The Lessons of Loss

The lessons of loss begin early. A child’s favorite toy is left somewhere and never found. A parent turns angry or disappears, striking at a child’s feelings of safety or worth. Over time the losses mount—people, places, things that were loved—sometimes losing even faith or trust or sense of self.

There is nothing we have that can’t be taken away.

The lesson of loss is not surrender, not detachment. It is not to prepare for the worst, not to numb or rid the self of desire. The lesson of loss is a more perfect form of love; a love that requires nothing, that depends on nothing—not even the presence of the beloved.

Loss leads to a form of love that is unchanged by fading beauty or scars of time; a love that is unchanged even by destruction, by absence or death. Loss teaches how, eternally, we hold the beloved.

The Akashic Record

Time doesn’t contain anything. The dates of a lifespan do not hold that life. The years of a particular war, or even an empire, cannot contain the conflict or a civilization. Everything that has happened continues to happen. It goes on outside of time, in a form that can be reentered at any moment.

The lowest, lease authentic form of reentry is memory. More powerful is dissociation, which brings the past into the present so seamlessly that the current moment is obscured.

At some level, the tape of every cruelty, every conversation, every creative moment, every helpless scream is still playing. It is going on, exactly as it occurred, waiting to be revisited. Time can’t touch it.

The whip cracking on a slave stone mason, building the pyramids, can be felt right now. The lesson is waiting. The wisdom in knowing each form that pain takes—is waiting. Each moment of hope, of arrogance, of love, of running away is still alive. Waiting.

The Art of Failing

We learn by doing. And failing. The angels whisper to us, but in the end every soul is a scientist—learning by seeing how things turn out. Failure is completely acceptable because—as with every experiment—failure reveals what isn‘t true and what doesn’t work.

We learn from failure. Our lives are rightly full of it. There is no other teacher whose lessons are so clear, so convincing. The guides and the masters are interpreters—showing what happened and why. But we are here for one reason: to learn to be the architects of the next universe.

Judgment

Moral judgment is the curse of human consciousness. The evaluation of right-wrong, good-bad creates the illusion that each soul is on a mission to prove itself worthy. To be saved. To be granted entry to some heaven.

Moral judgment is the creation of those who seek to manipulate others. From parents who declare a child bad in order to control behavior, to churches and governments that preach moral principles to control the flock or citizenry, the concept of morality is an invention of those who seek power.

The only judgment that is useful is this question—What behavior is in alignment with life purpose? Does what I am doing support or undermine the reason I came here? In the end, whatever we do works or doesn’t work to help us—and the souls around us—find the truth and wisdom we came to seek.