Bonus Ep 1-Spirituality Fast Track

Bonus Episode One,
Spirituality Fast Track.

Welcome to Living The Tao, a spiritual podcast that explores
how ancient wisdom, a practical perspective
and deep truth can empower you to live your best life.
In this episode, Taoist Master. Mikel Steenrod explores the
nature and value of powerful choice
that can turbocharge your spiritual progress.

There are times
when you must lead, if you wish to accomplish something. There
are times where you do nothing,
and there are times when you follow.
And this can be difficult because these behaviors are determined
almost exclusively
by habit, and not by any other factor.
So if a person’s character is to lead,
oftentimes they will place themselves in the leadership
position in order to get something done.
Because there are so few people willing to lead,
oftentimes that’s the right thing to do.
Now…
But there are other times where you need to shut up and be a good follower.
And if you want to accomplish the thing that needs to be accomplished,
you are best in the following position.
Sitting back and knowing
that can be of vital importance, because there’s nothing like
having somebody in charge who shouldn’t be in charge.
And so you’re sitting back…
It’s obvious that this person should be in charge, because they
know everything that needs to be known about this,
and they should be followed.
But yet you have this person over here who is trying to be in
charge out of what basically habit and character;
however,
they’re interfering in the process of what should actually
be done, and by doing so will actually destroy the ability to
move from start to goal.
Now, in your own…you may not have any ability to change that
situation when somebody else is engaged in it,
but you can certainly control your own response.
And when it is time to follow, follow and when it is time to
lead, lead.
For some people, the challenge will be in the following, and for
some people the challenge will be in the leading.
But there are times when there is no other mover.
You’re
ultimately responsible, especially if you look at
anything spiritual,
you’re the only person responsible for your own development.
Nobody else can spiritually develop you.
It’s not possible.
It’s been tried repeatedly through Taoist practice.
All sorts of intervening
agents, from herbalism to other practices that have been moved
in.
Person can’t go where
they don’t choose to go,
within spiritual development. You are completely restricted by choice.
Now…
And so that’s why it’s of such importance to karmic pursuit.
When it comes to your own spirituality, you have to lead.
You have to take it and consider control into your hand
and you have to walk forward.
It’s nobody else’s game.
Now, other people will contribute to that.
You’ll interact with other people, but you’re the one who
leads it.
Nobody else does.
And so if you’re sitting there simply following and expecting
spiritual development, you don’t get anything.
You’re just one of the masses showing up to a big building,
and then you’ll go home.
If you’re looking for spiritual development, for actual spiritual
progress, you have to lead.
You have to lead yourself.
Now,
in other events, there are times when it is time to follow.
And people are oftentimes surprised when I shut up and do
nothing and just follow somebody else.
And that’s because I sit back and go,
“Well, good.
I don’t have to be in charge.”
And, two, I sit back and go,
“I’m obviously not the person to lead this thing as we’re going
along.
So I’m just a follower right now.”
And so my objective in that time is to be a good follower, because
I know that that’s the nature of success.
And there are also times when it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the lead. It doesn’t matter if you’re
the follower.
It doesn’t matter if you do anything or do nothing.
So you can hang out in the neutral of that
and it’s not going to significantly affect the course
of things.
That can be good to know, because sometimes
you are sitting back going,
“Well, should I lead or follow?”
It’s like…
it’s not going to matter.
And so don’t do anything.
Sit back.
Relax.
Let things go.
Let somebody else act.
Let the followers act.
Because the followers are still acting.
That’s the important thing.
They’re simply guided by some other thing.
The leader is acting.
However,
he is guiding other people, or guiding himself or herself in the
course of the events that they’re undertaking.
Now…and again, spirituality is a bit of an exception, because
there’s nobody else who’s going to lead you for that.
So you have to be the lead.
Now, there are times where you simply do nothing.
And
so there isn’t a great deal of follow.
But there are little moments of follow where you sit back and go,
“Well, I’m just going to follow this. Ride this beast. See where
it goes and pop out
the other end.”
This is very useful. For some people,
it leads to revolutionary conclusions.
