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How are we to understand the soul? What is the purpose of Spirituality? What do we need to live Spiritually? What does Spirituality Involve? What kind of work should I be doing? What I am supposed to be doing?
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Getting Real 6
Why
is it we fail?
Perceived
failure is one of the major causes of disillusionment and turning away
from a spiritual path. It is worth trying to understand what happens to
our intentions and inspiration after we consider that we have committed
ourselves.
There
is something intoxicating about new beginnings. To be committing to
something, be it a decision or course of action is usually a good place in
which to find oneself. It is to be in a place of possibility and, as yet,
free from direct experiences of the difficulties and sacrifices involved
in the realising of possibility. It is a place of creative freedom and
making resolutions tends to give the comforting sense that we have control
in our own lives and that we can make our lives different, more in line
with the way we think they should be. Yet we should be aware that the forces of resistance are lying in wait because they have been lying in wait since the world began, and we will experience their most serious challenges during the 3rd-4th hour after commencing the course of action, and then again on the 3rd-4th day; the 3rd-4th week; the 3rd- 4th month and in what will prove to be the 3rd-4th year - if we can still remember when we began. These challenges will either defeat our intention or they will draw from us a renewed commitment and effort. Everything in manifestation
is subject to the Law of Vibration or the Law of Octaves, which we readily
recognise, in the musical scale, if not in daily life. It will be either
descending (creative) or ascending (evolutionary). The vibration from the
original impulse whether that of God or that of man, proceeds uniformly
for a while and then is subject to retardation before resuming a uniform
rate once more. During retardation our plans undergo challenge.
Retardation occurs at the mi-fa interval.
It is the reason why there are no straight lines in Nature and why courses
of action all so frequently produce the very reverse of their intended
goal. The
Ascending Octave interval 4
fa The
Descending Octave interval 6
mi The phenomenon, which is our
solar system, is on the descending octave; the consciousness of man is on
the ascending octave. The Law of Vibration works through time and those
units of time with which the human brain is cognisant. One might say that the purpose of spirituality is to get human consciousness passed the mi-fa interval, to build the causal body, which is the bridge between the soul and the personality, and then to function as a personality under the control of the soul.
The
Personality
The Soul do
- the physical body
sol
- the first aspect (personality in
toto) Re
- the emotional body
la
- the second aspect mi
- the mental body
si
- the third aspect
fa - the causal body
do -
integrated man Any course of action to which
we commit ourselves or any decision made becomes a manifested, evolving
entity and, therefore, subject to the law of the ascending octave and
subject to time. We will encounter the retardation of vibration in all our
plans and we always will because it
is a fact of life in the world of manifestation. Where plans and intentions
are concerned, the retardation of vibration will manifest as loss of
enthusiasm for the project, external resistance to the intention or
confusion about the purpose or the validity and value of the original
plan. Retardation is one of the givens of any situation involving new
beginnings. It challenges us to raise the stakes of our own intentions and
to review and revise our own efforts and strategies. Consider the role of
spiritual crises: they are a challenge delivered by the soul, a higher
level, to the personality, the aim of which is to get the personality
functioning with a higher level of awareness. The best that we can offer in
the way of a response to the process of retardation is acknowledgement of
its existence, preparedness for it, an acceptance of the creative
potential contained within it, if we can bring in the right kind of action
to supplement the slowing vibration, and a realisation that we can pick up
and if necessary start again. Awareness of the workings of the Law of
Vibration should not remain a theoretical consideration. The workings of
this law need to be recognised in our daily lives. It is easy enough to
recognise when we know what we are looking for: it is omnipresent. We will
help ourselves greatly if we can involve other people who can deliver to
us the reminders we need at the time when the retardation of vibration is
in evidence. Whether we perceive it as coming from within ourselves or
from the external world, we will
meet resistance internal or external. Of that there is no question and so
we may as well organise ourselves to meet it. Where there is not
preparedness then there is all too often confusion and disappointment.
Spiritual thinking, which focuses only upon the positive experience and
upon attainment, usually of some advanced goal, does not prepare us to
recognise and to deal with inevitable
loss of momentum and changes of mood. In such circumstances, the
appearance of challenge is frequently experienced, as failure to attain
what, in all probability, is an inappropriately high standard - nothing
short of an altered reality. Thus, the place of new beginnings becomes the
place of an all too familiar sense of failure unless we learn how to keep
things going - whether it is a diet or a practice because we have decided
that they have a value, regardless of whether we feel like it. Losing
weight, exercising and keeping up to date with correspondence do not lose
their intrinsic value. What changes is the degree of
enthusiasm we feel for the undertaking. This usually diminishes. We have
to learn first, therefore, to dissociate our plans and decisions from our
fluctuating emotional reactions to them. We have to learn first how to
keep a show on the road, regardless of how we are feeling. We have to
learn first how to work with a familiar reality and, in doing this; it
helps greatly to be aware and prepared for the retardation intervals. What matters is not how many
times we fail by our own standards; what matters is that we pick ourselves
up and continue to work towards what we consider to be important. Failure
is a perception, created by a focus upon the destination and placing
insufficient value upon the journey. When we are focused on attainment we
are too selective; we do not see what the struggle itself is achieving or
what it is teaching us for future reference. What is true in reference to
a specific goal is true with reference to our lives as a whole. It is egotism and
self-dramatisation that makes us make a big event out of our perceived
failures. Breast-beating and despondency serve no useful purposes
whatsoever. They simply dramatise the situation. Why not pick up quietly
and go on, wiser now about ourselves and more aware of what our plans need
from us? This way we save our own energy and other people’s time. Spirituality is about
journeying. It involves taking wrong turnings, losing the way, falling and
running out of steam. Spirituality also provides the reasons why we keep
on struggling, the motivation to pick ourselves up and the means to learn
from our mistakes. Spirituality is always about awareness, effort and
application and only sometimes about a sense of achievement. Its concern
is to provide the goals and the sense of purpose, which keep us struggling
against the forces of resistance in order to achieve something more than
mere survival. Challenge is the warp, and the efforts of the human kingdom
to meet this challenge, are the weft of evolutionary achievement. To evolve in his
consciousness, man, individually and collectively, has to go up the down
staircase provided by Nature. Nature does not need humanity to evolve
beyond a certain point. Nature does not need us to bridge the mi-fa
interval in consciousness because she has her own ways of getting what she
needs from mankind and her means are epidemics, wars and mass destruction.
To evolve in consciousness
and to become what we can be, all of us, individually and collectively,
have to have goals and targets, which provide us with criteria for
discernment and consistency. Without a sense of purpose and without goals
we become simply consumers, grabbing greedily and indiscriminately at
whatever comes our way, changing our minds, losing faith and enthusiasm
and turning round on the same spot until we sink exhausted and
unfulfilled. It is in struggling to
arrange our time and energy in order to achieve what we consider to be
important that we make a contribution. We process energy, we live more
intelligently and we keep hope and, therefore, possibility alive.
Spirituality is working with what we know and taking the responsibility to
pick ourselves up and carrying on with what we still consider to be
important after the forces of resistance have challenged us and knocked us
off course and made us reconsider. The greatest betrayal of all
is to persuade ourselves that something is no longer important when we
know that it is, and to side-step the challenge in order to avoid making
an effort and to avoid the possibility of failing. That is to put out our
own light and sabotage our own potential. That is probably the only real
failure. Working
with the Law of Octaves is the subject of other website articles:
Harnessing Spirit. |
The DK
Foundation
