Back in 2003 I wrote a post called The Earth School. You should go read it.
Many spiritualists talk about this earth being a kindergarden for our spiritual evolution. We’re born here to experience life while evolving as spiritual beings. Along the way we have multiple lives to learn multiple lessons, all part of our spiritual growth, and sometimes even having multiple lives simply because we fail to learn some of the lessons so we need to repeat them.
The lessons are endless and infinite, but just like it’s impossible to learn everything as you go through kindergarden, you’re not expected to learn everything as you go through your multiple lives. You learn whatever you want or need to learn in order to grow as spiritual beings. (Make sure you read The Earth School for more information on that concept.)
This planet is a school for all the experiences we could ever possibly want. Everything that you can think of, we can experience. What we experience helps us grow.
War, pain, suffering… they’re all valid experiences for individual growth, and we’re always going to have them.
We can’t grow without experiencing pain for us to learn from. Along with pain and suffering we also have love and compassion, but they can’t exist in a vacuum. In order for us to feel love and compassion for others, we must also understand pain and suffering.
So when you see people making their ‘spiritual statements’ about how they dream of a world without war, pain and suffering, you’re looking at people who don’t actually get it. They don’t understand that spirituality involves understanding and embracing all of human experience, the negative as well as the positive.
At every time in our past, our present and our future, there will be war on this planet. There will be pain and suffering amongst millions of people.
But at every time in our past, our present and our future, there will also be peace on this planet, and there will be love and compassion amongst millions of people.
It’s impossible for this world to become entirely peaceful and loving. That’s not what it’s about. That’s not what we’re about as human beings. Everything that you could possibly experience can be experienced. That’s what this world is for, and that’s why we’re here.
The best we can do as ‘spiritual people’ is to understand that everything happening on this planet is part of the human experience. It’s up to us to make our own experience what we choose it to be.
We can stay in a war zone and learn from those experiences if we want, or we can get the hell out of it and find somewhere more peaceful. Of course, we might not be able to get out of the warzone, so we have to do the best we can within the life we’ve got.
If we’re not in a war zone, then we can learn to appreciate the peace we experience, and we can help make it better for ourselves and others that align with our values. We can focus on the people around us, and welcome those that make our way to us because of the shared values.
We can work together with like-minded people to improve our own lives and those we connect with. We can make our homes and our neighbourhoods peaceful and safe, if that’s what we want to do.
But we can’t expect or demand that this world become a peaceful world, without war, suffering or pain. It never will. It’s just not going to happen.
Thanks for reading! Please add your own thoughts below.
Don't forget to subscribe for new posts sent to you by email!