Making Your Efforts Count - A Spiritual Perspective

A Spiritual Perspective

Many of us come to the spiritual path to escape pain and unpleasant life circumstances.  The more life hurts, the more we reach for an outside source to alleviate suffering and to make things right.  On a superficial level this works by taking our mind away from the painful experiences, but is more like suppressing or covering up problems for a time rather than identifying and resolving the core issues, which may range from learning to make good decisions, resisting the urge to grow to emotional maturity, or simply making the necessary efforts to control the mind and break the attachments that no longer serve any purpose.  This is why so many walk the path of spirituality for many years (or incarnations) and seem to make limited progress when much quicker development (real peace & real happiness) is possible. 

The true purpose of spiritual practice is to wake up from the dream of mortality, which we've all agreed to participate in, but fail to recognize.  The following modern parable, will help illustrate the quickest way to wake up with the side benefit of cleaning up all those messy situations you'd like to be done with. 

Imagine, if you will, that you find your self trapped in a building with hundreds of people.  It just so happens that a bomb has been planted in the lobby and is quickly ticking down to detonation.  You are the only one that knows how to disarm this kind of bomb.  The hundreds of people around you are bemoaning their fate.  Some are screaming, some are sobbing, some have given up in despair, yet you have the ability to save them all.

Now, your first response is to try to calm all these people down.  How can you concentrate to diffuse this bomb with all that racket?  So you rush around trying to help the inconsolable, all the while the clock keeps ticking.  Then it occurs to you that no one is really listening because they are all still in a panic since the problem is not being attended to.  It then occurs to you, maybe you could block out the screaming and crying and just disarm the bomb.  So you rush over to do your work.  At first it is terribly hard.  The waves of grief rush over you empathically.  People are pulling at your shirt shouting “Hurry up!  Do something.” 

You start sweating and almost make a fatal mistake, and turn around to tell everyone to shut up!  That has no effect.  They wail even more because you are wasting even more precious time.  Seeing this, you tighten your jaw and try to block out all the noise.  You do your work, sweating and stressing all the while.  Finally, just as the last few seconds are nearing, and the hysteria is more than you can stomach, you succeed.  The bomb is disarmed.

A cheer goes up!  All the anxiety and terror is gone.  You are free.  The voices of despair and anguish are silenced in exchange for elation!

Liken this to your spiritual practice.  The quickest way to freedom (disarming the bomb) is not to attend to every distraction or problem (anxious and upset person) but it is to remember the need to disarm the problem (wake up to your fully free spiritual nature). 

When you meditate, or live intentionally, do not focus on doing it to be free of problems.  Do it to realize the fullness of your being, your oneness in God, or whatever else you want to call it.  If you try to do something to be free of problems, you are still focusing on your problems.  If you want to know God or the infinity of your spirit, contemplate that to the exclusion of all else for the simple joy of having the experience.  When you are aware of the truth of your oneness in God, the problems either cease to exist, do not bother, or you more easily find ways to resolve them.  Sounds counterintuitive, but you may find it works much better than the alternative.  It’s not really counterintuitive, it’s simply different than how you’ve been raised. 

Best Wishes,

Ryan Kurczak

www.ryan-kurczak.org