’t have a good life, you just have not worked hard enough. After all, “idle hands are the devil’s tools.”

We are seekers. We climb mountains, search through old manuscripts and travel to the ends of the earth in our eternal search for the truth. But Seng-ts’an tells us that this is not the way.

One big difference is that truth is not like money. You can seek money, you can strive for it, you can even hoard it. But truth is not like that. Like the air or sunlight, truth is everywhere. You cannot possess it, and although you can know it, you cannot hoard it. But you can hold it.

The idea of seeking the truth is a non-sequitur (it doesn’t make sense). Truth is what you are, so how can you seek it? But, you can learn about it. And perhaps most importantly, you can learn to not turn away from it, because that is where we all get into trouble.

We are afraid of the truth because it makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. But what did Christ teach us? “Love one another.” What was in the Ten Commandments? “Don’t lie,” “don’t cheat,” “don’t steal,” etc.

When we get scared, the first victim is the truth. What do we do? We lie, we close our hearts, we avoid, we cheat. The one thing we don’t do is stand in the truth. We are embarrassed and no one likes being criticized or condemned.

We hide form the truth by creating beliefs or “opinions” as Seng-ts’an called them. Consider for a moment, what is a belief? Sometimes beliefs reflect the truth, as in, “All men are created equal.”

But most often, beliefs are created to hide from the truth. They allow us to cover up our own feelings of inadequacy. “Blacks are stupid.” “Hispanics are lazy.” “Women are . . .” “Kathy is . . .” Beliefs give us permission to run our lives from our egos instead of from the truth. Beliefs are typically expressions of ego, and Seng-ts’an tells us, “Don’t go there.”

Many people experience the conflict between truth and belief when they try to meditate. Meditation requires you to stop thinking. And when the mind pauses, in those few moments, you can feel the truth. For many people, the conflict between the truth and the beliefs they hold about themselves is simply too threatening. Sitting in meditation means giving up control of the mind – the instrument of the ego and the mother of belief.meditation,

Otherwise, everyone would be meditating, because meditation, like many other spiritual practices, has no downside! Everything about them is beneficial! Except, of course, that they ask us, as Seng-ts’an did, to give up our false beliefs and embrace the truth.

One of my favorite quotes is by Nisargadatta Maharaj, who said,

The search for reality
is the most dangerous of all undertakings
for it destroys the world in which you live.

One of the things we resist strongly is giving up the ego-based life structures we have created. We fight giving them up even in the face of incredible dysfunction.

If you look back over your life, you will find that the events you have experienced have been a steady progression of pressure being applied against the false beliefs you hold (especially about yourself). Every conflict you have ever had was The Universe asking you to move to a place of greater compassion.

Most people are not ready to give up the sanctuary of their beliefs and surrender to the greater bliss of living from the truth. It’s just too risky to make the step! But have no fear. It’s going to happen. It’s just easier today because today you get to do it on your own terms.

Having Hurt Feelings

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

OK, so your partner said something hurtful and it stung! You are wounded, angry and you feel betrayed. Inside, you feel like you have leprosy. No one likes being in these situations, even though we all end up there from time to time.

When something like this happens we usually get caught up in the drama and feeling hurt and wounded. This prevents us from realizing that there is something far more important going on.

Life brings us opportunity after opportunity to work on our “soft spots.” But rather than looking at these situations as opportunities for inner healing, we turn them into sources of pain. The encounter has already aggravated an old wound, and we make things worse by getting lost in being hurt.

There are a couple of techniques that can help you move to a better place with all this. The first is to realize that pain does not/can not come from a situation. We all feel empathy or compassion, those are our natural feelings, but pain and hurt are uniquely personal emotions. They come from the way in which we have learned to relate to life. They do not come from life itself.

The second thing to realize, and this is hard for some people, is that although your feelings can be hurt, you cannot be harmed. All your partner did was create some vibrations in the air. Those vibrations do carry energy, and you’re not going to like being around them, but they cannot hurt you.* You are not going to like what he or she did, but the fear of harm is a holdover from when you were young and completely vulnerable to your parent’s unresolved emotional issues. That is a pretty vulnerable place to be!

Your partner did not create your response. You did. And if you are to look for a solution, you must take your focus off them and the relationship and look at what in your beliefs (especially about yourself) created the pain, because it is YOUR pain.

