Spiritual direction
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 5 years before Dec 18, 2018
maryada 5 years ago
I feel that I want to develop the spiritual wisdom and power to direct my spirit. I want to be free and prepared to experience higher levels of consciousness. I am so looking forward to experiencing visits form my guides, lucid dreams and astral projection and a deeper level of understanding I know this will take lots of discipline and practice.
MiBeloved 5 years ago
If that is the case, then step number one is to partition out your social budget so that you split it up into parts and know how much energy and time you will invest in what part of your life.
On a computer as you know there is a hard drive. In some hard drives there are partitions which mean that it only has a certain amount of file space and no more on a certain part of the drive. In other drives, there is no partition which means that it is open until the entire disc is filled up.
Books won’t help with this except to spur you on. To begin read the Uddhava Gita. First read the Uddhava Gita English so that you can get an overview of the book. As you get that overview jot down the chapters which have to do with curtailing social life. For instance there is a part in the latter part of the book about an Avanti brahmin. There is a part in the earlier part of the book about two parent birds which were captured by a hunter. Note those parts in the English pocket book, and then find those chapters in the Uddhava Gita Explained and read them.
As you read let me know how you are integrating that and how you are seeing where you can apply that in your life.
If you have much social outlay of expenses, which means many responsibilities for people, then it will be a task to get that budget reduced.
How much percentage of your emotional and time expenditure do you want to invest in personal spiritual practice?
How much helping others with their spiritual practice?
What part of your life do you want to invest in just ordinary social relationships which have no spiritual impact?
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Take a serious look at influence. Your social involvement, when it is for spiritual reasons and otherwise, means expression of your influence, as well as absorption of the influence of others.
For us, influence is everything. There is no escaping it.
How do we budget that?
Suppose I run a free food kitchen, how do I determine how to limit my time with that so that I can partition some time for my personal spiritual practice?
I have to deal with the influence of those in need. Then there are those who contribute money and produce to make this happen. There is the satisfaction which I get from doing this.
Can I curtail either of those influences even my satisfaction which influences me to expand the kitchen beyond any limit.