As you can sit back and begin to realize, “Well, the big problem is that
I don’t actually follow when I need to follow.”
Some people it’ll be a matter of, “I don’t actually lead when it’s
time to lead.”
And
it may not be anybody else to do that thing.
And
certainly, if you’re looking at accumulating your own karma,
you have to know that relationship,
and you have to be willing to do the thing when it pops up–even
if you’re sitting back going, “I’m a horrible leader of blah blah.”
But you’re the only leader of blah blah. There’s nobody else
to do it.
And sometimes that’s just the course of events.
It’s not that
somebody else’s job to stand off, or somebody else could do it
better.
It’s that
nobody else could do it.
You’re just the person who is supposed to be leading at that
particular time.
And the I Ching actually has all sorts of compulsions about that,
which basically say, “It’s your turn to lead.
You need to lead.”
And it also says, very clearly, “Your turn to shut up and follow. Follow!”
And so you get placed specifically into those positions
of acting, or
being the prime mover, or being the prime follower along.
So somebody says, pick up the rock and move it over there.
You pick up the rock and move it over there.
Hopefully the guy knows what he’s building, who’s telling you what
to do.
So if you’re looking at building a bridge, I don’t know how to
build a bridge,
I could certainly lift something up and move it over here.
Hopefully the person telling me, “Move that over there,” doesn’t
have a raft in mind, or is thinking about building a chocolate bar.
And so we built a big rock chocolate bar, or something like
that.
Because obviously that person wasn’t the person to be in charge.
That becomes a major factor.
And as you can see,
if there is confusion in these three factors, a plan will fail.
It is an absolute determinor of failure.
So if somebody’s following when they should be leading, or
somebody else is leading when
they should actually be the follower, you’re going to have a
massive failure of a plan.
And that’s
just the way it is.
And the reason it’s so important is because it almost always
results in massive failure.
If it’s not followed properly.
Ok?
The next one also has to do with others:
connection,
neutral,
isolation,
In the pursuit of a goal,
sometimes
connection, or increasing the connections that you have,
will
make the pursuit of your goal easier.
Sometimes isolation
will make the pursuit of your goal easier.
These can’t be willy nilly factors.
Again, you have to sit back and you can experiment, unless your
goal is really, really time critical, like you have five
minutes to do it,
in which case I guess you get a bunch of people that run in the
same direction, or something like that.
But
in other goals, it doesn’t matter
whether or not you are connected or isolated.
So
your success or failure in achieving this goal is not going
to be impacted by the presence of other humans.
And this is particularly true
in the neutral factor, is particularly true at times within
spiritual development.
And so if you sit back and go,
“Well, I need to be isolated for this.”
Yes, there are absolutely times in spiritual
pursuits where you must act in isolation.
If you work on connection, you will destroy your action.
There are times where it doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter if other
people are around.
Doesn’t matter if they’re not around.
You’re going to achieve the same ends.
There are times when a thing can only be accomplished by having
connections to other people.
Knowing these things and knowing what is critical to your plan is
really very helpful.
And again, this can overlap all the way over to supported, not
supported.
Maybe you need three connections and you only have two.
So wha’s that tell you? It’s going to be a huge tough battle.
You don’t have the Allies you need. You’re not going to get the
support from them that you need.
It can overlap into here.
It can overlap down there.
It’s a major factor as you come through,
but you can’t ignore it.
That’s the big thing.
Any plan.
So you can sit back and think about anything. Think about making dinner.
If it’s an elaborate dinner and you’re doing it in isolation,
it’s going to be a vastly more difficult dinner.
If it’s an elaborate dinner and you have connections, it’ll
probably be an easier dinner.
If it’s a simple dinner and you’re doing it in isolation,
it’ll probably be an easy dinner.
If it’s a simple dinner and you’re doing it in connection, it
could be vastly more difficult, because perhaps these people
aren’t helpful.
So it’s help chop your vegetables, and it comes out all
the wrong size.
Or they cut them into little, thin shreds,
when you need big chunks, or something.
That’s like, you’re helping me into a hole here, so beat it.
