Yes, it’s true in scale that we all create things. I write a book. You produce a painting. We develop a business model, or build a porch. But what escapes our understanding is that even though we have been given certain abilities that allow us to wield individual forces to produce given ends, our lives unfold within and as a part of a larger world. You know the passage, “To everything there is a season — turn, turn, turn.” There is no aspect of human existence that is not connected to the continual expansion and contraction of the broader life. 

You know the moments of expansive periods, expansive emotions, expansive energies — moments when you’re delighted, thrilled, empowered. Moments when you feel as though you’re going someplace and in charge of things. And then you can’t understand why, all of a sudden, in spite of all your intentions to move in one direction and to succeed in bringing about the outcome you’ve described for yourself, everything begins to go the other way. Everything begins to pull back. Things fall apart, things disappear. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put it back together again. And then you re-evaluate. You reassess. You come up with another plan. And the process begins again. And if the forces happen to be moving the way you want, you’re winning. And when they turn, you’re losing. And so the process repeats itself again and again. 

I don’t know if anyone has ever proven this, but I’ll bet you nickels to dollars that if there was a way to measure it accurately it would be shown that the sun itself, sitting up there in the sky and giving us warmth and light, itself expands and contracts. I guarantee it. I guarantee that the earth expands and contracts. Nothing exists that doesn’t expand and contract. There is nothing that doesn’t turn, nothing that doesn’t live and die.

As you begin to understand this, even a bit, you are brought to your spiritual knees because you begin to realize that you live in a world whose laws you are created to obey, not argue with. The healing comes as you learn to cooperate with these laws. You begin to understand that there is always an expansion and contraction within yourself that belongs to that aspect of you that takes itself from, and is itself, those expanding and contracting worlds. It loses itself with every up and down, every back and forth motion. But there is also an unchanging world within a human being. There must be, or how would it be possible for the human being to know that everything expands and contracts? You’d be moving with the ground if you were only that ground and nothing else. You’d be incapable of seeing it. 

To awaken means to begin recognizing the existence of these Laws and their actions. The only way you can recognize their existence is to begin to die to the self that derives its life from resisting the Higher Laws of Life, and that calls itself the law. Learning to recognize this difference between the inner law and the Higher Law, and allying yourself with the Higher, is what your spiritual work is all about.