The 4 Indispensable Ingredients to Spiritual Life

1. Your Highest Goal

If you want to improve your life more than cosmetically you need 4 things: the right goal, the right motivation, the right skills and the right guidance.

Everyone wants to be free of suffering and be more comfortable – but that in itself is not the right goal.

Just look: the whole world wants comfort and can’t find it in all their efforts. Everyone runs this way and that in their search and whatever they find, sooner or later they lose it again. They may be happy for a while, but then disasters strikes again.

~ Old age, sickness and death are inevitable, as the Buddha taught.

So we need to aim for something more than comfort: we need to aim to be free. Freedom or enlightenment or knowing who you truly are – that alone will bring you the permanent happiness you yearn for.  And just like striving for comfort, working toward freedom takes effort. More precisely, it takes effort with wisdom. This will make all the difference!

Today the market place is filled with offerings created by many who may have good intentions but cannot teach us from the space of enlightenment. These methods may bring you comfort – but not freedom. ~They may also confuse you.

Nothing is bad if it serves you and we all want comfort. There is nothing wrong with comfort at all. But for me, if I already make efforts I want them to bring me what I am really seeking. And temporary comfort that will fall apart again is not what I seek.

~ I am seeking the supreme comfort that can come only from true enlightenment.

We have all been striving for comfort for uncounted life times. How many more will it take until we get serious enough in our spiritual aspiration to stop deluding us with nice spiritual toys and get real?  I had to ask myself this many times on my journey, and each time I got a little more real, a little more focused on doing the work of liberation instead of chasing great spiritual experiences that didn’t set me free.

So choose wisely how you spend your time. If you make great progress going into the wrong direction, what good is all the effort you are making?

Next time we’ll talk about Intention!

Be well,

Ram Giri