Islands

Religion it's self is a system of beliefs,values, customs etc. regarding something or someone that is transcendental to the material creation. Yet despite this, the religious have always been quarreling about why their particular color of skin is God's favorite. However in order to truly understand spiritual truth, we must first accept the most basic yet essential fact about ourselves, that we are not these bodies but eternal, wise, and blissful spirit souls. Once we are able to give up identification with the body, we lessen our intense envy for those who are more beautiful or materialy advanced than us and we put much less focus on our material situation, realizing that home, where you belong is elsewhere. This mental health improvement allows us to begin to develop a genuine sense of compassion, and as the intensity of our material hankerings has decreased the mind can finally focus and begin to comprehend something spiritual. How can we hope to understand something spiritual while maintaining a materialistic mindset? It is in fact impossible to gain any spiritual wisdom while influenced by a materialistic standpoint. Materialism is, I want to conform the world to my desires. Because we have been endowed with free will, we can surely retain this mentality for as long as we want, however we will only find ourselves in deeper and more severe situations of suffering and confusion. With this type of mentality any spiritual wisdom heard passes through the wry filter of your mind and the message becomes distorted. Basically, you hear what you want to hear and again, we have free will so we of course can go on with our selective hearing eternally, but we will only reach lower and lower levels of consciousness until we are worse than the dog and hog. This is so because spiritual wisdom does not conform to your desires, neither does God. Thats why in this materialistic world everyone is suffering and no one can see God. God and the truths regarding him are not subject to our misconceptions and imperfect senses, they will go one existing eternally as they are, perfectly. Thus in order to perceive something spiritual you must develop a spiritual state of mind. The spiritual mindset is the opposite of a material one, spiritual mindset is realizing that since time immemorial, you have been in ignorance. You have been a slave to your senses constantly catering to their every impulsive whim whether it be food, sex, intoxication, all the while thinking yourself the controller whose sole purpose is to rearrange the world in a way that provides you with optimal enjoyment. The spiritual mindset is feeling disgust and remorse at the materialistic way of living, having foreseen the impudence and the suffering felt by yourself and others when selfishness rules over someone. The spiritual mindset is surrendering to the higher power that is within you and without you. That which connects not only everything in this world or this universe but everything in all existence known and unknown. That surrender entails giving up the designation of being "the knower" for as as long as we go through life thinking we understand everything, we leave no opportunity to actually advance towards a deeper level of understanding. By thinking we know everything we shut down that which doesn't appeal to our current frame of reference, which for most of us is very limited. Most of us live in one place for a very long time and we grow accustomed to that place and the lens from which we perceive things is very heavily influenced by that place. For example if someone lives their whole life on a secluded tropical island, they may think that the entire world is a tropical island. If you try to tell this person who's mind is only accustomed to tropical weather that there are places where it snows all the time, they will not understand. Now the person can either admit he doesn't understand and then become more educated on the reality of planet earth or he can think, "No, this person is crazy, I know what I'm talking about" and continue to live in ignorance. I think that we all live on our own little "tropical island" and I know that there is a whole world, a whole universe out there to explore full of beauty, truth, adventure and satisfaction. But in order to see whats really out there, we first must admit that our little island isn't the only thing available, that in fact there is much more to this life than meets the eye. Developing a more spiritual mentality takes a lot of patience and determination but by gradually lessening our tendency to identify with material nature and realizing arrogance is ignorance we gain access to the ocean of boundless, illuminative and eternal wisdom.