How many times will you have that dreaded feeling that “it’s all been for nothing”… even as you’ve “learned” from your mistakes? You may be growing in the addition of psychological information that you carry and refer to about yourself, with lots of facts why you’ll never run into trouble again (you know the drill — how it always starts with how much you see about what you didn’t see before), but the inevitable conclusion to each of these recurring painful life experiences is that you have not learned the real lesson behind them, else why their return visit? Which also means it’s usually just a matter of time until, because of yet some other unforeseen event, once again you’re wondering what on earth your life is for.

One of the secret reasons why the spiritual path is so difficult is because it begins in earnest with the new understanding that life has its own intention, and that real success in life depends upon our uncovering this higher intention and aligning ourselves, our actions, with it. Failure — to give it a quick definition — is when men and women place their invented intentions over life’s genuine one. Can we not see that the feeling of “all for nothing again” is the proof that our intention did not align itself with life’s? Otherwise, something different would have occurred.

Something must happen to us so we realize our actual condition, where one fateful day we say to ourselves: “Look at this! For years I’ve struggled to escape this circle of myself, to become a different kind of human being, and I’m still going through the same loops. I’m no more able to bring myself a new life than the fall can bring itself closer to spring!” When we no longer push away that fact, when we know we’ve run out of all explanations — all “whys” for the way we are — we’re ready for the first time to do something that we have never done before. We are ready to be for something that, by being for it, will change us.

One fact for both our inner education and constant encouragement is that when you know how to look into life, it’s possible to find the celestial in even the most common, natural things… and therein you see that everything in life is for something. The bees and the flowers, the birds and the trees, the rain and the soil are all for one another; they complete one another. This observable feature of natural life teaches us something vast and vital in our search for God’s life. The great dynamic of things that are for one another, that complete one another in an unseen web of life, speaks of an invisible relationship at work going on around us all of the time. When we’re for the right thing in this life we get the right reward — which is the joy of feeling ourselves more complete.

So before the Truth can set us free, we must be for the Truth. We don’t really understand what this truth means as it concerns our everyday lives and their various affairs. We lack this essential spiritual knowledge because every time we encounter a moment where there’s no denying we’ve been for the wrong thing, up pops a certain all-knowing part of us that pronounces, “Ah yes… it’s clear. I see it all now! I know what went wrong this time.” And we buy it! The self that’s talking to us has our complete confidence. We’ve no doubt it knows what to be for and how it’s going to change everything the next time around.

In the split second when we do something right for another human being — when we know we shouldn’t hurt someone with our angry tones or cruel remarks, and we abstain from ourselves at the cost of ourselves — when we know we shouldn’t spend money that we don’t have or even that we do have, when we do the right thing for ourselves, we receive the reward of doing the right thing. The reason we get that reward is because we are for the right thing! Our conscious action completes us in that split second. And in that same moment, we also receive the encouragement to do the right thing again, which is another kind of reward in itself!

Begin today, this moment, to use your whole life — every moment of it — to be for something that is in reality for you. When you begin to be for God before you’re for yourself, then God will begin to be there before you. This Supreme Nature will start to live inside of you and do something that you’ve never been able to do for yourself: Give you the feeling that — at long last — everything is right within you because now the whole of you is for the right thing.