What’s It All About?
What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)
In our blog post last week, I made what was perhaps a mistake when I used a couple of stories from my early personal life as illustrations. A new blog commenter here then found reason to scoff at me about my tales, since, as a very young adult, I had felt personally wounded by my mother’s telling me that if she could have aborted me when she found herself pregnant out of wedlock prior to Roe v. Wade, she would indeed have aborted me. That commenter said that by my “looking at these subjects so deeply” from what he called “the viewpoint of the ego illusion”, I sounded to him “like a materialist”. He told me that if this body that I am still wearing now had been aborted, I would “simply be associated with” a different body, and I would now be experiencing this reality through that other body. So, no bigs at all! He told me that I should have just stepped back and related to my mother’s revelation not emotionally, but instead “as consciousness”, and in fact I should have reacted to all three of the negative examples in my blog post with no emotions whatsoever. Then I “would not have suffered through the negative emotions” that I felt when I heard what my mother had said about perhaps wishing that she could have aborted me, or my childhood pain of feeling like a boy in a girl’s body, or our shared horror of having witnessed Iryna Zarutska‘s murder on a North Carolina light-rail train. He told me scornfully that my whole blog post was based on what he called “the ego illusion”, which he implied that we can entirely escape by just skating along above the tops of our earth-lives, and never feeling any negative emotions at all. I have to admit that my own first emotion upon reading his comment was a pretty deep feeling of shame that, yup, he had caught me out. I had just confessed to all of you that when I was young, I was deeply – well – human. But then my Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, pointed out to me that our clueless-sounding commenter had just given us a great, and probably a now essential topic for our follow-up blog post this week!
Well, of course, when I was very young, and I was already deeply emotionally invested in the lifetime that am still living now, I reacted with strong negativity to being told that if abortion had been legal when my mother first panicked as she realized that she was pregnant out of wedlock, she would have rushed straight to a legal abortionist. Of course, I was horrified to receive this news! I was by then deeply and happily into THIS earth-lifetime! I was in my late twenties, as I recall, when she and I had this conversation. It was soon after I was married, and I was still in the first flush of love with the man with whom I have since shared more than fifty years of three children, five grandchildren, and more joy than I ever can find a way to express to you. But that commenter’s suggestion was that I should only have shrugged and thrown away the thought of my entire investment in this earth-life so far, as if it were only nothing at all, just valueless crap, my whole childhood and college and the man that I loved, all worth nothing, since I could always start over and begin an entirely different life?
Our new-commenter friend’s big mistake is that he believes it is possible for us to get what is good and useful to our spiritual growth from an earth-life by just watching it happen, as if from above, and without actually living or in any way experiencing any of it. I have never heard of trying that, but who would even want to try it? In none of what he says does he take into account the value of human emotions, when in fact emotions are all that exist. Consciousness IS emotions! From fear, anger, and hatred at the lowest and slowest consciousness vibrations, to extreme affinity and love at the highest and most rapid emotional vibrations, consciousness as you and I feel and express the emotions of it is in fact all that objectively exists. In our real and eternal lives, in the life where no time and space exists; in the life where, as A Course in Miracles tells us, into the mind of the Son of God came a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God forgot to laugh, in that life: it is all so perfect and love-filled in that true eternal life that, really, no further elevation in our personal consciousness vibration is possible there. Just as you and I cannot sit around in a quiet corner of the gym and shout, “Biceps! I will now make BIGGER BICEPS on this body! And, ABS ! Very much BIGGER abs right now! Come on, six-pack! Just APPEAR! I can do it!” So, in the very same way, you cannot exist in the astral plane in the eternal love of God forevermore, and simply think or say, or even shout, “Even more LOVE now! I love everybody even MORE now! Come on, higher love vibration! I’m vibrating even HIGHER now! YESSS” You can say it or shout it for all eternity. But your consciousness vibration will not change at all.
I am sorry, my dear new-commenter friend. It simply does not work that way. If you want biceps and abs, you have got to not only go to the gym while never taking it seriously, but just sit around there watching others work their material bodies on those material machines, just as you don’t seem to be taking your precious life on earth at all seriously. In the gym, you have got to actually use those machines in the ways that they are meant to be used! And if you want to raise your personal consciousness vibration farther away from the lowest and slowest levels, and even more toward ever more perfect love, you cannot just thumb your nose at what you derisively call “materialism”, even while you are apparently also occupying a material body yourself on earth. But to use earth-life as it is meant to be used, you have to also really get down-and-dirty with the very materialism, and the material experiences that are all around you here on this material earth-plane. To get any spiritual growth at all from living on earth, you must make real use of the very earth-life that you seem to so much disdain!
I am sorry that you have so little respect for what could be so very useful to you while you are actually here. And it really does amaze and sadden me to find you writing about your own material body such insulting things, when you took that body for yourself, and apparently you now occupy it, and also apparently now you refuse to use it for its intended purpose, even though there are so many beings still stuck in the astral plane who wanted to use it for their personal spiritual growth, but you cut the line ahead of them and took it from them, but now you won’t use it? And now you say to me derisively, “You are looking at these subjects so deeply from the viewpoint of the ego illusion you sound like a materialist!” And, yup. You do have that perfectly right, my dear! While I am in the spiritual gym that this earth very deeply is, that is precisely what I am! I’m a materialist, to the core! And I am working these spiritual abs and biceps for everything that I’ve got. It’s not much, I’ll admit, but I’m workin’ ‘em hard, and every single day. You tell me that if my mother had aborted me, I just could have jumped to another body and “experienced this reality through it.” But I am not just an experiencer, dear new-commenter friend. I am a down-and-dirty DOER while I am here THIS time, and not just an above-it-all observer, which is what you tell us that you choose to be. The big difference between us is that I plan to ACE this lifetime, this time around. Because I do not ever intend to come back!
