The Great Puzzle: The School of Choices

Here on Earth living in physical bodies, we are growing, learning, evolving souls in the greatest of all schools. In this school are many classrooms… enough to offer the lessons needed by each soul. And there are many grades, accomodating the very youngest in experience, and all, up to the most advanced. 

The most advanced student in one curriculum, however, may be in preschool for some other line of study. It is not a linear system like a ladder.

We are all embarked, some say, no matter the field of concentration, on the most important scholarship: learning to make choices.

Now, some might make the most successful choices, those that lead towards the Divine rather than away from It, by nature, requiring no thought. That is a characteristic of infancy. But from that point on, the infant learns from the hardness of life in a body that other things factor into the choosing. What was once a clear and unconsidered action becomes confused, shadowed, distorted, distracted…  Alternate choices come into play, different options to choose from as the world becomes more complicated. 

What’s the point, if we as infants make the best choices from our inborn wisdom, our sense of connectedness? Why go through all the hell of the next decades, as we do, disconnected, uncertain, making choices that steer us away from Divinity?

It’s because the point is not the choosing: It is the knowing choosing, the exercise of our free will to choose what is connecting and affirming in the long run, rather than what gratifies, or solves problems in the short term. To do right by instinct is easy, is automatic, requires no thought or will. That is not what being human is about. 

So we go through our lessons, we enter classrooms and choose our teachers, we choose paths to follow for as long as they take us where we believe we want to go… Some of us will abandon a path that seems to be failing; some will follow a path to perdition because they choose with faith, but not necessarily with awareness of truth or the ability to distinguish it from lies. 

Lies, deliberate or not, simply misguide our expectations and distort our understanding. Learning to trust our own hearts’ wisdom, to listen to our own connection with the Divine–that is a difficult path, and it is easy to lean on a guide who claims to know the way. In fact, the path the guide follows may be the correct one for the guide, but not for the guided.