Life is a classroom. There is no other reason for us to incarnate into the physical realm than to provide ourselves with the opportunity to grow in a crucible where the lessons provided to us are both transformative and incredibly intense. We've intentionally and collectively established illusions, boundaries and limitations which channel our growth in very specific directions. Because of our limited perspective from within the scope of a single lifetime, the challenges we face in our lives carry incredible weight. The loss of a job, the ending of a romantic relationship, or the death of a loved one can forever change our world just as a sudden breakthrough in our career, falling in love, or the birth of a child can radically change our perspective and fill us with immeasurable hope.
If we understood our existence from a larger perspective, that we're eternal, spiritual beings and our experience is much greater than a single mortal lifetime, the lessons, challenges and victories we face in our daily lives would not be the powerful tools for growth that we need in this incarnation. Imagine for a moment, that your perspective of who you are was anchored in the next step in the spiritual evolutionary process, that you perceived yourself, not as who you are today, but as who you are from the collective experience of eternity. From this broader perspective, the tragedy that just occurred in your life clearly exists only in a moment in time. You would understand that it is not an ending, but simply an event to be experienced which also contained lessons specifically geared toward your personal growth. Even an unfathomable pain that overwhelmed your ability to cope would be released as you transitioned beyond this lifetime and regained your eternal experience from the other side of the veil between this lifetime and the afterlife.
From such an eternal perspective, we wouldn't learn our lessons as quickly and as thoroughly as we do with the illusions and boundaries in place that we experience in a single mortal lifetime. We often can't see beyond the current moment. We allow ourselves to be completely blinded by the emotions held in a single event and are often lost in that experience.
When we look at the larger development of ourselves as spiritual entities, we also have to understand that we choose to experience reality from our current perspective. That our perspective is so limited is a conscious choice, not by some God or creator who placed that criteria on our lives, but by ourselves as we prepared for this incarnation. If it were possible for us to spiritually grow, develop and evolve elsewhere with the potential depth we have available to us in a single physical lifetime, there would be no reason whatsoever for us to incarnate. As spiritual beings, we literally have the ability to create our own reality. What we manifest through our thoughts, emotions, and energy is exactly what we live. We have the ability to literally create any lifetime we want to experience.
However, if the process was that simple, the vast majority of Western culture would transform themselves into beautiful multi-millionaires. From a global perspective, there would be no war, no poverty, no sickness or pain. Our world would be filled only with people who loved and adored us. There would be no bad hair days, no challenges and absolutely no reason or opportunity to grow.
And that is obviously not the situation in which we live.
The first concept that makes growth in this incarnation possible is that we put forth the intent and energy to manifest a specific lifetime before we're ever incarnated. From a more eternal perspective, we choose specific things that we want to experience in this lifetime, selecting certain challenges and opportunities that we know will provide us with the perfect environment in which to grow. Much of the energy, the broader themes we experience within this life are things that we consciously put in place before we were born. This includes not only the joys we encounter, but also the difficulties and challenges that we face.
I don't speak of this process lightly, but from first hand experience. My early life was dark, horrible and nightmarish. Our family was extremely impoverished and I worked from an early age to help put food on the family table. Over the course of my formative years I was beaten until I almost died, brutally and violently raped for hours on end by a pair of individuals, and sexually abused by every adult non-family member that came into my world. At one point I was even drugged and kidnapped. Through a series of events, I was placed in a situation where I had to simultaneously beat multiple attackers into submission on a daily basis to protect my mother and brother. I found it necessary to deal with a parent's mental illness and continual suicide attempts. And I experienced all of this while raising my younger brother without the smallest shred of a support system. From the limited perspective of a single lifetime, was any of that something that I would choose to experience? Certainly not. Because of the illusions and boundaries we choose to experience, our perception is that we are living a single lifetime, that each moment is so fragile and precious that it has to have meaning. Why would any of us squander a childhood by submerging it in such darkness?
When looked at from a broader perspective, from the position of an eternal spiritual being who sees the challenges within their proper framework, this was exactly the life that I needed to live. From my childhood I learned strength and independence. I developed the ability to reach for a dream, regardless of the obstacles that stood between myself and the life that I wanted to live. Perseverance and discipline became tools and welcomed friends, not something to be avoided at all costs. I learned to find joy in the midst of hardship, to let go of the past and move on with hope for the future, and to truly believe that each day is going to be better than the day before. The ability to forgive, to love regardless of the cost, and to leave my own mistakes behind that I learned because of my childhood experiences are tools that I cherish and consider valuable beyond all measure. To be perfectly honest, I am very thankful for my childhood and feel blessed that I was given the opportunity to experience those things and learn from them. Without those challenges, my adult life would contain only a tiny fraction of the joy, love and promise that I experience today.
If we were solely responsible from the perspective of this single incarnation for manifesting our life, we wouldn't be given the opportunities that we experience. Much of the energy for this lifetime is put in place by our own selves, long before we're born. However, we have incredible latitude in choosing how we deal with experiences and our free will can interact with that energy in an almost limitless number of ways to create a lifetime. Given my own childhood, I could have chosen numerous paths, the least likely of which would find me writing this article. Part of this journey has been learning to listen to the guidance of my higher self and navigate through this lifetime from a broader spiritual perspective, but even the decision to proceed in that manner reflects a complete freedom to choose.
