Spiritual Exercise
Sometime, step outside your home and look around the yard. Look at the
plants and the trees and the hedges and you will see something interesting
which is a spiritual lesson. You’ll see that some of the plants and some of
the flowers are green – bright green and thriving. Others are dry, frail,
colorless. Why?
This is a lesson from nature, and it will jump into your mind if you
remember the lesson; and it will help you to transfer it to the spiritual
principle inside. Why are some of the plants green and strong, tall, and
others weak? Underground water, right? Some of them have stretched out
their roots below ground and reached out for it. Others did not.
I am telling you, you will find no better simple example of why most human
beings are indeed frail and scared, have no real life at all. If you want
to change that into being a very lively type of human being, think about
the idea all the time – that the water of life is there. It is yours for
the reaching. (And by the way, another lesson. The green plants don’t have
to have anything to do with the dry ones, and neither must you, whether
that dryness is in you or someone else.)
Most everyone scorns the water of life. How many love the water of life?
Love it more, and it will be so easy to not get entangled with the dreary,
sick affairs of this world. You will indeed get up in the morning and you
will be eager in a new way not to score that business victory, not to find
some way to push away your concealed angers, but you’ll get up, and the
first thing you will think about is to know that you have your Father’s
work to do.
And why does He give us this work? Because He knows it is what we need in
order to grow in the spirit, to grow in knowledge and graciousness of what
life is truly all about. So, there is much work to be done!
Let me emphasize that point for a minute. You can’t go back to your old
ways. STOP IT! What you’ve just heard is enough pure water for you to
absorb and for you to want to know from experience, not from the
dictionary, what the word dedication means. It means you are constantly
catching yourself sound asleep mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Catch
yourself thinking something you shouldn’t at all be thinking, saying
something utterly wasteful just to prove how friendly you are, or how
concerned you are with someone else.
You catch yourself doing wrong things, and having done that, you’re going
to prove to yourself that you can indeed escape yourself. But listen to me,
you do not have…any awareness of how subtly you are deceiving yourself.
And I’ll tell you one of the worst self-deceptions of all. You’ve read the
books; you’ve heard a thousand talks; you’ve talked with other people. You
want to be able to talk to yourself, blab to yourself, lie to yourself and
say, “I know what I’m doing.” You haven’t the slightest notion of what
you’re doing. If you know that about yourself, then there’s a chance for
you. Liars shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Look, knowing how bad it is, is absolutely essential for you to know how
good it can be about spiritual and psychological matters, and all you have
is a mind filled with mechanical motions that you think is power and
spirituality, which it is not.
The only way to shatter that is for you to go out of that door determined
that during your twenty-four hours of each day, you’re going to know how
bad off you really are. And you’re bluffing it and faking it, even when you
try to convince yourself that you know what you’re doing.
God says: “Stay close to Me; that’s all you need.” And when you do that,
no one, nothing, poverty, nothing can ever be a difficulty with you,
because you see, the eternal Truth is health; it is happiness. The heavenly
ways are perfect.
Let God prove Himself to you. Let your entire inner life go. It will be
replaced with what is heavenly.
