The Fog

  I was sixteen and flying along a highway north Los Angeles with my emotions completely out of control.  It’s bad enough when your feelings are overwhelming you, but when you’re behind the wheel of a car conditions become ripe for a disaster.

  The weather that late night was a dense fog, I couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any direction, and yet, I accelerated to over 70 miles an hour hurtling myself into the unknown.  It was suicidal, …or worse.  I could have easily killed several people.  And we know that the suffering from an event like that doesn’t just stay at the crash site. It travels quickly out to all the friends and loved ones of everyone involved. 

  And yet those kinds of thoughts never entered my mind.  It was as if my mind was in a fog.  I was not doing drugs or alcohol, but yet my mind felt completely numb.  I don’t know for how many minutes I drove like that, but every second of it was inviting a catastrophe. 

  When I finally came back into a rational state of mind I slowed down just in time to see the brake lights of the cars ahead.  My angels were obviously taking pity on me, and protecting several others nearby, no doubt.   Well, I’ve chewed myself out several times over the years for being so self-centered and thoughtless for the safety of others.

  But like everything else in life there is always a valuable lesson to be learned from every situation that comes to us if we are open to receive it.  And that’s a huge if and a whole other topic in itself.  But let me say just a few words about “being open to receive” what life is offering before we move on. 

  There was a watershed moment for me in the Viet Nam War where I consciously decided to “receive” with an open and trusting attitude whatever life brought to me each day.  And from that point it was like opening a door into the fast lane that leads to the land of fuller understanding and wisdom. 

  Which reminds me, there was once a saint who said: “All suffering ceases in surrender.”  He did not mean surrender in the context of not trying to be successful or to make efforts at problem solving.  He meant it in the context of understanding that everything that comes into our lives, comes with the intention to help us to learn exactly what is next and best for us at any given moment.

  But because we are endowed with “free will” we often resist and ignorantly disregard what life is trying to teach us.  Hence, life will keep trying to get through to us, but it will have to turn up the heat until we finally get the message!  So it’s wise to nurture this understanding because it offers a two-fold benefit.  One, we learn more quickly, and two, it’s far less painful. 

  OK. Back to the fog.  Which in my case was expressing through my out of control emotions.  In evolutionary astrology it is understood that our wounding from the past is carried in our emotional bodies.  Which for our purposes lets us know that we all have different emotional issues that come from the past that can interfere with or even cripple our ability to function successfully in our world. 

  So, here again, wisdom brings power!  The more you understand about how life works the more successful you can be in every facet of your life.   And because we cannot be fully successful without healing and strengthening every part of our personalities we need first to have the awareness of what needs fixing, and then the tools to get it done.  And the greatest tool you can bring to bear on all your life’s issues is meditation.

So learn to meditate and then spend a few minutes every morning and every evening in meditation.  In this way you will be energetically taking a spiritual bath that will wash away the pain and negativity that’s inherent in worldly life and thus giving yourself renewal and strength to not only tackle whatever tomorrow may bring, but to be a light of love and wisdom that flows out to everyone on your life’s way. 

 I’m John Johnston.  See you next time, here, On the Cosmic Porch!