copyright Bela Johnson, published by The Maine Eagle, May 2002

Does embarking on the soul's journey mean we are here on Earth to meet our destiny? Or does free will allow us to make of life what we wish? I believe both are true. From our intention to incarnate until this present moment, we have always possessed free will or choice. The difference between these two moments in time is that Soul experiences a unity consciousness that Personality only glimpses in comparison, even with the best of intentions. What does this mean?

Before we come into bodies we possess unlimited Mind. As expansive beings, we do not consider Mind to be contained in the brain, for we do not have brains or bodies. We exist as energy, limitless energy. This energy experiences Oneness and simply Is. There are no judging personalities to discriminate. This dimension is all-loving, all knowing. There is no sense of right or wrong, no sense of time as we know it. When we enter our bodies or shortly thereafter, we lose consciousness of Source in order to experience life on Earth. Our essential nature, our soul nature is loving. Human nature is complex and full of confusing and often conflicting emotions. If we were to maintain consciousness at all times of the incredibly loving realm from which we emerged, we might experience such great pain that we would choose to end our physical existence after a few really difficult challenges. Human life on Earth would extinguish itself pretty quickly. We maintain this forgetfulness, then, in order to effectively meet the challenges we have chosen for our soul's growth.

Why would anyone choose to incarnate on Earth, clearly a planet where we learn from adversity? Why would we choose to leave a loving place like Heaven, as many call it, to come here? Though love might be what many of us seek in life, if love was all we ever knew, how would we EXPERIENCE it, with nothing to compare it to? How would the soul grow without having something like adversity challenging it? Perhaps it would evolve over many eons, but it would be pretty slow going. The choice to come to Earth is up to each of us. The experience of human life on Earth is a collective choice made between Creator and Soul. Creator, being raw energy, cannot express itself except through its creations. In essence then, WE are IT, individual expressions of The One (along with nature, the stars and all other life in the cosmos). We make a choice to separate from Creator in order to experience life as human beings. Our destiny then, is to complete some human mission, some task(s), and return more enriched in order to strengthen Creation, of which we are a responsible part. Responsibility is key here, for it is what Soul knows is simply a given, but what humans fight against. Acceptance of responsibility is what shapes our experience of destiny.

Thus our destiny is also a choice, but remember, we have forgotten that part. We have, as Medical Intuitive Caroline Myss discusses in her new book SACRED CONTRACTS, places to go, people to meet, appointments to keep. Destiny brings us together with others to fulfill these contracts of Soul. How we choose to participate in such contracts is our CHOICE. Whether we nourish and strengthen Soul or turn our backs on it and die unfulfilled is our choice. The beauty of choice and destiny is that there are positive emotional and spiritual benefits when we align with the good of all. Instead of railing at the heavens and playing the victim in life, we can choose to view our challenges with an eye to the choices we made before we assumed human form.

All of us know that fighting takes tremendous energy. Resistance is a form of fighting. Surrendering to Divine Will is likewise surrendering to our own will, if we choose to see it this way. This does not mean we play a passive role in life and numbly stumble through. It does, however, put us in the role of Seeker. We become actively interested in life as a journey. We explore and embrace our challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. And yes, some of these challenges seem impossibly hard at times, usually because they trigger us emotionally. We respond from personality rather than from the heart. Yet remembering that our personalities are like masks which can disguise our divine nature will help us break through illusions and judgments. This re-membering (bringing our parts or fragments back to us) alters our perceptions where we may again see the gift rather than the curse in any given challenge.

Remember that being human means we arrive replete with a full set of feelings. One of the strongest emotions we experience is fear. When we allow fear to dictate our responses to people, places and things however, we block our understanding of these learning opportunities. We become stuck and rooted. When this occurs again and again, our bodies and minds become rigid and begin breaking down prematurely. Accepting the growth inherent in our challenges can create space to heal. We are not flawed because life is challenging. Quite to the contrary, our choices have led us here to this life, this world. Now what can we do with what we are given?