Life Is The Teacher

Life Is The Teacher
By Ed Komarek
7/31/08
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My blog: http://exopolitics.blogspot.com/

Most of us grow up with faulty life perspectives that we have learned through our social environment. Over the course of our lives some of us through years of introspection and contemplation have been able to make corrections to this faulty programming. As a young man I was able to benefit greatly from those that had passed on their knowledge of life and living to the next generation. In my old age I too have come to realize the importance of passing on important knowledge so as to benefit the evolution of humanity.

In a nutshell the most important concept both for individual and collective evolution is to understand that life is our teacher and that life is an advanced school of higher learning. Unfortunately many of us don’t have this understanding of reality and so we gain little benefit from life. We find ourselves overwhelmed by suffering, drowning in destructive emotions and thought. Peace of mind and happiness elude us and we find ourselves chasing the rainbow for that ever retreating pot of gold.

It really does not have to be this way. We can change the faulty programming of childhood and even the faulty programming of society as a whole. It takes will, dedication and perseverance to better ones own self and it takes many such people over many generations to evolve society. We do this the same way changes in raindrops make for changes in the nature of a cloud. The way to improve society is to improve ourselves as individuals.

Before we can change ourselves and society we must first become aware and face up to the truth of just how bad things really are. The first step in the process toward healing and wholeness is to admit to ourselves and to society that we really don’t understand life at all. We must consider the possibility that this could be the reason we suffer and are unable to find true peace of mind and happiness. We stumble through life bumping into each other hurting ourselves just as do very young children getting to know the physical world. Once we understand and admit our position of ignorance then we can begin to navigate away from that position to a more beneficial position through experimentation and trial and error.

Self work is a lifetime process and is not easy because it takes a lot of effort to undo erroneous habits of thinking and feeling consciously and unconsciously learned since birth. The more one repeats something the more engrained that something becomes be it either constructive or destructive. Therefore we can easily become discouraged and give up on ourselves before we hardly get started with self improvement. The thing to realize is that while reform starts slowly it accelerates as new positive habits are repeated and erroneous habits of thinking and emotion are dropped.

When we understand that life is both our teacher and school we should not be satisfied with anything less. No matter if we act at any particular time as teacher or student we are all learning life’s lessons. One most important first lesson is that the unwary student of life must be careful not to be captured by any individual or group of individuals professing to be teachers with the ultimate knowledge. The truth is that only life has the ultimate knowledge and wisdom and no one individual or group may usurp that. We can certainly learn from the wisdom of others but at the same time we must understand that being human we all harbor secret agendas and many that profess to be teachers are predators preying on the less knowledgeable.

Life is a series of lessons moment to moment, day to day. The important thing is not to fault the lesson but to learn the lesson and move on to more and more satisfying and fulfilling lessons. If we fault the lesson we are not able to learn the lesson. We then continue to suffer as the lesson repeats itself over and over until we learn it and by so doing move on to the next lesson. In this series of articles I will present to the reader a lesson to be learned and then provide commentary on that lesson.