SPIRITUAL GROWTH IS ALL ABOUT GIVING

Several years ago I read Deepak Chopra’s “Jesus, A Story of Enlightenment.”  It is a version of Jesus’s unrecorded years in which his buddy is Judas, and the power is in Jesus's nonresistance of Judas's slights and snubs up to the betrayal being the key to Jesus’s enlightenment. 

According to me, Jesus's enlightenment may have begun with his knowing to take nothing personally...to love in the face of hate. To resist not evil.

For me, that was the cracking of self's sealed door letting in the light for a slow turn within...away from  personal interpretations of hurt/anger that justify reactive hurt/anger. I quickly add that I am still learning and expect I will be till the proverbial three days after I'm dead. But I'm heading in the right direction.

The beginning, the pearl, is the recognition, then understanding, then realization that it is not the snarks and snubs that cause us pain...it is our ego-victim's perceptions inviting hurt, wanting that sense of betrayal. Our need for still more spiritual growth opens our mind, and we see the adverse comments or actions belong to and from whomever they came...with or without less-than intent. When we let them remain there, they remain there. 

When I was a little girl, I was afraid of the dark. I remember once seeing a shadow of a tree on a windy night, and I knew it was Not Good And It Was Coming To Take Me Away...away from my safety, security, love. Hysteria followed...it was real to me, and I reacted in kind. That didn't happen often...my folks were good people but they weren't fools.

It's a great gettin' up morning when we realize for fact that one of our most basic spiritual-growth needs is not taking personally real-appearing slights and snubs. They are not personal…they are not real. They only become personal, real, when we personally respond to them. We attach ourself to them by our resistance to them. 

Hard lesson learning: I See Me can and will link arms with our ego and our common sense, and those three can and will fight till our last breath against "letting them walk all over me," "taking what is rightfully mine," "making a fool of me," etc. That hard lesson is the first thing we learn in still more spiritual growth, may be the last thing we release as we lie dying. 

Our spiritual growth in short is give over, give up, give in...with the grace of gratitude in our prayer of thank you. 

Thank you.