Aging Is A Great Time When You Value What Life Has Taught
By: Shirley Willett
Tags: Spirituality, Higher Self, Humanity, Love, Spiritual Secrets

Great learning is through pain, not pleasure

A card I designed in 1985 in my 50s, and starting on a path to my own future

When you live in two worlds — beautifully expressed by Claire Elaine — there are many painful experiences as you bounce from one to the other. Physical society, especially in the last century, demands that you live in physical reality, and considers the search in Higher Worlds to be mental illness. But the road to Divinity in a Higher World is more appealing and beautiful. An analogy is a child in school who wants to live already in the adult world, and does not want to spend time learning how to live in the world. In other words, you cannot experience the Higher World of Divinity without the great but painful learning in the physical world, and with the need to build the faculties for seeing and experiencing in Higher Worlds — as expressed by Rudolph Steiner. From Britannica: “He was the founder of anthroposophy, a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure thought but accessible only to the highest faculties of mental knowledge.”

At 87 I am just about getting the balancing necessary to live in two worlds. There are no longer the painful experiences. Rather it is time for reflection on the learning of past painful experiences.

On Pain and Pleasure

From “Do You See What I See? 1995, Shirley Willett

Life is, unquestionably, an unfolding drama –

With all its pains and pleasures.

When you recall “that deepest pain”, and with it –

The learning;

A smile breaks across the face. In having experienced –

Faced and resolved the pain;

You are now the audience — — looking upon it,

Judging and enjoying –

One of the greatest plays ever written;

And would not have missed it — on a bet.

So, now I am comfortable in my skin and my soul and feeling a balancing of two worlds. But my deep love and concern for the whole of humanity distresses me for its future. There are so many painful occurrences that tears at my heart and I struggle with what is happening — and feeling that humanity is unbalanced. Painful experiences in my own life have taught me the greatest lessons, when I became aware and reflected on them. They are preparing me for the next step in evolution to Divinity. Why can I not feel that way for humanity? Are all these painful occurrences teaching humans the lessons to prepare for its next evolution?

These photos were in the Boston Globe, September 24, 2020 — as if a message mirroring my thoughts. The Balancing Rock, in Holliston, Massachusetts, has been attracting visitors for many years. Now the 5-ton boulder has fallen and “has the town off balance.” One man said, “I know it’s a rock, but it has a status symbol with it …”

Some may think I’m crazy but I think that this article is not just a coincidence. It is a message to me on my thinking recently about the imbalances in nature, humanity and civilizations — that can predict futures, if we are not aware and plan changes. Even though 87, I was delighted with Caelyn Grace, “Generation Z Will Save the World … We’re about to change the world.” My reply was “Go for it, girl.” It is youth’s job to feel this way.

James Redfield in the Celestine Prophecy, said, “Believe that coincidences are telling us something”. There were many New Age groups and books in the 1980s and 1990s that talked of the coming disasters in humanity, and were preparing for them. I studied them at that time, and reviewing many of them now. I can now feel my own evolution to Divinity, but I want to feel that the whole of humanity, whom I love, is evolving too.

What age has taught me as I reflect back is that all physical beings and nature are impermanent — as Buddhism teaches. They die — even civilizations I read about, when studying history. What about systems: social, political, religious, industrial, economic, etc.? Some die, but most always change. Nothing is retained “as we were”.