What's going on is that our most fundamental ideas about life are not serving us. They never have. But now, with our advances in communication and technology, the situation has become critical - for our mechanisms have outrun our mentality. And so we find ourselves trying to solve the dilemmas of tomorrow with the solutions of yesterday.
We are caught in a trap, a cycle, in which we keep trying to solve the world's problems at every level - except the level at which the problems exist.
The problems in the world today are not political problems, they are not economic problems, and they are not military problems. The problems in the world today are spiritual problems. They have to do with what people believe. They have to do with our most fervently held thoughts and ideas about Life, about God, and most of all, about ourselves, and our very reason for living.
We are not our body, that we have a body, but a body is not who we are. We are that which possesses a body, and that which stands outside of the body, if you please, and exists quite apart and independent from it, and uses the body as a device or tool.
People like Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and other walking masters who have moved through the earth have demonstrated that understanding that they have no needs, far from prohibiting them from experiencing the needs of others, allowed them to experience that others lived inside of the illusion of need and to have great compassion for them.
I think that whatever we encounter in life, we want to encourage a balance between the mind and the soul...and that is to consider about 50% data from the mind and 50% data from the soul. This is what Buddhists call, "the middle way."
Something is amiss, deeply wrong, something is deeply wrong with the way we're living our lives collectively, with the way we are creating our collective experience on earth. And we are coming to the conclusion that the problem after all is not political, that the problem after all is not economic, that the problem after all cannot be solved with bombs or missiles or bullets, but that the problem in fact is spiritual, that the problem with the world today is as it has always been, a problem of our most basic beliefs. Without a doubt it`s a spiritual awakening and a spiritual revolution.
Every great religion on the planet, regardless of what spiritual or cultural tradition from which it is that it emerges, announces and declares that spiritual mastery is an open possibility for every member of the human race. If that is not true, then the highest promise of God is a lie.
I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God.
I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.
The reason people don't know what is good for them is because most people don't know what they are trying to do.
In the previous days and times, we've been involved, not exclusively, but largely, in the process of individual survival: How do I get through the day, how do I get through the week, how do I get through the month? In the 21st century, we're learning that we can no longer concentrate on individual survival strategies, that unless we begin to coalesce those strategies and learn how we can survive collectively, that no individual is going to survive in the long run.
Stopping smoking was most dramatic for me. After 23 years, I picked up a cigarette one day and didn't know why I was doing it. Smoking was no longer in alignment with what I had intended to experience of myself.
