The following is only a fairy tale, but an interesting one:
Source cannot promise that we will have a "good" life or a "bad" life in our experience of "separateness." It can only promise that we will have an experience of what it's like to be alive.
Life evolves. That is the only prediction that we can really make about it. Exactly how it will do so is unknowable. It's unknowable because of existence's inconceivable vastness and complexity.
There's a gigantic computer working out how life will evolve, step by step. The complexities of this computation are so great that it's impossible to truly predict them in advance; not even Source can do so. This computer is what we call "reality" or "the universe."
Moreover, there is no way to perform the necessary calculations any faster. What we call "reality" is the fastest calculation possible.
It is moving forward, step by step, absolutely determined and absolutely unpredictable, even though it may seem predictable at times, like a run in the dice.
The only thing that existence can promise to any life form that seems to experience a separate identity is that it will—"you" will—experience what it's like to see, hear, taste, smell, think, live in a body, experience both the fragrance of perfume and the smell of decay, both waking and sleep, both birth and death, both light and darkness—in the end all just manifestations of, or names for, the same thing.
In this experience, all that really matters is to let love flow in your heart, to forgive everything and everybody so thoroughly that you come to see that there was never anything to forgive.
There was nothing to forgive because nothing in existence, not the tiniest grain of sand, can help being exactly the way it is. I can't. Can you? Right now, can you be anything but what you are, and the way you are? Nothing else and nobody else can either.
Seeing that, the tight muscle of judgment lets go of its fist; and then the heart opens automatically into a graceful relaxation, like a fist relaxing into an open hand, a graceful open-handedness which we call love.
Jesus showed us the close connection between love and tolerance. To love someone is to be tolerant of how they are, to be so tolerant that you rejoice in them. To love the universe is to be so tolerant of it that you rejoice in it, and all its myriad ways.
In this, the inherent preciousness of life begins to make itself visible.
Take your life right now and imagine that tomorrow it would disappear. All the details of your life, even the ones you despise, would take on a kind of precious allure if you knew you had to say goodbye to it all tomorrow.
Of course, you do have to say goodbye to it all tomorrow. Perhaps not "tomorrow," but the day after, or the day after...
All of it, all the experience of what it's like to be alive, to feel the up and the down, the "good" and the "bad," the "desirable" and the "undesirable"—the day will come, soon enough, when we must say goodbye to all of it.
"But I'll reincarnate." If there's no separate somebody in the first place, how can it re-incarnate? "My body will die, but my soul will go to heaven (or hell)." If there's no separate somebody, how can there be a separate soul? Existence itself re-incarnates, into millions of flowers and everything else, every day. There's only the One, and there never was anything but that.
That's why it's all a fairy tale. But what a beautiful one, hmm? And "we" got to participate, to feel the wind on our cheek. What a privilege. And we got to experience what it was like to love someone or something, even if it was only our car. Doesn't matter; we loved.
We are love. "You" and "me" and "us," who don't actually exist separately, are yet a magnificent opening for love, a resplendent excuse to love, a luminous possibility for existence to once again love itself.
That is why existence exists, so that it can once again discover itself in love with itself, through "you."
—jim sloman, for 3/22/02
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