We wish to speak about conflict. Do you know that all conflict is only a reflection of the war taking place within your own self? Yes, war between countries, or even between neighbors, is a reflection of the war within the individual—the battle over who gets to run the show, so to speak. Isn’t that what the wars between your nations are about as well? In national wars you fight over resources, territory, and ideological differences. On a personal level, you war with yourself over these same things. The resource you battle over internally is what to do with the time you have been given on this planet. Yes, given. You chose a course before you embodied—a loose blueprint for this lifetime with an allotted timeline to complete experiences and relationships to learn the lessons most appropriate for your soul’s evolution.
It is as though you are in a timed race with yourself to determine whether you will reach the finish line within the time you have been given, and you battle with yourself over the use of this time. From the second you embodied, you began absorbing the ideas and beliefs of those around you. Many of those beliefs are not in alignment with the goal you are trying to reach this lifetime. Thus, the battle becomes whether you will stay true to your path, or whether you will allow yourself to become distracted by all the conditions around you.
Yes, those conditions also serve you. They are there because you chose to embody into certain situations and relationships that are part of the roadmap you laid out for yourself as the best possible course for achieving your soul growth. But the internal battle begins when you decide to make those external circumstances more important than the growth you are here to achieve. Your conscious mind is focused on experiencing and responding to all those external conditions, while your superconscious is trying to lead you toward your goal of soul growth. Thus, the conflict.
Most of humanity is completely unaware of this, but you see the results all the time. Just as a war between nations leaves damage and loss in its wake, so your internal battle manifests in the physical as aging, disease, loss, and disappointment. Nations endure after a war ends, and likewise humans endure through their lives of struggle. In both cases, you believe it is just how things work and that they can work no other way. But that is an incorrect belief. That belief is the result of observing what is and deciding it must always be so. Humanity would be well-served to decide instead what must be so, and then by your conscious intent and action, make it what is.
Use Your Resources Well
As you move through your physical expression—your embodiment in this lifetime—time is a resource you can use to your advantage or your disadvantage. As with all things in the physical world, there is an abundant supply of time. It is only the perception of limitation in the slowed-down vibration of human consciousness that makes time appear finite. You have the ability to extend and bend time if you dare to push your own consciousness to accept that the reality you are living is entirely changeable. This is where territory and ideology come into the picture.
Nations war over ideologies. We believe this way and you believe that way. We worship this God, and you that one. We adhere to this system of authority and economy, and you to another. We think our way is better, and we want you to see it that way, too. If you do not accept our truth, we will go to war with you over it.
This is no different from the internal struggle each human experiences. In one sense, your life can be seen as a constant exposure and response to beliefs that are offered for your acceptance or rejection. In fact, there has been no other time on this planet when so many possible beliefs have been available to you. The proliferation of your media and the vast number of choices available to you for lifestyle, vocation, entertainment, and material consumption have made that so. When you see life only through the physical lens, it can be exhausting to try to sort through all the options and decide what is your truth.
In addition, your truth keeps changing. Do you believe all the same things you did 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago? Many of the beliefs that seemed so correct in the past have become incorrect to you now, have they not? The exposure to a vast array of other ideas and possible ways of living have led you to drop one idea for another, one habit for another, one relationship for another, and so on.
This is your ideology shifting and evolving. Sometimes that evolution is expansive because you have opened yourself more to higher Truths, and sometimes it represents contraction, as you choose lower-vibration beliefs that attract people and circumstances that resonate at lower frequencies. Thus, you find yourself looking back at who you used to be and thinking, “How was I ever that person? I am so much different now.”
That is the internal, ever-present ideological struggle within you, battling over the territory of your soul. Will you achieve the goal you came here to achieve? Or will you allow the distraction of beliefs that are not your own to claim that territory?
Learn the Art of Discernment
How do you know which is which? How do you know when the voices and feelings directing you to do this instead of that are in alignment with your soul purpose—the mission you came here to fulfill? We admit it is not easy to discern when you are in the physical body, experiencing the many forms of physical creation as an observable reality. It is not easy to ignore what you can perceive with all your known senses.
The key is to realize that there are more senses available to you. There is so much more to your existence in a human body than you realize. There are so many more tools at your disposal to help you realize the true nature of your existence. As we have said before, you all inherently know this, but you put it aside because you cannot see it with your eyes or touch it with your hands. Thus, you go through your days on the planet longing for something more but never daring to put your faith in the possibility that it is there within you.
Let’s get practical about this. When trying to discern that which is in alignment with the path of learning you came here to experience, the circumstances and relationships that are most in alignment are the ones that make you feel a genuine sense of joyful excitement. When you feel that upward movement of energy within your physical body and that sense of anticipation about what is to come, that is how you know that you have a choice in the moment to either align with your path or not. That rush of joy/excitement/anticipation is a tiny fraction of what it feels like to be aligned with your True Self—your Divine Self. When you feel that, recognize it is a signpost pointing you in the direction of your mission for this life.