Sometimes
it won’t matter. They’re TV dinners. It doesn’t matter how
many people are around to help you, and just put them in the
microwave.
They come out.
But
we can’t ignore it.
That becomes perhaps the single most important factor.
Some of these other things you can ignore or not know.
Maybe you don’t know what the course of events is going to be here.
You don’t know this particular thing here.
But not knowing this,
not having this,
these things will outright destroy your plans even before
you set out to get them.
And this is actually a major. I Ching factor as well.
It’ll tell you very specifically, you cannot do this
without other people.
This is a time for connection,
It will also tell you, this is a time for isolation.
You need to get away from other people if you want to accomplish anything.
(Neutral) It doesn’t matter.
Crowd. Alone in a cave. You’re going to get the same results.
But so we sit back and go, well, sometimes,
if you’re having failure or difficulty with a plan,
it can be because
you’re trying to do it
when you need more connections.
You need more people inputting into the process or providing you
with something else.
So you look at this plan and you go, why am I having so much
difficulty?
This should be smooth sailing, but now I’m over here on the
islands here, stuck on a rock.
And it’s because, well, you need twenty more people to row your boat.
There are twenty oars in it.
You’re just sitting there, you know,
in the front, pointing at things.
Nothing’s going to happen.
You forgot the oarsmen!
As you sit back and you look at your plan, you look at your
success or failure…Some plans,
if they fail,
they’re such short periods of time, you’re done with that plan.
There is no recovery,
but most plans
have a recovery that’s built into that.
And in fact,
the thing that will determine your success, for example, in
warfare, is how good you are at recovering
or adapting to the actual things as they change.
And that’s where the skill comes in.
So you sit back and go, “Well, I need this, or I need this, and
we need to make these alterations here in order to
accomplish this particular thing.
Sometimes
you have a lot of connections.
So you get into the habit of solving everything with
connections.
You get into this plan.
You can’t possibly move it ahead.
Why?
You got too many people there?
You need to get rid of them.
This is something you can only do yourself.
So it becomes a matter of ah,
I brought too many people to the party
and it wasn’t supposed to be a party.
Or too many cooks spoiled whatever they’re cooking.
So
knowing this factor, helps you make adjustments, which can be
critical for your own success.
And so if you sit back and you start seeing failure in your
plan, you’re sitting back and going, well, take a look at it.
Ask yourself, “Would increasing connections help this?
Now, if increasing connections who would help this,
what reason did you avoid setting up the connections to start off with?
Is that really your area of discomfort?
Sometimes when I talk about moving into discomfort,
moving away from expectation, from your most comfortable path,
people think, well, that means you have to cut off a toe if
you’re in discomfort.
Well, no.
Sometimes for some people it means getting rid of people.
For some people, it means
getting people in.
And so that moves you into an area where you’re uncomfortable
with things as they are.
Because, again, you build the most comfortable plan for yourself.
But as you’re sitting back going, “Oh, man, I’m going to need like
twenty more people.”
You’ve got to go out and find twenty people.
I’ve got to convince them to do it.
I’ve got to do all of these other things.
Hey, if that’s the only way to get there, guess who needs to eat
the discomfort?
You’d need to eat this discomfort.
Now, if you’re the huge social person, and you need to be
surrounded by fifteen people not doing this, not doing that,
and you’re wondering why you’re not getting anything done, why
you’re not making any motion forward, well, maybe you need to
be the dude
that’s completely alone doing this thing.
You’re just not willing to go into that discomfort.
Sometimes the only person to be in a room with is yourself, if you
want to achieve something,
because there’s nobody else who can help you.
And so you enter into your discomfort.
You move away from your most comfortable plan, and you start
start doing the thing that actually has to be done. That
requires accepting it,
and then being confident enough, rallying up that self belief that
will allow you to respond to the universe that is actually there.
As you can see, if a person is hugely flawed in their planning
ability, or responding to the universe as it is, you really
can’t make spiritual progress.
You just can’t.
Because you’re going to be caught doing things
that are consistently going to lead to small level failures in
your own life.
So you’re sitting back going,
“Well, you know…”
Let’s say,
I’m not picking on anybody.
