Number Twenty One

We are not here to be redeemed, or prove ourselves righteous. We are here to become, to learn.  That's all there is -- lessons.

The lessons arrive according to plan, what we agreed to face.  They are strung out, pearls of cause and effect, across the days of a life.  Some come from failed challenges in past lives.  Some from the shape and wiring of the body we were given.

As lessons arrive, we are free to learn or resist.  And there is no guarantee we have the strength or tools to learn a given lesson at a given time.  It's all good.  They will arrive again -- in this life or some other.

Number Twenty

We didn't come here for happiness or unhappiness.  We came to overcome what's compensatory and automatic: the habitual, corrosive solutions to our pain. We came to lean how to love while every impulse sends us back to the familiar ways.  Back to the flaw, the separation, the breakdown where we began to lose each other.

Number Nineteen

We don't want knowledge; we want confirmation of what we already know.  We want belief, fixed and immutable.

Belief constructs reality to satisfy our needs and fears.  Belief is the selective process of seeing and not seeing, of ignoring what is frightening and uncomfortable in favor of what is comforting and validating.  Hope and fear supercharge belief to make it absolute.

Knowledge is not absolute.  It forever expands, assimilates, changes.  It is the truth right now -- in this place, from this vantage, under this sky, between these souls.