Streetwise Spirituality
28 Days to Inner Fitness and Everyday Enlightenment
Carol Marleigh Kline
Published by NorLightsPress at Smashwords
Copyright (C) 2010 by Carol Marleigh Kline
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Katherine Leonard, PhD, Nataliya Schetchikova, PhD, Sandy Jost, PhD, Betty Halley, RN, and Harriet Cohen Cooke, MD, for their critiques. I value their insights, suggestions, and questions.
I am particularly grateful to Ken Wilcox. Without his sleuthing after materials and years of evenings and weekends devoted to putting aging audiotapes on CDs, there would be no book.
Thanks to formatter Melody Culver. Gifted, supportive, and wise, Melody smoothed the process from beginning to end.
A special word of thanks to my literary agent, Krista Goering, and to my publishers, Sammie and Dee Justesen, for saying “Yes!”
Words cannot express the depth of my gratitude to the infinitely generous lecturer, the infinitely patient Mr. Tate, and my mother, who became the angel on my shoulder, just as she said she would.
Finally, although the stories are based on my life (except for “Bungee Jumper”), names have been changed and situations have been fictionalized to protect others’ privacy.
Carol Marleigh Kline
Portland, Oregon
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Chapter One: The Secret
Chapter Two: Dreamchaser
Chapter Three: Earth School: If Not Now
Chapter Four: Earth School: Outer Mind and Soul Mind
Chapter Five: Earth School: Bridging Heart and Mind
Chapter Six: Earth School: Movable Classroom
Chapter Seven: Earth School: Extended Human Family
Chapter Eight: Earth School: Living Consciously
Chapter Nine: Workbook Introduction
Chapter Ten: Workbook: On Patience
Day 1 – Life Story: I, Judge and Jury
Day 2 – Life Story: Lost
Day 3 – Life Story: Living Others’ Lives
Day 4 – Life Story: Off Camera
Day 5 – Life Story: Like Magic
Day 6 – Life Story: For Nothing
Day 7 – Life Story: Kindest Cut
Day 8 – Life Story: Just Do It
Day 9 – Life Story: Comets
Day 10 – Life Story: Breath of Life
Day 11 – Life Story: Bungee Jumper
Day 12 – Life Story: Drums
Day 13 – Life Story: Chasing Time
Day 14 – Life Story: What’s in Front
Chapter Eleven: Workbook: On Perseverance
Day 15 – Life Story: Fantasy Father
Day 16 – Life Story: The Break
Day 17 – Life Story: Impossible
Day 18 – Life Story: Sleepwalker
Day 19 – Life Story: Brain Bees
Day 20 – Life Story: Promises to Keep
Day 21 – Life Story: Harriet
Chapter Twelve: Workbook: On Adaptability
Day 22 – Life Story: Fired
Day 23 – Life Story: The Commute
Day 24 – Life Story: Past Is Present
Day 25 – Life Story: Illegally Creative
Day 26 – Life Story: Dirt
Day 27 – Life Story: Needless Wonder
Day 28 – Life Story: Aurora
Afterword: Everything Matters
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Chapter One
The Secret
For eleven years, that battered brown box sat unopened in Japan. It crisscrossed America four times— still unopened. Parked forlornly on the floor of my new-to-me Oregon condo, it was out of place and out of time. With every move, I considered tossing it, but couldn’t. Inside were keys to a life I might have led, a secret I had kept from almost everyone.
Looking at my watch, I pick up the scissors and slit the tape. I shuffle through hundreds of lecture transcripts, the papers dotted with mildew. “Ten minutes,” I say aloud. That’s all it will take to skim through these pages and shove them into a garbage bag. The minutes become hours. The bag remains empty. In flashbacks, I recall the strong voice of the lecturer as he speaks of life, death, and everything in between. “We think our experiences come to us by chance,” he says. “Chance doesn’t exist. You can get hit by a car while crossing the street because your mind is somewhere else. That’s not chance. It has a cause—your carelessness. It has an effect—your early and quite unnecessary death.”
Physical pain, he said, means the body needs care. If the emotions are stirred, however, Earth School is in session. Heart and mind are calling on us to search our inner currents and make better choices than in the past. That search, he said, can lead to spiritual growth and understanding.
The lecturer outlined a set of life skills meant to help us meet our everyday challenges. Practical to the core, the skills were useful when we felt frustrated to the breaking point or when we felt afraid or rejected. They were comforting after deep loss. They helped explain why love that felt so good could feel so bad. If we mastered them, he said, we would no longer find ourselves running blindly through our days, wondering what was going on, and hoping to dodge all the bullets but the last one.