Let’s say you’re setting up a meditation routine, and it’s
coming from planning, and you’re trying to set up this meditation
routine.
You really are.
That’s your goal, your start is,. I’m not meditating.
And your goal is, I want to meditate.
There are going to be things that get in the way.
They’re going to be ups and downs.
There are all these other factors right here.
How do you get there?
Obviously,
if you’re not getting there by smooth sailing,
you need to make a plan that incorporates one of these other
factors in here.
But if you lack the ability to do that, you’re never going to get
to the goal, or you’re only going to get to the goal when it’s
smooth sailing.
A large part of spirituality
is going to places when it’s not smooth sailing, or the distance
is more than two feet!
And that’s a huge…and I’m not making fun of that
difficulty.
It is a difficulty.
That’s why
we sit and we go through this.
It is something you have to work towards,
and you will encounter difficulty, and you will
experience discomfort.
Hopefully not a “cut off the toe” discomfort.
Discomfort of, oh, I have to do this, or, oh, I have to do that.
And if you think of it (discomfort), when you’re encountering it, how much
of it is built around the assumption of smooth sailing?
You just sit back and go, well, it wasn’t smooth sailing.
The boat rocked when you stepped on it!
That’s not not smooth sailing!. It’s rocked. It just went, “Woort.” That’s all
that happened.
All you had to do is get in it and sit.
It’s mounted on a little wire.
It just pulls you right over.
But
as we have these (plan factors) available to us, we can sit back:
I encounter this difficulty.
So what should I do?
So I should make this maneuver here.
I should go over here.
I’m trying to do this, but it’s not supported.
Now, not supported is not necessarily a mandate from the universe.
Notice that it is a mandate just out of the function of like
resources.
Other things are using resources as you exist.
That’s something to keep in mind.
And if your resources
also have an equal position in the universe to you.
Now, that really sucks when you get down to it.
But we like to think of, well, if. I’ve set aside this for eating,
its job is to be eaten.
Well, its job is to do whatever it’s going to do.
If you want to eat it, you need to make an effort to eat it.
Now,
it doesn’t mean that the universe is sending you a divine message
by saying, “Oh, now you have five less widgets,
or the support goes out here and you have five less widgets.”
All that it’s saying is that this action is not supported at this time.
Things actually change.
As humans
who want this…
The great mandate of, “Well, you know, if
I were meant to do blah blah blah, fourteen cases would show up. A
road map would show up.
Somebody would lead me by the hand to the spot I want to go to.
Then they would build it for me.. Give me a massage,
and put the food in my mouth?
Well,
actually that’s almost been done.
However, the basic factors of it’s an equal universe,
everything is equal within it.
All that really means is that this ball, unfortunately, is
equal to me,
even though I’m sitting on it.
I could suddenly end up being a player in its play.
And so now I am here for its function as I’m going along.
Now, of course, we don’t like to think of it in those terms,
because if we want to be vastly superior to a lot of the things
that we’re going through,
but we’re not.

***

If you’re looking at directly the I Ching, you have other things
like cease,
change or progress.
Well, most of this is oracle advice.
It doesn’t actually have to deal with the patterns,
meaning that you can get direct indicators that you need to cease
your current action.
These are the things that underly
the function of the oracles.
This would be direct oracle advice, which is, stop
or change what you’re doing to something else now because you’re
about to explode.
So you get the indicator for change
or progress.
Maybe that, no matter what you think about the current situation,
go forward.
Now, as you can see,
this is advice that is composed of the knowledge of these things.
So that’s a different issue of the I Ching.
So if you’re looking for direct advice, you can boil a lot of
advice down to these things.
Somebody’s asking you a question, what are they asking?
Should I cease?
Should I change it, or should I progress?
And that’s generally what they’re asking you.
So you can just sit there and go, cease,
progress, change,
cease,
and just go on through like that.
But
so a certain amount of all of that is caught up there.
This typically refers to
factors in your surroundings,
but not always.
It can refer to your own action, or the action of others.
Creation,
neutral
destruction.
You can be in a time
of creation,
where things are going to be generated from nothingness
and new things will emerge
as a result.
