Getting EveryThing To Serve You

The idea is that most people wish to have a life full of joy, discovery, adventure, passion, romance, vibrance, health and abundance - rather than a life full of struggle, pain, suffering, fear, sadness, illness and scarcity. In our saner moments we prefer the former rather than the latter.

The problem is that few of us pull off the life we want on an ongoing basis. We give many reasons for this.

We say that our difficulties are caused by another or they are caused by outside influences. This, of course, assigns the cause and responsibility point outside of self. He, she or it caused my difficulty. He, she or it is responsible for the condition I am in. This is giving the power to something considered to be outside oneself. This is giving the power to something that one is defining as greater than self. This is in essence giving your power to handle the situation and create the life you want to someone or something else.

If you have ever experienced getting rid of an upset or problem by talking with a counselor or friend, or by working it out yourself, then you have a living demonstration that the upset or problem was not caused by someone or something else. That someone or something else was not around when you resolved it!

There are of course many other reasons people give for not having an ongoing wonderful life. People are very good (very, very good!) at creating reasons why they don't. Many have actually mastered the ability to create reasons why life can't be wonderful. After working on it and practicing it for years and decades, they have become experts. They can create reasons for a miserable life with the greatest of ease. It is no effort at all. They truly deserve Doctorate Degrees on the subject. I myself have been, and can be at will, a Master of My Limitations. However, it is not truly the life I prefer, and I suspect it is not the life others prefer either.

So what is the answer?

Well, there are in fact many answers. There is a lot of truth to clarify and simplify if we are going to prove the old adage that the truth will set us free.

These truths are no longer hard to find or clarify. They exist and are available to you. This is the Age of Transition, the age of really getting at the truth and know-how that enables us to discover that we are the ones who can and do create the life we have. We are the ones who can convert this life into anything we choose to have it be.

One of the key steps in doing this is to learn how to create benefit out of everything that happens, even those things we have previously labeled as upsets, problems, barriers, limitations and difficulties.

One can at least benefit by observing who and what one is relative to something that happens, and accepting it so that one can re-create oneself if one chooses to.

A person upsets you. They truly seem to be the cause of your upset. The very least you could do is to back away, take a walk, calm down a bit and take a clear and objective look at what happened. Then you could, if you chose to, say, "Well, I obviously am a person who gets upset when that person does that. At least I got to discover who and what I am relative to that person doing that thing. I suppose I could even thank that person, if I chose to, for presenting to me who and what I am relative to that occurrence. I could thank them for pointing out what I still seem, or choose, to react to. I could look at it as a service."

This is a weird and very non-traditional way of looking at things. Of course, you could always choose to go back to the old War Game Philosophy at any moment, and attack them as an enemy once more. After all, its traditional to treat upsetting people as enemies. It is traditional to criticize them and label them with derogatory terms and colorful terminology. It is traditional to tell your friends, associates and anyone who will listen what a no good so-and-so they are. It is traditional to enlist the agreement and support of others and to gather allies who are as convinced as you are that they are no good. It's just natural and human to do these things. The fact that it results in war of one kind or another is also traditional.

Attack and destroy is a time honored approach to getting rid of those we have chosen to label as bad and unworthy. It's tradition, and with our traditions we have kept our balance for many a year, haven't we?

Actually, a large part of the history of our planet that we are told about tends to focus on war and enemies. People got what they wanted by destroying or weakening others who had something they wanted. The war games have taken millions of forms from bombing those we chose to label enemies through "Winning Through Intimidation".

The philosophy behind war invited us to believe that there were enemies, people different from us, people who were willing to do anything to take away the things we valued. We decided there really were such people, and that destroying them was the only way to keep our valuables. So the game of creating and becoming enemies got into full swing. Lots of agreement and lots of evidence was created to prove that there really were enemies and they really needed to be destroyed in one way or another.

Not too long ago a dear friend invited me to adopt a new philosophy, a philosophy that stated that one could get anything and everything one wanted without the need to hurt anyone (including oneself) in the process.

The philosophy appealed to me, so I chose to adopt it, and began the ongoing process of learning how to pull it off. Learning to pull it off, I discovered, has a lot to do with accepting that every situation can serve me if I step back and carefully examine the meanings I assign.

The point here is that it always is and always will be your choice how you regard anything that happens in your life.

It will always be your choice to assign negative or positive meaning to anything that happens.

It is an easily observable fact that when you assign negative meaning you get a negative effect on yourself instantly, and when you assign a positive meaning you get a positive effect on yourself instantly. When you assign no meaning at all you don't get any effect on yourself.

You can choose to see anything as a service. You can see who and what you are relative to anything that happens. You can choose to see that it is your thoughts and ideas about what happenes that cause the feelings you are having. You can choose to discover that you are the cause of how you feel relative to anything that happens.

You can choose to discover on an ongoing basis that it isn't what happens to you that matters, it's what you choose to think about it and what meaning you choose to assign to it.

You could even choose to discover that what another person says or does has nothing to do with how you feel, and what you choose to do with what another person says or does has everything to do with how you feel. You could choose to enjoy the process of transition from a world where the quality of your life is determined by other people and things to a world where the quality of your life is determined exclusively and consciously by you. You could choose to gradually get everything that occurs to serve you or you could choose to consider yourself messed up by the things that occur.

The choice is yours and always well be.

So choose.

 
John Michael Rafanello
WonderTech's Chief Visioneer