“We are in Earth School to grow past personality and biological drives, past what we’ve been taught, past social and cultural expectations,” he said. “We are here to deepen our connections to our innermost selves and to each other.”
The lecturer touted no new religion. There was no one to worship and nothing to take on faith. Happiness and inner peace were not goals, but by-products of daily practice of the life skills. Enlightenment, he said, came about when people put heart and soul into building inner fitness. Enlightened people had one basic textbook—life. The more we used these life skills, the more we would positively affect the world as a whole, just as every wave in the ocean is connected to every other wave. The concept was generous and I liked it well enough, but I was only 13 when I first heard those lectures. They ran late, often on school nights. My attention wavered and my bed called to me.
Back then, I never asked myself what I was doing on this planet. When my mother found what she called a “practical spirituality,” though, I caught her excitement. We joined some 200 people who gathered twice weekly in Los Angeles to listen to talks that made sense even to the child-woman that I was. Originally from Egypt, the lecturer taught there for 35 years. He never made a dime for what he did. Why isn’t his name in this book? “Only the teachings count,” he said. “My name is unimportant.”
I was just 17 when I rejected all thought of inner growth. I did not want to believe that anything I did made a difference. My friends weren’t talking about purpose. They cared about fun. I cared about what they cared about, and I was passionately determined to fit in. I was not going to blaze any trails, spiritual or otherwise. Still, I continued to add copies of the lectures to that box for years, wanting reminders of a time when even the most ordinary event took on extraordinary meaning.
Traces of mud are still on my boots. I can talk from the shadow side. I am definitely no angel. Knowing the person I was, I can’t imagine I would have done things any differently. In these pages, you will see what one flawed person did to turn life around—when I rediscovered and put to use the wisdom found in a stack of dumpster-bound transcripts.
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Chapter Two
Dreamchaser
I was a gangly, knobby-kneed girl who grew very tall very fast. At nearly 6 feet, I was a lonely loner with no idea what to make of life, so I looked to Hollywood for answers. American movies promised men a good life if they worked hard and made money. Women had to be beautiful. And nice. Hollywood bitches never kept what little happiness they found. My last guideline came from the Great Book of Women’s Wisdom: “When in pain, eat chocolate.”
Most of all, I was desperate to fall in love and to remain in that state of blessed insanity forever.
Beginning in my teens, though, love was always the same. The first weeks were thrilling, followed by the fading of that Fourth-of-July feeling. And wasn’t true love measured by the fireworks in a lover’s kiss?
I was 20 when the movies set me on a career path. On Saturday nights, my boyfriend and I watched samurai movies at the local theater. Screen samurai took mortal offense at insults that seemed not worth drawing your sword over. They turned their backs on what I most wanted: Security. Infinitely layered, unwritten social rules kept everyone tightly wound. Nonconformists had no place in Japan, but the Japanese respected writers—who were nonconformists. Nothing about being Japanese was simple.
As hard as I tried to fit into my own culture, I could not crack the code. I smiled a lot. Tried not to take up too much space. Rarely expressed an opinion. Kept my emotions to myself lest they carry me somewhere I did not want to go. Japan gave me an out. If I could not be American apple pie, I could try for American sushi. Sad-eyed, kimono-clad people whose hearts bled into exquisite lines of poetry made me weep. My curiosity was aroused by, among other things, the bow. You bowed low for some people, and not so low for others. How did anyone figure it out?
Perplexed and magnetized by questions trivial and deep, I set sail for the life of a college teacher with a specialty in things Japanese. My choice was eccentric, but eccentricity was fine in my culture if you could make a living at it. This ambition determined every move I made for seven years.
From the University of Southern California, I headed for New York and Columbia University’s East Asian Studies department. Like everyone else, I was on a year-to-year fellowship. Fearful of losing it, I pared my life down to nothing but books. Well, almost.
Every six weeks or so, I allowed the Metropolitan Opera to make passionate, safe love to my dried-up scholar’s heart. At midnight, exalted and exhausted, I stumbled out onto the street to take the subway back to my fifth-floor walkup. While I lived in New York, my emotional life began and ended with opera.
