When Life Seems to Be Against You, It's Actually Working for You!

Daily Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

It’s easy when situations become painful to imagine that our life is going all wrong.

But there has long been a mystical sense among humans all over the world that the divine Presence that pervades everything is the only reality there is. Hence it only appears that events are getting off track.

In the case of the airman in the story, his crash in the Sahara Desert looks like a disaster, threatening his very life. Yet it will prove to be just the opposite.

In the case of the Little Prince, his breakup with the love of his life, the flower on his asteroid, seems tragic and yet will turn out to be the making of him.

Bear with me a moment if you’re not a person who has an interest in the sacred scriptures of the West, because I want to link them to the story of the Little Prince. They have been so incredibly misread and misunderstood, yet they actually contain the same journey that we find in this amazing story by the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

In the ancient Hebrew sacred scripture the book of Job, disaster strikes Job over and over. At least, it appears to be disaster. But are things really going wrong?

The message of this story is that it's all part of the unfolding of the divine Presence in history.

In this story the divine consciousness is personified as God, whereas the divine in the form that works to deepen us in consciousness through all the things that seem to be against us in life is personified as Satan.

The word “satan” just means adversary. Don’t think of a being of some kind; there is no such being. Unconsciousness is only personified as a being in the literature in order to impart an understanding of the role of this aspect of life that appears to be against us.

When you hear “satan,” think of the collective pain-body, a term coined by Eckhart Tolle. On the other hand, to be possessed by a demon is a personification of being taken over by our individual pain-body. We are no longer in our right mind.

As a letter to the people of Ephesus puts it, personifying it as the “prince of the power of the air,” it’s actually the “spirit at work in those who are in resistance.” Spirit is consciousness. In other words people are locked into resistance to their true nature by their unconsciousness.

Did you ever think of God and Satan as one reality, seen from different aspects?

Of course, how could it be otherwise? As the Hebrew mystic Isaiah said long ago, "I am the eternal, and there is no other."

In fact Isaiah went on to say of the divine, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.”

If you read the 40th through 45th chapters of Isaiah you can’t help but see that, as the song puts it, God’s “got the whole world” in the divine hand.

A timeless divine purpose is being worked out in history through the long process of evolution, which is a process that moves forward by trial and error. This is how divine consciousness becomes incarnate in the world of matter.

As a species we have slowly increased in consciousness as the physical development of our body, and in particular our brain, has allowed the concentration of higher levels of awareness. With the coming of the cerebral cortext a hundred-thousand years ago, we took a giant leap forward.

Now, we are taking another leap. We are learning to experience a level of consciousness through our brain, which has reached a highly complex state, that is the divine in pure form.

So life for many of us has become a process of the enlightening of our normal human consciousness, which is in many ways still very unconscious, bringing us into deep awareness of what’s really going on inside us and in the world around us.

To make statements such as “Jesus is Lord” isn’t merely to refer to an individual from Nazareth 2,000 years ago. It’s to recognize that the divine consciousness Jesus exhibited is what is now, through a gradual evolution, taking over the whole planet.

It’s this consciousness that the story of the Little Prince fleshes out for us, showing us how it works in everyday life—especially how we enter into this consciousness precisely through all the things that seem to go wrong! This is what pushes us to awaken to a higher level of functioning.