What Should We Strive For?

What do we want to accomplish as spiritual travelers? Sure, we want to experience God, but there is probably little we can do about besides meditating regularly and cutting interferences out to the best of our abilities. 

Should we strive for manifesting everything our heart desires the way the Law of Attraction folks encourage us to? Well, we can try to but having everything our heart desires is unlikely to make us happy either. We cannot visualize the missing God connection; we don't know what peace truly is and are thus unable to manifest it.

What we can do instead is to live life as a Tao master; that is, welcoming life moment by moment. Like an artist we can discover divinity in everything life presents to us. Like a mother we can recognize love wherever we are. God is next to us every step of the Way; all we have to strive for is to be open to the next moment and we can see Her.

The Lesson of the Bamboo Tree

There was once a massive bamboo tree that gave its owner a lot of joy. The tree was very happy and always felt appreciated. But then one day the owner came and said that a storm had devastated a neighbor's roof. So he needed to cut a number of branches to help out. Naturally, the tree was very sad but then it figured that there will still be plenty of branches left over, so the tree agreed.

The tree and the owner lived happily for many more years together but then one day the owner approached the tree again and said that he needed to cut it down as the town was in need of wood to build a bridge to a new school. The tree was devastated and no matter how much it contemplated the situation it just couldn't agree to such a violent act. The owner thanked the tree for its decades of service but reminded it that bamboo trees do not live that long. So if instead it would serve scores of children for decades to come in form of a bridge, it's existence would be so much more meaningful. That made sense to the tree and it graciously gave permission to the owner to be cut.

At home I have a "bible" based on Kerry Spackman's "The Winner's Bible". You write down the stuff that is important to you, you make plans for the future and you record major accomplishments that were really important for you. The bible describes your path and can be altered every day and every step along the Way. Yet, if you are really honest with yourself, you will probably find - like I had to - that there can be conflicts between what you really want and what your spiritual notion of your Self tells you. That's ok, just keep on rearranging and re-defining your goals until one day the vision of yourself merges with your Self. Often it is by getting exactly what you want, but sometimes it is by understanding that a different outcome is more meaningful, just like the bamboo tree had to find out.

That's what a spiritual path does for you, but you have to bring your conflicts out in the open otherwise life cannot interact with you. The worst thing is that you repress what is truly meaningful to you in the name of spirituality. Life will always force everything to the surface, so make it a conscious soul finding process instead. The Winner's Bible can help you!