Spiritual Secrets

That We Might All Secretly Know

(But maybe don’t know that we know...)

The most important secret of all….

Everybody has a hungry heart. 

The purpose of emotional pain is to awaken us, to make us so uncomfortable that finally, the fear of healing into truth becomes smaller than the terror of staying the same.

To be awake is to realize that we are more than human. We are divine Beings masquerading as people.

As we heal, compassion and awareness replace our old thoughts and perspective. This way, we become our real self, rather than the person we were conditioned to become.

People who allow their heartbreak to be healed, carry a mysteriously captivating grace. Because they know themselves, they see others clearly. They strengthen all of life because their inner healing work reduces the amount of hate, rage, cruelty and indifference present on the earth.

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To stay an acorn or sprout into a great oak, that is the question.

If we refuse to acknowledge our wounding, we are like an acorn that never sprouts.

If we decide to face our wounding and heal it, we are like an acorn that humbly goes beneath the soil so it can become a great oak tree.

This process can be unsettling. Others may ridicule you. Consider whether you wish to listen or not.

If an acorn gets persuaded not to sprout, it will rot away with all the others who were too frightened to change. The acorn who goes ahead and sprouts, has the chance of becoming a great oak tree.

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It looks like we are going to have to feel our emotions…. 

An older culture like India, deeply understands the inner logic of spirituality. The West, in contrast, deeply understands the inner rationale of machines.

In some ways, East and West are partnered up, each with great gifts for the other. In the last few decades, the East has stepped up to industrialize. The West, in contrast, has stumbled. Rather than learning how to look inward, we’ve all gotten very, very, busy instead.

Being busy is an excuse people use when they want to avoid something. Maybe we’d rather not look inside and feel unwanted emotions.   

But Eastern or Western, human beings have hearts and heads. Our brains are not our sole intelligence; the heart has its own neurons. If we’re denying our feelings and emotions, it is very sad because it means we’re turning away from our full talents and capacity, resulting in a lower emotional IQ and dissatisfaction.  

Without the input from the heart, we are like a person trying to walk on one leg. We’re crippled whether we admit it or not.

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Family patterns come down the generation until someone says: Stop!

Most of our adult pain results from what happened to us as children. Between birth and age six, we make crucial decisions such as whether we will trust ourselves, others, and existence in general.

Young children are like sponges – they soak up everything going on around them. Gandhi said that if we took better care of the innocence of children, many social problems would disappear. His logic is irrefutable but it might take an open, expanded heart to see it/accept it. 

Children who are not well loved, are left with no idea how to care deeply for themselves, others or Mother Nature.  They learn to exploit and manipulate instead. In adulthood, they will fear deep love, no matter how hard they look for it.

This will eat at the heart of all their relationships, including marriage bonds. Their children will inevitably suffer from the same insecurity, that pervasive feeling of being separate, of being unworthy of love. The beat goes on and on and on... into the next generations... until the day somebody in the family decides to awaken. Or encounters a truly enlightened individual who awakens others just by existing.

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Waking up is usually very hard to do.

The bravest choice a human being can make is to decide to wake up. Not only will there be a chorus of probably very sincere people, calling you crazy. (i.e. the acorns.) But you have to face what is inside.

The innermost you is your true divine Nature who adores your human self. But also inside you, are all the veils of fear, anger and hatred coming from this life and other lives if you believe in reincarnation.

This material is ego.

When you take steps to open up, your ego feels very threatened. (If you awaken to your true nature, it will cease to exist.)

Your ego does not want to die. It will use every trick to try to stop you. It will bring up every failure, every memory of unrequited love, every fear, every feeling of being helpless and worthless you ever had. It will flood you with the feeling that you yourself will not survive, if you continue.

The threatened ego creates an inner emotional turmoil that makes all the terrible things it says to you, feel like truth. This material is not truth.  It is just fear making up scary stories. But it’s very convincing, making it hard to even imagine that life could ever get better.

But these uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are not permanent. Think of them as a kind of emotional mud….it can all wash off with a shower.

This tsunami of negative thoughts and emotions is just the dying ego having a big tantrum. Still, it takes courage and strength at times like this, to just observe your negative thoughts and emotions, without buying into them. (This is how you enter the shower stall.)

If you can do that, and just keep living, and maybe cry in sorrow for how far you have gotten from yourself, how separate you feel from All That Is, then the heavy emotions, negative thoughts, and fears begin to dissipate.… (This is the shower.)

By the end of these experiences, you are more in truth, feel lighter, happier, have more energy, and are more helpful to others. (You are all clean!)

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The deeper the darkness, the brighter the light.