We focus on the other person. We don’t like having to deal with our inner pain. It takes us into our shame and makes us feel vulnerable in a world that has already hurt us a good deal. It is easier to focus on them – “They are off-base, they are jealous, or foolish. . . ” This allows us to not have to look at the wounds we drag into every interaction.

Getting caught up in the emotions of the situation isn’t going to help you. It actually blocks your ability to learn, which is its purpose. Your pain is a safety mechanism that makes you hold back from situations that the inner one feels are too threatening to deal with. The theory is that we block things out until we feel safe enough to learn. Most of the time we get forced into a corner where the old ways simply will no longer work, and we have no choice but to change.

Blocking your learning is unwise. The Universe has gone to a great deal of trouble to call your attention to an inner wound that it is ready to be resolved, and you want to walk away from it! You can avoid dealing with your wounds today, but tomorrow it will be “Someone Else 2.0,” with a 2 X 4. That is why avoidance is not a good idea.

Some people play a game of “chicken” with God. They say, “Let’s see how much pain I can endure before I flinch.” They would rather endure emotional torture than open up their inner Pandora’s box of pain. These people push away the immediate conflict with the resignation to take even worse condemnation later. Their childhood pain, whether they are conscious of it or not, is so great that they fear losing themselves or being cast into oblivion because they see themselves as hopelessly inadequate. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this is the path their soul has chosen in order for them to heal. It is a difficult path.

The central theme here is that the way you connect to a situation, not the situation itself, is what creates your pain. Our natural state is compassion, and when you come from that place, energy flows. When you operate from the fear of being hurt, you trap the energy that needs to move, and it turns into bodily tension and stress. And, Western medicine is just beginning to appreciate the devastating affect that years of stress takes on the body.

I once got royally chewed by a guy speaking Portuguese – a language I do not understand. It helped that I knew why he was upset and that I had done nothing to deserve his wrath, but I just stood there as he went through his tirade. It was uncomfortable, but it really didn’t make any difference, because I did not take myself emotionally into the situation (except to feel for his pain). Of course it helped that I couldn’t understand a single word he was saying! There was no “soft spot” of vulnerability in me for this man’s words to attach to, because although he was obviously upset, his words went nowhere!

Connecting through pain is an unnatural and unhealthy connection. Connecting through compassion is natural and normal. That is where we will all go. How we get there is by learning from our pain.

If you think about it, there are many situations each day that you simply allow to pass by because they do not “trigger” you. But on the other hand, a look from your partner or a word from your mother, and you’re in orbit. Right? Those are your soft spots that are getting pushed. Otherwise, you would just let them pass by!

There is a helpful technique that Krishnamurti used to teach. It was his “secret to life.” Krishnamurti looked at every situation and reminded himself that:

“IT DOESN’T MATTER.”

We make situations matter, when in truth they don’t. (Especially when you realize that you cannot be harmed.) The people involved your life situations are important, very important, but that is a significant distinction.

If someone tells a lie, that is unfortunate, but if the lie creates a “situation,” then that means someone else’s wounding has been sucked into the vortex. We are headed for a cat fight. Everyone is going to get hurt and nothing will really be resolved. What Krishnamurti was trying to teach us was to make the situation not important, but to honor them and their pain.

Gay Hendricks teaches people to say, “So what!” to life situations. I want to be careful here. This is not a “screw you” to the other person. It is an attempt to separate out and break our typical connection to the situation, so that, interestingly enough, we can actually be more open to see and feel what is troubling them.

So your partner is upset. “So what!” She gets to be mad if she needs to. Be aware that there may be something here you need to look at for yourself, so always, always, always, see and feel their pain, because you may want to look at your behavior. But, don’t get hooked in the drama!

We never want to fully disconnect because, after all, it is through other people that we learn! That’s why social isolation, although sometimes attractive, is not helpful. It makes it more difficult to finish what we came to do. When someone gets upset with me, I don’t like it, but there is always an important piece of learning there for me. We need to find a way to stand back from these encounters and say:

“What has this situation come to teach me?”

That is when the payoff comes for all that spiritual work you have been doing.

* I am referring to emotional wounding. Physical acts operate under different principles.

Loving Yourself

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Ross Bishop

by Ross Bishop

Humans are unique beings, but we do share some common traits. Interestingly one of the most universal is that we do not love ourselves. Take almost anyone – from anywhere – tell them how wonderful and special they are, and your praise almost always will be deflected.

