The Purpose Driven Life: Day 25

In day 25, Warren asserts that we are “transformed by trouble” and “God has a purpose behind every problem.”

I declare a wholehearted “YES” to these statements, with the usual caveats you should be used to by now if you’ve been reading these posts regularly.  Warren says “God uses problems to draw you closer to himself.”  I read this as “when we perceive that we have a problem, this is the Universe (Being, Love, Light, Truth, God, whatever you want to call it) reminding us that we’ve gotten sucked back into the illusion and telling us to snap out of it.”

I’ve touched on the idea of illusion in many places in this blog, but I’ve been remiss in explaining what I mean by that.  There is a spiritual philosophy – shared by every spiritual tradition, as far as I can tell, though imperfect human interpretation has led to  much discord over this – that says that this physical world and everything in it is merely an illusion.  There is only Being – Truth, Light, Love, God, whatever – and we are all a part of that Being, members of the body of Being.  The belief that we are separate from anything else in existence – separate from each other, separate from the earth, separate from the plants and animals, separate from the rest of creation – is the illusion.  We believe we are separate, and so we perceive separateness, including a separate mind and a separate body.  An extreme demonstration of this is found in a story told by Deepak Chopra about a saint – an enlightened person – in India who was known to walk around behind cows eating their feces.

…

The notion that we are all of one being is what underlies the concept of the Body of Christ, what underlies the notion that we are all brothers and sisters, and what Christ was referring to when he said “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”  This is not a parable or an analogy – Christ meant this literally.  The physical world is merely an illusion, one propped up by our belief in it.  When you stop believing in the illusion, it stops having power over you, and you literally can move mountains (or eat cow feces) because the mountains literally don’t exist.  Of course, once you’ve reached this point of understanding, you wouldn’t bother moving mountains because doing so would be pointless – what’s the point of relocating what doesn’t exist in the first place?  There are miraculous physical feats described in the Bible, such as Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus walking on water, but you can see how these acts were expedient and useful at the time, not merely showy displays of faith.  Perhaps Jesus would have moved a mountain had he a reason to do so.

So, that’s the illusion.  The ego, and the mind, are the perpetrators of this illusion.  They divide us from our Being – the one Being, of which we are all a part – and convince us we are separate from everything and everyone else that we see, the external world.  We come to see the external world – created in the perception of our mind and filtered through our ego – as being meaningful, as being more meaningful than the internal world of Being, as being reality.  And, when that happens, the universe comes along and thumps us on the forehead:  “Hey!  Snap out of it!”

Inherent in this philosophy is the idea that we have always existed and will always exist – we are not merely our physical bodies, and we do not perish when our physical bodies die.  This was the point of the Resurrection – we do not cease to exist just because we have left our bodies.  In fact, our bodies, which contribute to our sense of separateness from the rest of creation, are just another part of the illusion – they are not real.  Every spiritual tradition recognizes this, whether death is followed by reincarnation, freedom from reincarnation, or an eternity spent in “heaven” or “hell.”

The natural question that follows is:  why do we believe in the illusion?  Why do we choose to believe in what’s not real?  Why does it feel so real?  If we’re all one being, why can’t we read each others’ minds?  And on and on…  I don’t have an answer for you.  Christianity’s answer is the Fall, and I’m sure other spiritual traditions have their own answers.  From everything I’ve read, we started believing in the illusion – the separation from Being – when we created the ego.  But why did we create the ego in the first place?  I don’t know.  This is one of those things I’m taking on faith because the alternative hasn’t done me much good and, when I haven chosen to stop letting my ego dictate my decisions and let my internal guidance system – Being – lead the way, I’ve always come out of those situations better – wiser and more at peace – than I entered them.  Warren says “You will never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.”  In my darkest days, it wasn’t until I had expended everything I had in my ego’s arsenal and failed to find a workable solution to my problems that I let it all go and turned it over to the Universe to handle it for me.  The moment I let go and started going with the Flow instead of fighting for what I wanted and what I thought was right and what I thought I deserved was the moment things started getting better for me.

As far as reading minds, or being of one mind, goes, I think this is what the internal guidance system is about.  I don’t need to read your mind, I just need to seek the truth within me.  Finding the truth in me, I find the truth in you, as well.  Of course, I’m an idealist and I believe in universal, not personal, truths, so that all fits very nicely together for me.  You’re welcome to disagree (and I’m sure many, many of you do).

