I often ponder with fascination how each
of us popped up in family somewhere on this planet. Although there
are many beliefs and mythologies about how that choice is made
(karma, astrology, a celestial committee and life lessons, the
grinning cosmic choreographer, akashic records, punishment, reward),
there is a good chance that where and when we arrive is totally
arbitrary.
You popped up in a family, in whatever form
that took. It might have been a nice middle-class family in a
comfortable and safe neighborhood, or ganglord drug runners in
the bad part of a big city. You could have been born in a bucolic
tropical jungle, or a war-torn city in the Middle East. You could
have been any color, any ethnicity, and learned one of more than
5,000 languages in the world. . . while learning to worship one
of the thousands of gods that apparently all inhabit heaven together.
Why we popped up into life in the circumstances
we did may remain a mystery, however, there was one thing common
to all of our experiences: We learned to dream the way our caregivers
were dreaming, and we learned to be afraid of being rejected if
we refused. Ultimately, we could not refuse, because as little
people, it meant expulsion and annihilation ( = death). And the
essential leverage used by our caregivers to domesticate us into
their particular dream of what was right and wrong, and good and
bad, was that we were not good enough until we fulfilled their
expectations of us.
We had to be good enough to belong, and we had
to prove it with our behavior. Do you recognize this? You had
to be ____________ enough. Perhaps your inner Judge is still telling
you that you are not ____________ enough. That is the Judge’s
job, and he does it well. The inner and outer Judges insist you
must prove you are good enough so you can earn love, approval,
acceptance, money, a mate, and the other rewards of life.
The unfortunate downside of all this, no matter
what the standards of those in charge of wherever you popped into
Life, and wherever you are now, is that you can never prove you
are ___________ enough. The standards and expectations change,
and escalate with your every success or failure.
You can never be good enough by proving you
are (the bad news).
You are already good enough just as you are (the good news).
The entire idea that the dream your caregivers
believed when you arrived in their care has anything to do with
you is so clearly arbitrary that it becomes nonsense. Imagine
who you would be if you had popped up somewhere else! Six billion
possibilities! All dreaming, all dreams.
To try to prove you are good enough based on
the arbitrary standards produced by the random accident of your
birth circumstances is useless, a waste of precious personal power,
and impossible. On the other hand, since it was probably random,
and therefore there is no standard or expectations you need to
meet from God or man, perhaps you are perfect and enough just
the way you are.
And if you are enough just the way you are,
then you are free to be that You that you came here to be, free
to enjoy yourself, your life, and your nature as a unique expression
of the Life Force that created you here. You are free to love,
free to shine, and free to be YOU. That is the goal of the Artist
of the Spirit, the goal the modern Toltec-- who remembers the
truth of who he or she is, and falls INTO love with their own
perfection and enough-ness.
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