Spiritual effort

The idea of attainment when one is motivated by guilt, mere duty, fear, or as compensation for a sense of being wrong, bad, or inadequate, which indeed is often the main underlying motivation for all kinds of accomplishment in life, is not going to result in real spiritual fruit such as spiritual communion, detachment, spiritual grace and bounty. That is why so many New Age paths reject the idea of spiritual effort, and are appealing to so many people. This idea of 'effort' activates the sense of being bad, wrong, or not good enough, and these core wounds are difficult to reconcile with the idea that we need to improve, grow, or get better. It brings up images of original sin and inherent deficiency. We like to think we are fine the way we are. The fact is that we are LOVED no matter what, but we are as children and we need to learn and grow.

Most people were not given unconditional love as children, so have a nagging sense of inadequacy in their subconscious. Parents and schools usually train kids to feel value and validation only when they are excelling and achieving. So, many people are attracted to teachings that emphasize how you are valuable and acceptable as you are, rather than the idea that you need to improve, attain, grow, and achieve. But often the misunderstanding of Western religion is due to faulty training from parents and teachers, who fail to convey the All-Embracing Love and Forgiveness that exist simultaneous with the injunction to grow, change, and improve. We encourage children to grow and improve, but we can do it with love and mercy, so they always feel loved and accepted in all stages of their growth. This is how God sees us! He loves us always, even though we fall short of the divine standard, and His love sustains us through all our struggles and striving! But it is often difficult to access that Love; indeed it is a mystical world of infinite radiance, beyond this ephemeral one! And parents/teachers do their best, but as they are entrenched and inured in the present materialistic system, it is hard to pause long enough, process emotional blocks, and then access and feel the divine love as a palpable reality streaming into the heart and soul. So we have much work to do, brothers and sisters!

Although some of these eclectic and Eastern spiritual teachings have the ability to placate us and make us feel temporarily better about ourselves, they do not have the power to root out core wounds of inadequacy or cause us to soar into the kingdom of detachment from self and this material world. Often it’s the teachers’ or gurus’ approval that people receive into their hearts, and this becomes a substitute for the  Manifestation of God, whose teachings are the source of life and light, and the only source that can burn away the veils that we have acquired from this world of illusion. It is true that many Eastern spiritual teachings provide us with in-depth wisdom and understanding of the human condition, and offer us many techniques and practices to alleviate some of the suffering that comes from daily living. But unless we turn our hearts to the Manifestation of God for this day, we will never experience the true potential of the human soul as it was meant to be in this world.