Neil said:
Tribulations refers to those negative experiences that usually turn out to be lessons with positive results. It seems like so many people get defeated by these though and waste away into almost nothing.
Actually, events are only lessons when we approach them as such. If you really look at examples of "defeat" you will see that people were not approaching negative experiences as lessons, but reacting impulsively to them. And sometimes negative events are negative events, and the lesson is to understand why they escalated beyond our capacity to deal with them.
Sometimes the "school" analogy can be misleading. A school is an organized and controlled institution where learning is systematic and regulated. The world is a puzzle we are challenged to decode. It is also severely compromized, and we are challenged to understand why. Usually, we get part of the picture and stop there because we cannot release attachment to preconceptions below the level of conscious awareness.
It is those preconceptions and biases that lead to dead ends. So self knowledge is the big focus in learning. It allows you to understand where you inhibit life's lessons from being lessons. In addition, we tend to associate learning with something the intellect does. Many of life's lessons point out conditioning far below the level of conscious intellect, assumptions upon which we base our very sense of identity and connect with our survival in this world. On the other hand, we cannot simply throw away these assumptions without examination. We may just throw away something of value.
So those who do get "beaten" are beholden to the biases leading to defeat. A defeat can teach, but it can also debilitate, generating a chronic post traumatic syndrome of karmic implications, so deep that any thought of releasing it amounts to a portent of one's demise. Because of this, we tend to hide our real biases away, and mask them as truisms or fundamental beliefs about reality, clothing them with words that sound quite right, but may just be wrappings protecting these sacred cows from tampering.
Neil said:
I've felt so lost and alone much of the time, like I said waiting for some unknown thing to occur. However, most of the crucial junctures in my life were completely out of my control. They were just thrown into my life one day and I had to make a choice. I understand things seem to come with time, but I thought you could accelerate them a bit by making yourself more aware and intelligent. I guess these things only give you the ability to see new choices and see existing ones in a different way, not speed up your development. It comes when it comes.
Actually, you can accelerate them, and most likely have done so. The conscious intellect is often not aware of what the total being is doing. If it was, it would struggle against it. It becomes aware when it is ready. Then you can see the acceleration.
Your desire to evolve threw the events into your life, magnetizing them. The choices were what mattered. The results of those choices accumulate until you are ready as an individual to consciously identify with your whole being, which until then is just an influence to which you react with choices.
Eventually, through self-knowledge you can realize the greater pattern of your life, and connect it with your natural aspirations. You can learn to discern the biases limiting you, and the many things you take as givens that are really stories that give you a sense of safety from the unknown.
Seeing choices and the patterns of your life and self allows you to also see your inner aspiration in a more conscious way. Ask and you shall receive. But be careful when you ask. The link between asking and receiving, once understood, can lead to profound acceleration. The understanding of self can save you a lot of time otherwise spent on trial and error.
Part of the learning is to understand the right questions to pose, and how to pose them. Part of the learning is to understand all the forces motivating you to ask, which are sincere and which serve to maintain a secure state of status quo.
If things seem to be going to slow ask why? You might get an answer through an experience of what acceleration really is, and it may not feel very comfortable. Then you might cry "stop!". It pays to understand the hows and whys of our natural pace of growth. It pays to discover our true frontier of expansion and deepening, because then we are neither ahead of ourselves or lagging behind.
Neil said:
By battles I mean conflict. I understand most people conceptualize a battle as two armies on a field trying to kill each other, but I thought conflict was too vague. I believe there will be some of this with the Reptoids, but this will probably be a minor part of the overall struggle.
I believe the C's say somewhere that the battle is
through us. If you feel any inner turmoil or confusion or any sense of wrongness or that things could be better, the battle is being waged, and you are its field. One side is natural and the other is alien, alienating, alienated and invasive. Often it's hard to tell which is which because the alien side has conditioned us to its ways in a quite clever manner.
The aliens HAVE been here since the beginning of human society, of the species, of life on earth...it doesn't matter. What matters is that many things presented are externalizations of what is already going on within. So the question is also, who are the Reptoids? Are we speaking of what amounts to a science fiction/fantasy saga, or is there something far deeper, far less simplistic? What is the fairy tale here, and what is truth?
I think if you are thinking in terms of future events and struggles, you may be projecting away from the real situation, which is here and now. Actually, we really have no clue regarding awakening in a global sense. Some individuals have become more awake, in terms of what they were before, and in comparison to others. But do we really have a scale to discern just how awake they were? Were awake completely or just in certain ways?
So one thing one understands as one moves to the beat of a different drummer is that awakening is relative, and so far quite ineffective to generate tangible satisfactory changes in the world, unless one considers that things would be a lot worse without the degree of awakening already existent.
I think there are elements of awakening, and we are challenged to piece them together in a way now that transcends all past versions. The past may have been a bunch of individual specialized lessons, but graduation amounts to putting it all together in one tapestry of tangible and applicable meaning.
Part of the criteria for transcending the limitations of our current state, (which is not the same as thinking we are transcending our current place), is to understand the real nature of the corruption, and the true nature of the conflict within. Regarding esoteric work, much of this amounts to transcending definitions of what is possible and what is not, and transcending the teachings of former traditions through understanding their limitations.
Really, we are challenged to understand the nature of life, and what it means to act in life and through life. As such, when one is honest with oneself, there is no such thing as bungling, and no need for apologies. Bungling is often the best way to learn, and experts are those that learn least because they are comfortable in their expertise.
