Meant To Be?

How many times have heard people say when something happens that it was 'Meant To Be' or that it was 'God's Will' really depending on what one's belief system is.

New Age or Religious, the thinking is the same. Magical .

Such sayings are like whistling in the dark, pretending we are not scared.

Now stop and think about it.

A child dies a painful death from cancer. What sort of God do you believe in that requires such a thing to happen? What belief system have you chosen that is so cruel?

The Holocaust, Rwanda, Kosovo. God's Will? Meant to be?

If you think so than I suggest a rethink is in order. What we believe makes all the difference to our lives and to the world we live in. Each of us creates our own world by how we think.

No I don't mean we can think up a grand house and it will magically appear! But we can think up a grand house and then put it on paper and then build it! All such things start as thought.

We each inhabit our worlds. Huh? How is that then?

Simply put, we all think and all of us have beliefs, even if we are unaware of it. We have experience and we all INTERPRET that experience. It is this creation of meaning that creates the individual worlds we inhabit. None of us sees the world in quite the same way as the next person.

Do you believe in God? How can you answer that without knowing what I mean by God?

Anyway, as usual I digress from the original point-God's Will or Meant To Be.

First off, no matter what anyone says, not one person on this planet knows what God is or what God's Will is. No matter how they dress, no matter what their 'position', no matter what their knowledge of 'sacred texts', they do not know. Do not believe the lie that they do.

And the same goes for New Age guru's. They don't know either.

The aim of both these types of people is to keep you in their thrall, to have control over you. To have riches hear on earth. Power and money.

I have come to understand that inside of me, I have what I need to stay standing no matter what life throws at me. I have come to understand that is a power greater than you and I that I can tap into. I can ask this power for help. I can sit still and meditate and allow this power to do it's work. It is really simple. It does not require that I believe any given thought system. It does not require that I believe any 'sacred texts'. It doesn't require that I be anything other than who I am.

This power can be felt, most often when one is in a group of people where that group is there for a common purpose-to heal. I.E. support groups!

I think we can get off track and bogged down by trying to understand what we will never understand-God, the Universe, why we are here, how we are here and where we are going.
These questions will not have an answer for us. At least not here and not now.

So once again getting back to God's Will and things being Meant To Be. We need to think this through.

If we believe in either of these two concepts(basically the same) we logically have to accept that when a child is abducted, raped and murdered that the perp was following God's Will, doing what was Meant To Be.

Now the concept of God's Will and Meant To Be doesn't feel quite so comforting does it?

The Law of Attraction, as being pushed right now by Oprah Winfrey and The Secret, tells us that things happen to us because we attract them to us by our thinking. So back to this abducted child. What did they think that allowed this to happen?

It all boils down to this one sick, damaging idea-that bad things only happen to bad people. It is OUR fault no matter happens. Powerlessness is frightening, really frightening. It is one of the reasons(and only one of them) that children who have been abused feel guilty. One of the paybacks of guilt in this situation is that we can hold onto the belief that we were in control. That we were not powerless. That we were not victims. I do believe this is one reason why 'victim' has become a dirty word and that it has been substituted with a lie - that we were not victims but survivors. It is partly true - as the best and most dangerous lies are.

Now this way of thinking does have it's payback, it's advantage. It gives us the illusion of having control! As long as we think this, we can whistle in the dark and not be afraid. We can tell ourselves, I am a good person so nothing bad will happen to me. We can live with this lie, this fantasy and we might even live our whole lives with it. More often than not though, we are floored along the line because something bad does happen to us or those we love and we are then plummeted into Hell because our belief system, which we created to allay our fears, tells us it was our fault because we must have been bad after all.

In a way we are putting 'other God's Before Me'. We are following guru's, priests, preachers, our own ego and pride and above all FEAR. We worship and glorify fear. And fear is not love. It is the opposite.

Another very damaging idea that we may hold is that another will pay for our 'sins'. This is so clearly not true. If this was so then all of those people who believe that all their sins have been 'paid for' will cease to suffer! Nothing bad will ever happen to them. They will be able to flout the LAWS.

Let me explain. I see sin as error, mistakes. Now if we break a law, even by mistake, the consequences of that will occur. No matter what. It won't matter what you believe. You will suffer the consequence of breaking that law. For example, you stick your hand in the fire. Your hand will burn. It really won't matter what you think. It will burn. You can believe that someone else paid for your sins all you like, your hand will burn.

So all your thoughts of fear, envy, sadness, guilt, shame, anger, pride,-all your experience of any sort of emotional suffering will cease because someone else has paid for your mistakes.

So obviously untrue.

The only person who pays for our mistakes is ourselves. We are each personally responsible. We are rewarded or not by our own thoughts and actions. We are not punished FOR our sins but BY them! Quickly, a woman I knew was suffering badly.She was very sad and depressed. The reason for this, according to her, was her daughter's terrible treatment of her. How awful, you think, naturally. Until you know this: her daughter refused to leave her husband and her children and 'come home' which is what the mother and the rest of the family wanted. Why? The daughter was a wicked woman. She had married a person of a different race, was not the same religion, and had children by him. How wicked!

So you can see how this woman, the mother, was being punished by her own sin. Her suffering would only cease when she realised her mistake and made restitution as far as was possible. However, as far as this woman was concerned her daughter was the wicked one so her suffering would continue.

And then there is the suffering that we can do nothing with but bear the best we can. We have physical bodies. They deteriorate. They dies. they cause pain. This is not our fault. This is the way it is. We can deal with it because we have to. We do not accept the blame for it. That won't help. We don't blame others, or God or fate. It just is and that power that is grater than ourselves can and will help us deal with whatever life throws at us.

JUST BECAUSE WE CAN TURN GREAT SUFFERING TO OUR ADVANTAGE, JUST BECAUSE WE CAN LEARN FROM AND BECOME MORE THAN WE WERE BEFORE, DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE SUFFERING WAS MEANT TO BE. IT MEANS THAT WE FOLLOWED OUR INNER SPIRIT AND MADE GOOD FROM BAD. THAT IS OUR POWER.