One of my favourite spiritual books is ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho. It’s a spiritual fantasy which reflects on what I will be discussing today. I recommend reading it.
In the spiritual world a lot of people try to teach you stuff. They have no ill intentions yet sometimes they come off more as salesmen than guides or guru’s. This is usually caused by an inflated ego, the need to share and a possible misunderstanding that all beings in this life have their own perception of reality.
If you end up at some spiritual festivals you will without doubt speak to or hear from a hippy that tells you ‘how it is’. Most self-confessed guru’s talk s#$t with some little moments of insight, yet if you focus your efforts on speaking to the ones that you want to talk to, rather than the ones that want to talk to you, there is great benefit in this.
The best guides in this world are not the ones that have to sell or push information on you, they are the ones that give it freely when and if asked. And even when they do offer information it is usually a path more than the answer itself. This is because they understand that, in many cases, we have to walk our own path to fully understand our journey. Excessive information isn’t always the greatest key.
When taking guidance from someone, timing is an important factor. Yet we don’t just need to be in the right place at the right time, we also need to be ready to receive the message. This readiness is the key. The moment our subconscious mind decides that it is prepared for guidance it will seek the answers within our surroundings. These insights will then seem so coincidental that it appears to be divine intervention, and who knows, it just might be. It is then up to you if you want to walk the path and go with the flow.
Two blogs ago I wrote about how Budda himself went through his own journey to find out who he was, and HE’S BUDDA! Therefore it’s not out of the norm to expect that we too may need to find ourselves through walking the path. And although ‘the self’ is in the present moment, sometimes we need to travel, learn, read, run, party or whatever, to find ourselves. People can talk about presence and mindfulness until the cows come home but if the penny isn’t dropping then a different tactic might need to be employed. This is why I recommend packing your bags and traveling until guidance comes naturally. My greatest insights have come with empty pockets and extreme situations in places that I never thought I would end up.
As we all know, the more we learn and experience things in life the easier it is for us to handle future challenges. For this reason making mistakes and learning from them is important, but, avoiding unnecessary mistakes is also a wise choice. We don’t have to walk off of a cliff to find out what gravity will do. I have found that it is within the people that overuse the term ‘I have to make my own mistakes to learn’ that often fall into this trap. They make the mistakes over and over again in various ways, never truly learning. They are owned by their ego and an image of their future selves which they will never stop chasing.
I wrote this blog because during my personal spiritual journey many people told me that I didn’t need to do one. And fondly enough, my first workshop was about non-duality which teaches this exact concept. Yet luckily, at the time, I was so excited about my journey that I didn’t care that it was linked to my ego. I wasn’t going to miss out on the same type of journey that embraced Budda, Jesus, and every single character in every single book ever because someone told me ‘the answers were within’. Because although I do agree with this sentiment, I also believe that to find those answers we sometimes need to get the f#*k out of here.
The above sentence reminds me of the conundrum around what I have been blogging recently regarding presence. You have read ‘being present is simply a state of being’ and I am sure that others around you have been preaching this too. Yet there is a real catch twenty two here. The saying is correct, yet if we’re not in the right head space to hear such a message it won’t have any impact. Personally, it took me over 20 years to comprehend such a thing.
So please don’t feel stupid if presence doesn’t come naturally. In all respects, anyone who does ‘get it’ has probably already been through it, which means that in many way’s people such as myself are often doing nothing more than preaching to the choir. So if the penny isn’t dropping it simply may not be the right time, yet if we want to speed things up then maybe it’s time to make a change and challenge ourselves. I’ll be discussing this later though before then let’s talk about going with the flow.
The Lonely Spaceman 