Warren continues:

We are like jewels, shaped with the hammer and chisel of adversity.  If a jeweler’s hammer isn’t strong enough to chip off our rough edges, God will use a sledgehammer.  If we’re really stubborn, he uses a jackhammer.  He will use whatever it takes.

It’s is my sincere belief, based on my own experience, that we perceive problems in exactly the measure we need to show us that we have sunk, once again, back in to the illusion and need to snap out of it.  When Warren says that God has a purpose for every problem, I understand this to mean that the purpose of every “problem” we experience is to remind us that this is all just an illusion and to snap out of it.  And the degree of difficulty we experience in our “problems” will be in proportion to just how immersed in the illusion we have become.

It’s not that that those who are more illusioned actually have more or worse problems than those who are less illusioned, but that they perceive their problems as greater or more difficult than other people do.  I’ll give you a personal example.  I’ve written before about my angry driving and the steps I took to not be such an angry driver.  Do you think road conditions changed when I decided to drive more reasonably?  It’s possible they changed a little bit.  It’s possible that my own sane driving exerted a peaceful calming affect on the other drivers around me.  But, I suspect that influence was negligible just based on my own history of taking advantage of safe drivers rather than joining in their efforts.  No, I don’t think the road conditions changed much at all, yet I perceived driving to be much less problematic than before.  When I was deeply, deeply illusioned – when I saw myself as entitled and everyone else as in my way – I was assaulted by egregious offenses everywhere I looked.  When I gave up that illusion, I still observed the same “offensive” behavior on the road, yet I was much less offended by it.  It simply didn’t have the power over me that it used to.  I didn’t believe in its offensiveness anymore.

This thought occurred to me weeks ago when I was driving from SLO up to Santa Rosa.  It was a longish drive, plenty of time to zone out and forget that driving is just something I was doing as a means to an end, not a fundamental aspect of my personality.  From time to time, someone would cut too closely in front of me, forcing me to brake suddenly, and I would, of course, be annoyed.  Karma was on my mind for some reason…  I think I’d recently read some thoughts on karma by Deepak Chopra.  Chopra says that all events are karmic events, whether that’s drinking coffee, cooking dinner, or plotting against your enemies.  While on the road, it occurred to me that these events – the inconsiderate driving I was being subjected to – were also karmic events.

We’re all familiar with the concept of “karma” – cosmic payback.  Punishment for a bad deed, a universal eye for an eye, reap what you sow, what goes around comes around…  If we think about karma at all, we tend to view negative karmic events in our lives as something that we just have to suck up or as reminders of how imperfect we are (that we are all sinners, if that’s your preference), like cosmic (or divine) guilt trips.  These concepts are fine for understanding what karma looks like and how it plays out in our lives, but they’re not very helpful in understanding how we can relate to our karma in the moment in a positive and helpful way. They might bring to our awareness the realization that what goes around does, in fact, come around, that you reap what you sow, but they’re focused on the past, on things we can do nothing about, and there’s an inherent element of judgment to them – divine punishment for a mistake or misdeed.  There’s a real potential for resentment to grow out of negative events if we feel powerless to do anything about it.

So, while driving that day, and realizing the potential for another driver’s actions to instantly trigger my rage, a new perspective on karma emerged – that any negative event (or positive event, really, but I prefer to focus on negative events for the purpose of this discussion), anything one might think to label as “karma,” is really just a wake-up call, the universe saying:  “Hey! Snap out it!  This is all an illusion, remember?”

This, to me, is what “transformed by trouble” is all about.  It is a positive way of looking at our troubles – our negative karma – so that we can grow from them instead of simply seeing them as punishment.  Having bought into the illusion, you perceive trouble.  That “trouble” is really just a wake-up call from the Universe telling you to snap out of it – the deeper into the illusion you’ve sunk, the louder the wake-up call will be.  The transformation comes when you hand those troubles over to Being – Truth, Light, God, whatever – to handle for you.

But, you really have to let them go and hand them over and stop worrying about them.  The letting go and letting “God” must be complete.  Otherwise, you’ve merely retained your troubles and no transformation occurs.