And the wonder of it is that this earth-plane, and these lives that we all have chosen to live here, are carefully designed to give us the opportunity, if we really will give it a good, hard try, to actually live one-and-done earth-lifetimes now. Sadly, though, most people don’t use their earth-lives that way. Most people instead come back repeatedly, over and over again, because they don’t take what Craig Hogan calls “earth school” sufficiently seriously. Instead, they do what our new-commenter friend suggests that we all should be doing, and they just hang around in this material earth-gym, watching, not taking their earth-lives seriously at all, and therefore not growing spiritually very much, if at all, from the experience. Or else, they do what he also is suggesting, and they live their lives in fear of their emotions, so rather than accepting, and even embracing these earth-experiences, and taking them in and learning from them deeply, and growing thereby ever spiritually much stronger; they instead run from them, learning little or nothing in each lifetime. Which is why they must come back again and again, a phenomenon which Buddhists call turning on the wheel.
So then, what’s it all about, Alfie? Why do we even come to this earth and plan and live these difficult earth-lives at all? And if you finally do know for certain the purpose of your earth-life, how can you actually make this lifetime that you are living right now your truly last necessary one-and-done earth-lifetime? Believe it or not, managing a one-and-done last necessary earth- lifetime in even just a few years’ time is apparently not all that difficult. Jesus tells us that He became so frustrated, after He was Himself perfected about six thousand years ago, just watching all the follies of humankind from His exalted place, that He wanted badly to help to simplify what was then a more complex process of spiritual growth. So He petitioned God to allow Him to be born again from out of the Godhead to teach His own ideas for a more simplified spiritual process, and at length God gave Him that permission, so He was born to us as Jesus two thousand years ago, specifically to be our Teacher. And if we now can follow Jesus’s teachings closely, what will we learn?
Well, Jesus tells us what we can learn, and how quickly we can learn it, if only we will take His teachings sufficiently seriously. His disciples came to Jesus and asked Him who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, which is that aspect of the astral plane which is our eternal home. 2 “And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, 3 and He said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you are changed and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea’” (MT 18: 2-6). In other words, my dear ones, spiritual growth is not about our becoming spiritual big shots on heavenly thrones! It is not about our rising above this material world, as our clueless new-commenter of last week would have us try to do; but rather, it is about our becoming as spiritually innocent and as perfectly loving, and therefore as high-vibrating as children.
So, now let’s quickly summarize what the steps are that each of us takes as we plan for optimal spiritual growth in the earth-lifetime that we are about to enter. Each time we plan an earth-lifetime, we are aiming to grow so much in this lifetime to come that we can achieve the astral fifth level, and thereby end our personal cycle of endless rebirths. The afterlife evidence tells us quite a lot about this process, how it works in the astral plane and on this side as well. Of course, there are exceptions to every complex process, but in general:
We Very Carefully Plan Each Earth-Lifetime for Optimal Spiritual Growth. Life in the infinite astral plane is all love and light, but it also is highly stratified, and while we easily can go lower, we cannot move higher than the consciousness level at which we already are vibrating without being shielded in some fashion. And we want to go higher! So before long, we are gathering eternal friends and recruiting a personal spirit guide so we can plan another lifetime on earth. Our goal is to attain astral Level Five, because once we are able to vibrate so high, we can continue to grow spiritually by guiding others on earth, by teaching, or by doing other good things, without a need ever to return to earth as a learner.We Must Contend for an Earth-Body, and Our Life-Plan Must Pass Muster. When we are at home in the astral plane, we feel invincible. So we want to plan very hard earth-lives, since the more bad things happen to us on earth, the more we are stressed and strained by our earth-lives spiritually, and the more we can grow from them spiritually. If an earth-life is too hard, however, with too many bad things happening to us, there is a risk that those awful events might break us spiritually, and thereby set us back. And also, there are far more people eagerly planning earth-lives in the most desirable places now than there are bodies being conceived that are unlikely to be aborted. So we consult with a council that must approve our life-plan, and might well require that we scale back its hardships; and as our plan is being approved, we work with those who have the authority to assign the few bodies being conceived on earth that are likely to survive and be born, in hopes of finding a body. We Come to Earth Stripped-Down Mentally for Optimal Spiritual Growth. In order for us to be finally born on earth, each of us must (a) accept complete amnesia for everything that ever has happened to us in all the millennia before this new birthday, and (b) leave behind what we calculate is even sixty to seventy percent of our vast, eternal minds, including all our past-life memories, so what we take with us to earth are just the efficient aspects of our minds that equip us for optimum spiritual learning and growth. Mikey Morgan, who is a frequent Seek Reality guest, is a sixth-level being who last lived on earth in the 1600s, and his fabulous book is a must-read for so many reasons! Mikey was born this time around in 1987, he died in a planned accident in 2007, and in his phenomenal book, he describes how his spirit went through the roof of the car as it crashed, his guide met him and took him to the afterlife, and then suddenly, Bingo! He was reunited with his entire mind, and he remembered everything.
Yes, it is possible nowadays to book-study consciousness, and to feel so very smart about it, as our new-commenter friend showed us last week that he had done, while he still lives in a meat-suit here on earth. But, you know, you are deeply privileged to live in that meat-suit here, that suit that so many people in the astral plane coveted, but you, dear new-commenter, actually won it. We all are here for a very important purpose! And feeling smug, as you clearly do, about ignoring that purpose, not attempting to use the precious facilities of this spiritual gym to grow spiritually, and even looking with disdain at those of us around you who are trying to grow spiritually, who take our reason for being here seriously, might make you feel very smart indeed! But still, for you to be doing that is not at all wise.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
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