Three years later, I flew to the former Stanford Center in Tokyo to study Japanese while writing a Master’s thesis. When my fellowship there vanished overnight, I stayed in Japan—too stubborn to go home. Eighteen months later, my remaining academic dreams crumbled, leaving me with no particular reason to get up in the morning. Like so many Westerners there, I taught English conversation to achieve my two remaining life goals: Eating and paying the rent. Later, I became a Tokyo newscaster and talk show host. My husband-to-be and I met when my best friend, his wife, was about to leave him. More on that story, and on the derailed dreams, later.
On my eleventh anniversary in Japan, a yearning to go home while America still felt like home put me on a plane to Los Angeles. What I didn’t know was that American TV stations ranked themselves from #1 to about #200—and foreign TV stardom counted for nothing. Frustrated, I took broadcast journalism courses at U.S.C., looking for a way in. For a year, Stu flew to L.A. every three months, stayed a day or two, and headed back to Tokyo.
To blunt the edge of pain and loneliness, I’d flip on the set to catch the news—and wind up watching nonstop until my eyelids slid south. As long as the TV was on, lively adventures and handsome men were mine. By morning, the images had faded and the hunt was on again for something to fill all the holes in my life.
Finally, I asked my commuter husband for a divorce. In six weeks, he had moved to Los Angeles. From there, we drove 3,000 miles to my new job as a TV reporter in High Point, North Carolina. People at the television station packed exciting or numbing activities into every waking moment. I did, too. There were parties, wine, and relationships. We chased endlessly after everything new. All of us lived as if boredom were a capital crime.
In time, I discovered that jobs you love can go away and marriages can blow apart. And chocolate? Chocolate takes you only so far. If picks and shovels dig gold out of a mine, I wondered, what tools do people have to dig life out of life?
I looked for a quick fix in my favorite bookstore’s personal growth section. One author recommended gratitude—another touted love. Seeing no evidence that these authors’ feet even touched the ground, I could not relate. Why should I be grateful for pain? How could I love those I didn’t even like? Shelves of inspiring books gathered dust in my house—all read and forgotten, along with notes taken at too many instant life-transformation workshops.
If, as my society told me, happiness for a woman meant having a good man, a good job, and maybe a pair of fabulous shoes, life would never be more than the sunlit flash off a bluebird’s wings. I was determined that my last words would not be, “Is that all there is?”
My days were a sideways slide through time. I watched as people spoiled the present by clinging to the past. Others, like me, struggled to achieve a dream, only to throw it away in a moment of recklessness.
A few managed to be at home in their own skins. They laughed often—with people, not at them. Neither doormats nor saints, they were several cuts above me as I drifted along, seeking to find love and avoid pain. They might suffer, but they didn’t ask, “Why me?” These people had to be faking it, I decided. What were they like when no one was watching? Wasn’t it exhausting to pretend to be so above it all, so ready to roll with everything life threw at them? I knew how hard it was to live a lie. Here I was, years into trying to manufacture a permanent persona I could stand. Still trying my best to be someone I wasn’t.
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Chapter Three
Earth School: If Not Now
Still surrounded by piles of musty transcripts, I read these words: “Your lives are short, no matter how long they are.” At 17, my best years had been ahead of me. No talk about time limits or life missions was going to slow me down then. Maybe I’d get serious later. Well, “later” had arrived and all I could think was, “If not now, when?”
A School Like No Other
The lecturer insisted that no matter what it looks like, life is not a random series of events. Earth School, he said, has its own ABCs. They are: a) learn, b) grow, and c) expand in consciousness. Each experience moves us into the path of learning opportunities. In Earth School, nobody gets “social promotions.” Tests are cheat-proof. And we can’t call in sick. Sleeping through class only puts off the inevitable—the lessons that are ours to learn.
“So, if this is a school,” I thought, “why haven’t I seen it from day one?” That’s easy, the lecturer said. The drama blinds us to what’s going on. Life lessons are subtle, complex, enthralling, or devastating. They distract us. We don’t see how exquisitely custom-designed they are. “Maybe so,” I thought, “but show me.”
Two days later, I found my answer in a transcript: “Earth School lies in our repetitive patterns. Do we repeatedly attract romantic partners who can’t commit? Are close friends demanding or selfish? Do we pitch our tents on the edge of burnout?” Repetitive patterns, the lecturer said, are guideposts to what we have not yet mastered. If gold lay buried in my repetitive patterns, I thought, I was a wealthy woman.
Whatever the experience, he told us, our attitude determined its quality. We could always make a bad experience better—or worse.
