UDJA,
Level 1 – Lesson 7
224A – What is necessary for success in the spiritual practise
What are the main teachings brought out in the recorded lecture?
– What is needed to be successful in your spiritual practise
1. Cultivating virtues
2. Bringing these virtues into your everyday life
3. Continued spiritual practise
– Virtues and truth
There are many virtues in life, non violence, self control, no ego, but it is possible that there is one virtue that leads you to the rest and that is self truth. Nothing other than your true self is abiding. Living life in accordance with truth. Truth leads all to the correct paths, notions and concepts but even truth can change in a way that in 2017 I will not see the truth I see now in the same way. When we learn more we must let go of what we used to think is true. If we hold on we can become even more ignorant and steadfast in our ignorance.
Being true to yourself gives you constant awareness of your true self encouraging you at all times to act with virtue. But you must be ready to hear the truth. You must have humility, be ever humble. Even in great heights of enlightenment you must be humble.
Truth is something we must learn to understand. We do this by purifying ourselves through our shedy. Even the scriptures do not tell us the abiding truth but it leads us in the direction to find it. Until purification you can listen to the teaching 1000 times and not understand it. We must go beyond concepts and faith and go ever higher in search of ourselves.
– Description and translation of Shedy/Sheti & Shet
Shedy or Sheti means to penetrate the teachings or to study the teachings profoundly and in great depth.
Shet means corpse of the Mummy. The corpse of Mummy symbolises the human mind before spiritual enlightenment. It symbolises that which is going to be transformed or resurrected. The human mind is not seen as Human until the mind has become enlightened, only then has that person become worthy to be called Human, before the spiritual path humans can not be seen as anything higher than an animal or insect as they have no aim or any course. They can even become lower than that of animals as humans can become begot with negativities and worries in life even animals do not suffer from.
– Getting rid of negativity and the ego
We should not feel that enlightenment is beyond our grasp. Or feel we are not good enough or we are not the kind of people who become enlightened. Don’t allow yourself to be swayed by the egoistic and solely sense perceptive part of your mind (Meaning we tend to base things and our reality and the people around us based off of our senses which is a delusion, we must base reality on the truth and nature, not illusive values we develop while on earth). Don’t allow yourself to be down trodden by negativities or unrighteous acts you may have committed. Give yourself your own forgiveness, understand yourself and give yourself a chance to change, evolve, become more aware and become a better spirit and person.
The actions we do now engender our past and the actions we do now also engender our future and purifies it as if you are creating a way and a clear path for yourself to walk on in the future.
– Selfless service
Selfless service is a great way to put down ego and to become service. Its almost as if selfless service slowly seeps a humble like energy into your mind. Its like it tells you some how, probably could be said more scientifically but it tells you subconsciously that this is a good act and because you are doing it selflessly it helps your mind engender this non self like kind of complex where you stop looking at yourself for once and start looking at everything and the bigger picture. It rubs out the notion of self and the ego. Once we understand what spirituality really is we’ll re-adjust our concepts and notions of what things are and what life is thought to be or what life seems like and get to the part where we actually start to know what it is and what its all about.
Are you currently implementing the teachings given? If not how will you implement the teaching?
I do believe that when it comes to this particular lecture, because I have come to the 1st 3rd of this part of the course I have started to understand what an initiate is meant to do and I have started to bring virtue into everything I do and say as well as serve everyone and everything with respect, humility, virtue and patience. Like when I go to work, I work with students, 90% of them are 18-25 so I get a whole load of trouble and I got to the point where I couldn’t be bothered to do my job properly but now I’m understanding that I can use work as an opportunity to serve people selflessly, no matter how stressed, tired or fed u I get because I see the higher purpose in doing this. There are small things that I do within my day to help keep the virtue and truth in my everyday life.
I do give myself an awfully hard time though, I have always given myself a hard time for not being the best, not being perfect, not being able to do something and I always get upset and annoyed and disappointed with myself and wonder why I am bothering in the first place. It is particularly hard nowadays because I am in a position where I have someone who constantly puts all my effort and my work down when I don’t get things perfect, whether I put my all into it or not I always get put down for not being able to do what they do or understand what they understand and that’s put me in a position where I’m even harder on myself because I’m now disappointing someone else.
But that’s something that also needs to be worked on. I just have not quite figured out the best method to use to make myself not bothered about what this particular person thinks about me.
HTP
