Question: What kind of spiritual teacher are you? Are you the type that says that you can have whatever you want, or the type who says give up materialism?
That’s a marvelous question. I finally get a chance to answer it. My personal lifestyle is my choice for my personal happiness. By that token, your lifestyle is your choice for your personal happiness.
In Eastern spiritual philosophies of buddhism and sufism, you don’t actually exist, you have an illusory self. You are actually god (the collective conscience)creating a story (according to sufism) and in buddhism, you arrive into insight about who you are from examining the mind.
Now that you know that, how can you re-write yourself? Assuming of course that you want to live a happier story
Iqbal *a poet of India (and Pakistan) called this ability that humans have the elevation of your vibration
In Urdu:
Khudi ko kar bulund itna key har taqdeer sey pehlay
khuda banday sey khud poochay bata teri reza kiya hai
“create a sense of self so sublime that it can act in God’s place”
Similar to Christ consciousness, some will say, interestingly enough Mohammed Iqbal studied philosophy at Trinity College, England and Christ is highly respected as a prophet in muslim societies, i.e., Pakistan, where I grew up. I actually attended a convent school and for generations my family sang hymns, until the Islamization process was done by Zia Ul Haq–a military dictator in Pakistan.
NOTE: You can only practice the elevation of consciousness through merger into the collective consciousness and rewriting the story wherever it is found in your consciousness.
Thus prayer, meditation, yoga, hypnosis guided visualizations, energy healing are wonderful tools for people who want to redo their life and increase their joy in the present.
They all work.
Everything works.
But to merge fully with the collective unconscious you have to let go of the attachments, (and that’s a free will issue) to your current self. Thus the spiritual path is a journey with moments of merger or seeing the truth of who you are. This is the practice of the removal of suffering and seeing the truth, and the annihilation of the ego (in sufism).
These vices themselves spring from the false idea of a self and the attachment to the false self, i.e., ego or sense of I.
That is why the meditation, the yoga, the prayers are first done to heal these attachments coming not only from this life but many lifetimes past, as well as ancestral baggage.
Finally the psyche is ready to let go of the false self, and realize that it is god i.e., it has the ultimate power over its destiny, because in truth the self is an illusion. To glimmer what it is like to be a spiritual master–ask yourself, “ if you felt you were god, what would you do? how would you live? what would change for you?’. Most people are not ready for this and thus the spiritual path trains them to take full responsibility for their inner world and thus do the work they are here to do.
Definitions of self, personality types—agnostic, atheist are actually redundant in spiritual philosophies of the East. They come from an unawakened consciousness of who you truly are. They are whining from ego attachments to a false self.
Now, how can this benefit you?
Some spiritual teachers in the West take this to mean you can now have everything you want such as success in material terms etc. That is a very false marketing of these philosophies and an almost childish disregard of the true purpose of humanity. It is like false advertizing, except worse, because it appears that hardly anyone is educated in philosophy in schools. If they were, they’d know that this is an incorrect remix of spiritual philosophy.
Life isn’t about benefit or deficit, gain or loss. It is instead a continuum of consciousness. It is sacred in itself, since the ego is false, there is a higher purpose. A human heart only wants love, family and happiness. That is all that is needed. Pandering to the egoic self is a misuse of spiritual concepts from the East. For example wealth. Maybe a spiritual teacher says here is the magic formula for wealth, despite natural limits, but is it true? If it is not true, it is not spiritual.
Nowhere in my philosophical quest have I seen that the intent of these great thinkers and writers on the psyche was to create more money. More abundance, yes. Abundance is about feeling like you have enough and being happy with it–thus more comes and there is peace in that flow of life. There is no craving in that, instead it is about feeling secure and in harmony with your real needs. Also, if you go into the collective unconscious taking craving with you, you will actually ENHANCE the craving in your conscious lived life.
The idea of ‘benefit’ comes because the false ego is the purpose of life (my happiness, my health) and so, there is a need to calm down the ego, and tell the ego there are benefits to removing the ego’s suffering.
Let’s answer this question, what is the benefit of this way of thinking?
The benefit is that you are free from suffering. That those things that previously upset you are no longer a problem. The benefit is good health and emotional health. Being loved and accepted just because you are there is an amazing way to live. Because you are happier, you spread happiness and opportunities that you would not have had because of negative thinking appear from nowhere.
But, you said you can go into the collective unconscious and rewrite your story? what about that?
When you start to vibrate differently, then life starts flowing again–you reset the direction of your life by resetting your thoughts. Everything that you could have possibly wanted comes to you. But it happens in the Universe’s timeframe. Your job is to surrender to the Universe and continue to conquer the false attachments and fears of the ego.
But, money doesn’t flow like that anymore! we have to struggle, work hard and worry.
That’s not true. Ideas of great truth persist over centuries. These spiritual ideas have persisted over thousands of years. There is truth here. Profound truth.
Surrender is the path to success.
You can send spiritual questions and I will do my best to share my insight through this blog.
Thank you!
