[NOTE: This post coincides with the Portland Conference Call from September 23, 2014]

You might say that evidence of human maturity is humility.

Life is a process if we know how to take advantage of its lessons. It can help us become aware of our limitations as well as our strengths. We learn how to maneuver through the domain of family, relationships, work, aging, illness and death. Our hopes and dreams become our disappointments and disillusionments. Life wears us down and in the process we become wise. At this point it sometimes happens that the universe opens for us and we enter into the next stage of development, and the mature spiritual path begins. This is what happened to me. This is the path I teach.

As a seed sends out a shoot that pushes its way upward through the darkness of the soil eventually breaking through into a new domain of existence for it, one filled with energy, light, wind and rain, so too is a human life just the first stage of our own natural development. The spiritual path begins when we awaken from our slumber in the soil of our human life and wake up into the next step of our journey –  spiritual life.

People often have the wrong idea about the spiritual path. It is not just about having high states, ecstatic visions and bliss. It’s not just about insights and revelations. It’s not even about attaining enlightenment. Any or all of these things may happen as they did to me, but these are just evidence of a universal process of maturation that we are all engaged in, a continuation of the same process as our human life but in a different domain of existence.

If we are able to meet the challenges of our human life then we are more capable of meeting these challenges on the spiritual path. If we are still undeveloped, if there are areas of our nature that are immature, where ego still dominates, then these things will become the obstacles and blockages we encounter in our spiritual development.  Then the spiritual path can be very difficult.

Ultimately, the spiritual path is about revealing what is hidden in us; dismantling our ego; releasing our true nature from its error of identification with mind, life and body. The spiritual path is not an easy process and should not be sought prematurely. No self-respecting ego would enter the spiritual path before it is ready.

My work is to show people how to collaborate with the natural maturation process each of us, in fact, all of mankind is going through. I have traveled this journey myself and have learned the secrets. I am, like all truly awakened spiritual teachers, a farmer tending nature’s garden of evolving souls.

QUESTIONS

Why is immaturity a problem on the spiritual path?

What about all the people pursuing the spiritual path who do not have maturity? What happens to them?

What are the signs of immaturity?

How is humility a sign of maturity?

What are some of the other indicators of maturity?

Describe your own maturing process?

What happened to you that had you become a spiritual teacher?

What kinds of immaturity did you see in yourself and others and how did this make the spiritual path more difficult?

What are the indicators that can tell someone they are making progress?

Is there a way of accelerating the maturation process?

Photo by Norrington1