The importance of core life lessons

Behind every desire is a core life lesson. Learn the lessons to liberate yourself.

Life is desire. At the heart of it all is the desire to know oneself.

For that reason, I say that desire is not the enemy of spiritual liberation, peace, happiness, joy, and love. Rather, desire is the means by which truth is realized. Otherwise, perfection, wholeness, love and bliss exist only in potential, but they aren’t actually known.

So the key to success in life - materially and spiritually - is to get clarity about your true heart desires and to fulfill them. This abolishes fear (which is based on ignorance) and establishes true peace and freedom. Only by learning through practice that you have the power to manifest your experience (indeed, that you are always manifesting your experience) and gaining confidence in your ability to consciously manifest what you truly want can you remove all self-ignorance. Until that point, doubts remain about who you truly are and what your relationship to the whole is.

Along the way, we have to take control of our experience at all levels, including at a material level. Because, for example, if a person feels that they are powerless and must suffer from material lack - fearing whether they will have the ability to pay their bills and have enough to eat - they are necessarily living in ignorance of the truth of who they are. Because the truth of who you are is consciousness. All of this is consciousness only. There is nothing else. Just as a dream is only consciousness, so too the waking state is only consciousness. So it is necessary to gain confidence through practice that truly “I am consciousness”, meaning I can change my experience, even at the material level, to abolish fear and thereby keep my attention abiding in the direct knowing of my supreme nature.

One possible path, of course, is the path of the renunciate. The renunciate gives up attachment and identification with all material things, including relationships and even the body. But since you are reading this, you are not a renunciate. So you cannot take that approach. You need to instead manifest your experience consciously, even at a material level. Meaning, you need to take responsibility for your health, your relationships, your material prosperity, etc. Otherwise you will continue to suffer from doubts about who you are and your relationship to the whole. So study the natural laws which I have outlined in previous essays. Those natural laws are what govern manifest reality, and by understanding them and working with them, you can consciously manifest your experience. Doing so is important for spiritual well-being and realization.

Now, there is no shortcut to that. If you struggle with suffering due to what you consider to be health problems or relationship problems or any other unfulfilled desires which are authentic (not borrowed from others), then you actually need to study the natural laws and consciously manifest your experience to fulfill those desires. However, with that said, ultimately, behind all desires is the desire to fully learn a core life lesson. And so having this understanding is important.

This is important knowledge for at least two reasons. One reason is that often times, the underlying life lesson in back of a desire must be adequately learned in order to fulfill the desire. And for another thing, ultimately, once you satisfy the desire outwardly, to fully resolve it requires adequately learning the corresponding life lesson.

I’ll give you some examples to help this make sense. But first, let me give you the life lessons. There are just five of them. This is important to understand so that you don’t over-complicate your life. There are just five life lessons, so you should focus on these only as the core life lessons you need to learn. They are as follows: forgiveness, acceptance, love, care, and awareness. I use the acronym FALCA to remember them, and you can shorten “awareness” to “aware” so that it rhymes with “care” to make it even easier to remember as: forgiveness, acceptance, love, care, aware. Or if you want to make it even shorter: forgive, accept, love, care, aware.

Now for some examples. Let’s imagine that a person struggles in life with lack. He never seems to be able to hold on to money and constantly struggles to pay his bills. He experiences a lot of stress from his poverty consciousness, and it spills over into all areas of his life with negative consequences. When he looks carefully, he realizes that this is his biggest challenge in life, his biggest pain, and he discovers that his core desire in life is to shift from lack to abundance. He wants to know and live true abundance.

Now, he might study the natural laws and start to practice by writing down what he wants in the present tense as though he already has it. Perhaps something like the following: “I am calm and confident in my true nature as living abundance. I effortlessly allow all good to flow to me, to bless me and my world with happiness, peace, and joy for all." He reads his statement three times a day. He does his best to feel the truth of it. He visualizes that as already true, imagining whatever conditions and circumstances allow him to best accept and feel that truth. He notices the limiting beliefs that he has which surface when he affirms this new truth, and he takes a little time each day to clear those beliefs.

As he does this, his life will change for the better. It is guaranteed. However, one of two things will happen. One possibility is that he will manifest the outer abundance in correspondence with the inner changes in consciousness only to find that eventually there are diminishing returns because somehow it is never quite enough or complete no matter how good it is. The other possibility is that he will keep getting blocked on the manifestation. There will be fits and starts. Things will change but then regress. Or there will be plateaus.

In either case, there is a life lesson he needs to study.

The life lesson will give the complete results.

