Tag: spiritual progress

Q: I’ve Been Self-Employed for 20 years, and It’s Sort Of Tiring. What’s the Difference Between Working for Myself and Getting a Job, Spiritually?

BigMe explains to little me the spiritual difference between having a j-o-b and being self-employed.

A: There’s quite a big difference actually. Why is this? When you work for yourself, all the responsibility rests on your shoulders, you get to see the fruits of your actions directly. When you work for somebody else, you don’t take responsibility for everything. Someone else is in charge. If something fails, you can blame it on somebody else. If something succeeds, it’s because of somebody else. Working for yourself is ideal for spiritual discernment and progress. That being said, if you find yourself in a good stable job making good money, with benefits, this may also add your spiritual progress because the fact that it will be low-stress, and It will give you more of an opportunity to work on your spirituality and your practice. Like everything, discernment between the two is needed. However, if you feel yourself pulled up to your own business, that would be ideal for spiritual growth.

Q: What Should My Practice Be and Why?

A: There are many great practices out there. The key to any practice however, is consistency. Part of the big problem with any kind of spirituality today is learning about the spirituality instead of practicing it. For instance, putting in fact, or practice, what it says in the Didache will help you make serious spiritual progress. The same can be said of the Noble Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism. But it must be practiced. And Ideal practice for anybody would be to take any spiritual principle, from the Didache, the Noble Eight-Fold Path, the Neti Neti practice, anything, and do it consistently, every day. It’s also a good idea not to skip around too much. Doing the Neti Neti practice one day, then looking at the Didache one day, and the Noble Eight-Fold Path another day, it’s kind of like starting a different project each day. It’s best to pick one project, and finish it before going on to the next. That being said, you don’t have to become enlightened before you switch spiritual paths. There’s a specific type of discernment that has to be learned.  Any spiritual principle, if really practiced with intensity and earnestness, will reap huge spiritual benefits. Some of the most powerful spiritual principles to put into effect each day are ones that you were already aware of. Things like being as honest as possible with yourself and others as long as it hurts nobody are great spiritual principles. Another one is to try to see the world through another person’s eyes; this will help you develop compassion for other people. Compassion eventually leads to unconditional love. Another great spiritual practice is focusing completely on the moment, instead of projecting oneself into the future or the past. Another great spiritual principle is to focus completely on the sense of self. What that feels like, both mentally, and viscerally. All of these are great principles, and great paths that will lead two serious spiritual progress.

Q: Is it Important to Live in an Area of Higher Consciousness?

BigMe explains how where you live is important to your spiritual journey.

A: Living in a higher-calibrating area would help. However, just because it would help doesn’t mean it’s necessarily something that you should pursue. Everybody has specific things that they have to learn in life. Just because it may be easier to live in a high-calibrating area, for spiritual progress, does not mean that it’s right for you. Maybe in a lower-calibrating area would be better to learn the things that you need to learn.  That being said, being in a lower-calibrating area would certainly have a greater chance to pull you down. For instance, let’s take for example the Internet. If you spend a lot of time surfing the Internet, Facebook, and things like that, it’s going to gradually get into your psyche, and inhibit spiritual progress to a large degree. The same thing is true for where you live. If you’re surrounded by negativity, ugliness, and negative people, unless you are strong and steady enough in your own spirituality, it’s going to be easy to be dragged down by these tendencies. So to sum up, living in a higher-calibrating area has more of a tendency to pull you up, but that might not be your destiny. Just keep these things in mind wherever you live.