You can be in a neutral time, which is actually a lot of time,
where nothing really special is going to happen.
You can be in a time of destruction,
meaning that no matter what you do, no matter what the course of
events are, no matter what the other factors are,
something in particular–could be your goal.
It could be one of the factors in the surroundings are slated
for destruction.
So that is simply the cycle that it is in, and it is in the point
of destruction.
Now, if you look at it, that’s a very natural cycle.
You know, the cycle of creation.
It’s in a time of existence.
And then you have a cycle of destruction.
You can want it to be a different way, and that’s fine,
but it’s not going to be a different way.
There are times when you are the agent of creation and you are the
agent of destruction.
And you have to be willing to be that thing if you want to achieve
that goal.
So you are the force of destruction,
or you are the force of creation.
And so in that plan, it can be a matter of, well, perhaps you can
only overcome this thing by destroying it, or being its
agent of destruction.
Or you have to create something,
something that has never been done before.
And it must simply be born out of nothingness,
and that’s the nature of what you have to do in order to succeed.
Or
you can be bumping up against something that’s doing those
things, and you have to deal with it.
So you might want to be doing….
It’s hard to come up with an example of this.
Let’s say, you’re setting out to go to
a distant state,
Maryland,
in your car.
However,
your car is achieving the phase of destruction.
There’s nothing you can do about that.
It’s just going to go through its cycle of destruction.
It’s in a time of destruction.
Your plan has to take that
into consideration,
or has to adapt to it as it emerges.
If you sit there lamenting your car, what’s going to happen?
Absolutely nothing.
Your car doesn’t care. It’s in a cycle of destruction.
That’s what’s going to happen.
You simply have to accept it and then choose another action if you
want to experience that particular thing.
Is it going to be uncomfortable as a result?
Well, yeah, you might have to get a new car and go through that
whole process.
Is it going to be expensive?
While, yeah, it definitely will probably cost you money.
But
sitting back and thinking, oh, the universe has cursed me,
because this thing is going into its cycle of destruction, is
really not beneficial to you at all.
It is in its cycle of destruction.
And sitting back, going, “Oh that is simply the cycle of destruction,”
makes life vastly easier, because now you’ll be free to do other things.
So you’ll sit back and go, well, you know,
that’s the destruction,
and you go out and do something else.
Now, perhaps the solution is the cycle of creation.
So you build a car from scratch.. Like, I don’t know, you build it
out of butter or something. Drive it around. You make something
that’s never been made before.
Now, you drive in the butter car to Maryland.
But basically,
again, knowing these factors,
knowing that it is natural and it is inevitable that those factors exist,
keep you from getting attached to the idea of, well, I am failing
horribly because this is occurring.
You’re failing horribly because what the universe is progressing
according to the rules of the universe, and you want it some
other way.
There’s no horrible failure in there, except the expectation
that it should be some other way.
So remember, to a certain extent, you can control
wherever you set that reference point.
If your reference point is, I need to be able to turn blue with
pink spots at will.
Yeah, you’re going to have quite a bit of failure in that, and
there’s just no way around it.
But we create all sorts of bizarre things like that.
The other thing is, if you’re pursuing any sort of ambitious
goal–one, and it’s a distant goal, there are going to be failures.
And I’m saying that with quote marks around the word,
that occur in that process, and that’s part of
things actually changing.
And so it’s ok for it to fail.
It’s ok for it to move on, and it’s ok for you to adapt and
shift your position, because you’re supposed to.
And the lesson of this is what there are periods of same.
But notice, the same periods are not as large as the increase
periods or the decrease periods.
And if you’re looking uphill and downhill, what are you dealing
with?
You deal with this little, tiny peak (of same)
in comparison to other things.
That, if anything, is, probably one of the most difficult things
to accept about the I Ching, is that you do have stable states,
but in every single stable state, they warn you that, remember,
stable states end.
Stable states do not last forever.
Do not favor the stable state.
And you have that repeated over and over again,
because that’s the way it is.
Our expectation of a stable state is incorrect.
It’s the expectation of change that we should have.
And
so we can’t become overly
disappointed if
something enters a cycle of destruction.