Again, I am not saying that studying the life lessons is a shortcut. The life lessons are essential and they underlie the desires. But for our true heart desires we typically need also to manifest a resolution at a material level in order to completely satisfy ourselves. So I am just reminding you yet again that the life lessons are in addition to working with natural laws, not in place of.

Now, in this example of the person who gets stuck one way or another in terms of resolving completely his desire to know abundance, he has to discover the underlying life lesson and study it in order to completely satisfy his desire for abundance.

Importantly, the underlying life lesson can only be discovered subjectively. You have to actually learn through directly looking for yourself in your life. There’s not a manual which gives the one-to-one correspondences between the life lessons and the desires. It doesn’t work like that. What life lesson is connected to a desire for abundance for one may be different than that for another, even though the label used for the desire (abundance) is the same in both cases. For one person it may be love and for another it may be acceptance or something else.

In this hypothetical example, I’ll say that this man discovers that the underlying life lesson connected to his desire for abundance is forgiveness. Perhaps through self-study, he discovers that he has habits of self-sabotage in which he undermines his own desired outcomes of abundance because he holds on to resentments. For example, he might have resentments toward his father who he felt was never present for him during childhood. Instead, he perceived that his father valued money more than his son. This is just a hypothetical example. The connection need not always be so obvious or blatant. It could be anything. But here I’m just giving this as an example.

So this man needs to forgive his father. And as he does so, he discovers that he finds true inner abundance, a sense of wholeness, peace, and knowledge that he is truly valuable and worthy of greatness and love. As a result, because it is simply a law that outer experience is a reflection of inner reality, this man necessarily will begin to experience outer abundance according to his constitution. That is, it may manifest as millions of dollars if that is in alignment with who he is in this life. But it could just as easily manifest as him giving up all his worldly possessions and begging for his daily bread, so to speak. However it manifests outwardly, he will experience it as absolute abundance, overflowing grace and goodness, and more than he could ever actually need. And that is the truth. Not only that, but his presence of abundance will be palpable to all so much that even if he appears as a beggar outwardly, he will be recognized by others for his generosity and beauty.

Is it always a matter of just forgiving one’s father? No. It is rarely that simple. If we hold resentments and grievances toward one person, chances are, we hold them toward others as well. And, importantly, we typically hold resentments and grievances toward ourselves. So self-forgiveness is of fundamental importance. The point here is that when the life lesson of forgiveness underlies a desire, you will experience much more rapid, complete, and satisfying resolution of the desire by applying yourself to the study of that life lesson. And if you refuse to study the life lesson sincerely, you will fail to get complete and satisfying resolution to the desire.

Likely you already get a pretty clear sense of how this works. But I’ll give you another hypothetical example to further clarity the point. In this example, I’ll say that a woman struggles with chronic pain. She too discovers the natural laws and begins to work with them. She writes her statement of her desire fulfilled, perhaps as something like the following: “I am a living temple of the divine, filled and overflowing with harmony, wholeness, and peace. I experience my body as supple, graceful, and brimming with vitality and ease. I gratefully enjoy all the activities that I am here to do in this life with pleasure and satisfaction.” Every day she reads this three times and imagines it as being true in her inner world.

Now, perhaps she sees some improvements. But then she seems to backslide. She cannot seem to sustain the pain relief, and she starts to despair that she’ll never succeed. She then learns of the life lessons and looks within herself to discover that for her the lesson of care is highly relevant. She realizes that she has had chronically poor boundaries in her relationships, feeling that she had to say yes to everything and that it was wrong for her to honor her preferences in life. Perhaps she was a super mom who did everything for her children, even though it meant not getting enough sleep or time for herself. And perhaps that same kind of lack of good boundaries has shown up in all of her relationships. Maybe she was the one who always took thje lead on the church fund raisers even though she really didn’t have the time to do it in a non-stressful way. She might have opened her home to anyone she perceived was in need, even though she sometimes didn’t feel safe. Maybe the chronic pain was really the only way she could allow herself to ever take time for herself.

So this woman begins to study the lesson of care - in particular self-care - and as a result she starts to see steady, sustained improvements in her health.

Again, the correspondence between the life lesson and the desire may not always be quite so blatant. So don’t think it has to be. Rather, you have to follow your intuition on this process. And I understand that is sometimes challenging for people to do because they are often accustomed to looking to outer authorities to give them the answers. So here you have to claim your rightful inner authority to know your own experience and truth.

Also, it is worth mentioning that it may not always be a one-to-one correspondence. Perhaps there may be multple life lessons connected to a desire.

