Shop
Close 
LANGUAGE

New Day Herald

Use Everything To Your Advantage

 

The ultimate weapon with which to forge personal happiness, fulfillment and upliftment is your attitude. You can enter into an attitude of thankfulness and walk through some of the strangest, most difficult times, knowing that “this too shall pass,” and it does. -John-Roger

This article by John-Roger was first published in The Movement Newspaper, April 1982

There is nothing on this planet that can “do it for you.” You and you alone are responsible for your life and your actions. But discovering the Spirit of God present inside of you can turn you from all the hurts of this world and bring you immediate fulfillment. The nice thing about that is, you don’t have to go out into the world to prove anything.

When you discover the spiritual center inside of you, the place where you reside as an extension of God living in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is a contentment that surpasses understanding. Certainly it surpasses any vocabulary you can put on it. The peace of God has been talked about by philosophers and sages and avatars since time began, and they all have missed the essence of it. God and the awareness of God are not part of any doctrine nor are they anyone’s exclusive property. God has written the message of His presence in each and every heart. It’s as present for you as it has ever been for the greatest of holy men.

God dwells within you as you. Your job is to come into a greater and greater awareness of that God within. As you do, you enter into the joy of spiritual consciousness, and then you want to go out into the world and do something with it. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. As soon as you go “out there,” you’ve moved away from your awareness of God and entered into frailty and potential failure. When you have sensed the perfection of God within you, the imperfection of this physical level can be difficult, indeed, to handle.

When the world gets a little rough and you feel far away from your spiritual center, you say, “Oh, God I’ll give up anything, just to be close to you.” However, too often you put conditions on that statement, such as, “I’ll give up anything but I’d like to keep…” Conditions just don’t work when you’re dealing with Spirit. You have to be really willing to give up anything and everything. And when you are ready to give it all up to God and honestly call, “Help!” from deep within yourself, Spirit responds and you do get the help. Along with it, you get a deeper awareness of God’s presence in your life, and you get joy and bliss and all sorts of good things.

And sometimes all that comes right along with a garbage truck, because when you’ve been involved in the negativities and impurities of this level, there is no way that you can hold the energy of God inside of you until you take care of cleaning up some areas in your life. It might be that you need to clean up physical things like drug or alcohol addiction. It might be cleaning up areas of emotional imbalance like anger or jealousy. Maybe it’s cleaning up areas of mental confusion brought about by reading or listening to too many people without being responsible to yourself by checking out the validity of the teachings you read and hear. All those areas of imbalance will block your awareness of Spirit and keep you bound to this level.

When the fullness of God’s “good news” starts coming into you, you will go through a strengthening process. Do you think athletes who have tremendous physical strength and ability got that way without going through a strengthening process? Do you think they always found the process fun and easy? They strained and groaned and put up with aches and pains and misery, looked in the mirror and couldn’t see their growth, and then finally moved into the fulfillment of their process and reaped the benefits.

It’s the same kind of process when you enter into the Spirit. You are strengthened. You are tied to the very moment of your breath and must perform in that moment to gain the spiritual strength. And it’s too often true that you gain the greatest strength through adversity rather than through contentment, complacency, and everything being fine and dandy. If you’re smart, when the adversity comes upon you, you’ll welcome it and use it to your greatest advantage, getting everything you can out of it, learning every nuance of the lessons presented.

Even that which you call despair is a part of God. God is multifaceted, and because God is God, all things are always in their proper place. So it is only the attitude that is variable. The ultimate weapon with which to forge personal happiness, fulfillment and upliftment is your attitude. You can enter into an attitude of thankfulness and walk through some of the strangest, most difficult times, knowing that “this too shall pass,” and it does.

Attitude is one of the primary areas you deal with as you move into greater awareness of Spirit in your life. If you have the attitude of separation, “Why is this happening to me? Why me, Lord?” you’re really going to create a lot of unhappiness. But if you turn that attitude around and discover the very beingness of God in all that you do, all the time, then your life will move into a deeper sense of joy and fullness.

People say to me, “Doesn’t it bother you that it’s raining and the canyon is flooding?” I say, “No, that’s really in line with what I want.” Then later they might say, “Doesn’t it bother you when there’s a drought and everything dries up and there’s danger of fire?” I say, “No, that’s right in line with what I want.” They say, “Do you really want all that?” I say, “No, I don’t necessarily want anything, but when it comes in, that’s okay. It’s just really fine.” They say, “But look what it’s doing!” I say, “I see what it’s doing. It’s letting us look at our weaknesses so we can strengthen them. It’s making us become responsible to our own process of upliftment, to that very thing that is energizing our life.” Use everything to learn and grow from; that’s when you make your life valuable to your spiritual evolvement.

Perhaps you are married, and you let your spouse bring adversity to you in some way. Or you have children, and you let your children bring adversity to you by way of schoolmates, teachers or principals, or by their spouses and your grandchildren. The moments of adversity go on until one day you say, “I’m really strong inside.”

The process is an on-going one. As long as you live on this planet and involve yourself in the falderal of the world, the processing continues. You are processed by the things you get involved with, but if there is not a value and a sense of purpose beyond the process, all you’ve done is make a circle upon yourself, Then you feel ripped off or feel like you have been abused by other people. But it is always your own greed or your own negativity that rips you off. You can never be taken advantage of unless you allow it.

And in the same way you can never take advantage of an honest person. You cannot take advantage of a person who is not responding from their greed, because if they are not being greedy, they just say, “No, I don’t need that. Thank you, but no, give it to someone else.” Those people who have that kind of integrity are those who live in great security inside of themselves.

You can maintain your center of spiritual awareness, have the security of your own integrity and still participate in the world and be involved in the fullness of your life. You can complete the things that you have contracted to do in this life. And you will have the ability to discern those things of which you are not a part and the strength to say “no” to what is not yours. That’s one of the benefits of becoming more aware of Spirit’s presence within you.

The movement of spiritual inner awareness is a process within you. The Consciousness of the Mystical Traveler is not a process. It’s the processor. It brings you in and turns you every way but loose, shakes everything around you and says, “Here is what you are, the pearl of great price, the wisdom of the ages; the beingness you have been looking for is present within you.” Until you know that truth, you attempt to follow the truth in others as you perceive it. And that’s okay, but always, always check out the “truth” others present to you, lest someone in the guise of spirituality comes and leads you astray.

Books can lead you astray as easily as people. If you would not be led astray, practice the process of meditation or spiritual exercises which will reveal to you the spiritual being inside of you that is the “micro” and the “macro” at exactly the same point. Used to their advantage, words – whether written or spoken – can be used as a modus operandi by which you can unlock yourself to yourself. Be careful that you don’t hypnotize yourself with beautiful words that are empty of truth and righteousness.

At some point, you have to go beyond all the words, ideas, concepts, and ideals and you have to enter into yourself, without illusions or embellishment.

As you begin to express your Self, people start coming around you because you awaken the Self that is also their center. The “center” you recognize as the God within awakens the “center” in their Self which is also God, and all becomes One, which is the “at-one-ment” that brings such peace and contentment. It’s the richness that comes with living the essence of Spirit in every moment of your life.

Seek always to awaken yourself to the Spirit within you. There are a lot of ways to do that, and all of them are fine. Find the way that works for you. And always, follow the love of your spiritual heart, for it will lead you home to God.

Baruch Bashan

WATCH A SHORT VIDEO WITH JOHN-ROGER

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *