The key to your spiritual progress
Do you ever find it difficult to make time to focus on your spiritual growth?
Life is busy. It can be difficult to accomplish all that we need to in our daily lives and also find time to focus on living spiritual lives.
Maybe you’ve had a long day or you’ve woken up feeling groggy. Sometimes the last thing you feel like doing is concentrating on a profound spiritual teaching or practice.
We have all made excuses:
I just don’t feel like it right now … I wouldn’t be able to do them properly with the way that I am feeling … I just have too much else to do right now.
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Focusing on our spiritual path can help us in numerous ways. But if we give in to these excuses that keep us from making our spirituality our focus, we won’t be able to make meaningful progress.
Dr. George King gave a lecture in 1981 entitled “The Key to your Spiritual Progress.” In this lecture he encourages us not to wait for a future life to actively work towards our own enlightenment, but to do so now.
He said the spiritual seeker:
“must have a yearning desire, which fills his very soul, to learn all he can and to absorb this, and practice these teachings—a yearning desire, above everything else—and this is the acid test. Not very easy. It’s very, very difficult. Then, the road to enlightenment is a long, arduous one.”
Dr. King also reminds us that the spiritual path is a difficult one, and our progress is really up to us:
“In the early days, I found—like everyone else has always found before—that the more I practiced, the more discipline I exercised over myself, the more I knew. You know, you will not—doesn’t matter who tells you otherwise, it makes no difference—you will not ever experience a mystical state such as Cosmic Consciousness unless you work really, really hard for it.
There’s no easy way. There’s a quick way and a long way. The quick way is by far the most dangerous, by far the most difficult. The long way is much safer. But whichever way you take you must work very, very, very hard. And it’s up to you.
You can say, “weIl in the next life it might come, or the life afterwards it might come.” Or you can say, as I did, “It’s got to come now. I can’t wait for the next life. Definitely not. Now it’s gonna come.”
Richard Lawrence has been the Executive Secretary of the European Jurisdiction of The Aetherius Society for over 40 years.
Through decades of focusing on Service to others and prioritizing living a spiritual life, he has been able to have incredible experiences.
In a recent blog post A Cosmic Realization of the Purpose of Life – in One Word he talks about his spiritual journey and the heights it has led him to.
Something you can try
Different affirmations help in different ways. Try the below affirmation, without strain, but with full conviction, like you really mean it. While just before you go to bed is a good time to use affirmations, you can do so anytime. In fact, Dr. King recommended repeating this affirmation hundreds of times a day.
“I am the Divine Presence which is creating perfection throughout my whole life.”
Was there a moment when you knew that you wanted to make your spiritual efforts a priority? Feel free to share your story with me.