Voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering.
I am coming to believe that we will never know peace until we can voluntarily accept undeserved suffering. Our reasoning mind rises in righteous indignation before those words have finished coming to mind, before our eyes have finished reading the words on the page.
They do not make sense to the reasoning mind, the ego-driven reasoning mind, and, on that basis alone, must be rejected. And yet, those who are serious about still more spiritual growth, and the getting of same, must needs come into agreement with those very words and the meaning behind those words.
There are in the world the likes of Etty Hillesum (who died at Auschwitz in 1943) who are the embodiment of undeserved suffering. Then there's you and me. Our undeserved suffering is pretty much getting our feelings hurt by a loved one when we did not do a single thing to deserve it (according to our own ego-centered mind).
The extraordinarily hard lesson to learn unto doing is the necessity of keeping the focus on our own self. A book of spiritual principles that I follow teaches that when someone does something that makes us sore we are in the wrong, too...and there's the answer: Stay focused on our own self, not on him or her and how s/he hurt us oh so deeply. Because the more we ponder our hurt, the hurter we feel. So we react in kind.
It is only when we ponder the whys and wherefores of our own actions, our own reactions, that we begin to find the necessary spiritual light to see from another angle not our own.
God can and will lovingly clarify our vision if we seek his aid without our ego dictating terms. If we hold onto one iota of self-preservation, we're on our own, and s/he really is wrong. Oops. Another friendship done gone wrong.
Thank you.
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