What's more is that we interact with others who are living by the same rules with which we live this incarnation. They have also put the energy behind their lifetime in motion before their birth and they also have complete freedom in choosing what to do with that energy. From the perspective of my own lifetime, because I chose the path of a spiritual teacher, my own energy interacts in a certain way with the people I teach, share my time with, and those who read the articles and lessons that I write. Had I lost myself in the darkness of my childhood, I could have become a violent criminal and my interactions with those who crossed my path would be extraordinarily different than they are today. From my current path, I try to give of myself to those I encounter; from another path, I may have taken from those same people instead. The energy that established this lifetime before I incarnated was certainly put in place long before I was born, but because I have complete freedom to choose my path, the manner in which that energy manifests in my life can literally take any form.
Since all of us have the choice to not only interact with the energy of our own lives in any manner we choose, but also have the choice to interact with each other's energy with the same breadth of freedom of choice, the possible permutations to this incarnation are literally limitless.
What we, as spiritual beings need to remember, is that we are here in this incarnation to learn. Not only do we learn from the events we experience, but we also learn from each other. In other words, our own actions, attitudes, and energy we manifest not only define our own incarnation, but act as teachers and lessons for those we encounter within the daily flow of our lives.
The simplest example of this is our interaction with our children. My son, Gavin, is four years old and, on rare occasions, wets his bed. It's not a big deal in our world. He gets up, lets me know he's had an accident and hops in the bathtub. While he's bathing, I wash his bedding and our day goes on as if nothing happened.
However, Gavin woke up this morning, as dry as he's been for months. He chose to lay in bed for awhile, fell asleep again, and then wet his bed during his short nap. When I went into his bedroom to check on him a second time, he was laying quietly in bed with his eyes open, the room smelling faintly of urine. I immediately knew what had happened and Gavin was well aware that I knew what had happened as well.
In that moment, we both became each other's teachers. Gavin presented an opportunity to test my patience. We both knew that he should have gotten out of bed when he awoke, used the bathroom, and then laid down again if he chose to do so. Gavin was aware of the implications from his choice and the subsequent bed wetting. The energy had already manifested in our world. It was simply a matter of exercising freedom of will to determine what course things would take from that point forward. I could yell at him and crush his spirit, wounding both our relationship and his self-confidence in the process. I could ignore the situation and, knowing Gavin's personality, he would take that as me wanting to put distance between he and I because of his mistake. There were a thousand paths I could take, each resulting in a completely unique manifestation of energy.
I acknowledged the situation, offering him a suggestion of what to do the next time it happened. Then I told him that I loved him, that it was simply an accident, and gave him the opportunity to lend a hand in the solution. I asked him if he would mind waiting while I ran him a bath and, once he heard the sound of the water, if he would get up, toss his underwear in the washing machine, and then climb in the tub. It gave him something concrete to assist with in the solution (taking care of his soiled underwear) and created an energy where he and I drew even closer together by solving the problem together.
While it may seem more concrete and clear-cut than the daily flow of our world, my interaction with my son is the same sort of interaction that we experience countless times during our daily lives. I can choose to let the driver pull in front of me during my busy morning commute or I can let them sit in their driveway with their turn signal on. I can snap at a co-worker who dropped the ball on a big project, or I can manifest energy for us to work together to solve the problem in much the same way that Gavin and I dealt with his bedwetting. I can choose to exercise or relax, enjoy a desert or observe a diet, stay up late or get extra sleep. Each moment holds an infinite possibility of choices. It's simply up to us to choose, consciously or unconsciously, how we want that energy to manifest.
The thing that we have to keep in mind is the energy that we set in place before we incarnated into this lifetime. If we could set specific energy in motion that impacted the course of our life before we were born, then the energy we currently manifest in our lives can have the same sort of long-term and far-reaching impact. The energy we are manifesting by our current choices isn't simply defining the moment we exist in, but is setting in motion the energy that we will continue to interact with some distance down our path. There are occasions in our lives when we feel like we are putting in massive amounts of work on an issue and not seeing any sort of a resolution. What we have to understand is that the energy may not be manifesting in our current moment, but could be setting up the energy, people and events that we will be interacting with farther along our path. The solutions we are trying to achieve may not manifest immediately, but may result in sudden breakthroughs or massive shifts in energy down the road.
Whether we perceive the moments of our current incarnation as "good" or "bad," whether the lessons that we learn are pleasant or difficult to process, at some point we will be released from the energy of this lifetime and return to a broader perspective that is devoid of the illusions, boundaries and limitations we've chosen to accept in a physical incarnation. The pain will disappear, the lessons retained, and the joy celebrated. For most of us, after taking a break from this existence and given the time to properly process the lessons we have learned, we'll return for another lifetime of joy and sorrow, of victory and defeat. We will once again be given the freedom to grow and learn in an environment where our limited perspective makes the lessons we learn incredibly vibrant and transformative.