Seeking advice on spiritual development

[rva_jeremy]

Welcome! You are certainly in the right place. I think for the amount you're dealing with you were quite concise.

There's an aspect to the spiritual path that has a certain menace to it, I think, and I was reminded of it in my morning reading. We make a solemn dedication and commitment to our growth, to service, etc. as if we have a choice. And there is a certain sense that we do. But the choice, as A Course in Miracles says, is not so much what to learn but when to learn it.

There is no escape, no exit from this moment and its ultimate trajectory back to the Creator. There is no alternative to forgiving yourself and others. In many ways, I've come to see despair and "giving up on oneself" as the belief that there's some viable alternative we could invest our attention in that would resolve the tensions and tarnish of our situations. But we have no ability to affect the destination; we can only delay. The situation, you see, is completely hopeless.

What I'm trying to convey is that you have all the time in the world. You have time to feel this anger and hatred. You have time to resent others for the way they treat their brothers and sisters. You have time to rant in impatience and outrage. All of these activities are not simply behaviors; they are reflections of things within you that you are dealing with. This is just the particular way you are trying to balance them. It doesn't feel pretty, but that doesn't mean it's useless.

In my life I've found that trying to stop doing negative things tends to simply delay them. Instead, balancing seems more effective in the long term. Accept yourself as having these feelings. Before you can change yourself, you have to fully accept yourself as a Creator capable of this darkness. Only then can you accept that you have another side as well; as long as you try to obscure your negativity you will recapitulate the traumas and sufferings that were likely programmed to bring this to the forefront in the first place. You seem to already understand how this principle works; I think you should give yourself far more credit.

Suffering is not punishment. Suffering is for teaching us something. Ease yourself into a program of fully feeling this stuff, without explanation or justification. By allowing yourself to be angry when you're angry, sad when you're sad, despairing when you're despairing, you'll find out for yourself the exact character of what you're dealing with, what still needs to be uncovered in order to understand yourself. As those of Ra say, by not seeking to overcome this stuff but instead seeking to balance it, you start to notice the randomness of the energy, the way it is raw and urgent and, most importantly, disconnected in principle from the specific reasons you attach to it. If that process is for you anything like it is for me, you start to see the energy expended as not necessarily a subjugation of the self by the negativity but instead an experience of a self in a given distortion. It still sucks, but there is a real sense that it isn't a setback, that you're not using it to escape the demands of the incarnation.

Please continue to reach out if we can be of any assistance. Congratulations for having the courage to begin looking at yourself and your patterns. Only by looking squarely at ourselves can we love ourselves enough to serve. Try also to remember that others have their issues as well, and the suffering you feel does not separate you from others--it unites you with others on this plane. In that suffering and heartache lies embedded all the tenderness and compassion that enables you to serve, not from a place of exaltation, but from a place where your service conveys the true unity and equality of all of us. Good luck!