Think about that for a minute. Your personal situation feels unique (and it is), but at the same time, how is it that everyone you know, everyone you will ever know and for that matter every other human being on the planet, feels essentially the same way you do? How can all these other people, from all these diverse cultures and all these other family environments hold essentially the same feelings of unworthiness or unlovability?

One of the reasons I love doing workshops is that there comes a time for each person during the weekend when they realize that they are hearing their story told by someone else. As unique as we feel, our struggles and problems are far more universal than we realize. How is this possible? Can seven billion people all have had the same experience? As unlikely as it may seem, the answer is – “Yes!” We all feel wounded. And since we all share the same wounding, we react similarly. And, I do not mean similar wounds, I mean the same wounds.

We have come to earth to resolve the parts of ourselves that do not hold the God Space. We slip readily into our egos when pushed. We do not accept the truth about who we are. We run around leading with our egos, getting our feelings hurt. We beat each other up, make war on one another, ignore those in need or those who suffer and in a thousand other ways, ignore the spiritual truths we have been taught. We are afraid to really love one another. Then we wonder why we aren’t happy, or alternatively, why there is so much dissension in the world.

It is these parts of ourselves that are aggravated by the wounding I describe. What was that wounding? Simply, the belief that you had been separated from God. Your previous connection to The Creator was unconscious. You were just there.

It was essential for your spiritual development that you move from unconscious awareness into conscious awareness of who you were. So you and God decided that you would come to earth and for reasons I will explain, it was necessary for you to temporarily forget your connection to Him/Her.

So one moment you were in “heaven,” and the next you were floating unattached in the cold, unforgiving universe. That was enough to trigger your unresolved ego issues. You felt alone, abandoned and rejected. You interpreted the situation to mean that you were somehow unlovable and had been cast out. And your feelings of abandonment and worthlessness, i.e., unlovability, would influence everything you did from that moment forward. This happens for everyone, which explains why all of humanity feels the same way and why we have many of the problems we do.

Had you come here with your connection to The Creator intact, even unconsciously, your unresolved ego issues would have been very difficult to trigger. You would not not have become caught up in the endless problems of daily life and would have had little motivation to resolve your vulnerabilities and make the changes you came here for.

Your relationship to The Creator has and always will be there, but now with your temporary amnesia in place, all God had to do was turn you lose with all the other humans down here so that you would eventually figure out that: (1.) Not loving each other was foolish and unproductive, and (2.) Not loving yourself was even greater folly.

Obviously, we have a ways to go on those two considerations, but we have also come a long way toward their resolution. A friend of mine reminds people that in the Middle Ages people lived in castles behind walled cities because they needed them.

The ego arises out of the fear that is created when the connection to The Creator is dropped. As life brings you to resolve your ego issues, you will then naturally seek to recreate your connection to the Creator. But this will be done as a matter of conscious choice, and as you will see, that is most important.

You have free will. If you are going to make a change, you must accept the change for yourself. Telling it to you or reading it in a book may be helpful for your intellectual understanding, but that is not going to provide sufficient impetus for you to take on your ego. That kind of learning does not compare to the way we know something when we experience it. When it comes to making changes in life, experience is a very different and much richer kind of knowing that provides the emotional horsepower essential for the necessary changes. The intellect, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t have the juice.
There are many kinds of experience. Some experiences support what you already believe, others challenge those beliefs. It is in solidifying or grounding your beliefs that real wisdom comes. Untested beliefs that you simply accepted from your parents or religion are intellectual concepts until you ground them in your reality. The most profound learning comes when a belief you hold is challenged and you then decide to accept a different perspective. When you do this, you hold the truth more powerfully than is possible by any other means.

Convince a black man that he is inferior, and he may believe you for a time, but the light of truth will eventually dawn in him – as it must – and you will never get him or his descendants back down into the pit of slavery again. Free a people from tyranny and they may be grateful, but if they free themselves, they will defend that freedom to their last breath, because they will now own it. Women in the industrialized West fought for and won legal equality. You will never take that away from them. This is the power of transformation.

Life on earth is based upon the principle of transformation. The “separation” from The Creator instilled in each of us a set of beliefs that were untrue – i.e., that we were unlovable and unworthy. But because these beliefs were untrue, our life experiences, as difficult as they are, were guaranteed to (eventually) bring us to question and reject them for the truth. And, there can only be one truth, that is the great “Secret” to life.