In the East, this process is called an austerity. The heavier and more taxing the austerity, the greater the spiritual gift.  Another term for this experience is a ‘spiritual fire’, in which the dross of our egos burns off, leaving us clearer, lighter emotionally, and more in truth.

The great Indian saint Amma calls this process an ‘operation’.

She says people need to lie down for their operations. Perhaps she means that we need to slow down and pay attention to this emotional material, rather than just getting busily distracted and staying on automatic, refusing to give ourselves any extra time and space.

The deeper and more painful these periods of austerity, the greater the gifts.

To grow spiritually always involves some sacrifice. Still, everything in life costs something. To rise up in a career takes our time, energy and stress. Raising kids, too.  But when we sacrifice in order to know the truth of our Beings, the rewards cannot be taken away. The peace and understanding that come are permanent.

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Deep Compassion and Broadmindedness 

When we grow beyond our conditioning, becoming more compassionate and broadminded, we lay the foundations of our true, soul-based personality.

This early foundation work is the most difficult. We are still unskilled in the process of spiritual evolution.  Our faith might not be very deep yet.  Or we might doubt that we, personally, deserve its love. (WE DO!)

To increase our faith, we learn to follow our intuitive guidance. We have the feeling to take some training, or help someone, or move to the other side of the country. It feels like divine guidance but we’re not sure. We follow through but it all feels risky, like walking out on thin ice. But if we are sincere and open, we find our hearts and intuition to be trustworthy. Naturally, we will make mistakes but we learn from them too.  Gradually the house of our awakened personality emerges, firmly built on the rock of true wisdom.                     

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It takes time for our bodies to make the shifts.

Sometimes when we are evolving, our bodies get aches and pains or get stiff. We might experience indigestion or low energy or worse. These symptoms can be part of an emotional complex that also includes some negative thought or beliefs, which are coming up to be cleared. When we are letting go of such a complex, mental, emotional and physical pain might arise. This is just our ego rattling chains, trying to bully us into submission.  If we just observe its antics and keep going, the ego will let go; the complex will leave us; our thoughts will lighten; and our bodies will stop hurting and our energy will return.

We might have to go through this process many times until our ego has burnt off completely, bringing us to self-realization.

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The happiest camper is the self-realized person... not the richest person... although an awakened person might be wealthy as well.

The self-realized individual is completely focused on helping humanity and all of life. Even if they have wealth, they could happily leave it all behind tomorrow, if they had to. They are unattached to money and material possessions because they are so entirely bonded to the inner Beloved, or All That Is, that external objects lose importance. 

As a self-realized person, described by ancient Hawaiians as a ‘companion of God’, an individual is free of inner conflict. They just follow their internal guidance in speech and action. They are physically very relaxed and just accept what happens in life, rather than having an agenda, other than just helping others in some way.  

The wisdom received in self-realization is as big as the original fear and confusion was, within the spiritual aspirant. That’s why the Eastern image of enlightenment is the lotus growing out of the mud. Once an individual faces and heals their inner fear and anger, all that dense emotional material (the mud) turns into wisdom (the lotus).

Since the self-realized person knows intimately how challenging the spiritual journey can be, inevitably their compassion makes them turn to help others along on the journey or take some action to assist the human race.  

Perhaps the big challenge for Westerners is to trust that the state of self-realization is real and attainable.

Here in the West, the Universe might be perceived as random and accidental, rather than designed by a loving intelligence.  Even if we posit a God, we might picture a judgmental guy with a white beard sitting somewhere in the sky, ready to rain down troubles and punishments on us.

Ironically, scientists might not realize they have already discovered God. They know everything is Energy and that matter arises as this vibration is slowed, just as steam turns to water when cooled. We just haven’t understood that this Energy is Infinite Universal Love! 

This means of course, that you, I, every person and everything alive, along with the earth and the stars are all made out of Universal Love. Maybe we haven’t realized this, because we are just a little bit out of touch with the deeper knowledge of our hearts!

It’s a bit like the story of deaf and blind Helen Keller. Every day her teacher would patiently sign into Helen’s hands the code for various objects. Helen learned the codes but never connected them to the objects that she touched. 

But one day, her teacher placed her hand under a tap and signed “water” into her palm. Suddenly the light dawned and Helen grasped the connection between the signing and the water she felt flowing over her skin.

She made the connection between the symbol – i.e. the signing – and true reality – the water. The inner light went on; confusion together with its sibling, distress died; and a whole new life began. 

One day, we will realize that all people and all of life, indeed everything in the Universe, is formed out of this Universal Unconditional Love.  

That means that the Creator is looking of out your eyes and the eyes of other people. Who Knew???? 

What a change in paradigm and life experience this will bring. What a relief that will be! We might even stop fighting for a while…

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