*
Hi all,
How very prosaic life is at times. At the moment I am stuck at home with a second degree burn on my leg. This was due to a bowl of soup being spilt down my leg accidentally.
Wow did I scream with pain! Apparently second degree burns are the most painful type of burns and one of the most painful injuries possible. Anyhow I did first aid, got to a hospital and now it is healing up nicely. The nurse has also said there should be no scaring which is good.
But how prosaic life can be. Because I cannot go anywhere because of the leg people have been coming to see me and with all the extra time of my hands I have been having some amazing conversations. And they have caused me to see that some of my friends are not as developed as I supposed them to be.
In one conversation I had a friend who told me that we are "the sum of all our experiences". Now he did actually mean all the experiences in all of our lifetimes. But to me the idea that we are just "the sum of all our experiences" falls little short of those materialistic sociologists and psychologists etc. who taught in the the sixties that people became thugs etc because they had a bad childhood etc etc. This just renders humans being into robots that merely react to outside influences. It is behaviorism at its worst.
To say that on a karmic or spiritual level we are just "the sum of all our experiences" makes us seem like spiritual robots. It is a form a spiritual behaviorism. God is ringing the karmic bell and in a spiritual Pavlovian way we react.
To say that someone is just "the sum of all their experiences" is to render a human being as something that is merely enacted upon by outside influences. Now a dog may repond Pavlovian like to the ringing of a bell but you and I are not dogs.
Two people can experience the same event and respond to it differently. Therefore it is not true to say that we are shaped merely by our experiences. It would possibly be truer to say that we are shaped by how we respond to our experiences. But what is the 'I' or 'we' that is responding?
Well to me the 'I' or the 'we' that responds is our soul. I could say that the soul is that eternal part of ourselves that chooses to come into the world to learn lessons. But I will not say that I believe that is the truth. The truth is that our souls are not part of ourselves. They are ourselves. We do not have a soul: we are a soul. Everything else that we consider to be ourselves such as our minds, our personalities, our bodies even are not really us. Not is the sense of them lasting forever. They are just temporary vehicles created to facilitate our learning in one particular lifetime.
I would like to say here that I have used the word "repond" with regard to the soul. However there are many people who although they are a soul in Reality are identified with their ego. That is their little Earth self. They think that is who they really are. At that level of consciousness they do not respond they "react". These are the people whose behaviour the materialist psychologists and sociologists can predict. Because in truth their level of consciousness is more or less a little higher that that of Pavlov's dogs. And with the right Government programs those who at this level have been conditioned to become thugs can be reconditioned "trained" to become better behaved. But it is training and not education. Education is of the soul. What materialistc Government programs teach and what an educated (enlightened) soul learns is the difference between information and Knowledge.
Now I believe that enlightenment for most souls is a ongoing process. It is like drip drip drip. The soul is enlightened for most people over many lifetimes. Their are some like Buddha for whom it was instantaneous. But for most people it is a ongoing challenge.
One thing I am asked over an over again is how is the crossover made from being identified as a conditioned ego to starting to become an enlightened soul and I can only answer truthfully: I do not know. Perhaps this is one of the Mysteries that certain occult schools claim to teach. I don't know. All my my spiritual insights have come as a result of direct contact with the Divine mainly through my dreams and my poetry.
All I can say with certainty is that it is true "When the student is ready the teacher will appear" - occult saying.
So what are we? We are souls that have chosen to come to Earth to learn more lessons. Whether or not we do learn them is entirely out responsibility.
Until next time,
Blessed be
KK
* Acknowledgement: this image is by William Blake and was designed by him for his grave.
