Spiritual Quest

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The spiritual quest starts with the individual saying to themself, “I am ready.” And forming an intention to work on their own spiritual development. However, soon after this statement of intent, there emerge problems. To whom should one turn? Who is reliable? For a start we may eliminate as potential teachers and guides all those who receive pay for their teaching. This is reminiscent of Socrates’ idea that the sophists who were paid for their teaching were not to be followed. If you attempt spiritual development by following the teaching of an individual or organization that gets paid for its teaching, you will get stuck on the highway to Infinity. Another guideline is to study the source teachings of any wisdom tradition. Go back to the …show more content…

Sometimes this is hard to discern because people can be very good at appearing to be sincere, but often close observation will reveal whether this person is capable of being spontaneous, if this person is hiding behind a mask or if this person is willing to risk the exposure of their true self. Many of the things we would look for in an ideal teacher or guide spring from basic assumptions. If we assume that the Creator gave us free will, then clearly this would be part of our spiritual development. If we assume that we are all from the same origin, that we are all one, behind superficial differences, then any system of development that does not honor this unity is to be called into question. The search is predicated upon the assumption of ultimate oneness. Sometimes we might come across a person who seems to have “mystical” powers. They might be able to read our minds or perform dazzling feats. It is important to bear in mind that just as “savants” might be able to perform amazing feats of memory or computation, but be unable to make change or write a coherent paragraph, so someone may be able to perform seemingly mystical acts, but be quite unable to aid others in their spiritual …show more content…

It is as if we have a camera running in our heart, recording every deed, every thought, and every impulse. How can there be enough recording time for each life, for all of humanity? The answer is that human time, human years, are but microseconds in higher levels of the universe. An entire geological era might be as but one sentence. So many of the conflicts that we see in the world today and that we explain by invoking events of history, by going back, say 50 or even a hundred years, are in fact conditioned and brought about by tens, hundreds of thousands of years of karma. The battles in the Middle East are between individuals and groups that have been seeking revenge for hundreds of millennia. By recognizing this we, perhaps, realize the extreme difficulty of bringing such a conflict to a halt. We may refer to the story of Dhruva and his herculean efforts. Such efforts would be required by a large number of people if true peace were to become possible, if we look at these conflicts from the karmic point of

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