Udja,
Reply to post from October 15, 2015 #3790 by Lindsey Hunnicutt
Level 1, Lesson 8 audio, What is necessary to succeed on the spiritual path, 224B
Re Your Statement: Additionally, we should recognize that not all of our efforts in moving along the spiritual path will be successful.
Seba Dja’s commentary: One reflection is to understand that it is the ego making this judgement that one’s action is “not” successful.
Consider a baby just learning to walk on its own. Consider a mom calling the baby to come to her. The baby takes a step and falls, gets up, takes a couple more steps and falls again, gets up and takes a few more steps and makes it int mom’s arms. Eventually the baby learns to walk without falling.
So, were the falls “unsuccessful” or just part of the process of walking…and therefore, still a form of success.
This is why we refer to the process at integral also…because it is a bit of a back and forth, and the back is often seen by the ego as “unsuccessful” but if you forgot your bags at home when going on a journey, is going back to pick it up before you board the plane unsuccessful towards your overall trip? or just something that you did not deal with previously that you now have to go back to deal with. So, both the back and forth movement, what the ego is calling “unsuccessful attempts” as well as what the ego call successful attempts are really just par for the course of spiritual evolution…both are involved in the overall forward movement towards the attainment of Nehast.
If you did not achieve worldly success in a venture, any venture, then it merely means that you have to evaluate what the error was, and correct it. So rather than looking at it as unsuccessful it could be looked at as just an area that more work is needed.
There is no real error in using the term unsuccessful depending on the meaning you ascribe to it, such as “an unsuccessful attempt”, which means one still has work to do in that area. However, most people in this culture have been conditioned and associate unsuccessful, consciously or unconsciously, with failure…with being somehow inadequate, etc., which brings in more egoism.
HTP
S Dja
