Personal Growth: On Lessons, Creating our Reality, Limitation, and Eternal Suffering

By Matthew Blais

One of the most difficult spaces I have been in recently was when I was acutely in touch with all of the grief and pain I've been holding, and at the same time completely alienated from any experience of love or compassion, not even able to remember what they felt like (or if they ever really existed at all). And that brought me to a fear that I was loathe to examine: the fear that there would be no end to my suffering; that even should my grief pass, that I would never experience love and compassion, that perhaps they had only been imagined, or that somehow it would be my fate or karmic due to suffer eternally as Prometheus. "Eternal suffering" myths such as his are probably a manifestation of mankind's fear of just such a fate. Following are some things I have realized about from that experience.

We are here to learn. We have created all our experiences for that purpose only: to learn, understand, and recognize ourselves in all that is. This is our sole/soul purpose in this entire existence.

To learn a lesson never requires eternity; it is only our own unconscious choice to resist and avoid the learning that perpetuates the lesson. It is never God's or our higher self's "will" that the lesson be extended beyond what is necessary. And as we know from experience, when the lesson is truly learned, the situation resolves.

Our original state of unity with unlimited source gave us the experience of absolute, unconditional, infinite love. When we immersed ourselves in the experience of separation from source, there naturally came a gradual forgetting of that original reality of infinite love and compassion. What took its place was the reality/fear that love and compassion do not really exist, or that if they do, there is obviously not enough for me (limited love). Through our ongoing painful experiences of separation, this fear grew, and became a Truth for us about the nature of reality and God. The more our experiences validated this "truth," the more we feared it, and vice versa. And we have given it exactly that much power over ourselves: we have structured our life and our reality to protect us from this fear/truth of a deficit of love.

It is by clinging to this fear/truth (in an effort to protect ourselves from it) that we prevent ourselves from realizing that it is actually not true. It is an illusion born of our experiences of separation. Our ego knows only separation, and foreseeing no end to the situation, concludes that God actually desires for us to remain indefinitely in our painful experience. And that would be a cruel God indeed. This thought is so scary, so terrifying, that we are afraid to let such a God back into our life, and reaffirm we had better take care of ourselves (i.e. control every aspect of our life).

To willingly give up this control over every detail and decision in our life is to give up our fear/truth of a cruel or unloving God. Our threatening reality is the one that we created for ourselves by separating our conscious awareness from our source. It is a very real experience, but it is not the higher reality; it is only the dream, the lesson, and we awake from it as soon as we cease insisting that it is the "real truth," and cease clinging to the ego's cherished control (which gives us our false sense of security and safety in a "cruel" world). We resist learning the lesson because we are afraid that if we open our long-shut eyes to see, we might find out that our fears really ARE true.

The is a good illustration of how we create our own reality (in this example, by the choice to separate our conscious awareness from source and unlimited love), with its own inherent "truths" (e.g. love is limited, fickle, an illusion, etc.) and then inhabit that reality so fully that it becomes completely real to us. We will fight tooth and nail to avoid the dangers we perceive in our fantasy (e.g. the danger of letting go of our control if God is cruel and arbitrary).

Matthew Blais is a software consultant, writer, musician, and healer, who has been pursuing his own healing journey since 1985. His interests include personal transformation, healing through music and drumming, and researching the relationship between sound, rhythm, cycles, harmonics, resonance, and healing. Matthew Blais can be reached by mail at healspirit@yummage.com