Do you find your life more complicated than you’d like it to be?
Does it have twists and turns, when you wish it would roll along in a little straighter direction?
If your life sometimes seems complicated, it’s helpful to know that a conscious journey through life necessarily has lots of twists and turns.
A conscious journey through life isn’t going to proceed in a straight line toward your goals. If you are present in your life, your life isn’t necessarily going to line up with your intentions.
While goals may emerge from consciousness, often they are something we impose on life based on our egoic beliefs. To have intentions very easily generates a lot of tensionin life.
Why does a conscious journey through life twist and turn? Why can’t it go straight ahead, especially if we have a clear vision of what we want for our life?
To be present in our life, truly awake to what’s happening, requires us to interact fully with the actual moment we are experiencing.
We encounter each moment just as it is.
This is fundamentally different from following a set plan that dictates our experience and thereby rides roughshod over what may be happening in this moment now.
The reality is that what’s happening in any given moment is often contrary to what we tell ourselves ought to be happening.
Consciousness generates flow. If you look at a map of a river, it doesn’t head straight for the ocean. It meanders through the scenery in all kinds of different directions, taking a turn this way, then perhaps a turn in exactly the opposite direction. Yet its mighty flow gets it where it needs to go.
Because consciousness is universal, so that its presence is experienced everywhere if we are attuned to it, our journey doesn’t need to follow a straight line. This makes for a much more interesting, beautiful journey—once we give up our belief that we have to go in a particular direction.
This is vividly pictured in the story of the Little Prince when the airman suggests that he should make a rope for the sheep. The Little Prince is horrified. Why would his sheep need a rope?
The pilot answers that by tying the sheep up, it will be unable to wander away and get lost—to which the Little Prince laughs because his planet is so small that the sheep can’t get lost.
The idea of tying the sheep to a stake is an image of how we try to control our spiritual journey. We want it to go a certain way.
But as Jesus said, speaking of spirit which is divine consciousness, it’s like the wind that blows wherever it will. It can’t be controlled and contained.
To attempt to direct our life is to fall back under the control of the boa constrictor. It’s what ego does, not consciousness.
When the pilot suggests he might just wander straight ahead, the Little Prince answers that straight ahead you can’t go very far.
There is wonderful symbolism in this conversation. When we begin to awaken from our boa constrictor mentality, we have nothing to fear in terms of going off course. No matter what direction we go, we will increase in consciousness because we will learn from all our experiences how to be more aware.
As I look back on my life, there were times when I felt incredibly lost. I wondered if I was ever going to emerge from such dark periods. Perhaps you have experienced similar dark nights of the soul.
But emerge I did, each time more deeply in tune with my true being. As the saying goes, I’ve learned that “it’s all good” because in the end it’s all the self-manifestation of God.
David Robert Ord is author of Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ and the audio book Lessons in Loving–A Journey into the Heart, both from Namaste Publishing, publishers of Eckhart Tolle and other transformational authors. He writes The Compassionate Eye daily, together with his daily author blog Consciousness Rising, at www.namastepublishing.com
To go deeper into topics like this, we invite you to read the daily blog Consciousness Rising – - http://www.namastepublishing.com/blog/author/david-robert-ord.
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