Unfracturing the Self

My dear friends...

It seems to me that life continues to be an unfolding mystery for nearly everyone. There have been, and are now, true Masters holding all the answers, knowing every solution, and living life in ongoing peace and harmony (no matter what was or is happening). So we know that reaching such a level of personal and spiritual development is possible. Indeed, we have been promised this by every great religion. Still, I have seen very few people achieve it “in a flash.”

My observation is that for most of us life continues to reveal itself one layer at a time. What I notice is that the world is still full of seekers. Despite all the wisdom that’s out there, despite all the data in all the encyclopedias, despite all the spiritual messages in all the sacred books of all the world’s religions, despite all the deep insights offered to us by the world’s philosophies—despite all of it, we still have no idea about many things regarding the life that we’re living.

So we search for guideposts. We search for insights. We look to each other for suggestions on how to get through all of this, on how to get by, on how to get on. And if we’re lucky, we have a relationship—a personal relationship—with God.

If we’re lucky, we have the ability to relate with this Source of Wisdom that exists in the universe. If we’re very fortunate, we are able to interact with this source, to experience it as a friend, to be able to use it as a resource.

I have been lucky enough to do that, and so I have been given many resources and many guideposts that have helped me along the way and that have made me more comfortable with myself and with the whole life experience than I have ever been before as I move into my seventh decade.

I’ve had a chance to observe and to remember a great many things, and I’ve dared myself to pile it all together over these most recent fifteen years of my life and to create a holistic approach to my day-to-day experience.

All my life I’ve wanted to know how to live as a whole person—which is the first step to experiencing Oneness in all of Life. I experienced myself in the past as being, in a sense, “fractured.” That is, a part of me was going in one direction, a part of me was going in another, and a third part of me was trying to go both ways at once! I’ve felt “torn” many times in my life.

This fractured sense of who I am is, I have no doubt, what caused me to live a life that until most recent years was anything but smooth, anything but easy, anything but peaceful. Not that I was having a particularly terrible time of it, mind you, but my life certainly had more challenges, more disappointments, and more deeply unhappy moments than it needed to have. And, I am sorry to say, more moments when I made other people deeply unhappy than I ever imagined it would.

Yet life is meant to be happy, and there really should be no reason for it to be otherwise. Certainly, there is no reason for life to be an experience of ongoing unhappiness. But when we are living as fractured people, trying to serve two masters and three agendas and four different thoughts that four different people have about who they think we are supposed to be, life can become very stressful and unhappy indeed.

So the invitation of Life is to “unfracture” ourselves, to become whole once again. In the weeks ahead, we are going to explore ways in which we can all do that, from what I have come to understand in my Conversations with God. I hope you will choose to join us here.

Hugs and love,

Read this week's Letter to Neale here

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Read a message from one of the prisoners impacted by our Prison Outreach HERE