Tools for learning

QUESTION: Masters, in your teaching you speak of the purpose for our lives here on Earth being to “learn lessons.” What does that really mean? Do you mean that we just come here to experience as many different types of situations as we possibly can? How are we to understand what we have experienced?

ANSWER: First you need to know that the lessons that are presented to you are what you have chosen to learn in this incarnation. When you are at Home in unconditional love, the only thing you are aware of is that all- consuming sense of love. But just how fantastic is it? You have no way of appreciating it until you experience the absence of that love. At Home love is everywhere and everything; on Earth it is something you have to work to find, and this is done through the lessons you have set up to learn.

To reap the benefit of the experience you must understand the nature of the circumstance. When you have completed an event, to truly understand it you must be able to look at it without judging your action or the action of anyone else involved. Evaluating the motives, emotions, and actions that grew out of the event instead of judging or condemning allows you to “see” the reason that the event occurred. This is the lesson; it answers the question “Why would I choose to experience this?”

Before you can reach this place of evaluation without judgment you must be able to set aside interfering influences. The greatest interference comes from your fears, anger, revenge, hatred, all things that are the exact opposite of unconditional love. One way that this may be done, if those emotions are too strong to permit viewing without them, is to review your life experience as if it were happening on a movie screen where the strong emotions cannot affect you. Evaluate the occurrence; then—and only then—internalize it so that you may feel its effect upon your soul. You have then integrated that lesson.

If you are not too affected by the interferences above, allowing yourself to be vulnerable to the happenings around you will allow you to see and learn the lessons rapidly. “Allowing yourself to be vulnerable” means that you are facing the lessons straight on without the protective screen of the interferences. You jump right into a mode of evaluating without judging, immediately gaining the wisdom available from the experience.