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Your Ticket To Paradise

by Judi Thomases

Previously published in Evolve! magazine, Volume 5, Number 1. Reprinted with permission.

Would you like to find your way to bliss? Would you like to turn the wounds, stresses and anxieties of your life into something more manageable? Laugh more and hurt less? Look at your emotions in a different, more empowering, way? Understand the point of your life, who you really are, and how you can help enlighten Earth? Would you at least want to discover a new perspective on things so that you can reframe your woes, explain why they are so necessary to your growth, and, in so doing, thereby return control of your life back to you?
Who wouldn't? It's not even all that difficult. It merely requires altering your perspective with a little help from the spiritual realm! It requires seeing your life as a game that your soul is playing, and grasping the fact that you agreed to play by its rules in order to gain something more valuable than gold, something that can remove pain and replace it with joy. That something is wisdom.

The Game
You "signed on" for every bit of your suffering! In fact, not only did you okay your karmic predicament but you were thrilled to have the chance to live it through. Actually, you not only rejoiced to have a shot at these challenges called misery, fear and pain, but you designed the whole scenario!

Such is the message given by the spirit teachers who call themselves The Brotherhood of Light Workers, and whose mission is to enlighten us about the soul-game we're all playing, the game of life. It is "play" because our souls relish the opportunity to engage in life's difficulties in order to realize our potential, follow our passion, and stretch our limits; it's a "game" because there's a strategy to master and a target to reach.

The strategy involves developing wisdom and remembering our spiritual nature. The target is reaching inner peace (or, you could call it, reconnection with spiritual bliss). And every time life bites, we get further along towards the end goal. That's because the only way to arrive at bliss is to gain more and more wisdom, even the low-level kind that's called common sense. And the only way to gain wisdom is to go through an experience that feels like a measure of suffering.

Here's what The Brotherhood says:
You-as spirit, as God-wanted this journey with all your heart, and you waited your turn to accept a birth into it. You knew full well that you were saying yes to suffering-for that was the game. Suffering, and nothing else, is the abrasion that produces wisdom! It is hard but brilliant, like diamonds. It is a true gift, for without suffering you would float through everything, and nothing would have much meaning. ("Wisdom's Game: How to Change Life's Pain Into Joy", Cypress House, 2005, Chapter Two, pp. 8-9)

Spirit wants us to understand our participation in the unfolding of our fate. It's time to awaken! Everything that's happening - whether by man or nature, by "accident" or design - is part of our own creation. We are being called to wake up to this truth. Spirit wants us to see the reason behind our lives' predicaments and unhappiness. That not only are we self-creating our challenges, but without them life would have no meaning; it wouldn't push us to rise to our next level. Pain - of the physical or emotional variety - is designed into life to force us to grow. It's absolutely essential. Without it, life would be too easy and have no point.

The upshot of growth is awareness, and, of awareness, wisdom. We are playing a game deep within, and to win it we must see the connection between our mind-set and our experience, and then realize that we can change our beliefs enough to change our life.

As if you were a scriptwriter, you concocted a drama in which there'd be plenty of challenge and a lot of grief, but also many chances to triumph and feel happy and then you jumped right into the action, overjoyed (on the soul level, at least) to play the tragic-comic role. You are the star of your own movie, the game-player on the board of your own design. And part of the game was to forget who wrote the script… and thus, who can change it at will!

The point
What, in fact, is the point of suffering altogether? Everybody has some of it; no one - not even Paris Hilton - escapes completely. Why does life have to be this way?

Here's why, The Brotherhood says: If life's a game that the soul plays to gain wisdom, it contains struggle because we're essentially spiritual (energy) in nature, and as soon as our unbounded spiritual nature gets entrapped in a physical body, it feels uncomfortable. Then, not only are we entrapped as limited physical beings, but we accepted a karmic predicament. We put ourselves into school! To this, we react with sadness, fear, negativity, anger, despair anything but joy! Yet since struggle produces wisdom, it's something we wanted or agreed to on some level. So, since we can begin to see through the game, we have a choice about reacting to this set-up-that is, our problems-especially in starting to change our thoughts regarding our circumstances. This is one of our best tools to win life's game.

One of the markers of this new age will be the understanding that our thoughts are creating our reality, so that we can, by mastering the process, really gain dominion over what we experience. First and foremost, we must master our thoughts. Are they creating inner peace or inner disharmony (dis-ease)? It's all in the way we're framing life in our minds. "Mind creates reality," say the sages. What thoughts are you repeating day after day? And how aware of them are you?

Another marker is the knowledge that we're not puny, helpless beings but world-creators. Another is that consciousness is greater than physical existence, and is deliberately playing a game to extend its potential and realize its perfection while in form. Yet another is that the spiritual realm coexists with, and is one with, the physical at all times. Your karma isn't your punishment it's your game-plan! We, as spirit, wanted to challenge ourselves with predicaments that were both painful and real, in order to play the wondrous game of life.

So rejoice when you are most miserable! It's your ticket to paradise. Take heart from your pain; you will be most motivated to find the way back to us. The big trick-or mastery-is to do so without harming yourself or another along the way, so that you do not bring forth any additional pain as you go. (Chapter Fifteen, p. 63)

Spirit doesn't want us to feel victimized by the world anymore, but rather to gain mastery over it, to see ourselves as its creator. The Brotherhood's message gives us the rules to play the game well, the new standard by which to change the world for the better, the best wisdom to obtain, and the job that humanity is tasked with. With such insights we can heal our physical woes and our emotional ones. We are Gods-in-training, and that's the whole point of the Age of Aquarius.




© 2005 Judi Thomases.