life is our school

Life Is Our School

September 22, 2022

In my last several newsletters, I’ve been unpacking the core maxims that I live by. We talked about how love is our blueprint and choice is our power, helping us shift into a more empowered, creative role in our lives. The third maxim is, for me, the most exciting: Life is our school. 

This maxim helps to provide meaning for everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. In A Dose of Hope, the protagonist, Alex, begins to understand that the greatest obstacles in his life actually turn out to be his best teachers, his most potent opportunities for growth and change. He discovers that it’s only when suffering is divorced from meaning that a situation can become unbearable and overwhelming. So if we see the meaning underlying our pain or suffering, the painful situation becomes an opportunity for growth and for a positive trajectory shift in our lives.

This becomes a radical position to choose. However crappy my life circumstances may be, it’s possible that I may have consciously chosen the exact architecture, orientation, timing, place, and circumstances that I’m born into, in order to support my soul’s evolutionary path. Notably, this is a radical position of faith and one that needs to be adopted in the right timing and with the right support. However, this is not a position that I encourage for immediate adoption when a person is in the midst of a trauma recovery process and dealing with high degrees of shame and self-judgment. 

Everything in the universe is undergoing a growth process of evolution, learning, self-awareness, realization, and expansion. Our souls are no different. We might say soul is to spirit as a drop is to the ocean. Our souls are extensions of the Godhead or spark of the divine that incepted all life in the known Omniverse, so naturally we are in that same evolutionary process of growth. 

We might think of our entire life as just a single day’s process in the soul’s entire arc of experience, a set of conditions and experiences designed to help the soul learn certain lessons in order for it to grow in specific ways. We might be coming in with a soul-oriented contract and intention to maximize the soul’s evolutionary growth within a particular frame of experience. This includes the soul’s dharma–what we’ve come to do, to serve, to create–which allows us to feel that our lives have purpose and that we’ve contributed something significant. 

If we can realize and appreciate that the soul is on its own evolutionary arc and has its own potentiality, it softens the criticism and negative judgment of life, rather than thinking that whatever’s happening in life shouldn’t be happening. This idea is expressed in a good definition of suffering I recently heard from Byron Katie:  “Suffering is arguing with reality.”

Likewise, suppose we’re telling the story that everything in our lives has meaning and is part of our school. In that case, it makes sense that our souls would choose to come into a body to maximize the trajectory of its evolutionary potential.

Being in a body is the densest experience and expression of a soul, so if our souls were just existing outside of a body, the evolutionary process would be slower. Everything gets accelerated in a body because we’re grounded in a multitude of forces: our psychic force, our emotional force, our physiologic force, as well as the natural environmental forces. It all blends together into this thick soup of physicality that can be messy, intense, and painful. And it can also be glorious, sublime, and ecstatic. Truly a full spectrum experience.

As we extend this idea out further and consider that if our souls have the opportunity to come into a body and this full spectrum of experience to accelerate the evolutionary process, then it makes sense we would keep coming through cyclical experiences with different evolutionary growth, and that the curriculum for this school of life would extend beyond physicality. There are enough case reports of consciousness remaining after the physical body has been pronounced dead that we can say our soul’s evolutionary process likely continues after the physical body dies. 

Life in the Omniverse will continue to go through an evolutionary arc of consciousness with no beginning and no end, where everything is interconnected. This doesn’t even have to include a conversation of divinity or God. It’s just the recognition that life is our school, in and of itself, and here we are.

May your life be a school of mastery with continuous moments of joy along the way.

 

To your health, 

Dr. Dan

 

Get healthy. Stay present. Help out.

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