Boy, are we all having an amusement park-style ride these days, or what? Through the portion of this week, we can understand what is going on, and how to come out of this ride smiling.
I want to share with you two points that inspired me from a lecture of Karen Berg in 2009, which can be found on Kabbalah University (university.kabbalah.com).
Why is it that we experience ups and downs in life? Why is it that we seemingly must face challenges in life? Why is it that, after choosing our spiritual work and adhering to it for years now, it seems we sometimes pray for one thing and get the opposite?
Why couldn’t we just live our life, get married, have children, make a career and pick up the rewards sometime in the future? Simply put, because then we wouldn’t be any better than animals. Look around and watch how we treat each other, how much pain and suffering we see around us and read about, how much we abuse other people and nature… On the other hand, when we see how animals live in such harmony and synergy with nature, it makes you think, are we better than the animals?
Of course the answer is yes! The biggest difference is that animals accept their environment as a given; it is what it is. We humans have the power to change our environment, for good or for bad. We have the capacity to change the world, and therefore we have a responsibility towards other people, as well as towards animals and nature.
Each one of us has a job to do in this world, and when we are not quite getting there we get “a little nudge…” as Karen says. A little elbow from life in our ribs: “Hey, you have a bigger responsibility here. You don’t like something in your life – get up and change!”
Change what?
Change yourself!
Why? Why does the Light constantly push us – through other people and challenging situations – to change? It is very simple and we have heard it before: the law of attraction. Like attracts like. I’m the magnet that attracts everything and everyone into my life – if I don’t like part of it, I need to change. Change what? Change the objects attracted by the magnet? Impossible, we can try – and often we are trying all our life – to change the objects around us. Yet the magnet will continue on attracting more of the same type of objects, until the magnet itself changes. Change your magnet (yourself), change your life, the entire world will follow. It starts with you.
From the darkest points in our life we can get to the greatest Light.
I’m writing these words under the devastating shadow of the earthquake in Nepal. It didn’t happen to them, it happened to us. Each one of us is responsible for whatever is happening in the entire world. As we peel the layers off our own ego, we reveal the Light of our true soul and continue towards the great Light of the bright soul of humanity.
