Self-reflection:

I’m posting this with the express written consent of Vanessa. She finds herself at a 4-path crossroads with regards to her next stage in life. She asked her spirit guides for guidance. I did not inquire as to how she made contact with her guides, but Vanessa has her ways. Their response to her discouraged her. It was, “be true and loyal to that which you believe.” Vanessa’s reaction: “WTF? I was like HELLO I am asking you for advice and you don’t tell me anything else but that???”

Before she told me all this, she told me her path possibilities and asked for my feedback. All of her paths involved some pretty hefty uprooting of her lifestyle now. I advised her to not choose one of these options now, but to explore all of them before committing to any of them. Go to the locations and check ’em out before deciding whether to dump yourself there indefinitely, so to speak. And when she told me about her advice from Beyond, I felt it was not inappropriate or irrelevant advice, it was just a little ahead of her. I believe that if you go for an informed decision, then whatever path you choose will be the right one. That’s what they’re telling her. “The key here is for you to have conviction for the path that you BELIEVE in. That means you have to first establish a sense of conviction to HAVE a belief. They didn’t say ‘be true and loyal to that which you randomly stumble upon with a toss of a coin.’ They said BELIEVE. All I’m doing is giving you an idea for how to arrive on something that you’d believe in.”

Vanessa said she had been hoping to have a more directive answer from them, like “pick this and then do that.” I don’t think they’re supposed to tell you to do a and b and c, or life would be their puppetshow and we won’t learn anything. It’s not free will if we do things cuz “my spirit guide told me to.” She felt that at confusing times like this, tho, she wished the answers would be clearer to make things easier for her. So here’s my theory on that.

The reason we’re not more closely connected to the Other Side is because we’re supposed to be here to learn from our experiences, and the only way to do that is to see what happens when we act in a certain way. If we already know exactly what would happen, this incarnation’s pretty useless. Sure it’d be “easier” if we’re given a map (at least one we can access consciously), but the opportunities for the largest personal growth ARE these difficult spots. You are called upon to pull out every resource you’ve collected in your experience this life — be it your own past experiences, your friends, your intellect, your understanding of human nature, your ability to do research — to make an educated gamble about some aspect of your life. Not that it’s really a test to see if you were paying attention throughout your life, but this is a chance for you to USE the skills you’ve gone thru so much, decades’ worth of acquisition, to collect! And after you emerge from this rough experience, you’ve now gained MORE knowledge, experience, tools for you to use in bigger, harder tasks in the future. Cool, huh?

I think life’s sort of like an adventure/rpg video game.

On the opposite side of the coin, toward the end of the email discussion with Vanessa, I got an email from a “California genius” that got me heavily involved in a discussion about someone else’s inability to take or even acknowledge the myriad possible paths in life, opting instead, it appears, to play the safe if unfulfilling role.

This makes me wonder if my spirit guide is trying to tell me something, or at least get me to think about something that Mr. W’s been trying to get me to think about, i.e. settling for complacency and letting my own dreams slip through my fingers.