Unappreciation + Greed = Bitterness

 

I will start this communication with a little experience out of my life.

When my Earth-Body was 21 years old, I had a wife. She was 21 years old also. She was pregnant. We were very excited. We were even talking about what we were going to do when the baby grew up.

We were married for two months. Then one morning I leaned over to kiss her good morrning and she was dead. I knew the moment I touched her that the life was no longer in her body. I feverously tried to revive her by pumping her heart and breathing into her lungs. However, what came out of her lungs was dead air. Of course the baby never lived either.

For the next two years, I was a very bitter person. I felt that God and life cheated me. I felt robbed. I looked at two people who were married for 20 years and I felt how could there be a God when I had only two months of married life.

I spent days, weeks and months walking around seeing the world through anger, pain and bitterness. Everybody had a better life than me.

Then, one day, about two years after she died, I was reading the newpaper. The article was about a young boy and girl who were on their way home from their wedding and they had a car accident. The new wife was killed in the accident. Her husband lived through it.

All of a sudden a major enlightenment swept over and through every cell of my body and every space of my consciousness. I realized why I was bitter for two years.

When I compared my two months of married life to people who had twenty, thirty, forty or more years of married life, I was cheated. When I compared my two months of married life to the young couple on their way home from their wedding in which the wife was killed, I was truly blessed. I had a whole two months more than him.

I realized at that moment that REALITY IS WHAT REALITY IS. What we choose to think about it will determine our experience of it. What we choose as comparisons to what we consider our situation in life to be will determined whether we feel bitter or blessed.

Reality is neither good nor bad. It just is. The mental and emotional baggage we bring to our encounter with reality will influence our perceptions of heaven and hell. What we choose to compare our experience to will determine whether we feel blessed or cursed.

We choose the comparisons. We choose what is the ideal and then compare our perception of our life to the ideal we choose as desireable. The choice of comparisons is our choice and our choice alone. Whether we live in heaven or live in hell during our earthly journey will be largely determined by the comparisons we choose for ourselves.

It is so simple. In fact it is so simple that our mind finds it almost impossible to accept and embrace this simplicity. We resist it in our greed for what we want life to be or what we want as our experience of life as earth-humans to be.

How many babies never make it out of the womb alive? I do not mean abortions that the mother chooses. I mean the babies that just never make it to a live delivery.

How many never have the experience of tasting an apple? How many never have the experience of their first romantic kiss? How many never know the love of a mother or the love of a father? How many do not have both of their parents alive through the first 20 years of their earthly life? How many never know what the gift of sight is? How many never know the joy of running across a meadow? How many never know the sound of a bird singing in the spring? How many never know the joy of marrying your true love? How many never have the love and the fights of a brother or a sister? How many children never see their tenth birthday?

I could go on and on but you know what I mean.

I was bitter because of the simple mathematical equation of unappreciation + greed = bitterness. I did not appreciate what I had experienced for the fullness of the miracle it truly was. I was greedy. I wanted more, more, more. I WANTED MORE! This attitude is guaranteed to bring you bitterness.

Of course it would have been nice for me to have been married for many years. Perhaps 10 years or 20 years would have been nice. But would there have been ever a good time to say goodbye to my wife? How about before the children started school? How about when the children drove their first car? How about when the children got married? How about when the children gave us our first grandchild? How about when the grandchildren started school for the first time? How about when the grandchildren had their first date? I could go on and on with this also and we would never come up with a good time to die. We would always want more and more and more. It is natural for us to want more of a special relationship.

The only key to peace and blessing through an experience of loss of a loved one is first to appreciate the fact that you even had a minute to have had the experience of having the loved one in the first place. For each minute, each hour, each day, each week, each month and each year that you had the incredible blessing of even had the experience at all - say Praise God, Thank you God, I am truly blessed..

Appreciate the incredible reality of your awareness of being aware. Appreciate the incredible reality that you had a chance to have experienced anything at all and you will know the key to Paradise. Every breath you take is one of breathing the air of paradise. Bitterness is a sin of attitude. The sin of greedy non-appreciation.

The mathematical formula for paradise is simple. APPRECIATION = PARADISE.

The choice is yours - Heaven or Hell - right here, right now - on Earth.