The Incredible Thread Of Life

This afternoon, I got to thinking about the thread of my life, those significant events that have led me to where I am now, to what I am doing, and who I have become.  It was my plan to sit down and create a list of the events that occurred, and by doing so, to illustrate how seemingly random life can be.  As I was running through some of these events in my mind, something quite remarkable occurred - I experienced an epiphany. 

You see, I had been imagining my chain of events as beginning when I had just turned nine years old.  This was the moment when my parents moved the family from our home just outside of London, down to the south coast of England.  Living by the ocean created my love of the beach and of being in and around water, and helped me to create the dream that I held, of one day spending my life on a palm tree lined beach.  An impossible and crazy notion, but one that was to take hold of my heart nonetheless.

So, beginning with this event, I started to think of others.  There are some that I knew were life changing events: giving up on my high school education so that I could work on a factory production line, going to South Africa for the first time, taking the opportunity to move to Budapest, quitting my job with IBM to go backpacking to Asia.  Some events may not have seemed significant at the time that they occurred, but they were the trigger for a change in my thinking about life: being handed a copy of The Alchemist by a friend, talking about life with Sergio, meeting up again with an old colleague after fourteen years and hearing of his life as a scuba instructor in Thailand.  As I went over these events, I thought about my life when I was working at IBM, and how that had been so significant for my story, how working there had provided me with the very opportunities that were to shape my thinking.  And this was the moment when I was struck by a sudden thought: why was it that I was working at IBM in the first place? 

The answer is because of my father.  My father is a great man.  He is my hero and I have been lucky enough to have enjoyed an affinity with him.  Growing up, I guess that I wanted to be like him.  I used to watch him getting ready for work each morning, putting on his suit and clipping his security clearance badge to his trouser belt.  He used to bring home punch cards and computer paper, copies of computer printed pictures and I used to think how cool he was to work at such an amazing and mysterious place called IBM.  Some weekends, if he had to go in to the office, I would accompany him, sitting and listening to the football on the radio, keeping him updated with the scores, watching what he was doing.  I knew that this was the place that I wanted to work, that I had to work.  It became my dream to work for IBM, to emulate my father, and to give us one more thing in common.

So here's what I realised.  If my father had not worked at IBM, my life would probably have turned out very differently.  Perhaps I would have worked there anyway, but I don't think so.  You see, my family moved to the seaside because of my father's work.  If he had not worked for IBM, then this would never have occurred and I would never have developed my love of the ocean, which in turn would mean that I would never have developed my dream of one day having my home on a tropical beach paradise.  My first significant event was not that we moved home when I was nine years old, it was in fact my father commencing work for IBM back in the late 1960's.  My first significant event occurred before I was even born.

Of course, it is now clear to see how all of the lives that came before us, generation through generation, all the way back to the very beginning of life on this planet, have played some vital role in my own life and my own course of events.  The chain of events that shape our lives can be traced all the way back to the dawning of time itself, to the moment of creation.  Every thing that we do changes the future, not only our future, but the futures of every one affected by the ripples that spread out through time and space.  Everything and everyone is interconnected.  All of the threads of lives intertwine to create the great tapestry of life. 

When I stop and think of how it was that I arrived at IBM, how it was necessary for my girlfriend at the time to be made redundant; how I accompanied her to a job fair at a local hotel; where, feeling bored, I decided on a whim to complete an application form for an employment agency; how that agency contacted me two months later to say there was an opening at IBM for which they thought I would be perfect; how the set of skills that I had acquired since beginning my working life had made me the right fit for the role...  It really is incredible.

Is it fate?  Perhaps.  Maybe my life was always going to be this way.  Perhaps all of these events were preordained, necessary to help create the big picture, vital to some future design.  All I know is that each individual link in the chain of events that have brought me to this moment, is a miracle.  Every thing, every person, every experience has in some way linked together and those links are being formed ahead of me, in my future.  I cannot see them, but what I do know is that when I look back from some moment that lies ahead of me, I will again be amazed at the incredible serendipity that has been my journey.

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Spiritual Evolution: The Reason Why We Are Here

This afternoon, I fell into a discussion with one of my students about life, or to be more correct, death.  This is not as morbid as you might at first think, since I'm teaching a Rescue Diver course, and we had been talking about life saving and the effectiveness of providing rescue breathing and chest compressions (CPR).  This conversation took on a whole new meaning, when out of the blue, my student told me something that left me dumbstruck and momentarily speechless.

As we were discussing the steps in responding to a non-breathing diver and how, through the use of rescue breaths and CPR, maintaining the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain is absolutely critical, Charlie told me that he was particularly interested in this point, since he had arrived home one day and walked into his brother's bedroom, where he had discovered him laying dead on the floor.  He was not even twenty years old and his brother had taken his own life. 

