Journey of the individual

"A great journey lies ahead for you—a journey that will be challenging and remarkable, a journey that will affirm your deeper nature, a journey that will free you from the bondage of your own ideas and obligations to others, a journey that will take you beyond dependency into a truly independent state and beyond this into a state where you can become interdependent with others. It is in this stage of interdependence that real relationships are established and true devotion can arise."

"God is like a great attraction pulling you Homeward, and this attraction stimulates your Knowledge. Once Knowledge is stimulated sufficiently, and once you are prepared and your outer life is open enough, then Knowledge will emerge within you, and you will begin to discover real happiness."

Directives

"Do not take the foolish approach of trying to mix this with that—a patchwork quilt of spiritual ideas from different traditions, for that means you have never climbed the mountain. You have only sat at the bottom collecting postcards from people who have."

"Come to your studenthood without requiring others to come with you, for this is your calling. You cannot bring your partner or your friend or even your children along, for this is your calling and perhaps not theirs at this time."

"You will not travel alone, but you cannot take everyone with you. You will find that you cannot keep all of your friends and past acquaintances because they are part of your past, and the emphasis in those relationships is not what you are experiencing now. Allow them to depart and bless them. Do not condemn them. Do not deny them. Just let them drift away. Release them."

Confusion

"You find out on the Path of Knowledge that you have some very unloving and difficult experiences. It is not all wonderful, glorious, exciting and spiritual. It is hard. 'Oh, my God! What is happening to me? I was a nice person; now I don’t know what I am!'"

"Your first challenge in change will be with yourself. That is the most important. It will be with yourself and in your primary relationships: your partner, your loved ones, your family and so forth. If you feel a spiritual emergence arising that you must respond to, you will have to change your relationship with your family. You cannot change and have relationships around you not adjust according to that change. You must do it, not wait for someone to do it for you."

"To be a student of a New Revelation requires then a very pure approach on your part. This means that you are not trying to mix the New Message with other teachings, with other beliefs, with other spiritual practices. It means you are not alloying the New Message with your own spiritual beliefs and perspective."

"You will begin to learn what is significant within you and what is insignificant and how previously you were so caught up in making the insignificant significant and in neglecting the significant all together."

Beginner's mind

"You will go through periods that will seem very dry and empty and others that seem very rich and revealing."

"Here you must start from the beginning and constantly set aside things you think you understand, things that you believe in, things that you believe have to be in the world and things you hold true about yourself, others and life in general. You must keep opening yourself to something new."

"If you have a beginner's mind, you will have an open mind. Here you will be able to see things as they are and not as you think they must be or prefer them to be."

"Become a beginning student. Open yourself. Assume nothing. This makes you really available. This makes it possible to give you instruction. This makes it possible for you to learn from instruction."

"Beginning students always think they know things they don’t know, and they always think they don’t know things they do know. This requires a great deal of sorting out. It requires discovering the true and the false and, through this contrast, learning to separate the two. In time, you will realize the distinction between the true and the false and will not be deceived by the pretense the false can make in its imitation of the true."

"It takes a preparation at the outset for" [people] "to come to terms with the fact that their approach is not wholesome and honest yet and must become wholesome and honest, or they will not reach the Greater Powers. They will not find their greater purpose. They will not be in a position in life to assume greater responsibilities, and they will not take the time to develop the wisdom required to take this greater journey."

Born Again

"You cannot transform yourself. That would only be a change in your ideas or concepts or circumstances. If you can improve your circumstances through great effort and application, nothing has really changed on the inside. You are still guided by your fear. You are still filled with judgments and associations. You are still a slave to your social conditioning."

"To be free of the past is to be free of the mind that represents the past, which is to be free of your thoughts as they are today. This allows you to have new thoughts, new experiences and to have a new beginning in life. In reality, this is what it means to be born again--to wipe the slate clean, to see things as they are and not as you have always interpreted them to be, to be open to new experiences without being conditioned against them by your past fears and disappointments."