Getting to the Good Things
Many cultures, the lecturer told us, don’t value what’s most important in Earth School—the little stuff. Like how to create peace of mind in the midst of chaos. Like how to uncover moments of happiness in completely unexpected places. Like how to love and be loved. We rarely get around to putting the little things where they belong—at the center of our lives. It’s not that we can’t have the good things in life that aren’t free, he said. We can. But they aren’t why we’re here.
Where the Pitfalls Are
Even those who take an evolutionary slow boat, he told us, still get where they’re going. Later, if not sooner. If we think sooner is better than later, it’s possible to pick up the pace. All it takes is the willingness to think for ourselves. That’s where I drew the line. Nobody tells me what to think.
Consider this, he said: If we believe we create our assumptions and attitudes, our biases and preferences all by ourselves, we’re mistaken. We pick up ideas with the very air we breathe, from friends and family, through what we hear and see, and in how we react to pain and loss. The longer we hold on to these ideas, the more fixed they become. Like boxes we haven’t opened in a decade, ideas benefit from a periodic airing out.
Okay, so where was I supposed to find worn-out ideas that no longer served me? In our reactions, he said. When we get upset because someone else takes “our” parking space. When someone decides to stop loving us. When we share a holiday with the family and all the same fights are fought again with all the same people for all the same reasons. When we feel irritated over having to do what we don’t want to do. Getting upset doesn’t change reality, he said. It doesn’t make things better. Chances are, it makes them worse. We know that, but we vent our emotions anyway. We think the world should know that we don’t like having to deal with change. “Do we know anyone on Earth who escapes change?” he asked.
I had a short fuse that was easily lit when I felt unfairly treated, or even when I just bashed my toe against a pile of books I’d left on the floor. Wasn’t it normal to feel a fire in the belly at such times—and let it roar? It was perfectly normal for someone who operated on automatic, he said. But if I wanted to move on up the ladder in Earth School, to evolve past the familiar emotional smog, I would have to start looking at things in a new way. That idea did not please me, but the lecturer said that Earth School is not designed to please anyone. Instead, it’s all about learning. If we’re still walking around in Earth School, he added, we still have lessons to learn. By learning them, we move on to the next level, and the next. That’s where the really good stuff is—but getting there requires some internal housecleaning.
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Chapter Four
Earth School: Outer Mind and Soul Mind
A program so complex that it provides exactly the right life lessons for each human being from birth through death is beyond my power to imagine, but that’s Earth School, said the lecturer. Who, then, are the architects, the teachers behind our multidimensional mosaic of a class-room? Who lays out the endlessly interrelated opportunities for us to respond in a more enlightened way? Life would be simpler if those who have already figured things out were still around—if we had an army of Earth School “graduates” to answer our questions. We don’t. So you and I still sit in our child-sized seats, knees poking out into the aisles. Now and then, we glimpse what we’re here for. More often, we miss the cues. Or we just coast.
Even though we can’t see our two primary teachers, we know one of them intimately. It’s what we call “the voice in our heads.” If we pay attention to its gabble, said the lecturer, we’ll notice that none of it takes us anywhere new. Those erratic thought patterns are very different from the creative daydream flow— daydreams known to inventors and artists. That flow accesses our second teacher, soul mind.
Each of these two teachers has its own way of acting and its own goals. One dies when we do. The other does not. The teacher who dies (the voice in our heads) is closely tied to material things, to competition, and to fear. Most people’s lives, said the lecturer, don’t get much beyond this level. That grumpy, self-satisfied teacher encourages us to react out of unthinking habit.*
__________
*Gary Zukav, author of Seat of the Soul, calls a reaction a choice rooted in habit, while a response is creative, healthy, and made in the moment. That same distinction is respectfully made throughout Streetwise Spirituality.
__________
It tempts us to forget what we’re here for—the learning, the growing, and the expansion of consciousness. Playing on our emotions, it keeps us under its thumb by pumping up our fears, our doubts, and our many hungers. We cannot grow much as long as it’s in charge. And only conscious choices, made consistently, can train that teacher to shift direction over time.
Something this important needs a name. The difficulty with terms like “ego,” “egoic mind,” and “personality” is the baggage they carry. Psychologists put a positive spin on the ego. To them, it’s our identity. People on the street don’t agree. To us, it’s an overinflated sense of self-worth. The word “personality” is equally murky.
