What’s the main difficulty In endeavouring to live the spiritual life, so that it brings you into harmony within and without?
The main problem is the personalising of your life. When you come to your senses and start to live the spiritual life, you endeavour to de-personalise it. But all the personalising of your life that you’ve done before - for say, fifteen, thirty or forty years - keeps coming back. What you did in your ignorance as a younger woman or man, it’s all going to keep coming. The karmic repetition of what you’ve been, and of what in your ignorance you’ve done in the past, is going to keep pushing you. And it will make you think ‘I’m not spiritual enough’ or ‘I’m not doing it rightly enough’.
What does it mean to personalise your life? This is where you have to see the difference between looking and thinking. All thinking is about your person, your personal life - the thought that you’re not spiritual enough, your unhappy love-life, the emotion of your mother and father, the fact or assumption that your lover or partner doesn’t love you enough … The waking at night, thinking about all that - that’s personalising your life.
Your person is the only problem in your life. When you think, you’re thinking about your own emotional problems and you perpetuate the person. You have to learn to look and see. Look and listen with your whole body. When you look, you start to clear your mind of its assumptions and opinions so that you see as straight as you can in the circumstances, with the information you’ve got.
We all have practical things to do in the world; and sometimes it’s not easy. So we have to learn to do one thing at a time, because the mind wants to do or think about ten things at a time, concertina everything and create confusion. We have to be able to look without thinking. That’s the only way you can attend to your practical life. If you’ve got what appear to be difficult decisions or difficult circumstances, look purely at the fact – not at your assumptions, fears and doubts. You have to look and see as best you can, ‘What can I do in this situation that is practical?’
Never put two things first. The mind will want to present two things to you. The mind is confusion personified. The mind is the person. It always wants something to think about. But the idea of the spiritual life is to get into a state of consciousness where you don’t think about anything but are always looking to see what the fact is. So it doesn’t matter what job difficulty you have. Do not think about it, because then you’ll personalise it and huff and puff and get depressed. And you’ll have discussions with your friends and say, ‘I don’t know what to do’. That’s the person, the talker.
Do you see yourself thinking about your pathetic life, especially your pathetic love-life? Or do you look and see whether you’ve learnt anything from the broken hearts, all the disappointments, all that men or women have done to you? Have you learnt anything yet? That’s what experience is for - so that we can learn not to repeat the same errors that lead to disharmony and unhappiness. Are you still repeating the same errors? Then you’re personalising your life instead of looking at it straight and true.
Edited extract from a talk on the Gold Coast, Australia, 20 February 2000.
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