Guided by Spirit Not Driven by Ego - Part 3

It was a homeless person who gave me my first glimpse of a soul.  I was teaching in San Francisco and every night at the end of my class when I left the building the same homeless woman would approach me.  I have had contact with a lot of homeless people but she was different.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Because of some bad experiences with homeless people in our neighborhood I have had a somewhat negative feeling about homeless people which I know is wrong and if there is a God I will probably end up in a homeless shelter before I die.  This woman however I truly felt for.  I didn’t have much money at the time and hardly ever carried any with me but I would always take the left over food from the class and bring it to her.   She was always very thankful.  On one particular evening when I came downstairs she was waiting as usual.  On this evening I could see in her eyes that she was sick.  She looked flush and feverish and obviously did not feel well.  I asked if she was ok and she said “I’m just so sick.  If I just had a bed to sleep in one night I might be able to get better.”  I couldn’t think fast enough. I didn’t have enough money in my purse to pay for a hotel room.  I wanted very much to do something but all I could do was give her the food I had and be on my way.  On the way home I went over and over all of the things I could have done.  I could have taken her to a hotel and paid for it with my credit card.  I could have taken her home and nursed her back to health.  But I kept coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t do any of those things.  And then as I was driving and chastising myself for not acting quickly to help this poor woman it hit me like a ton of bricks.  This is going to sound really weird and when I think back to this it even sounds weird to me.  But all of a sudden, I knew --- KNEW!! – this woman had been Jesus in the flesh.  It was so clear to me and for the first time in my life I understood when Mother Teresa said “Everyone is Jesus.”  I felt like someone was shining a light on me showing me this and wanting me to fully understand that “Everyone is Jesus” because just as sure as I am that you are you, I am certain that this woman was Jesus.  I also believed that I had let Jesus down by not helping him in some way that evening.  That I had been tested, if you will, and had failed.  But the really interesting thing about this test that I failed was that I didn’t feel bad about failing, I just felt that even though I failed by not helping her in some way, I had learned what Jesus wanted me to learn.  I got it!  So, I didn’t feel like he was angry with me but rather knew that through my failure I finally understood.  

I know that all of that sounds a bit off the religious zealot deep end which we already know I am not.  But looking back let me tell you what I believe.  I believe that there are forces in this world that pretty much all organized religions agree on.  They just call them different things.  Organized religions give these forces names so that we, in our human states, can understand on a level that we understand things.  So, let’s say for a minute that we all know and believe that there is some higher power, someone or something, or some force that controls this world.  Maybe it’s just Karma, maybe it’s just “The Force”, maybe it is a God who takes a form that is beyond our imagination so we imagine him/her in human form, maybe it’s Mother Nature.   And let’s say that “force” lives in each and every one of us – our soul perhaps.  Maybe our soul could also be called “Jesus”.  Maybe what I saw that night was someone’s very soul.  Maybe that night for whatever reason I reached a level of consciousness that gave me a peek into the deep spiritual side of humans.   Maybe this raised consciousness is what people like Mother Teresa  live in all the time and so it is all very clear to them.   And they are trying to help us see by using metaphors that are more familiar to us. What I believe is that there is a force, greater than us.  And this force affects everything we do.  But it comes from within and when we pray we aren’t tapping into some God in the heavens, we are tapping into a communication with our soul and the forces of those we love, dead or alive as well as the forces of nature and the universe.  And that’s where we find our comfort and our answers.  

I also believe we all have a path we are supposed to take, lessons we are supposed to learn in this lifetime and when we veer from that path, things get difficult.  But when we follow the path we are supposed to take, even though at the time it seems like it is not the one we want to take, things fall into place.  The right path leads us to the right people and the right circumstances.  It will not always be the easiest path and we will certainly experience challenges even on the right path but they are the challenges we need to experience in order to become the person we were meant to become and have the human experiences we were meant to have.  

As you can see I don’t have this all fully figured out but I’m working on it. This definitely is a life long process but I feel like I’m getting really close to all of the answers of the universe. Just give me a few more years . . .