Here we’ll call the disgruntled Earth School teacher “outer mind.” Outer mind is with us all of our lives, and the havoc it creates is almost inconceivable.
Meet Outer Mind
We can temporarily drown out the voice of the outer mind. We all know how. A glass of wine. A shopping trip. Blanked-out hours with something electronic. At the end of the day, though, we are still alone with ourselves—and with that voice. Outer mind, however, is not some great cosmic error. It has its purpose. We could not survive in Earth School without it. Outer mind helps us navigate through the mazes of this material life. It focuses on keeping us alive. To learn our lessons, the lecturer reminded us, a body is required. Outer mind tells us not to step in front of speeding cars. It reminds us to eat. It urges us to do what it takes to keep the species going.
Outer mind gets out of hand, though, when it tries to run our lives through its infantile emotions and its utter disdain for logic. When we become frightened, insulted, disappointed, or defeated, outer mind pushes us to react as we always have. Why pause to analyze what’s going on? The outer mind is always right, right? Maybe we have a habit of shouting foul words at other drivers from the safety of our car—windows rolled up, of course. Outer mind croons, “Go for it.”
Outer Mind in Charge
The Earth-bound outer mind nags and yammers. It uses any tactic to create negative beliefs that keep it in control. It lies to us and never looks back. It stokes the fires of fantasy. It sucks hard on past pain. It reinforces our conditioning, our stereotypes, and our memories. It wants what it wants when it wants it. Outer mind honks and shouts: “Me first!” It manipulates people and considers their suffering only a means to an end. The negative belief at work is, “My needs are paramount. I am free to do whatever it takes to get them met.”
Outer mind may choose bigotry to feel superior. It can’t stand to be contradicted because only one side of any issue could possibly exist—its side. Outer mind likes to steal good ideas—“Why give credit where credit is due?” Notice how often outer mind leaps up to blame others for bad situations we’ve brought on ourselves. When things go well, see how quickly it says, “Thanks to me! All thanks to me!”
Stories it tells about other people show them in a lesser light. Outer mind loves being the star. The negative belief is: “I must show everyone how special I am.” Outer mind takes no joy in other people’s successes. “She wouldn’t have won that race if I’d had a good night’s sleep.” Outer mind has a half-dozen forgotten projects around the house. It drops projects—and relationships—when the novelty wears off: “Boring!”
Outer mind can also rule us by generating feelings of inferiority. “Everyone else is better/smarter/more spiritually evolved than I am.” “I’m hopeless.” “I have no control over my addiction to food/sex/alcohol/ drugs.”
Outer mind’s hungers are very young and insatiable. Outer mind tempts us to give in to cravings because addictions make people feel out of control, keeping outer mind in control. Outer mind is all about power and the belief that everyone on Earth is either inferior or superior to everyone else. The lecturer said the outer mind likes comparisons. It may see others as material or mental pygmies, compared to us. When the outer mind is in the driver’s seat, we say, “I am greater.” “I have more.” “I am recognized and you are not.”
Those who see themselves as inferior feel invisible and weak. They may spend their lives trying to fill others’ needs out of a desire to feel worthwhile. But they can never do enough to bring themselves peace. That’s because they are using the tools of outer mind to manipulate others’ passions or thoughts—a strategy that cannot bring about inner peace or wholeness.
The outer mind presents the greatest challenges that any of us will ever face. The lecturer said that if we allow its signature markers such as selfishness, despair, judgment, or ingratitude to run us, outer mind will succeed in distracting us from the great work at hand. It will keep us from evolving. We will stay locked in place until we are brought to our knees.
With outer mind in the driver’s seat, we can become cynical, seeing a self-centered agenda behind any kind act. We may become disillusioned, calling happy people fools. Alienated, and in thrall to outer mind, we may say, “Ah, the world is no damned good.”
The lecturer said that every trouble on Earth is created by the outer mind. “Some may call that mind the ‘devil,” he added. “It’s the only devil that any of us will ever know. The outer mind wants nothing more than to rule, dictate, and destroy what’s standing in its way—when it isn’t busy satisfying one of its infinite hungers or whims.” The outer mind tears us apart in its passion for dominance. It feeds on our chemistry, DNA, upbringing, past experiences, and dark emotions.
If we spend all our days in getting and spending, in loving, losing, and blaming, or in fighting or ignoring our lessons, the lecturer told us, fresh opportunities arrive to become more conscious and true to our deepest selves. Why are we attracted to the wrong people? We are not fools. We don’t want to love them. It’s only a dance of two souls, both with something to teach, both with something to learn. Many of our most important lessons are brought to us through difficult relationships.
