Stop worrying about achieving enlightenment, and focus on being in the moment instead. Focus on living your own life to the fullest extent, to the best of your abilities, with no excuses, at all times. Too many people are seeking thrills from so-called spirituality, boosting their egos up with fancy new terms, pretending to fully understand ancient concepts. Nowadays people make money off of spirituality just as with any other service, it’s all been commercialized now. The answer is not in some training program though, or in some spirituality course. The answer can only be found in your own Spirit, the Spirit of God living within you. Can you not feel God’s presence within you? Are you blind to your own goodness, to your own consciousness? Remove the blindfolds then, and behold, be honest with yourself and complete, look at you through God’s ayes, feel your oneness with all beings in Spirit. See that the suffering you can go through could be anyone else’s. We all go through problems while we live our lives, and some of us are stronger than others and are able to find better coping mechanisms than them. Many go down a very dark path of destruction, whether of self or of others. They are caught up in negative emotions, in feelings of hate, of extreme hopelessness, of being alone in a cold world. Understand that everything depends on how we handle each situation. Everything changes, so each decision leads to a new condition of life, and slowly but surely we create the lives we wish to live. On the flip side, we can create a life which we’ll later blame God for, claiming to have no idea how things could have gone so horribly wrong. So make the right decisions now, while you still have the chance to do so. No one will pay for your mistakes but yourself, yet you are bound to bring others down with you with each bad decision, just as everyone else will bring you down with their bad behavior. Let go of the cynicism and understand that, as you help to normalize negativity, others are bound to do the same, and soon we will all be at risk, we will all think we are fine, that we are normal, yet we will be living in an insane and dangerous society, one whose values are upside down. Aren’t these the times we are living in now? Stop looking for the answer here and there, stop treating spiritual matters as a game, as if you can advance from level to level, ascending and becoming some kind of divine teacher who reads peoples futures or commands others what to do at all times. Be humble, acknowledge your limitations and don’t flaunt your talents, use them when necessary. Understand that fools love to talk much, remain observant and alert, alive in the Spirit, unshaken by all the stupidity that might surround us at any given moment. Life becomes a moving meditation, writing a sitting meditation, cooking and making tea or coffee are standing meditations. Feel the moment, whether there’s nothing that seems to important currently going on, or whether you’re going through the biggest crisis you could ever possibly face, remain grounded in your awareness that this too shall pass, and that everything has a lesson to teach. Don’t feel entitled, don’t fight life’s process, however painful it may be, don’t complain, feel all the suffering and pain, but understand is as necessary. A lesson can be learned from every tragedy, and all can rise from the bottom of the deepest pit and ascend to the top of an empire like Joseph, all of us have been granted the ability to rise again, time and time again, just like a fiery phoenix. This is enough to challenge us for the rest of our lives, learning to live with acceptance, submitting our will to the Divine will, to things we cannot understand. Being content with events which we can only analyze over and over in order to learn from, or moments we can only cherish in memory now. What need do we have then to conjure up spirits back from the dead, to do great feats before the eyes of the masses, to spread the word of some religion or ideology wherever we may go, if we have not mastered our own minds, if we haven’t yet learned to be truly humble and accepting of life in every way we perceive it? We will fall, we will easily be deceived, we will think ourselves powerful, yet we will be nothing but puppets for the system, or even for evil spirits, who knows? Spiritual learning is nothing without true humility, without a true commitment to truth, without love for humanity, with cynicism towards life, with evil intentions towards others. No advancement can be made if the requirements to reach the goal are not followed. True bliss comes from the feeling of being rid of all impurity, or at least of most of it, knowing we have tried and struggled but succeeded in the end, from feeling that we are truly connected with the Divine Will, not from acting totally against it. We cannot feel God’s presence within us if we ignore the goodness of our own Spirit. We sometimes choose to ignore our intuition for reasons such as impressing others, or simply blindly following others against our better judgment. We can’t trust others to make decisions for us, we need to be always alert and we need to understand that we have to make the correct decisions for our own lives, each and every one of us, at all times. We are all imperfect as we live in this earthly life, and we all feel this illusion of separateness. It is the reason why we try to learn special skills, why we are so interested in the dark and mysterious at times, since we want to feel like we possess some special, or hidden, knowledge. We can now use this knowledge or wisdom to elevate our consciousness, and therefore our own lives, to a higher level. This is most people’s mentality, and it simply stops there. Not a single thought about using this new knowledge or energy for good, or to give back to the community by creating actual positive change. People want to achieve the condition of no-self, by following purely selfish pursuits, and it just doesn’t work that way.

To be continued tomorrow, on Day 38.

~ Rebel Spirit