AMBITION, EVIL, SUFFERING
Lesson 11
Every
problem in your life stems directly from ambiÂtion: your need to be, do, or
have something. It is this process of setting up goals and attempting to
achieve them which is the cause of all your fears, suffering
and-ultimately-your death.
Because
we are not aware of the availability of proper guidance from within ourselves,
we react to the pressures of our environment ambitiously.
Sensing a need, we
attempt to identify it by means of outside reference points and then plan a
course of action which we believe will satisfy it. Not only do we fail, but
somehow things are worse because of the trying. We resent our wasted effort and
our failure; and this wrong emotional reaction adds yet another layer of ills
and confusion.
Because
of pride which blocks us from our proper source of guidance we err, and one
error seems to attract another to it, each less subtle, more serious, more
grotesque than its predecessor.
The movement of prideful ambition is downward:
away from the spiritual and toward the natural, led by that which operates in a
realm just beyond the border of the material world. When we fall away from
grace by way of the temptation of pride, a bond of the flesh is created between
ourselves and the thing or person that tempts us. And both the tempter and the
bond become subject not only to time but also to that which operates in space
beyond the material "it" holds up as the tempting goal.
A
goal which is exciting, then, one which can motivate us to take action, has to
do with failing and dying, for dying is a movement of our consciousness through
the material realm down through the evolutionary strata toward the spiritual
cause of our temptation at the end of the journey.
To reach out for prideful
goals, then, is to fulfill the purpose of evil, which is to draw us away from
our proper source of guidance from within. As this process develops, there is a
growing sense of futility-an intuitive awareness that we are dying.
Distressing
as this sense of futility may be, it is, nevertheless, a kind of blessing
because it is a result of the Light wanting to make us aware of the subtle evil
which is leading us to both physical and eternal death.
To admit that there is
futility is also to admit to a wrong path in contrast to a right one. If there
were neither wrong nor purpose, then one could never experience futility. Some
people seem to escape this awareness, but that is because they won't stop long
enough in their headlong plunge toward death to let the reality of it overtake
them.
To be still within is to realize that the spiritual counterpart to escape
from the reality of awareness in the present moment is eternal oblivion. TemptaÂtion
always gives you more than you bargained for. And so we move faster and faster
toward unawareness, lured by a false sense of achievement, and we expire before
our time.
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