One of the ways that we push away the real lessons behind our recurring painful life experiences is by telling ourselves, "Well.. this is just something I have to go through." Please don't misunderstand me. You see, the fact of the matter is, it is something you have to go through. But the other unseen fact of life is that you're not supposed to go through the same thing 50,000 times! It is not necessary to go through painful self-doubt 50,000 times! You're not supposed to hate someone 50,000 times and then -- feeling the separation and sense of self-isolation that the hatred causes you -- follow it up by telling yourself, "I know better than to do that because Christ (or Mohammed, Buddha, or the Great Mother, or whomever) said I should be different." And then, because you've identified yourself with something outside of yourself that you hope is greater than your weakness, or you've pounced on yourself (to punish yourself to prove to yourself you're sorry) you believe in this moment that next time you're going to be different. But you're not! And as rightfully humiliating as this lesson may be, it's so important for us to come to terms with the time-proven truth of it. Here is one more example:
If I asked you how many of the same "loops" have you gone through in your life, you'd know more or less what was being implied, wouldn't you? Sometimes these unwanted life-loops take less than a minute, swearing to yourself, "never again," even as you begin that self-compromising cycle yet once more. Sometimes these losing loops can take a month or even years. What about the career loop? Or certainly one of the most painful loops of all, the relationship loop? Where, much to your disbelief, you find yourself right back where you started. You know the story! He's completely dependable, much different than the one before; or she seemed so caring, she'd never betray your trust. Then you hear yourself crying out, "Oh no!" And because you don't realize the real reason why you're back "there" again ("there" being that same feeling you didn't want to feel last time), you make the same mistake you made the time before: You are still for the wrong things in life.
Before the Truth can set you free, you must be for the Truth. But we don't really understand what this Truth means as it concerns our everyday lives and their various affairs. We lack this essential spiritual knowledge because every time we encounter a moment where there's no denying we've been for the wrong thing, up pops a certain all-knowing part of us and pronounces, "Ah yes... it's clear. I see it all now! I know what went wrong this time." And we buy it! The self that's talking to us has our complete confidence. We've no doubt it knows what to be for and how it's going to change everything next time around. Balderdash!
Something must happen to us where we realize our actual condition, where one fateful day we say to ourselves something like, "Look at this! For five, ten, twenty, even forty years, I've struggled to escape this circle of myself, to become a different kind of human being, and I'm still going through these loops. I'm no more able to bring myself a new life than the fall can bring itself closer to spring!" And I tell you when you no longer push away the fact of that, when you know you've run out of all explanations -- all "whys" for the way you are -- you're ready for the first time to do something that you have never done before. You are ready to be for something which, by you being for it, will change you.
You can't begin to change the kind of human being you are until you start to understand that you live in a world that is, by and large, ten thousand times greater in its invisibility than its visibility. This great dynamic of things that are for one another, and that complete one another in an unseen web of life, speaks of an invisible relationship at work going on around us all of the time. The key here is that when we're for the right thing in this life we get the right reward, which is the joy of feeling ourselves more complete. Another way of restating this same happy result, and perhaps better said, is that we finally lose that terrible sense we have of feeling ourselves as being apart and incomplete.
In the split second when you do something right for another human being, when you know you shouldn't hurt someone with your angry tones or cruel remarks and abstain from yourself at the cost of yourself, when you know you shouldn't spend money that you don't have or even that you do have, when you do the right thing for yourself, you receive the reward of doing the right thing. The reason you get that reward is because you were for the right thing! Your conscious action completes you in that split second. And in that exact same split second, you also receive the encouragement to do the right thing again, which is another kind of reward in itself!
Begin today, this moment, to use your whole life -- every moment of it -- to be for something that is in reality for you. When you begin to be for God, for Truth, before you're for yourself, God, Truth, will begin to be there before you. This Supreme Nature will start to live inside of you and do something that you've never been able to do for yourself. Which is what? Give you the feeling that -- at long last -- everything is right within you because now the whole of you is for the right thing.