Spiritual Success

I have ended up on several New Age email lists.

They send announcements telling me that there is something that I don’t have that I need to get.

I need to rewire my brain to overcome my blocks to success. I need to attend this seminar that will bring me the abundance that I was meant to have. I need to change my life by using this superior strategy for manifesting everything I dreamed of.

Spirituality is going to do this for me. My wishes will come true.

Yet something seems askew.

First, training oneself to think differently is not transcendental. It is what I would call re-arranging the furniture of your mind.

There can be benefits to it. But the “thoughts are things” angle is not fundamental enough. Even the mind is not fundamental enough.

There is something more primary than thoughts and more primary than the mind: pure consciousness itself. Before there was the painting, there was the canvas.

Dwelling there would be the best strategy.

Second, the premise that the purpose and the result of spirituality are to be able to score higher on worldly success is perhaps misdirected.

Worldly success is great. I am not disagreeing with that. If you arrive at it, you have my sincere congratulations.

It’s just that spiritual success can be measured differently. It is not about coming out on top, or doing things better and getting ahead, or positioning yourself for a bigger payoff from God.

It’s more about what God wants from you, and about you delivering that.

“Wants” is an interesting word. It can mean that there is a lack of something.

How could God lack anything?

If God is the awareness in everything of everything, as Answers From Silence says, then the lack would be in your awareness.

What your awareness lacks is boundlessness and timelessness. It lacks the knowledge of yourself not as an individual in the cosmos but instead as the cosmos in an individual.

The drop of your tiny, limited, individual awareness needs to be taken back into the ocean of boundless awareness. There, it will be buoyed by the totality.

Then God’s wish will have come true.

—JC