You can use spiritual knowledge to become more conscious. You can also use it to stop looking at your own life. The same words that once opened something in you can become a way of explaining everything without questioning anything. And when that happens, you may call it faith while you quietly give up the freedom to choose.
God is not sending you disasters so that suffering will somehow make you wake up. I don't believe suffering is a spiritual assignment you have to accept without examining how you are living. If you believe that, you can surrender your responsibility at the exact moment you need to recover it.
Recently, someone from my past called me. We hadn't spoken for years. She told me about family problems, difficulties with her health, isolation, things that had gone wrong in her life. And again and again, she returned to the same explanation: “God gave me this. I need to accept it. This is my karma.”
She was a spiritual woman. She knew the language. That was precisely the problem. She was using spiritual understanding in a way that left her with less room to move. Everything had already been decided somewhere above her. Her mission was to take the suffering, endure it, and somehow come out free on the other side.
Listen, this is how spiritual knowledge can put us into deeper confusion. You can give a sacred explanation to your suffering and still never look at the choices you are making inside it.
You don't escape the journey by refusing to live
When I speak about karma, I mean experiences we need to go through, something we need to encounter and understand in this world. But that does not mean there is only one way to go through them. It does not mean your only spiritual option is to sit still and suffer.
Take something simple. You feel deeply inspired to make a long journey. Three weeks across a country you have never visited, perhaps six months around the world. Something that makes you feel alive when you think about it. Then you begin to see what it asks of you. You need money. You need to arrange your life. There are commitments to resolve, an itinerary to prepare, things you cannot take with you.
And once you leave, the difficulties don't disappear. You can find yourself alone in an unfamiliar village, with something going wrong and your fears coming to visit you. You have to think. You have to find a solution. Sometimes there is no solution you like, and you have to accept what is happening. You discover what you can do and where you need to let go.
There is death in this process, too. I mean that something has to end. You cannot keep everything exactly as it is and live something completely different. Some attachments, some arrangements, some image you have of yourself will not fit in the backpack.
This is one way of meeting your karma: walking towards what inspires you and confronting what the journey brings. You are involved. Your desire has brought you into contact with life, and life is asking you to grow.
Now consider the other choice. You feel the inspiration, but fear decides. “Six months? Impossible. How could I do that?” So you stay. You keep putting aside what you want to do, and the energy that wanted to move into the world has nowhere to go. The journey you refused can remain inside you as frustration, tension, confusion. Staying may protect you from the difficulties of travelling, but it does not protect you from difficulty itself.
That is the part we forget. You can meet challenges while following something that matters to you, or meet challenges while avoiding it. Refusal does not place you outside the process of life. From my point of view, I would rather go through the difficulties while walking towards something that inspires me. That is the path I chose.
If God gave you everything, he also gave you free will
There is a decision in this. You are choosing, even when you would prefer to think that everything has been chosen for you. And the idea that God gave you everything can become very convenient if it means you no longer have to look at what you do, what you feel, what you want, or what you keep refusing.
You can believe in a divine plan. But if God gave you everything, why leave your freedom out of the picture? Your determination, your capacity to understand, your desires, your passion, the inspiration that makes you want to get up and do something with your life… where do you think those came from?
There is an individual part of the spiritual journey that you cannot escape. Your understanding has to become a choice in your own life. You have to do something with what you see. When you deny your power and call that surrender to God, you may be denying the very capacities you believe God gave you.
I don't see awakening as God imposing an experience until you finally submit. Awakening asks something of your awareness. Your individuality has a role in that. It is not an inconvenience to be removed from the spiritual path.
What is happening, and where is your attention?
This is not about getting one particular thing so that, at last, you can be fulfilled. The trip, the money, whatever you want to manifest: achieving it is not the end of your growth. The deeper work happens in the connection between your experience and how you are living.
What is happening in your life right now? And where are you directing your attention?
Bring those two things together. Usually we stare at the experience and try to explain it. We ask why it happened, what it means, whether it is fate or karma or God's will. But we don't look with the same honesty at where our attention goes every day. Towards fear, scarcity, self-rejection? Towards God, freedom, the enthusiasm we feel for something? Look at where you actually go, not where you think your attention should be.
Your attention is your awareness in movement. Where you place it affects what you notice, what you keep returning to, what you act on. What you give attention to grows. This is what I mean by a basic rule of God: a rule through which we participate in life and learn to become conscious. Your freedom becomes something you can actually use, instead of a beautiful idea you agree with.
If your attention keeps returning to what limits you, look at what that does to your choices. Look at what becomes possible to you, and what you dismiss before you have even tried. Then look again at the life you are experiencing. There is a connection worth investigating there. Don't hand that investigation over to an explanation that leaves you powerless.
I am not telling you to blame yourself
I am not telling you that every bad thing in your life is your fault. Illness, loss, other people's actions: these are not proof that you failed spiritually. Turning this teaching into another reason to punish yourself would miss its whole purpose. The conversation is about recovering the freedom you do have, not pretending you control everything that happens.
The question is what you are doing with that freedom now. Even in a situation you did not choose, where is your attention going? What choices are still yours? You don't need to condemn yourself to look honestly. You need enough willingness to see where you have been handing your power away.
Maybe you have put your attention in the same place for years. You have defended it, explained it, called it reality, perhaps even called it God's will. And maybe you can change that choice. Begin putting your attention somewhere different, see what you do differently, and pay attention to what follows. Find out through your own experience.
Maybe things will improve. Maybe this is awakening.
