Spiritual success requires only one thing: commitment
For reasons that I will explain in another blog post, spirituality is a choice. As a human being, you do not have to get on the spiritual path (unless a guru initiated you without your knowledge, which happens a lot!). You are welcome to fool around and live however you like on this Earth, make a lot of money, buy yachts, have fancy weddings and generally waste your life. I am not judging you if you live this way, but I must say that given all the problems humanity is facing—and that does not include sending rockets to Mars—you would be wasting your life if you didn’t love and serve the people on this Earth and create a better world.
However, people are afraid to get on the spiritual path because they believe they do not have what it takes to succeed. Some people have read too much (e.g. the story of Jesus in the Bible) and they think they too will have to suffer His fate. Others think spirituality requires courage, fearlessness and a steadfast faith in God, which they no longer have, most likely because something bad happened in their life. Still others are simply skeptical, believe that science is enough and that with enough meditation, yoga and the right nutrition, you can be at peace and live a fruitful and happy life. This latter point of view is the favorite of corporate America, because once you can put a label on something (including “spirituality”), you can now sell products and services to the hilt.
The truth is though, that you don’t need all these wonderful virtues and qualities to be spiritual. In fact, the qualities you seek in yourself (e.g. kindness, patience, etc.) are a result of being spiritual, not a pre-requisite.
Effort is the beginning
If you weren’t enlightened as a child, the first thing you will need to learn, is that it takes some effort to be successful at spirituality. In the beginning, you have to constantly remind yourself of truths. For example, you may need to constantly remind yourself to step back, let things happen and keep your peace. You may need to breathe deeply, count to 10, etc. when things go awry. You may have to come to me repeatedly and ask the same question from different points of view, just to clarify things. All this is necessary, and if you don’t make an effort, you will not move forward. This is why I offer my services to you for life, because you will need them! I cannot abandon you mid-way.
As you move forward though, slowly you will find a kind of effortlessness creeping into your world. You may find that some things that you used to fret over, no longer pose a challenge, or that you simply don’t care anymore. For instance, perhaps you used to waste time at a grocery trying to decide which brand of toothpaste to buy and now you don’t even care about the price-you just pick up something and leave. Or that you kept fantasizing about a car and all of a sudden, you took a test drive and decided you never again wanted to waste time on stupid toys you don’t need. Modern civilization is deliberately designed by large corporations to keep you indecisive, because indecisiveness leads to you paying a lot of attention to choices, thus draining your energy and making you susceptible to suggestion.
No, there is no conspiracy. I am just saying that corporations spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to manipulate people into doing what they want. Yes, it’s unethical and deeply disturbing, but it’s become acceptable (we’ll change that).
However, once you start progressing spiritually, indecisiveness will be replaced with action.
“Proof of spiritual progress? A sense of ease, and indecisiveness replaced by action.”
Commitment is what keeps you moving
Now, it is rare that you will go to bed one fine evening and wake up the next morning fully enlightened. The process will unfold over a long period of time, long enough for you to be able to survive the process! If too many changes happen in a short period of time, you will go crazy trying to make sense of it all. This will happen to people in the ashram I am interested in building, because those women will be on the fast-track, so to speak: they are expected to finish in two years or less, which is why there will be other women in the ashram, keeping an eye on and taking care of the women moving at light speed. But for most of you, interested in living in the world and having a normal life, changes will happen at a much reduced pace, allowing you to not only lead a good life, but also reflect on, appreciate and even document everything that’s happening to you. This makes life a richly rewarding experience and you will have lots of wisdom to share with your children and grand children.
But of course, not all your experiences will be pleasant. Many of them, including healing from past traumas, will cause you much grief and sorrow. You will understandably not want to experience the pain (again) and want to maybe give up, take a pill and go to sleep with your eyes open, but all that will do is slow you down and compound the pain.
This is because once you get on the spiritual path, there is no turning back. You must make your choice at the beginning-either to go towards light, or darkness. Once you’ve made your choice, the Lord himself (AKA the Power of Love, if you prefer), will see to it that you finish going down your chosen path. There is no possibility of revisiting that choice. Only a guru can truly reverse it, but gurus are no longer doing that.
“Once you take a step on the spiritual path, there is no turning back. The powers that be will force you to finish.”
Until you get to a point where you experience effortlessness and ease most of the time, the only thing you will have to keep you moving forward is your own commitment. You will literally need to commit, and recommit, every single moment sometimes. On bad days, you may have to talk aloud to yourself and tell yourself to keep going. You may have to “take it out” on a pillow or a punching bag (please, not on other living things, however they treat you), scream, shout, kick, cry, whatever. And you are most welcome to cry your eyes out in my presence—I will love you even more if you do get to that point. But whatever you do, don’t give up.
Spirituality is not a business
And neither is life. When it comes to your life, don’t think in commercial terms. There is no “evaluating the risk”, “weighing the cost vs benefit”, “creating efficiencies” or “cutting your loses”. You do not “invest”, but divest, giving up everything you don’t need, including possessions, money, memories, fears, whatever. As you keep moving forward, you drop all your burdens, get light and fast, ultimately becoming impossible for most others to keep up with. Not only will you have infinite energy (really!), but also tons of beautiful things to share, not least of them blog posts like this.
So think carefully before you commit to the spiritual path. Make sure you understand why you want to get on it in the first place. Don’t just listen to some guru or yogi and think that you too, want to be like them (or me). We have suffered a lot to get to this point, and not by choice-all of us were commanded to do so. In my case, Jesus told me to come down to Earth and serve, believe it or not. This is why I don’t have some kind of swami-like appearance or title, nor do I belong to some Eastern tradition. My lineage is quite simply, Christian, but I have been explicitly forbidden from using any language or practices from any particular religious or spiritual tradition so that I may create something that reaches everyone.
I just want to love you, each and every one of you. I will miserably fail at my goal, because so many of the people of this Earth nowadays are too far gone, unlovable to the core. But if I can help a few succeed, God! I will die ecstatic.
