Do you ever find yourself saying, “How on earth did I land where I am right now? I did not choose this, would never choose this, and I don’t belong here. This isn’t my life!”
If you’re on the consciousness journey, you may be experiencing a strange dissonance borne of two things you know: Your soul is 100% in charge of choosing your life adventure (we are the sovereign creators of our divine mystery plays), and your human would never choose the crap you are going through. These perspectives are both mutually exclusive and true at the same time. It’s a real WTF? kind of consciousness moment.
I personally know this one inside and out, and when a client recently sent me an email asking for some clarification about what I had described as her confusing timeline shift, I realized there was information for all of us in the answer.
So let’s unpack this a bit. We all know that sometimes life takes us for a ride with such a curve, we simply can’t reconcile ourselves to our new trajectory. In the case of my client, who has put a great deal of energy into healing from one such curve, there was a question for clarification: Did I choose this, or did it happen to me without my choosing?
As I looked at her question, what came was “Yes and yes.” I know this is not satisfying to the cognitive mind, but it really is what is happening/has happened. The human choice was not to make a change of trajectory, so it feels as though that came from the outside. This is where we are victimized. And victimization is absolutely true, at this level of seeing and being. So we, the individuated person, a person who finds a great deal of pleasure in whatever aspect of our lives was in the old timeline, did not choose to change or abandon it, and in fact would never choose that. It came from outside.
Alongside, through and around this is our soul, or Infinite Being, that is always nudging us to wake up beyond our individual identifications and into the Oneness that is. In this sense and at this level, we have no preference, because we are not the individuated identity that has a personality, story, and history. We are transcendent of the small self, and thus are immune to its confusion and even pain. All experience is equally interesting, valid, and worthwhile to us. And just to be clear, this is not true for our human personality. From there, we want only the experiences that resonate with us, that align with “who we are.” Ah… there is the gold! Just who are we? The better question might be, “What are we?”
So when we ask the question, “Did my soul choose this path?” we may find ourselves saying, “Of course!” as this answer reflects our understanding of our nature beyond a single lifetime. And to be sure, this is the answer many give, and indeed the answer I have often given. But perhaps there is a bigger thing going on. What if Life itself – call it what you like: God, Universe, All that Is, Divine Oneness, all expressing as the individuating us’s of the universe – is choosing reunification with itself through all of the pieces it has diversely created? What if the “I chose this” answer is actually the doorway into what “I” actually is!
If it is true that all is One, which it feels to me at the ultimate, cosmic level it is, then nothing is ever against itself. Stop and take a breath here. You, your life, nor anyone in it, is ever against you. Wherever we feel against, whether that is the world against us or conflict within (for these are very real feelings), those are the places that are inviting us into a new relationship with the truth of what is. Always in this is a call to cease and desist, to end identifying in separation, i.e. the “me” to whom this has happened by “them.” Since ultimately there is only One, any identification with the partial pieces is going to hurt.
So, as humans, It is often the very experiences that are excruciating or intolerable for the personality that guide us in this harmonization and reunification. This is because we can find no peace at the level of personhood from the wounds visited upon us. The person will never be ok with injustice, wrong, or unfairness, for those things simply will always be unjust, wrong, and unfair! And still… For all of us, at some point, our alignment with the personality becomes so painful, precisely because of this dissonance, that we begin to seek another way. This is the journey of awakening.
Our souls are all expressions of the One and it is our ultimate nature to return to our Source in unity. And here is the really interesting part! If we are this unity, how can we be anything else? Are we ever separate? No! Wow! How could we be? (“How am I not being myself?” asks Dustin Hoffman philosophically in I ❤️Huckabees). Thus we see that only our perception can convince us of separation, as it doesn’t exist. So what is really happening is that our embodied awareness is waking up to this truth.
While I don’t ever see our human condition as a “problem,” I do like Einstein’s analogy that a problem cannot be solved at the level it was created. We will not find our way out of the human matrix of perceived separation through human understanding. It is only through transcendence of the small, personal self that ultimate freedom is found.
How do we do this? In so many ways. We allow all. We feel what we feel, acknowledging when we’ve felt wronged. We do not heap our knowing of “I chose this” on top of our pain, for this is simply piling the abuse of “you should know better” on ourselves. First we feel. And then we learn to align ourselves with the awareness that is noticing the feeling, the awareness that notices the thoughts, the awareness that is always fine, always neutral, always interested. This is the awareness of our awakened heart.
All fine and good, you may say, but honestly, this neutral awareness may not be accessible when we are simply in pain from life. It can be difficult to move from “I am a human who is hurting” (our current timeline identification) to “I am pure awareness.” Great in theory, but not very practical. So sometimes we need a bridge. This is where timeline awareness can be helpful. Getting a sense of other trajectories playing out, understanding that we are embodied as many, not only as one, is a helpful step beyond small-self-realization and into God-realization as Being.
What I see is that we not only have “past” or “future” lives, but we have multiple lives living now (as ultimately all time is now). Some are perceived in other time periods, and some may be “concurrent” to the life we are experiencing with the awareness that is reading this post (see Jane Roberts’ trilogy Oversoul Seven for a great exploration into this). Opening beyond singular identification is one way to begin loosening our attachment to the trajectory we are on so that we can see other possibilities. It becomes the intermediary step between “I’m Christine” and “I’m the Awareness of the Universe,” for instance.
More healing energy can come when we realize that that timeline we were so identified and attached to, the one that felt like our lives that is no longer available to us, is still playing out. Yes, our individual identities also run multiple timelines, it’s just that we are primarily identified with the one where our main awareness is. It was a great comfort to me to realize that the one I missed, the one I thought I’d be in, was still going along somewhere, albeit in another, less accessible dimension to my conscious awareness. I was still receiving all that I desired to experience there, it simply didn’t require my conscious attention any more. It’s best that I keep that with my body!
Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear your comments. If you are one who is looping through the confusion of where your life has landed you, reach out! That’s the work I love doing. support@christiel.net
Infinite Love –
Christine
