Spread yourself without hesitation and look differently at your pain and joy. Become lawless like raindrops and indifferent to your opinions.
Where do we start?
You are excited about the decision to transform your life and become a spiritual being. You have started reading transformative books, meditating in the morning, eating healthier to feed your body well. And you try to ban forms of negativity and judgment from your life.
I congratulate you on these first steps. But the part of you that initiated all these little efforts is the old self that you must leave behind, in the end. Your thoughts and feelings of doing something right and starting your journey into awakening are controlled by your earthly vessel, which looks at these achievements for selfish reasons.
Do you want people to see you in a different light? Do you like showing off your acquired knowledge and practices? The first important rule for any inner transformation is your invisibility and humility as your imaginary ideas fall slowly apart.
What does spiritual transformation mean?
Spiritual transformation generally relates to achieving higher states of consciousness and a deeper awareness of oneself. One’s perception of reality shifts from a limited, ego-centered focus toward a broader understanding of a deep connection with the universe.
A journey of self-discovery has started within you. You question old beliefs and identifications and try to replace those with new emotions of compassion, gratitude, and kindness.
Although you are breaking free from some egoistic limitations, you are still wandering blindly. You remain within the prison of your lifelong acquired habits and misunderstandings.
At this point in your evolution, it is vital that you do not judge yourself. You must observe your vessel as an intriguing stranger who has started to understand certain things but does not have the strength and will to implement those realizations into your life.
Conscious Beings Showing the Way
No matter which system of transformation you study, the central point is liberating oneself from the attachments of the body and dissolving the ego by connecting with the divine. But how can you shift toward living a life of love and service when you get irritated by minor disturbances and difficulties?
At this point, you need some help and divine grace from above. You need to find a teacher who has transcended herself and has become conscious to guide you toward your liberation.
Without this help, your efforts will only reach so far, and you might lose your inner practice within the necessities of life. Even starting strong in your quest for inner transformation, you will find yourself at one point doubting your efforts and slacking in your convictions and daily practices. At this point, the guidance of a teacher comes in, and the support of fellow students who can see our weaknesses and offer us a helping hand.
Only teachers like Buddha, Jesus, and Meher Baba, gods who became men to teach humanity and bring hope and guidance, needed no one else to reveal themselves. We humans, though, cannot escape this prison without the help of those who have escaped before. And we need to be lucky in finding a teacher who helps us evolve.
We are all Beginners
On our path to spiritual transformation, we must believe in our ability to achieve this goal. Any doubt about fulfilling this aim will hinder our progress. We must be like ‘Hans im Glück’ in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, who sees all hindrances and obstacles as blessings and luck on his journey. No time for self-pity. Everything that comes your way is here to teach and enlighten you. Nothing is random.
If you are destined to evolve, then every human you encounter and every interaction you are faced with is only there to teach you and bring you further along your quest for spiritual transformation. Believing in this concept is insufficient; you must be entrenched in this certainty with all your being. Only then will you discover the meaning of your life. It is not easy to walk this path, but if you understand that you have no more choices and must go this way, no matter where and how, then miracles shall follow miracles, and wonders shall never cease. It is your quest, and no one knows your specific trials, but in the end, it all comes down to one ultimate decision:
’To be or not to be present.’ Good luck on your journey.
Klaus Labuttis, a practitioner of the Fourth Way for four decades, is a frequent contributor to FourthWayToday.org. For more of his articles, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/klaus-labuttis/.
For a related viewpoint on Gurdjieff’s ideas for transformation, see: https://www.gurdjieff.org/hoyt1.htm.