Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

It is, at best, an intuitive skill. How does one acquire it? There are no simple, cut and dried steps. It helps to have a few essentials tucked in your belt such as: a broad knowledge base, a sound noggin, a good upbringing, a good heart, time and propensity for deep reflection and study to think things through, guidance from both the mortal and the spiritual realms and the ability to extract the lessons from one’s own experiences or better yet, from the collective pool of other people’s experiences.

It is a tall order. No one can say for certain how the ability to choose wisely ever comes about in anyone’s life. More often than not, this gets developed late in life when all the lessons from a lifetime of experience reach a critical mass and congeal. Things finally click and everything seems clearer. It could be a combination of nature and nurture where heredity may play a tiny part. Even the wisest of men can have fools for children just as there are children seemingly born with old souls, far advanced in their wisdom, who can have fools for parents. It is enough to know that you earn this skill yourself acquiring it layer upon layer with every season of your life from birth to death. At the highest levels, the intuition to make the right judgment calls at every turn, works like a sixth sense. This skill belongs to the most highly evolved human beings.

Why is this skill so important? It is because for as long as the world turns, our choices determine our results. The law of cause and effect like the force of gravity that holds the universe together, rules human life. To understand intimately how the intricate workings of this law apply to our own lives, imagine it as borrowing heavily from the principles of accounting.

Visualize an invisible, unerring and indisputable ledger of one’s life being recorded—its highs and lows, its pluses and minuses, the volume of both good and bad, both beauty and horror which one has generated through the course of his life, the amount and range of happiness and the depths of pain, misery and tears one has caused in others. And yet unlike human accounting, that same invisible ledger takes into account such intangible, unquantifiable factors, both human and divine, such as love, kindness, forgiveness, redemption, generosity of spirit and tender mercies. At the end of it all, one is presented with the bottom line—either in red—what one owes life, a deficiency or a debt that must be paid—if not in this lifetime—then in successive ones or if one has lived life well and has reached the highest rungs of nirvana—in the black, on the plus side with profits to show, with a wealth of positive contributions to the self, to others and the world at large—a life well lived, a life well spent. It is a thought-provoking parallel that should give everyone cause to take a long hard look at one’s own precious life.