Life is a series of experiences, and every experience you have holds a teaching. And every person you meet can teach you something. A student of life recognises this, and is open to learning at all times.
To be open to learning, you have to keep an open mind. If you are too stubborn or rigid in your beliefs, you will miss opportunities to learn. You have to have a curiosity and inquisitiveness, and be willing to explore and inquire. You have to step away from being dogmatic and judgemental. So, you become less opinionated and more open to new understandings and different perspectives. You’re willing to learn and change.
You also have to embark on a process by which you free your mind from social programming, and discover what is genuinely meaningful to you. So, you learn about yourself, and you recognise your own inner values. Then you can grow from experiences that are more aligned with your authenticity.
When you live as a student of life, you can consider life to be a series of interesting experiences that you can learn from. You can understand that life is a process of learning and developing. And with this philosophy, you do not become overly phased by shortcomings or unexpected events because you understand that every experience offers new opportunities to learn, grow and develop from.
So, you make friends with uncertainty. And when the unexpected happens, you can act with intrigue. You can look for what you can learn and take from the experience.
If things aren’t going as you would like, look for the silver lining. What can I learn? How can I grow from this? What can I do to make things better? How can I do better next time?
As you live by this philosophy, you develop resilience, and you realise that even stressful and challenging situations are opportunities. Indeed, challenging situations are often the ones we can grow and develop from the most.
And even when you find yourself in some emotional turmoil, you can reorient yourself with this philosophy. You can compose yourself by acknowledging what you have learnt, and how you are changing. Finding the silver lining of what you can learn and take heed from, is often the key to passing through emotional turmoil.
The more you prove to yourself that you are capable of resolving the difficulties of life, the more confidence you will gain. And as you grow in confidence, you become more courageous and can actively seek new experiences to advance yourself. Any perceived failures and inadequacies simply become lessons for growth in the journey of life.
Graduating the School of Life
Many thousands of people have had a near-death experience. They were clinically deceased, their heart and brain had stopped functioning, yet they came back to life. Thousands of these experiences across cultures have been studied. And there are some common themes that people report from the afterlife.
One theme consistently reported is that the purpose of life on Earth is to learn and evolve, and that it often takes multiple incarnations to facilitate this process. If you don’t learn and heed the lessons in one life, you may well come back again. In some ways, it’s like you come back and resit the exam.
People also report how extraordinarily self-aware they felt, with a heightened sense of moral obligation and ethical disposition. And it is very common for people to have the impression that the material things in life are not important, but rather their relationships and their inner feelings are much more significant.
And many people experience a sort of ‘life review’ from which they perceive the wisdom of unconditional love, acceptance and forgiveness. They are shown the significance of their inner feelings, and they comprehend the purpose of their experiences from a more advanced perspective.
They come to understand that how you do things is more important than what you do.
Did you do it from love? Did you act from kindness? Did you serve people from goodness? Were your intentions honourable?
These are the type of questions people felt as if they were being asked when they were reviewing their life within the white light of the near-death experience.
It is the quality of our inner feelings and inner understandings that guide the way of our spiritual evolution.
© Adrian Connock