Sometimes you’re just going for your best ride,
and that’s the way it is.
On the other hand, you really shouldn’t be sitting back,
really, with this huge sense of victory if you’re in a cycle of
creation
and things are being created.
It’s how it should be.
It’s like taking
credit for the sun rising.
It’s like, I want the sun to rise and the sun’s rising.
Yes!
Now in twelve hours, I want the sun to set.
So
you can enter into that.
Should you take credit for those?
You should take credit for responding to those.
But there are obviously things that you are not dictating or
controlling in that process.
And so
we take a look at these.
And you’ll notice that a lot of times when you’re experiencing disappointment,
let’s, say, with destruction,
you have this big thought or habit of, well, you know, these
things don’t occur to me, or this won’t occur to me unless
something wrong is going on, or. I’m bad, or,
and it has absolutely nothing to do with that.
It has to do with the fact that here is a cycle that is being executed.
You are riding along on this cycle.
It’s going to come to an end.
That’s how cycles go, and it’s going to cycle back around.
Where is the creation for it?
How does it move?
How long do you stay with that?
Do you need to alter your position somewhere in these
things as you go through?
So, are there any questions about that?
So those are the dominant underlying factors of yin and
yang.
So the expansion and contraction, things just shifted and destroyed.
Things are easy.
Sometimes it’ll be harder other times.
And the universe does favor certain things at certain times.
Probably one of the great privileges of making spiritual
progress, besides
having
many fascinating insights, is that periodically things are
required of you.
And the thing to remember is that things are not required of children,
except for very, very small things.
So if you think about it, if you have a big nursery filled with
babies, you know, rolling around,
you don’t even expect them really to clean up very much.
You don’t require much.
And
on the other hand, if you walk in there and say, invent for me a
new vehicle that can jump me to the moon, or something like that.
The baby’s just going (baby motions).
That would be an unrealistic expectation, but it’s also one
that’s not heaped upon
people (by the Tao) as you go
along.
So favor
if you’re playing a significant role in things,
is a real factor.
If you’re not playing a significant role in things, it’s
not really a major factor in things.
And you can choose to either look for moments where that’s created,
or choose not to and they’ll emerge as you go along.
And remember, if you’re looking to leave the nursery, you’re
looking for consistency and action
consistency and what you’re choosing to do with your mental
resources.
That doesn’t mean you sit around and think about the same thing
all day.
It’s just an overall consistency.
And
also simply seeking to leave the nursery.
Part of what happens when we recognize a child as growing up
by them, by their actions. What they’re doing. The choices
they’re making, but by also them consistently saying,
I’m growing up,
and I want to be grown up.
I want to be treated like a grown up.
And then you can say,
“Yeah, but that means you need to stop this and this, or you need
to do this for me.
You want to be a grown up.
Take out the garbage and build me that moon jumping machine.”
I’m really looking for that.
And
then i’ll say, you’re 12.
And
so those really are the factors that go into controlling that
nursery element as you go along.
And progress can be extremely quick
as you work with those factors.
We like to sit back a lot of times and think of spirituality
as being a slow thing, but the only limit for spirituality is
the person that’s involved in it.
It is not necessarily slow.
And one of the big lessons, the fundamental lessons, that should
never be forgotten about any enlightenment religion, is that
enlightenment is available to anybody who is practicing
that religion.
It’s a spiritual system that is designed to move the person
towards enlightenment.
If they move in this thought of enlightenment into a spectrum of,
oh, it can only be attained by blablah blah, you should run away,
because it’s not going to produce a yield for you.
They’re already creating excuses
for not getting there.
And
really, spirituality can be extremely fast.
You will make periods of tremendous and sudden gain,
much like the factors up here.
You notice that
there’s no line that goes like this
forever.
There’s no line that goes like this forever.
And there’s no line that goes like this forever.
They just don’t exist.
Spirituality
will cycle.
You’ll have peaks and valleys as you go through, but they can be
extremely fast.
There is no real limit for that.
That door opens up
and you move according to choice.
You just have to be willing to move according to choice.