Now, when you feel that rush, or even just a twinge, of joyful excitement, this is usually also the point where all the other beliefs currently operating in your mental and emotional bodies come forth. They surface immediately in the mind with questions and statements like, “Really—are you sure? That doesn’t seem right, you know. That’s not how that person did it. That’s not what your peers are doing. What if you fail? They’ll think you’re crazy, you know?” And so on.
Thus, the war within begins. Which side will I choose? The one that is exciting, expansive, and joyful, or the one that is the way it has been done for all these years—the way everyone else seems to be doing it?
Expect the Unexpected
We have said before that the choices you make that align with a feeling of love and all its attributes (joy, compassion, patience, kindness, generosity, a desire to let go) are the ones that are most in alignment with the Divine plan for your life. Conversely, the ones that are most in alignment with fear and its attributes (anger, shame, regret, greed, the need to control) are the ones that have the highest potential to take you away from the mission you are here to realize. When you are at choice, if you take a moment to get in touch with what you are feeling, you will notice the signposts become bigger, brighter, and easier to recognize.
But know this—following your highest excitement does not always mean you will get the results you have in mind, or that you will find yourself living a life of ease and contentment. Quite often, choosing the path of your highest excitement and joy will lead you into completely unexpected results. In fact, you may find yourself disappointed with the outcome. You may find yourself saying, “Well, that wasn’t what I expected.” Or “Why did I choose that? It seemed so right at the time, but in retrospect it seems wrong.”
This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of human existence and one of the most difficult to comprehend. When you are offered a choice that you know in your heart is expansive, that choice may lead you into a circumstance or relationship that will push your ability to expand further, and sometimes it comes fastest through circumstances you judge to be undesirable. For example, say you fall in love and choose to marry your beloved, but in a few years’ time your marriage is falling apart and you can’t seem to understand how it happened. Or you choose a job that you believe is your dream job, but then the company makes changes that put you with people and circumstances you do not like.
How does this happen? It is because your first and foremost goal as a Spiritual Being in a physical human body is to get back to the realization that you are a Spiritual Being. That is why you chose a body in the first place. And while it is possible to achieve this awakening amid nothing but one happy experience after another, such a path to ascension is a very rare occurrence.
Instead, the more likely and usual path is that the disillusionment you experience causes you to question who you are. It causes you to seek new experiences and relationships that align with what you think you want next. In your sorting through the information gained by the disillusionment, you begin to expand your perception of who or what you are. This happens slowly over the course of your life. It is why people often say, “I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger.” A better phrase would be, “I wish I had accumulated all of this perspective on who I am and what truly matters to me earlier in life. Then I would have chosen differently and behaved differently toward myself and others.”
Friends, you can rarely achieve such a perspective without having been through the crucible of disappointment and disillusionment. That is why your scripture says, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” It is not because there is something wrong with being rich. In fact, all the wealth of the Universe is yours to command if you believe it. But when you have achieved physical wealth before achieving the enlightened wisdom that is the Kingdom of Heaven, you will no longer seek the Kingdom. It’s not that God won’t allow you to have both. It’s simply that most of humanity will not choose to seek God when they have achieved a degree of physical comfort with which they are content.
Seek and You Will Find
The Kingdom of Heaven does not manifest in your life if you do not seek it. The promise is that if you seek, you will find. If you knock on the door, it will be opened. However, behind that door you will typically find another, and then another. Yes, there will be many doors for the seeker to open, and those doors will not always lead to the results you thought you would realize. But they will always lead you to the next logical step in the fulfillment of your mission. If you open the door that you thought was going to bring you lasting peace and contentment, and instead you find unexpected struggle, you can choose to remain in the struggle. You can also choose to go back through the door that brought you there and say, “I’ve had enough—I’m going back to what I know.” Or you can choose to look at the next door in front of you and say, “OK, let’s keep going. Which one most aligns with my highest excitement now?”
This is how you make the achievement of your Spiritual ascension a joyful journey rather than a struggle. Know that there will be disappointments as you allow your Higher Self to step forward and lead you through your life; as your ego learns to step back and get in line behind It. But know, too, that you can be joyful amid your disappointment. Joy is always a choice, no matter what you are experiencing. True mastery is walking through the next door with joyful anticipation and maintaining that feeling of joy and excitement even when you find yourself saying, “Well that certainly didn’t work out as I expected.”
Know this, friends: The Higher Self is more powerful than all your physical senses combined. Much more powerful. Align with it, experience it, and grow to trust it. Do not become angry when it leads you into circumstances that your ego judges to be failure. Look instead to the lessons in patience, compassion, kindness, and generosity that come to you through those apparent setbacks and honor them as the soul growth you are here to realize. Do not always expect the road to be smooth. Rather, roll over the bumps with joy and thanksgiving in your heart.
This is how you win the battle within. And as more and more of humanity does so, the battles without will cease. That is our absolute promise to you. Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all else will be given unto you.
We wish you blessings on your journey.
Image credits: Kareni