Now that I’ve explained all that, you may next be wondering how does one effectively study the life lessons? Is there a manual which gives the exact definitions of these lessons of forgiveness, acceptance, love, care, and awareness so that you can memorize them and then pass the test? And the answer to that is, no, it doesn’t work like that. Because these life lessons are actually divine qualities which are inherent within you. And your study must be a self-study to draw forth the knowledge from within. That is the only way it works.

However, with that said, I can give you a few pointers to help you get started.

First, in every case the life lessons are unconditional. Don’t waste your time trying to forgive or love conditionally. That misses the point. So it is not about forgiving only when the person apologizes or changes their behavior. It is not about loving yourself only when you are perfect (according to your impossible definition of perfection). Rather, it is always about unconditional forgiveness, acceptance, love, care, and awareness. The point is to notice that your conditions you place on these things hurts you. And truthfully, that hurt is unbearable. So you simply cannot afford to hold on to those conditions any longer.

So forgive unconditionally. Just see that you don’t want to hold on to the hurt any longer. Love unconditionally, understanding that only when you drop the conditions do you get to experience the inner peace you so long for. Care (especially self-care) unconditionally, not just when it is convenient or when you feel you deserve it.

Next, remember that the Law of Attention states that what you put your attention on grows. So to learn these life lessons, the key to success is to put your attention on them. And remember that the truth already exists within you, so your study is about drawing out that knowledge from within. This means that if you simply sincerely give your attention to these life lessons consistently and persistently, you will learn what needs to be learned.

While you can approach the life lessons by studying them as the pain necessitates it, a more efficient way to do it is to study them daily. You can do whatever you want, of course, but my recommendation is this: write down the five life lessons, and read the list each morning. Then choose one of the life lessons to study that day. And throughout the day, think about your chosen lesson. For example, if you choose love for the day, then throughout the day return over and over to thinking “love”. And ask yourself “What is love? What does unconditional love mean? How can I practice unconditional love right now? In what way am I placing conditions on self-love and/or love of others?” Affirm to yourself that you are love, that love is the supreme truth, that love is expressing from the core of your being.

Another important point is that these life lessons are entirely life-affirming, wholesome, and positive. They never ever result in self-harm. However, your wrong ideas certainly can and do cause self-harm. So be watchful of your wrong ideas as you study the life lessons. For example, if you are studying the lesson of forgiveness and you have the wrong idea that forgiving someone means you must have no boundaries and allow that person to behave in whatever way they want even if it is hurtful to you, that wrong idea could lead to self-harm. So be very truthful with yourself and remember that these life lessons are always entirely wholesome, healing, and positive. Forgiveness means letting go of the hurt, the resentments, and the burden of the past. That is it. It does not mean anything about letting people walk all over you. It does not mean calling bad behavior good. It just means not holding on to the hurt any longer. It means liberating yourself and everyone else involved to greater good and healing. It means turning it all over to God instead of trying to manage it yourself. It means trusting in a greater power which can and will operate through you, and sometimes that means maintaining healthy and appropriate boundaries while still letting go of the past.

Additionally, you may at times think that it is difficult to clearly differentiate between the life lessons. For example, it may sometimes seem that love and acceptance are more or less the same thing. Or it may seem that self-care and self-love are indistinguishable. And that is because at the highest level they are all ultimately one lesson or self-knowledge. So don’t get hung up on trying to distinguish them clearly from one another. The point here is really more to provide a framework for effective self-study and ultimate fulfillment than it is to have an intellectually-rigorous definition of anything. You might think of these life lessons as facets in a jewel where the jewel is the self. Sometimes it is most helpful to view things through one of those facets. At other times another. So just work with this framework to your own benefit and don’t get hung up on anything.

The proof is in the pudding. As you sincerely study these life lessons, your life will get better and better. You will naturally experience more peace, happiness, love, joy, harmony, and abundance. You will be able to manifest your desires more efficiently. Those are the certain benefits of sincere study. Whereas, if you critique the framework and sit on the sidelines waiting for something else to happen before you’ll take action, you won’t see any benefits.

So I highly encourage you to take up this study of the life lessons daily. As I have suggested, just establish a simple and sustainable daily practice which will help you to learn more about these life lessons with each day. You don’t have to master any of them overnight. That is unrealistic. What is entirely realistic and very reachable by anybody is to gain practical, direct insight and integrate that bit by bit, day by day. Just form the habit. Read the list of the life lessons every morning. Each day choose one to study. Throughout the day contemplate it and prompt yourself to put what you learn into action. Take a minute at night before bed to review what you learned and discovered in practice that day. Give thanks for your growing self-knowledge and the increasing experience of the benefits of the divine qualities manifesting through you. Do that sincerely, daily, and you will see very wonderful results.