Divine

I am neither good nor bad. What I am is Divine. As is everyone and everything else.

Good and bad are perspective dependent descriptors that generally hold way too much influence over sense of worth and what's worthy. "I did this, that makes me good." "He did that, that makes him bad." It's a childish way of evaluating, and all it does is either inflate or diminish based on the latest simplistic judgment call drawn from limited information. It's often also a shame-based means of control. Approve and praise or reject and condemn. If a behavior is approved and desired, call it good. If it's rejected and unwanted, call it bad.

Acknowledging Divinity is embracing what the universe calls forth in each being and element of creation. Everyone/thing, including myself, are elements of a single unfolding process. Sometimes that will play out on the surface in ways that make certain elements appear good and sometimes it will play out in ways that make certain elements appear bad. In time that appearance and the subsequent judgments will change again and again, like public opinion on a celebrity across time or going through something painful that we later come to appreciate.

I'm writing this because I was just processing some thoughts that were producing guilt over a past situation, mainly because a memory came up of a time when someone judged a choice I'd made in a way that implied it/I was bad. The perspective they had of the situation produced feelings of guilt in me while thinking about it. Then I thought about it in a greater context than the other person was aware of and realized that from that perspective it was good, or at least understandable. So which is true? It seems to depend on the perspective, which means that neither ultimately is.

As is often the case with hindsight, there are things that I wish I'd done differently. Situations are always more than they appear though, more than these singular events that come up in the mind. What we're evaluating aren't really people or things but our own limited perspectives, our own ideas and stories, our own thoughts. I and others are always more than these thoughts. We are expressions of the universal intelligence at play. Infinitely vast, varied and irreducible to concept, definition or judgment. Life doesn't really begin at birth and end at death, just as isolated events don't really occur. I and everyone else are part of a continuum of dominos falling from the dawn of existence and even beyond that, with each moment in constant transition to the next. Along the way there's no telling what good will come of bad moments and what bad will come of good ones. In short, it's always more complex than simple good or bad.

Carried guilt and shame are products of faulty perception - of superficial thinking and judgments. They can be felt and explored when they arise and then released in favor of resting in the reality of Divinity and trusting in the process that's unfolding among all the various elements of it across time/space. Rather than believed and given power, ideas of good and bad can be transcended and understood in the greater context in which they appear.