“Your second great education in life is the reclamation and the expression of Knowledge. This is when your spiritual emergence begins. This is what it really means to become reborn. It is like a new beginning. And just like when you began life as a small child, you start out very uncertain, very shaky in your foundation, and you enter a brave new world with new influences and new things to consider. You are not leaving your life. You are not going anywhere. But you are penetrating the whole other part of life, which you are not encouraged to learn about in your prior education.”

Renewal of the mind

"This is the relationship that you need with your mind. Without this, your mind will continue to reinforce its old ideas by interpreting every new experience, every new encounter and every new relationship in such a way that these ideas are validated. What a great loss this is to you, for you are denied access to people, you are denied access to new experience and you are denied access to Knowledge. Here you are frozen in the past and bound to reinforce it at all times. Without a greater authority in your life, this is what the mind will do. It will calcify and become hard and brittle. It will become impenetrable and impermeable, something that defends its point of view without any regard to reality or to changes in circumstances. This imperils you and imprisons you. This denies you and isolates you. This prevents you from having access to others and learning from them. This denies your gift and your ability to receive the gifts of others."

"The thinking mind must constantly be stirred by new experience and by adaptation to new experience and new understanding in order to be vital and capable of learning. It is like stirring concrete. If you do not keep stirring it and adding water and new things to it, it hardens. And once it hardens, it can only be broken. People who are learning and living The Way of Knowledge are constantly being renewed and refreshed because they are close to life, and they are close to Knowledge. Their thoughts change, grow and evolve. Their ideas change, grow and evolve. Their conclusions change, grow and evolve. They can do this because there is something greater. There is Knowledge, the dynamic force of life within you, within the world and within the Greater Community as well. Knowledge brings you to the edge of life where you have to learn and adapt, communicate and contribute. This keeps you young, alive and close to the heart of life. Your mind, then, becomes constantly relevant to the present and is able to prepare for the future."

The demonstration in the world

"When you attend to what you know and follow what you know, this gives you inner confirmation. This heals the division within yourself and brings real resolution to your experience. As you advance as a student of Knowledge, your problems will be more and more circumstantial and not personal in nature. You will encounter difficult thresholds along the way, but increasingly you will not be the problem."

"Those who continue will advance. And those who advance will understand not only their accomplishment but the means of preparation itself. They will be the ones in a position to help others prepare and to bring the gift of preparation into whatever service they may render to others in the future. There will be others who will want to know why and how these people have achieved such a state of equanimity in their life, such a state of strength, balance and self-determination. How can it be that they are so free from so many things that paralyze other people? How can it be that they can accomplish so much and be so dedicated How can it be that their gift is so great that they can keep giving it without being exhausted?"

Integrity in relationship

"For humanity to become unified, individuals must become unified, within themselves and with other people. This is how a new fabric of unity is established. The great tapestry of life is woven strand by strand, person by person. Do not think another will do this for you. Do not think such great things are only left up to people who are great, who are heroes or heroines, for this is your responsibility. This is your calling—not to gain spiritual immunity, not to become all knowing or all powerful, but to join your mind with other minds in Knowledge, to become stronger than you are or ever could be as an individual."

"People want truth, but they want many other things as well. However, truth and these other things are not that compatible with each other. As your desire for truth grows deeper and your experience of truth grows deeper, then other things become seen as either useful or useless. However, they are no longer the central focus of your life. You are no longer drawn away by love or money. You are not captivated by beauty, grandeur, glory or security. You are not seeking to escape life or to be comfortably positioned. Instead, you are seeking something that verifies who you really are, why you have come into the world and what you must do here. These relationships are a central part of this initiation."

See Also

Disorientation

Emptiness

Metaphors for the journey of the individual

Further Study

• Building a Bridge to a New Life (February 25, 2008)

• Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume II, Chapter 1: Ambition

• The Soul's Journey on Earth (October 25, 2008)

• The Journey to a New Life, Chapter 6: The Gift of a New Life

• Greater Community Spirituality, Chapter 14: What Must Be Avoided?

• Deepening Your Spiritual Practice (November 1, 2008)

• Living The Way of Knowledge, Chapter 7: Your Relationship with Your Spiritual Family