When Life Throws You a Curve, Is that Okay with You?

Daily Spiritual Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

How we see reality has to do with our beliefs. If you hold one set of beliefs, you will interpret what happens to you in a very different way than someone who holds an opposing set of beliefs.

However, at a deeper level our beliefs are governed by our emotional state—the degree of our emotional maturity.

When people want to dispense with good and bad, right and wrong, as if these didn’t exist—for instance, to say that the Holocaust wasn’t bad—it’s because they are too emotionally immature to deal with the riskiness of life.

Many of us simply can’t handle the fact that sometimes things in life go horribly awry. We can't philosophically deal with being thrown a curve. We have to pretend it isn't a curve.

To shield ourselves from this hard fact, we have a need to pretend that everything is really “all just fine.”

This makes a mockery of our everyday experiences. It means it really makes no difference what experiences we have, nor whether we learn from them. It doesn’t matter anyway, because “it’s all just fine.”

When we try to paper over the gaping insecurity of life, telling ourselves horrific events really don’t make any difference, we are quite simply pretending.

To tell ourselves it’s all just an “illusion,” because we can’t emotionally cope with it being real, is to live in a fantasy of our own imagining.

There is nothing honest about this. It has no integrity.

To take this approach is to be truly trapped in duality.

Instead of seeing everything as a single reality, so that we recognize both the Source and that which emanates from the Source as all of a piece, we split it into two: the Source, and a dream state that’s illusory. This is dualistic.

It doesn’t matter which belief system we embrace, whether Eastern or Western—or the claim that we don’t have a belief system, which is often nothing more than self-deception—dualism is rife, much of it under the label of “nondualism!”

On the one hand many Christians and those of other religions are frightened of what they call “the devil,” fearful of “temptation,” terrified of falling off the so-called “straight and narrow”—all of which is nothing but dualism.

On the other hand much of New Age wants to pretend like reality isn’t actually real, as if it were just a dream—which is pure Gnostic dualism.

Both groups of people are running from what’s staring them in the face: that life is real, and that it’s often capricious and uncertain.

The mature person, which is what the story of the Little Prince is calling us to, embraces everything.

To mature spiritually is to embrace the whole of reality authentically, for what it is, as it is—no pretending that it’s otherwise.

If we are moving into consciousness, we don’t lie to ourselves, engaging in wishful thinking, pretending, living in our own version of an Alice in Wonderland-type fantasy. We have the courage to face up to and outgrow our childish need for everything to be safe and secure as it once seemed in the womb.

We don’t get hit on the head with a two-by-four, knocked into a coma, sent to hospital, and then tell ourselves “Oh, this is just a dream. Nothing bad happened at all.”

Dualism imagines a real world other than this world, as if this were a dream. Authenticity accepts the whole of reality as a seamless garment, both the beingness from which everything has come and our own experience of being.

It accepts that wonderful things happen, but also horrific things. It embraces it all with courage.

When we take this approach, we place ourselves on a redemptive path. We take becoming increasingly conscious seriously, which enables us to move toward what Eckhart Tolle has called A New Earth.

We realize that ultimately everything works for our good and that all will eventually enter into the fullness of divine consciousness, even people like Adolph Hitler who inflicted so much suffering on so many.

But in the meantime, we call things what they are: good and bad, products of a world that's based in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And despite living in such a world, we ourselves come from the flow of consciousness that's the tree of life.

Consciousness enables us to redeem everything, forgive everything, knowing that nothing but God ultimately exists and that everything is the evolving incarnation of the divine in material form.