I went for a walk in the West End of Vancouver this evening as people went about their Christmas shopping. It was a most enjoyable time to just watch myself and everyone else because this time of year seems to liberate energy in people and many seem to be at their best. I just enjoyed mingling with and meeting them on their own terms, so to speak.
And as I walked I thought. I found myself watching how life was designed to prompt us to develop discrimination.
I believe that everything about 3D life is designed to oblige us to discriminate. Discrimination is so important that Sri Krishna called it “life’s only purpose.” (1) Why might that be? Well, I don’t know for sure, but I assume it’s because of its role in achieving the purpose of life.
The purpose of life is that God should meet God when we realize our true identity in a moment of enlightenment. Our true identity is God, every one of us. When we experience illumination, God is able to experience his (her or its) own bliss.
But to realize God we need to discriminate between the Real and the unreal. Consequently I believe that life is designed to present us with the need to develop our powers of discrimination. As outlandish as it might sound, I believe that all this learning we go through is only to equip us for that one moment when we discriminate the Real from all this illusion.
In my opinion, life could have been designed in such a way that we needed to do nothing. Our mythical stories about the Garden of Eden contain the suggestion that there all our needs were fulfilled without effort. Well, imagine that such a condition could exist. If it did, we would be faced with fewer decisions and less need to discriminate.
But in our world as it’s presently constructed, we’re subject to hunger and thirst. We need protection from the weather. We must sleep a portion of the day. We must procreate and raise children. We are subject to disease. We grow old and weak. The round of life is designed to force decision-making upon us and, by so doing, to oblige us to discriminate.
In addition, differences are built into us that further require us to think and discern. Some of us are male; some of us are female. Gender is one difference that guarantees that we need to think, discriminate, and decide because we are not all the same.
Moreover, we are designed so that we derive some of our information from one source; some from another. Our minds turn sensory input into words, which we call thoughts; but other systems in our being do not turn sensory input into words, but leave them in a pre-lingual state – examples of these include feelings, intuitions, and leanings. We must discriminate between information that comes from without and from within, between data that is objective and subjective. We must make sense of it all, weigh it, make decisions on the basis of it, and communicate those decisions. Life requires it.
But how we live life is about to be revolutionized by the arrival of humans from other locations, domains, and dimensions. Extraterrestrials will arrive from other regions of space; non-corporeal spirits and angels will manifest; residents of higher dimensions will join us. Our paradigms will expand or fall. Life will seem like constant change. How are we going to manage?
Moreover, even as everything is about to be turned upside down, we’ll be given no breather. If anything, probably more decisions will confront us and the time to make decisions will apparently shrink. Everything old and familiar may be called into question.
Important and basic questions face us and will demand answers. Are we ready for this? How will we adapt? How will we remain calm? Upon what will we rely to carry us through?
I chuckled today to think that the most important word in our vocabulary, with the exception of the word “love,” may turn out to be “etcetera.” Life will expand beyond our ability to keep track of or manage. If we don’t tack “etcetera” onto perhaps every sentence, our words may become obsolete in a day.
Our power of discernment, as it’s been developed so far, will allow us to recognize what to resist and what not to resist. It is our sense of what’s important, as we’ve refined it to date, that will help us see what we need to align with and what set our faces against.
I might have said “resist nothing,” but we need to resist untruth, violence, intolerance, etcetera (if I may). The more work we can do letting go of what’s old and no longer serves us, simplifying our lives and releasing attachment, perhaps the better positioned we’ll be not to be overwhelmed by the novelty and strangeness that awaits us.
I’m tempted to say “forget everything and just open to the new.” But it isn’t that simple. I think I’d rather say “trust in the power of discrimination as you’ve developed it so far to carry you through.” The discernment we’ve developed out of our years in third-dimensionality will, I think, serve us. If we need to develop anything additional, I think it would be trust in that discernment.
Footnotes
(1) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 41.