Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
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Encouragement For The Spiritual Journey
When you decide to embark on the journey of authentic spirituality, I encourage you to consider the following.
First, please don’t think that you have forever to awaken. Complacency is simply delay. Inhabit your heart with the same urgency with which you would rescue a child from a burning house or dash to save an injured animal from being run over on the highway. Seize the opportunity, as soon as you can see that it is available to you!
Second, the spiritual does not, ever, appear as an experience in the ordinary world, the world of space and time. Anyone who tells you this is mistaken. The most sublime, pleasurable, and elevated human experiences remains essentially that – human – they arise and they pass, begin and end. The distinguishing mark of the truly spiritual event is that it does not occur in space and time, therefore it does not begin and end for the simple, and what should be self-evident, reason that it is eternal. Spiritual events are eternal, beyond the relative world, and sourced from the Divine. Most of the so-called spiritual experiences you hear about are merely heightened human experiences, but here is what you should look for and understand. Some beings, some teachings, and some transmissions of spiritual energy are like holes in the fabric of time and illusion; they penetrate through and offer a view of eternity in the field of space and time. So much, that realized spiritual adepts can have affect on the relative plane long after they have left the earthly body and shed their attachments to form. People and teachings that arise in this way either shock you, or disorientate you, fill you with unusual feelings like energetic waves, ecstasy, appear more vivid than real life, glow with silver, gold, purple, or other colors, fill you with peace or restlessness, pour heart and tender feelings into you, terrify you or may appear entirely ordinary, yet somehow shake your reality or otherwise reach you deeply inside. These experiences are the ones that count in the process of undivided, individual awakening. Learn to recognize them and bask in them as much as you possibly can.
Third, please try to resist unnecessary dallying and shopping around among spiritual ways and means, teachers and teachings. Some of you have chosen a way, some have not. If you are serious then you are ready and your heart should guide you. You don’t need to think. You are at a meeting of many ways but you must choose one and one only to get where you’re going. Choose now!
Finally, according to which stage of awakening you are currently in, your practice is simple and I will summarize it as a single word. If you are in the first-stage awakening, practice awareness; it will burn through all illusion. If you are in second-stage awakening, practice love; it will take you to the edges of your manifest self. If you find yourself in third stage awakening, practice devotion which is the culmination and the resolution of love and awareness. Devotion will bring you home to the divine transcendence of the eternal, to real god who is known as love, the ultimate reality, the ultimate truth, peace and bliss, fulfillment and Unity.
This article is an excerpt from Richard Harvey’s book Your Divine Opportunity.
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This article was published on this site in April 2024.
