Be Good Before You Do Good
The best you can do is to change yourself and then sustain that. If you can achieve that and start knowing yourself properly, then you have fulfilled what you have been created for. You don’t need to do any more than that. A lot of spiritual fantasy stems from learning from many religions and preaching to others how they should live, how they should love, how they should practice. This approach is dominating and suppressive and you can witness this in many religions. People are either born into religion or they join because they feel their heart needs that connection, but then they find they are limited rather than liberated. In this way, religion becomes institutionalised.
However, as a seeker, you should not look at religion as the cause of that. It is us causing the problem as humans. All religions have essentially the same message and it’s a message of love; you were created from that love and given experience so that you can be above any other creation. In relation to the cosmos we are nothing, yet we have been given that affection and love and importance within it. Rumi, the Sufi mystic, is right when he says we sell ourselves cheap! We are unaware of the importance of our own being. We are so distracted by worrying about other people, thinking that we are being very spiritual if we attend to others, yet the key point is that you first have to attend to yourself. Once you have done that and tried to be a better person, you have helped humanity as a whole.
Humanity doesn’t really require the external corrective help that we ordinarily apply to social problems around the world. What is really required is the pure correction of the individual and the principle of love between ourselves. But this love should be real love, not based on greed or the support of the ego.
It is very difficult for the seeker to be on guard against these issues caused by the vibration and expansion of the heart. We have had so many retrievals and have heard reports about how lovely the experience was, yet people don’t perceive what is happening underneath that. It is the teacher who is working unconditionally and giving freely because he has felt the Absolute energy and the pure love inherent in that. Once your heart feels that connection you feel the same, you do not expect any return, you just do it for love. That is a hard thing to do in today’s society which is based on the gratification of the individual. We are influenced in such a way that we have the constant expectation of ‘what can I get out of this?’ We have really become slaves to that greed but free people are those who give and because of that giving they receive far more than those who expect to gain or are seeking gratification.
