How can you achieve a state of freedom in your relationships? Well, there is inner freedom, there is outer freedom, and in some relationships you cannot achieve outer freedom. But in all relationships, you can achieve inner freedom by resolving these separate selves.
There comes a point where you need to look at something that is, of course, a separate self, but it is also a certain attitude, a certain mindset. And this mindset can be described with one word, “should.” When you look at earth, you see that there are so many things in all societies and all cultures and all historical epochs, where people have had the sense that there is something they should do, a certain way that they should live, or they have a strong sense that there are some things they should not do, a certain way they should not behave or should not believe or should not live, should not talk, should not look and so on.
There are so many “shoulds” and “should nots” that it makes your head spin when you start looking at it. How do you achieve inner freedom in your relationships and for that matter all other aspects of life? By getting rid of the word should. Of course, it is not just one word you need to get rid of because in past lives you have created many separate selves that are focused on a particular thing you should do or a particular thing you should not do. It will be a process where you need to look at these and begin to overcome them one by one. It is possible within a reasonable period of time to free ourselves from at least some of these ‘shoulds’. And it can influence your relationships in a profound way so that you can have relationships that are not simply free but also creative.
Let us focus on this word “should” and the concept of should. The ultimate law is free will. The one thing that is most difficult to understand about free will is that it is free. Well, if free will is free, does that not mean you have complete freedom to choose anything you want? If you imagine that you have a cosmic law book where there is written the law of free will in words, then you can ask yourself, can there in this cosmic law text about free will be the word should?
Of course, there could not, because then free will would not be free, if there are some choices you should make, and some choices you should not make. It is a contradiction in terms that you can have free will and there are some things you should or should not do. Where does the should come from? Well, of course, it comes ultimately from the manipulators who have created all of these ideas of should or should not. And they have done this partly, as the one side of the coin, to control people but also to defend themselves.
Some of them believe that God did not give them completely free will because then they should not have to face the consequences of their choices. And therefore, God requires them to do certain things. They think that God has defined certain things they should do or should not do. And that is why they are being punished. Falling into a lower state of awareness is not something that was forced upon them, it is a result of their free choices. You can debate how free they were but they had the freedom to get themselves into a progressively self-centered state of mind.
What it is very important for you as aware to contemplate is why you have come to accept these ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’. You come to earth, you are confronted with the manipulators, who are very aggressively putting you down, seeking to destroy you. And most aware people were shocked by the aggressiveness and willingness to destroy them that they felt this should not have happened to them. Because they came to earth with the best of intentions, they came to earth to help planet earth, to help raise the earth, to help raise the people of earth, so there are certain things that should not have happened to them. Some even adopted the attitude that “God should not have allowed this to happen to me”. Some aware people came with a “should” in their consciousness. But most people after they experienced the attack of the manipulators, they adopted certain “should nots.”
Many of the aware people came to earth in order to give service, to raise up the earth and its inhabitants beyond duality and suffering. After you came to earth and experienced the density, the difficulty, the unpleasantness of earth, most aware people came to this point where they recognized that they did not like being on earth, it was not pleasant. There was really nothing they personally wanted to do or experience or achieve on earth, as a personal matter. What most of them decided was that they were only here to give service.
And what then creeps into the mind is this sense that because it is so unpleasant to be here, there should be a positive experience that could compensate for the unpleasantness. And in order to achieve this positive experience, there is something we should achieve on earth so we can feel we have given service. After all, if we came to earth and experienced all this unpleasantness, and we did not give any service, it did not make any positive difference that we were here, then it could very easily seem pointless of us to come here, or so it begins to seem in people’s minds.
They now get themselves into this state of mind where they feel there is something they should do, there is something they should achieve, there are some problems they should solve, there are some people they should help here on earth. It is an understandable reaction. But it is also a very tricky reaction, given the nature of free will. Because what does it mean for people to have made a positive difference on earth?
It essentially means that they have changed some of the people living on earth, either the original inhabitants, or the manipulators. You have now created this mindset that, in order to achieve what you think you should achieve on earth, you should be able to change other people, which means changing their minds. And yet, you experienced time and time again that the manipulators viciously attack you, and that most among the original inhabitants of the earth ignore or reject you more aggressively.