So a large part of it is that willingness to step out and to
accumulate in a specific direction.
It is an entirely accomplishable,
entirely doable regime.
Notice, even with all this complexity, what are we really
talking about?
We’re talking about nine different relationships,
most of which overlap and are clustered into three things.
And what are the core essence?
Expectation, and habit are going to inhibit your ability to see
these things as you move along.
Knowing that they exist will allow you to look for them,
which will make it easier and help you move away from habit
and expectation. That’s a lesson of today. That’s what we just
spent two hours talking about, that cross nine different things.
It’s not hugely complex.
And so if you just sit back…
the underlying thing of all of that, “Well things actually
change.” Any time you behave, like things won’t actually
change, you’re going to end up in a bad spot,
or you’re going to end up having to make up a bunch of stuff,
so you can justify things actually changing.
So you’re sitting around going (simulated mumbles)
that was
divine interference,
divine interference for something that was supposed to happen at a
particular time.
That’s always been happening for how long a period of time. That’s
you just not recognizing that it would occur because you didn’t
want to.
And that’s a whole different factor.
And so again,
this is actually simple.
So keep it simple.
Don’t make it more complex than it is.
It’s like, remember this piece?
And if you can remember these things, if you can’t remember
these things, just look around you.
You’ll see these things occurring all the time.
You’ll see people going, “Oh, yeah, everything’s going my way.”
Or “Oh man today suck horribly!”. And it’s like, oh,
you just move through the pieces.
It’s going to be there.
These factors are going to exist on a daily basis.
You may not like them.
It may throw you into huge discomfort, but that’s all there is.
And if that’s all there is, that means that it’s easily manageable.
Now, of course,
they can interact.
You’re pursuing something really complex.
You have to choose where you’re going to stand on the factors and
stuff like that.
But from a spiritual standpoint, think you’re really just finding
your path back to who you’re actually supposed to be,
it’s not all that hugely difficult for a lot of those
things.
So most of what we talked about, repeat across certain specific
areas.
And then it’s just a matter of getting the confidence to
make a journey to a little point here, and then make a journey to
a little point here, make a journey to a little point here,
and pretty soon you’ve journeyed this tremendous distance.
And
people that are around you that you knew before, I would be
sitting back on, how did they do that in that period of time?
That’s not even possible.
It’s like, well, I just, I walked over there.
You sat the entire time. I walked.
It wasn’t that I was walking hugely fast.
I was dragging a leg. I had a dog bite in my ear.
I’m sitting there. I’m out of food.
I don’t have any windings.
My shin digs are out.
The difference was, is, I was actually walking.
That’s the only reason I made it over there in that miraculous
period of time.
If you compare me to somebody who doesn’t walk at all…
Yeah, that’s a fantastic journey.
It’s an epic scale of development.
I just walked,
and that’s all you really have, and that’s present there.
So it’s entirely doable.
And don’t allow restriction to emerge out of fear.
So in a lot of times we sit back and we had that intentional
restriction that says, well, you can’t make progress.
You just can’t do it that fast.
You can do it that fast.
You can make jumps through things that you can’t possibly imagine
in such a short period of time.
It’s amazing.
For example, as a final closer, in power form in essence, which
is a system very similar to these practices, but without the safeties,
you could actually bang through the equivalent of the mind of
clarity inside of six months.
However, not everybody could tolerate doing that.
And in that amount of vast information about the universe
that became available to people, so easily seeing all these
patterns, easily seeing the choice structures,
people just couldn’t tolerate.
It’s not that they couldn’t do it. It’s that they couldn’t stand it.
And so
I’m suggesting don’t do it in six months.
But the other thing is it’s easily available to people
because it’s part of natural ability.
So you can make greater gains spiritually in a short period of
time then you would
ever actually desire.
And so you sit back and go, well,. I want this and this. You can have
it. Just do the little things.
It becomes that it’s not a huge thing as you go through.
So your first real struggle,
and, of course, is to move through the different stages of
spirituality.
But if you’re having difficulty doing the meditation,
ah,
Use these elements to really look at what’s inhibiting the
meditative process,
because it will naturally grow out from those things.