We may hope that if we ignore our purpose long enough, it will go away. It won’t. Why we’re here is rooted in who we are. We can’t get rid of who we are, so that brings us full circle, right back to what we didn’t want to face to begin with.
We may get upset when we don’t have what we expect. We may say, “I deserve better!” Why? Do we think that physical beauty, education, money, status, or some other external measuring stick should determine our quality of life? Are we blind to everything but our pleasures or making a living? “We call this human nature,” said the lecturer. “If it is, it holds us close to Earth and keeps us from growing spiritually.”
Many people make the mistake of thinking that the outer mind, together with its beliefs and prejudices and baggage, is who they are, and all that they are. Unaware of why they are here, they stagnate.
The outer mind focuses on externals. It tells us, “Seeing is believing.” Seeing is not believing, the lecturer said. The eye deceives us. The five senses are “lovely liars,” he said. “They tell us that what we see, hear, smell, touch, or taste is more important than what we feel and know at a deep level.” The five senses help us function in the outside world. But if we let them, the senses can distract us from who we are by stimulating and feeding the energies of the outer mind.
Outer Mind’s Higher Purpose
The outer mind has a higher purpose. Outer mind is designed to eventually enrich itself through learning, and to apply that learning to our growing understanding, the lecturer told us. Day by day, we can improve our lives, pay our karma, and interact with each other in ways that show we are more than sleepwalking members of this species—that we are evolving.
Meet Soul Mind
Our eyes tell us we are forever separate, said the lecturer, but our hearts know we are forever connected. The heart connection is made through the soul. The soul is the individualized portion of the oneness in each of us. The soul communicates with us through soul mind, which is our other internal teacher, the only part of us that is eternal.
Conscience, Common Sense, and Intuition
Soul mind uses conscience, common sense, and intuition to guide us toward growth and learning.
Conscience is one of soul mind’s most recognizable voices, he said. When we are tempted by outer mind to do something that will hurt us or someone else, it’s conscience that advises us to choose otherwise.
Common sense helps us respond to life in practical, reasonable ways based on reality, not fantasy.
Intuition is another soul mind voice. The outer mind tries to dismiss soul mind’s hunches as figments of our imagination. We may act on our intuition—and a hunch may turn out to be right—but our doubting outer mind will say, “That’s a coincidence. Since when are you psychic?”
Soul mind constantly tries to warn us through impressions, premonitions, and hunches. If we listen, we leave the door open to receive more such gifts. Hunches and impressions make us aware of what is coming, often as a result of poor choices we made in the past. We may not remember what we did long ago, but soul mind’s memory is 20/20, the lecturer told us.
Paying Karma
In Earth School, soul mind custom designs the basic curriculum—our life lessons. And it is soul mind that judges our actions, thoughts, words, and feelings. If the soul believes that suffering will help us learn a lesson, we will suffer, but suffering is only a potential teaching tool and its value lies in how we use it. The purpose is not to punish, but to teach. Soul mind works toward balancing the ledger while we pay off the karma we’ve brought on ourselves. “Karma? I’ve done nothing to bring on bad karma,” we may say. “Why should I have such a hard life?” Soul mind takes the long view. How could anyone learn all there is to learn in a single incarnation? Even if we wanted to, we could not. And most of us don’t really want to. We’d rather wait for others to change first. “If he starts being more loving toward me, I’ll be more loving toward him.” With that mindset, we can miss the changes that would take place in our lives if we became the kind of person we want others to be, of loving in the way that we wish we were loved.
When I went to parties in my teens and twenties, I sat off by my introverted self, danced when asked, and used my little set speech: “This is a really nice home, isn’t it? They’ve painted the walls pretty colors.” I said the same boring thing to each partner. After I’d said “the words,” I went mute. Dancing with me was as stimulating as wrapping your arms around a broom. I never thought to ask a man about his interests. To me, finding love was all chance. It was supposed to be pure chemistry, all myth and magic. Prince Charming would see through my quiet disguise. I had so very much to learn.
The Blueprint
Some people believe everything is pre-destined, but the lecturer says no. Certain experiences are laid out in advance by soul mind—people to meet, challenges to overcome, and joys to delight in—but we make of them what we will and a passive approach to life gets us nowhere. How can we grow if we roll over and play dead?