Are You Ready To Turn Inward?
Basic principles for a good foundation in our lives can be established through consistency. The consistency in approach to what we are doing—a good habit pattern in living our life, as we approach our inner life, the understanding of our inner life, the study of it and the experience of it—has to be on a day-to-day basis. Developing a contemplative lifestyle that is sensible, that is positively worked out, and programming that into our complete pattern of daily life gives us a foundation strong enough to face decisions and the ensuing experiences and the reaction to those experiences in a way that they enhance our spiritual unfoldment. Remember, the lifestyle that we now have was programmed for us by mothers, fathers, religious leaders, teachers, people that we had just met along the way, and good friends. It’s not a particularly good lifestyle in which to hold the perspective that we’re an immortal being. It’s a great lifestyle to hold the perspective that we’re a temporal being, and we’re only here a few years and then we die.
To develop a whole new lifestyle takes thought. Our desire has to be transmuted into doing that. In the ordinary lifestyle of human consciousness, our desires generally are for things, for emotional experiences, for intellectual knowing. And that’s all good, but they’re not organized. We have to organize the tremendous power of desire so that it’s transmuted, and we desire the realization of the Self more than anything else. Then you’ll have enough desire left over to get things, to get happiness and to get all the getting that humans want.
But the tremendous force of desire is transmuted. The perspective is changed. We see ourself as an immortal being, and we work consistently with our lifestyle, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. Each decision that we make is an easier decision to make, and each reaction that we face, we face it joyfully. Each meditation that we hold is more profound than the last, and the spiritual being, the soul body, begins to merge with the physical body, as the elements of the instinct and the elements of the intellect that have been supreme life after life after life begin to give up and transmute their energies into the immortal body of the soul.