If you would take one idea from this article, let it be that a spiritual life is not a life of denial. When spiritual teachers talk about recognizing spirit, they don't mean we need to deny the flesh. The body is no more than a communication vehicle for our mind. The mistake we make is exaggerating the importance of the body. That means we are often overly concerned with it when we are afraid and overly guilty about it when we feel pleasure.
I am not an enlightened being or spiritual master. I am a student. I believe strongly that the mind should be telling the body how to feel and not the other way around. Our obsession with the comfort of the body often dominates our life. If we can learn to recognize spirit and let forgiveness dominate our life instead, we are moving toward spiritual awakening.
My favorite little book is called Lucid Living. This simple book can help you wake up to a greater awareness of yourself (in less than one hour). We spend our lives building a concept of the self that is not real. Anything that helps us see beyond a limited concept of the self will bring us closer to spiritual awakening.
Why is it important for us to "wake up?" We can live our lives without giving any thought to spiritual awakening. Yet, at some point in most lives we begin to wonder what it all means. For some this happens as we become aware of our own mortality. For others, as with me, it happens when we lose a loved one. My youngest son left this world in the prime of his life. Still others have a near-death experience or suffering that becomes so intense there is a forced release that leads to enlightenment. Examples of this third path to enlightenment abound in spiritual literature. Eckhart Tolle (Power of Now), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements) and Lester Levenson (The Sedona Method) are just three examples of teachers who approached death before waking up and teaching what they learned.
It is not necessary to approach death before learning what it means to be enlightened. We can learn from the experience of these and other spiritual teachers. The teachings about awakening are remarkably similar. They can be summarized in a few simple statements. Who we are resides in one singular, continuous moment - this moment. That could have been written by Eckhart Tolle, or Timothy Freke (Lucid Living). It happens to have been written by Bradley Falk (Guided Passages).
Read the entire series on awakening to spiritual life at http://www.beapasserby.com
Prosperity Thinking Like The Rich
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