Life companions

Why and how do we meet people? Have you ever wondered about this?

Beside the people who are part of your family or those who lived close by the place at which you were born, if you look at the people who make up your circle of friends today, you will find that they were random strangers at some point in your live. But at another point they were so close to you that you breathed what they breathed, lived what they lived and shared with them the most intimate thoughts of yours. At this point, you most probably thought that life could not be lived without them. Yet, this moment will fade; they will sail into the horizon and will mingle with the unknown; a full circle will almost be closed; they will no longer be random strangers, but they will be definitely strangers. And You, sitting on the bank of your river, watching the stream of your life passes by, asking yourself “why did they come to my life and why did they leave it?”

If you are like me, your life took you over many lands, cities, countries, and faces, this cycle must have happened to you many times. Some of the people you will miss terribly for many years, some of them you cry in your dreams because you have got the honor to meet them in your life, and some will be easier to forget, but no matter what the emotion you carry for these people, you still don’t get an answer to the question “why did we meet?”

Richard Bach, another one of my favorite authors, said “people are in your life for a reason, but what you do with them is up to you”. This sentence says a lot but tells us nothing about the particular people in our lives. It does not tell me what I shall do with the people in my life, or how I could cope with the losses I keep enduring, of loved ones whose laughter, at one point in my life was everything I wanted to hear. If I am a sincere person, and I am, I give a piece of my heart to every human who touches my life. That part dies with that person departing from my life, how am I supposed to keep on living if this keeps happening to me? Richard Bach, with all respect to your wisdom, but you are not helping me here.

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Warriors of the light

Paulo Coelho is one of my favorite authors; he writes stories describing human growth as happening to people from all walks of life and starting from varied different points in their stories. He calls these people “Warriors of Light”, because they use whatever is happening to them as a mean to transcend their situation and achieve a higher vintage point for the soul.

The word “warrior” could be off putting to many people, it used to be the case with me, because the word denotes fighting and struggling maybe even against an enemy which is ethereal and intangible. And we don’t want to feel that life is a struggle, because it is not, or that we have to fight for anything, because we don’t have to. So many of us end up not wanting to associate ourselves with being warriors, just because of the negative connotations of the word.

It took me years to understand what is really meant by being a warrior; it has nothing to do with fights or struggle, but by a certain style of life in which you choose to do or act in a certain way that brings the best out of every situation you live. For example, in a situation where someone does you some harm, you might want to choose loving this person and seeing why he has done this to you instead of hating him. Even if you are not able to love that person at all or you are not able to see the reason for his action, the choice of not hating him is a strong and powerful decision in itself. 

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The dark side of the force

I knew that it is only a matter of time before I am asked this question “there is this person I am in love with, but s/he does not feel the same way about me. Can I create a program to change her/him?” I don’t know if the program would work or not, but I can assure you one thing, you would live to regret doing that. This will be literally “stepping to the dark side of the force” which is about controlling and manipulating others. This type of action has been called bad names since the beginning of human history, and in no way that is what I am teaching here.

Let me try to distinguish what we are trying to do here from manipulation or controlling others. I am about the power of the knowledge that our life is merely a reflection of the way we belief about ourselves and our lives. By changing the way we perceive, our live and our surroundings also change (read the harpist). The key is in our perception, which is a result of our beliefs, and we work to change the way WE believe. The world is nothing but a mirror reflecting what is inside us. If we step in the direction of trying to change the way someone else reacts towards us, we will be in effect trying to change the reflection not what has been reflected. It is a big step in the wrong direction, because in the first case we do acknowledge that ‘we are the world’ and by perfecting ourselves we will create a perfect world for ourselves. In the second case, our focus will be on coercion, manipulation and control of our fellow humans, and we will discover, when it is too late, that all this negative energy has been directed towards ourselves. After all we are all one.

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The finger pointed out

In the year 2003 I came across the wonderful book “Sacred Contracts” by Caroline Myss. It was hard to miss that book then if you are into spirituality in any way, because it was on New York Times Bestseller list during that time. Myss took Jung’s archetypes concepts and merged them with astrology and produced a wonderful work that explores the archetypal patterns that are governing your life. It is almost impossible to overestimate the positive effect this book had on my life and the understanding of its meaning, as the work I did with this book then still shed light on the archetypal energy I encounter today.

Through the book, I learned that the Victim archetype is a constant in every human’s repertoire. By mapping the archetypes to different astrological houses, you discover the area of your life that each archetype plays a major role in. For me, the victim was related to the house of Aquarius, which represents my relationship to the world; and according to the book, this is where most of the people find their Victim archetype. Every archetype has a negative and a positive aspect; someone who is acting out of the Victim’s negative aspect (when it is located in Aquarius) will feel that the world is against him, and he would feel victimised by the world and everyone. When anything bad happens to that person, he will be ready to point the finger out blaming someone/something for the misfortune that had befallen him. On the other hand, a person who acts out of the positive aspect of that archetype, will feel empowered and in control. I used to be of the earlier type; I was serious, heavy, and trying to control what I can control of my circumstances because, simply, I did not trust the world to deliver what I want.

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