Over many lifetimes, you come to feel that “Why am I here? What is the point in me being here? What difference does it make? What have I achieved?” This causes you to create these separate selves that are still, some of them, trying to push you into achieving something, into doing something because if you have not achieved a solid result so far it must be because you have not done the right thing. You have not tried hard enough. Therefore, you must redouble your efforts. If at first you do not succeed, try, try, try again. You build this entire conglomerate of selves that are being obsessive compulsive about you doing something on earth, achieving something that makes a difference, something you should be able to achieve, you should have achieved.
This can profoundly affect your relationships to other people, where you go into relationships with this sense that you should be able to help other people. Instead of having a peaceful relationship, instead of approaching a relationship with peace, you approach it not with fear so much as this sense of compulsion, you should be able to achieve something through this relationship, helping another person. And this still gives this element of force, this element of tension.
You are not at peace, and therefore, of course, you are not free, you are not free in yourself, to relate to other people freely. You are not even free to relate to other people as equals, because you feel that you are the more advanced beings and the other people should listen to you, learn from you, be inspired by you. This sets up this certain dynamic that is based on force, based on a sense of should. And if you will be willing to look at your personal relationships, you might be able to recognize this pattern.
You can start looking at these patterns, and ask yourself where they came from. You will then be able to free yourself somewhat, at least, from this sense that you should change other people. And after having worked on this, you can come to the point where you realize, “I am getting out of the business of changing other people”.
You can start contemplating “What was it that brought me to earth? What was it in my attitude that I need to overcome” and that is when you start recognizing that, regardless of why you thought you came to earth in order to give a certain service, the real reason you came to earth was to overcome something in yourself, to resolve something in yourself. And it very much relates to free will, because how can you have a free relationship to other people if you feel that you should help them change?
How does a person ultimately change? By making a free-will choice. If you feel you should help them to make a certain choice, then you are not setting them free to make their own choices in their own time. But neither are you setting yourself free to relate to them in a free manner, because you are taking on a certain role as a teacher, as a guru, and you feel that you should behave a certain way in order to change the other person. And that means you are in a sense, willing to change yourself in order to change another person, and that is disrespecting the free will of the other person. But it is also disrespecting your own free will.
Now, again, this is not blaming anyone. It is an understandable reaction. Each of the aware people can have their own individual reasons for it, their own individual attitude and psychology. But all have gone into this. You want to achieve something, but the only way to achieve it is by changing other people. And in order to change other people you are willing to change yourself.
You need to carefully consider your desire to change other people. In order to be completely free, you need to look at this, work on it, and let it take the time it takes until you can come to that inner resolution, “I am done with changing other people, I do not have to change anyone on earth”. And that is when you can begin to be free from this compulsion of should. This means you can now begin to look at yourself in a different way, look at your sojourn on earth in a different way.
Many of the more aware people have a sense that they are here to give service. And when they then encountered this attack from the manipulators, they went into this should not or this should, they should achieve certain results. In a sense, there was a certain strain in your view of what it means to give service, you were not giving service freely, you were giving it from the sense that you should give the service or that you should achieve certain results. You look at earth and say: “This is more of a duty we are doing as a service to other people”. There is that element of “should,” that element of force, that element of compulsion.
The result of this is that you are not free in your mind to consider: “Could there be something I actually would enjoy here on earth? Could there be something I really want to do here on earth?” Some of the aware people have never really dared to ask those questions openly: “Is there something I want to do on earth? Is there something I enjoy doing on earth? Can I actually be at peace with being here, and make the best out of this planet as it is, and get the best experiences I can have in the time I have left?” And many of you will find the same reaction in you.
You can see the pattern of this sense of duty, obligation, this sense that “we should be doing this, and we should not be out there enjoying life. Because as dedicated spiritual students who want to make progress, we cannot actually allow ourselves to enjoy life, and to consider what we would enjoy doing on earth. We have to consider what we should be doing in order to qualify for our ascension, or save the world”. This is a pattern that you can observe in many spiritual organizations if you are willing to look at it.
When you come to the point where you have this inner peace in your relationship, you have resolved some of your outer selves, it is really a logical next step for you to consider: “What do I want out of a relationship? What do I want to experience in terms of relationships? What kind of relationships do I want to have with people?” It is a perfectly legitimate question, because no matter why you came to earth, no matter what sense of duty or service you have, you still have free will. And you have a right to consider what kind of experiences you want.
