Our Best Interests

     I was reading a book, interesting and enjoyable, when the author wrote about choosing a course of action that was “in our best interests”. A common enough sentiment and one I have used myself in many a conversation.  But as we pursue our course along the inner journey where all conventional assumptions are challenged and sometimes overturned, such thoughts often turn into questions. I found myself wondering what are “our best interests” exactly?

     Well, it depends on who you ask. Your parents, your spouse, your boss, your banker, your pastor, your team mate, your drinking buddy, your doctor or chiropractor,… all these would shape their opinion from their experience and education and happily provide you with a slant they sincerely feel useful. Now what about your spirit guide, your higher self or your wise friend who died last year and keeps popping into your dreams? Or maybe your long time neighbour or that grocery check-out clerk, both of whom you’ve been chatting with for years?

     On this, our inner journey, shorn of the paradigms and guidelines others inhabit, the notion of “our best interests” is, well, amorphous, vague, and I would venture, nearly impossible to pin down.  We all know by this point even the most oppressive turns of ‘fate’ can be blessings in disguise.  We might not choose that steep rocky hill to climb but once we find our feet upon it, we know that we’ll ‘climb that hill in our own way’ and that ‘every day is the right day’ to do so.

      We all know that when handed a lemon we can make some lemonade, take the energy of the issue  and shape it into some workable solution, but the metaphysical question is, – who hands us the lemon in the first place?  Perhaps predictably I would answer our higher selves or that level of knowingness that provides the launch pad for what was then our upcoming incarnation.  And in occasional deeper meditative insights I have glimpsed how certain ‘themes’ were set up several lives before some sort of completion was attempted.  For example, several incarnations in the countries that were to become Great Britain gave me roles that were useful not only in ‘my’ attempts to harmonize my pagan self with the then new Christ energies sweeping the planet but also in the gradual formation of a national identity out of the debris of warring tribalisms and religious squabbling.

     The down side of this development, where national pride could not resist the lust for conquest and then empire, with all the distinctly mixed blessings of colonialism settling themselves into the unavoidable solution of commonwealth.  It’s a pattern empires cannot seem to avoid, the rise and fall of power, wealth and influence, the many recent European examples being the most obvious, but the ancient ones – Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian and Chinese supplying the basic template.  I suspect the ones of ‘pre-history’ and ‘myth’, the Lemurian and Atlantean, where ‘I’ and others have spotty memories but little historical evidence, were much the same.  The metaphor of growth and decay, supplied by the seasons of nature seems not only useful but unavoidable.

     Those are some of ‘my’ lengthy excursions but I know from the regression (past and LBL) archives, that others have experienced similar long term planning and execution.  Some have extended that into an understanding of our arrival on Earth from other planetary systems such as Sirius, Lyra and  Andromeda to willingly participate in the experiment of dense materiality and free will that our harsh mistress Gaia offered.  Our cycles of incarnations in many sentient forms, including but not exclusive to the human, can be viewed, as the song goes, the longest and strangest trip we’ve been on.  With the many personal experiments in creativity, destructiveness and stability it can become another empire in itself, the empire of the many me’s. In that context the notion of what’s in our best interests looks charming and quaint.

    It hardly matters what you do or don’t do: every path has its pitfalls and prizes, every choice has its palette of consequences, every action has its karmic rewards and retributions. It’s not that you have to do something, it’s that you can’t avoid doing anything.  Actions will chase you to every hiding place, forcing you to interact and finally empathize. Sympathy for the little devil in you and everyone else, regardless of planet or quality of performance.