When you come to one of those occasions in your life when you must make a real decision that will affect your future or even your spiritual state how do you discriminate between what comes into your thoughts on the matter from God or the higher powers or your own soul, that is to say, your spiritual being, and what is self-generated as in coming from your worldly mind which includes desires, fears and ego or put there by the counter-evolutionary powers, as we might term them, those forces that would hold you back or misdirect you? Incidentally, both these powers exist. The old and slightly comical image of an angel on one shoulder and a devil (usually a red one) on the other have a lot of truth in them. The mind is a receiving station and, depending on its tuning, can receive impressions from the forces of both light and darkness.
To get back to the question. If something comes from God, using that term very loosely because God delegates and most people are not directly in touch with him but one of his hierarchical intermediaries, you don't worry about whether you should be doing something. You know you must do it. If a situation arises in your life and you are genuinely uncertain as to how to respond, the spiritual significance of your decision may not be great. But when you come to a fork in the road and one of the paths is a destined path that you are required to take for the benefit of your spiritual growth then you know.
Which is not to say you do not doubt. The mind will often come up with all sorts of reasons for avoiding taking the right decision. There will be rationalisations about why you shouldn't be doing a particular thing or should be doing something else. Outer circumstances and other people, even family members, might try to deter you from the correct choice. But inside you will know. You will know that you have to do a certain thing or take a certain course. That doesn't mean you will do it. The outer mind can suppress that inner knowledge which means the connection you have to the inner voice will be weakened from then on. But, nevertheless, at a deep level of your being you will know. The worldly self might overwhelm that deep knowledge, even to the extent of posing as a deeper knowledge itself, but if you are true to yourself then you will know. An honest person will feel guilt for doing the wrong thing and relief for doing the right thing even if it is the difficult thing and brings worldly problems. A spiritual slacker will brush off this guilt and dismiss it as societal conditioning or impractical romanticism or even disguised selfishness, but that person is killing the voice of the soul inside and it will be easier for him to ignore it next time a similar situation arises until the point is reached where there is no connection at all.
Listen out for the voice of the soul. It will not always tell you what you want to hear, but it will unerringly direct you to the truth.
3 comments:
What I needed to hear today. Thank you. Just finishing Remember the Creator and ordering A Survival Guide to the End Times.
As you know I was an atheist for most of my life, but I always had a kind of recognition of the distinction you make here between the spiritual being and the self-generated. I certainly recall times when the considerations of the worldly, self-generated, and expedient; overcame what I knew I ought to be doing.
One of these was just a couple of weeks into my first job as a qualified doctor - as a Houseman, or what is nowadays called an Intern - when I realized, one night coming back to my room in the hospital at 3am after being woken to deal with some emergency; that this was Not For Me. That I did not have the mental or physical stamiana required to work the necessary very long hours, that prevented me from doing what I (inarticulately) "ought" to be doing.
But instead of acting immediately upon this true insight; it took me another two years to disentangle myself from the situation; and this delay - rooted in what was surely a kind of cowardice - took its toll in terms of hardening my personality and increasing my hedonistic selfishness.
Of course, I could (and still can) "justify" the worng decision in terms of this-worldly benefits, and many other social considerations - which were considerable (because after two years I got a well-paid and prestigious Research Fellowship to do my doctorate; and this in turn led onto other good professional opportunities).
So it is not that I have any idea of the alternative reality of how things might have turned-out if I had been honest to my soul - it is hard for me to imagine even.
Nonetheless, and this has been my conclusion for most of the time since, I have no doubt that I made the Wrong decision in terms of the "destiny" of my soul, when I obeyed my worldly mind.
Thanks Anon.
Well, Bruce, we've all done similar things. I know I have! Sometimes though we might have to do the wrong thing first before we are ready to do the right thing . When I consider the fact that I still face tests for things l was told about over 40 years ago I feel more than a little embarrassed.
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