It is very constructive and valuable to do this, because before leaving permanently, you would have to take that last long look back at earth. And if there is some experience that you actually desired to have but that you have not had, well, how can you be ready to ascend? It has to be a free choice. You may come to earth, you may stay on earth for a long time out of a sense of duty and giving service, but you cannot ascend out of a sense of duty, you cannot ascend as a service to others. It has to be a completely free choice, where you decide that this is what I want more than anything on earth.
And in order to come to that point, where you can decide you want your ascension more than any experience you could have on earth, you must have considered what experiences you could have on earth, and whether there are some you really desire to have. And if you then identify that there are certain experiences you desire to have, then you may very well need to go after these experiences and have those experiences or you may need to work on how you can let go of this desire without having the actual experience. Either way can work.
There comes a point where you really need to consider honestly, “Do I want to be in a relationship with this person“. And if you can identify that you have the sense that you should be in a relationship with this person, maybe because they are family, maybe because you have decided in some past life that you need to help this person and you cannot just leave them behind, even though they are obviously not willing to be helped, well, then you are not really free. You are not free either to decide “what kind of relationships do I want, what kind of people do I want to attract in my life?”
This leads to the next topic, which is that most relationships when you look at them on earth, they are based on this sense of obligation, the sense of should and should not. But there is another type of relationship, which is fairly rare, but nevertheless, will become much more common in the Age of Higher Awareness. And it is what we might call a creative relationship. It is a relationship where both people in the relationship or perhaps even more if it is in a group or team setting, are so free in their psychology that they can focus on a creative goal. It can be anything from having a personal love relationship, or bringing forth children, raising a family to working together in some setting, or bringing forth some new invention, some new idea. It can be anything that is creative, where you improve some aspect of life. But it is not based on duty, a sense of obligation, should or should not. It is based on the desire to be creative.
Now, you may say: Well, isn’t this what we have been doing in trying to give service to this planet? Well, in an outer sense, it is about you improving some aspect of life. But in an inner sense, it is two vastly different things because you are not doing it out of a sense of obligation. You are not doing from a sense of compulsion that you must feel you have achieved something on earth, you are doing it without any of these force-based aspects. Instead, you are free to be creative.
Creativity cannot be forced – it cannot be based on duty and obligation. Many people would say: “But what about the saying that necessity is the mother of invention? Look how many times people have been in a desperate situation and as a result of this, they have come up with some new solution, some new invention”. And this is true. But necessity is only the mother of invention in an age that is not a golden age that is a force-based, fear-based age. But in the Age of Higher Awareness, necessity will not be the mother of invention, creativity and joy will be the mother of invention. People will not invent because they have to, because they face some kind of crisis. They will invent because they desire to, they enjoy to, they get a sense of joy and fulfillment by inventing. It is a fundamental difference.
This is the shift that you can come to in your relationships. When you become free enough in your own psychology, when you attain that inner peace, you can come to a point where you can have a different form of relationship that is a creative relationship, that is not fear-based or force-based. It is love-based. Because there is something you love on earth.
When you take what has been said, that most aware people came to earth with a sense of giving service or a sense of obligation, you can say there is a certain love in this. This is not saying that this was not loving, and that this was not love-based, it was not fear-based. But it was not the highest form of love, because the highest form of love is not really that you sense you should be doing this, but that you desire to do it, your higher self desires to experience something or to express something. This is the highest form of love, in that from an outer sense, you may be doing almost the same thing. But the inner experience of this is different. Because when you give this service out of a sense of obligation, the Conscious You is not in pure awareness, it has certain selves that it is expressing itself through. When the Conscious You is in pure awareness, that is when it is an open door for the higher self. And then the Conscious You does not have a sense of compulsion, a sense that it should do certain things. It does it because it feels the joy of the higher self flowing through it.
You can benefit from considering this “should” and how many “shoulds’’ you have. And you can look at your relationships and you can actually set up a certain scale where you say: “How many ‘‘shoulds’’ are there, how few ‘‘shoulds’’ are there.” And you can see that some relationships are freer than others. And you can certainly begin to strive to qualify yourself so that you are free, you are not disturbed by the people who have all the ‘shoulds’ of what you should do or what you should not do. And you will become more and more free from reacting to them. And therefore you will become more and more open to attracting yourself to people with the same level of freedom so that you can have a relationship that is not based on all of these ‘shoulds’.