People get upset at God for this process because it feels manipulative, but that is a pointless exercise. It is the way life is. Either you have faith that God knows what He/She is doing or you have not yet found faith and are still living from your ego. This simply means that you are not ready for the next step yet.

Today I can see the perfection of the process, but there were times early on when I raged against life’s unfairness. What I have come to understand is that life is just life, it is not fair or unfair, it just is. God does not make good trees or bad trees, good frogs or bad frogs. God just makes trees and frogs.

Getting caught in the storm has a lot to do with not paying attention. The ego that ran my life made life seem unfair, but that was a decidedly “poor me” victim projection. It would be some time and no small amount of work, before I began to realize who I truly was so that I could then release my anger and my feelings of abandonment.

And the truth was, I had never been abandoned. I just thought so. I was living in a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation, if you will. He/She was always right there. I was just not in a position to know it and I was blinded by my beliefs, my wounds and my rage. As bad as it was, and it was at times, my pain is what turned me around. God didn’t create my problems, my ego did. I was a self-made man!

And, I had the power to unmake the beliefs that were getting me into trouble. Your troubles, missteps and problems are going to bring you “home” too, because they unmask the “unfinished” parts of yourself. We don’t like this part of the process because it makes us feel vulnerable. But it does show you the ways you do not love yourself, and it will provide the motivation for you to change.

Events on earth are no different than in the rest of the universe. When you or any other part of the natural world moves out of harmony, it creates a dissonance or a disturbance. The disturbance then leads to a rebalancing compensation. For example, when you move out of harmony, you experience pain. The pain eventually motivates you to change, whether that is to change your life or stop sitting on your foot.

In nature, when the atmosphere gets out of balance, wind is created. The wind dissipates the imbalance. If the imbalance is significant, a storm will be created, which mitigates the originating disharmony. There is an interesting parallel for your life here – a storm creates more collateral damage than the wind. That is the same way your problems create more damage in your life the longer you ignore them and allow them to fester.

When you operate from love and compassion, your life is significantly enhanced and you feel better. Conversely when you act out of the feeling of separation, in other words, when you live from your ego, there will be pain – there must be. So, when you live from ego, life is guaranteed to be difficult and uncomfortable. And when that becomes intolerable, you will change.

The question is, how much discomfort will you endure before you give up your ego-based beliefs (which cannot possibly be true), accept God’s love and begin to follow the spiritual principles we have been taught for so many years? You know, “love each other, “don’t lie,” “don’t cheat,” “help those in need” and “don’t accumulate worldly possessions” – that kind of thing. (I am not advocating for religion here, churches tend to get in the way of spiritual experience.)

Even if your new way is alien and unfamiliar, it will be better that what you have been doing. Thus, you will always be motivated to move to that which is more gratifying and rewarding, because it is more in harmony with the rest of the universe. That is God’s trump card in the process of life. Ultimately, there isn’t anywhere else for you to go!

Is it a smooth line from A to B? No. Will the journey be filled with pitfalls, side roads and will you occasionally lose your way? Absolutely. We humans learn mostly from our failures, so you can expect your share. And what we can learn, once we get our focus away from, “She hurt me!” and shift to “What has this situation come to teach me about myself?” is to hold center. To be compassionate (be in the God Space) in spite of what is going on around you. And you will progress, (sometimes even in spite of yourself). That is the inevitable march of our evolution, both as individuals and as a species.

When you reach the place that you are no longer living in the “briar patch,” you begin to realize just how much better life is when you let go of the ego and do not have to spend your life “protecting’ yourself. Later, you begin to understand why your life has been as it has – and why it needed to be exactly as it was. As you come to this realization, you stop being angry at God for the troubles in your life. You may even begin to move toward a level of gratitude for your difficulties and for the learning and insights they have given you. You don’t want to repeat your experiences, and you certainly don’t go out looking for trouble, but when it comes, as it must, you understand that it comes to teach, not to harm, because who you truly are cannot be harmed, and you then become a student of life rather than a victim of it, and then everything changes.

Ross Bishop

"Wisdom is not gained by knowing the answer; it is gained through the experience of the journey."

Category Archives: Articles

Having Problems

What’s In The Temple? (a poem)

Hinduism, Yoga and Life

Why Am I Here?

Adam and Eve

Learning From Failure

Affirmations

Seeking Truth

Having Hurt Feelings

Loving Yourself