Charlie told me that his brother had been good looking, that they came from a middle class upbringing, that they needed for nothing, that he was popular and well liked at school, that he dated many girls.  Essentially, that there was no known reason at all for him to have ended his own life so early and so abruptly.  Charlie surmised that his brother had figured out that there was no point to continuing, since he already had everything, there was nothing left for him.  What goes on in the mind of someone who takes their own life, particularly in these circumstances, is not for me to say.  Each of us has our own demons, it is just that for most of us, those demons remain under control and in check.  I know that for myself only too well.  I told Charlie about a good friend of mine who had died unexpectedly and suddenly a few years ago, and we got to talking about life and death, and the reason why we are here.  I have a theory.  I call it Spiritual Evolution.

Spiritual Evolution.  Let me try to explain what I mean by this term.  Spiritual Evolution is the process of developing the soul.  We each develop our own soul through having experiences, meeting people, going places, attaining knowledge, and feeling emotions.  In fact, everything that we do offers us the chance to grow our soul, to move it forward.  As we do this, so too do we evolve our soul's into something more than they were before.  It is growth, advancement, and change.  I see spiritual evolution as our mission in this life.

Everyone has a voice inside of them - the voice of their heart.  That voice tells you constantly what you should do, what is the right thing for you.  Some of us ignore it and some of us heed it.  I believe that by following that voice, we follow our one true path and by walking that path, we walk in the light.  It is on our true path, basking in our own light, that we truly evolve our soul, giving it the best possible chance to attain its goal, its mission.  Our one true path is our spiritual quest, our mission for this life.

How many times have you stopped suddenly, aware that the situation in which you find yourself has happened before?  This occurs often in life and it is my belief that each time that it does, it is because there is a lesson of fundamental importance and consequence to our spiritual journey, that we need to learn and to assimilate.  If we fail to take the correct course of action, the situation will inevitably come around again and again, until such a time that we make the right choice or take the action that is necessary.  The situation may occur in a different place, with different people, but it will be the same lesson that is being shown to us.  When we make the right choices then we have learned the lesson and we are able to move on.  The learning of the lesson evolves our soul and this situation will no longer repeat itself in the same way again.  Déjà vu works in the same way, only déjà vu is our remembrance of the same situation but not in this particular physical manifestation of ourselves, but in a previous incarnation of our physical aspect on this planet - in another life.

Let's put this all together.  The soul is trying to attain its ultimate state, to reach the point of nirvana - the point at which the release of the soul from the physical body in which it exists occurs.  To do that, the soul must evolve.  As we journey through life, the soul is learning, changing and evolving.  When it reaches a certain point of the evolutionary process, there is no more that it can achieve in this life.  At that point, it is necessary for the soul to be released from the physical body in which it resides and if it has not yet reached its ultimate objective, then it is reborn into a different physical body and the process of evolution continues.  On and on.  Time and again.  Until the evolution is complete.

I came up with this theory because I wanted to explain to myself why it is that some people die early. You see, when my friend died, I did not understand how someone who enjoyed life as fully as he had, was taken away.  It seemed to me that it was too soon.  But perhaps it wasn't.  What if his soul had reached its goal for this particular life?  Now it was free to leave and so it found a way of breaking out of the physical body.  I don't know if the soul of my friend exists again on this planet in a different physical form, or whether he has left and moved on to a different realm, I'll probably never know that.  It does not matter though, since when I look back at his life, I see someone who clearly sucked out all the marrow, and then sucked out some more.

An acquaintance of mine, who worked as a nurse in a hospital for the mentally ill, once told me that she did not believe in fate because she was unable to explain why some innocent people needed to suffer at the hands of tormentors and abusers.  "How could that be their fate?" she had asked me.  Well, perhaps Spiritual Evolution helps to explain this.  Even though in this life, they suffered, in the greater scheme of evolution of the soul, perhaps that was a necessary suffering, so that they could assimilate a lesson.  We only see a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle, one single thread in the great tapestry that is life.  How can we truly know what is going on, what is the whole picture in which we are just one tiny, miniscule part?  We cannot.

Let me clarify one more thing, because I know the question is burning away in the back of your mind.  You're thinking to yourself that surely, with the rapid growth in the population of humans on this planet, there cannot be enough souls to populate all of the new bodies that have been born? Right?  Well, here is what I think.  Spiritual Evolution occurs throughout all of life that exists on this planet.  Every living thing has a soul of some kind.  Some are simple, others are very complex.  Each is at a different state in its evolution.  I also believe that all life on this planet must be in equilibrium, meaning that the sum of all life, must always equate to the same answer.  More humans, means less life forms of other types.  Therefore, the number of souls in existence is also balanced by the number of living bodies.  More simply put: all things are one.

So, perhaps Charlie's brother had accomplished all that was needed in that particular incarnation of his physical being, and it was just his time to depart and move on.  In choosing the manner in which he did, it is entirely possible that he passed on a message to Charlie.  Perhaps this event was needed to alter the destiny of Charlie, to steer him towards where he needed to go for his own spiritual evolution?  Without that event in the life of Charlie, maybe he would not have been sitting with me in Costa Rica, learning to become a Rescue Diver and going beyond to become a dive instructor.  No one really knows.  All I know is that I believe in my theory of Spiritual Evolution and I'm sticking to it.

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