When we recall the turning points in our lives, the times where we had no choice but to go through those wrenching self changes that come with personal crisis, it shouldn’t be hard to remember how sure we were that these same trials heralded our doom. But behind each of these seeming impossible moments stands an unseen (at the time) purpose: to bring us to a certain realization or experience of the truth about our self. And while this medicine may be bitter, it also heals us. How?

For starters, we realize (in hindsight!) that what has transpired was not only a gift in disguise, but that we are much better off for having worked our way through its challenging wrapping! Now we understand, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that we couldn’t begin the next level of our life journey until we had completed these lessons now behind us. In other words, it’s clear to us that what we first fought so hard to avoid was really a truth come to rescue us from self-ignorance — a truth that not only explained why our lives were as they were, thus freeing us from a mistaken sense of self, but in the same moment set the stage for our further self-development.

This means that in the middle of any unwanted experience, waiting there all along for us to realize it, is the truth that liberates and lifts us above our former limited understanding responsible for that very experience. In other words, our experiences revolve around, and are actually created to reveal, certain life lessons yet to be learned. This discovery reveals the unimaginable: There exists behind these life lessons a timeless truth — one that has not only perceived what we need before we do, but that somehow actively arranges our life experiences for the sole purpose of revealing itself to our soul.

We have set before us evidence of a completely compassionate, purposeful Intelligence — a Living Truth whose silent operation not only reveals the meaning of our existence but serves in this capacity as seed, nourishment, and fruition of our incredibly diverse life-experiences. To grasp, even in the smallest way, that a Wisdom revealed to us as Truth (call it what you will) is the secret fabric of our lives, is to begin realizing a whole new order of self-victory. Here we come upon a success that has no opposite. Failure ceases to exist as a fear. The painful idea of loss, of falling down and losing our way, forever loses its sting because in the light of our new understanding we see now that the universe itself not only wants us to be victorious individuals, but actually wills this special victory.