Karma as Our Teacher--Learning From Nature
By John Gilmore

I once had a friend who was a great performer. He sang, he played the guitar, the piano, the drums, and did just about anything associated with music. He had actually been a professional singer in the 50s. He sang a lot of music by people like the Silver Platters and the Ink Spots. He did a lot of Raggae and a lot of Calypso. He was talented enough to do just about anything.

One day he found God and became a very religions person. He quickly left his musical career and began to study all types of esoteric documents wanting to enlightened the people who lived in darkness to "the way of and to God." He had been at it for almost forty years when I met him. One day he just threw his hands up and cried out, " Forty years! What happened to the last forty years!" He was devastated as he realized that had put his life on hold waiting for God to come back and take him out of the world. He was living with the expectation that the world would end any minute for forty years. This man had given up everything, because his spiritual leaders told him he should. He had given up his first love, music and singing, and now he was left with nothing. He had the gift and the talent, but he didn't use it, because he wasn't supposed to, according to them.

I don't know what happened to him. He moved to another city and then disappeared. I haven't seen him since. One thing that I do know is that he learned a hard lesson from the whole episode, but it was a painful lesson. The lesson was to live in the present and to trust in one's own spiritual experiences. He had been putting off living in the present. He had ignored all of the good things about the world, like the ability to create beauty through his music and performing. That wasn't part of their spirituality.