This is from a sharing John-Roger did with a student in a Peace Theological Seminary Master of Spiritual Science class.

If you want greater spirituality, you can’t force it. You have to put yourself where it is. If your favorite TV show is “Friends,” and it comes on every Monday night at 8:00PM, this is what you need to do if you want to guarantee that you watch it: Shortly before 8:00PM, you sit down in front of the TV, turn it on, turn to the right channel, and wait for “Friends.” That way, you guarantee that you will see it when it comes on.
So, if you want more spirituality, you place yourself in an area or in a way where you can receive of it if it appears or if it happens. If Spirit happens, you’ll be there to receive all of it. If you place yourself in many, many different places to receive it, you will not get what you want; you will spread your energy too thin.
If you want to take a train to New York, you have to find out when the train comes, find out the right place to catch it, and so on. So, let’s say you’re down at the train station, and you ask them, “Does this train go to New York City?”
And they say, “Yes it does. It goes to New York City. It leaves in three minutes.”
You say, “Oh, great. Is there a possibility I can go?” and they say, “I don’t know.” Then what must you do? You must get a ticket and go. Everything says you can go—except the train is full.
Sometimes spirituality works the same way. You’re at the train. It’s going where you want to go. The price is right. You’ve got the money. You’re prepared. You can see the seat you would like, and your heart’s set on it, except for one thing: You don’t have a ticket. And you don’t have a ticket because there’s no ticket to sell. There’s no ticket to sell because the train is full. What are your next choices?
The next sequence of events starts to take place. They’re not your favorites; your favorite was to go right now. If you’re going to go to New York on a train from this station, you don’t have to have faith and trust; you don’t need any metaphysical help. This is called practical spirituality. You can’t get on the train you want, so you stand there with your bags. There goes the train to New York, and you’re not on it. You start to cry. That doesn’t get you on the train. So, all of a sudden you realize, “Why am I crying? I’m still not getting on the train.” You see that crying is ineffective behavior.
Then you may say, “I’ll stand here until another train to New York shows up.” That’s like standing in front of the TV set until “Friends” comes on. You can do that, but how long are you going to stand until the train shows up? There’s got to be some shortcut in this, some different way of managing what you want.
Here’s what I’d do: I’d look for the place at the train station that says “Information” because I don’t have any, and I’d walk up to them and say, “I need some information.” I know that’s their job because that’s what the sign says.
So they say, “How may I help you?” and I say, “I want to know when the next train leaves for New York, and can I get on it?”
They say, “Yes, you can, and the next train for New York leaves in an hour and ten minutes on track 8.” That’s important information—where it’s leaving from. So I write down “track 8” because maybe my memory’s going to fail me. (It does often.)
Then I say, “How much is a ticket?”
The information person says, “Well, there are three different kinds of tickets. There’s coach; that means you sit up all night, but you can still go to sleep if you can manage it. There’s also a sleeping chair that’s going to recline. And the third one is a sleeper, where for three days on the trip, you’ll have a place to sleep every night.”
You have the information, and now you have to choose. (You also have to choose regarding your spirituality.) You want to make sure that when you choose the New York train, you don’t go to Chicago unless that train is going on into New York. You also have to find out if they serve food, since on a three-day trip, you can get a little hungry. You can probably understand the practicalness in all this. But it’s still spiritual because you’re conversing inwardly with yourself to find what’s next, what’s next?
Now say that you decided to take the sleeping car, so you’re going to be luxurious about it. “Do I have sheets in there so I can make a bed?”
“Oh, yeah. Sheets come with it, good sheets.”
“What kind?”
“Combed cotton.”
“Don’t you have silk? I’d like silk.” (Those are the indulgences that we put on ourselves now that we know we are on the train and the train is going.)
They say, “No, we don’t have any silk ones. But if you have some, we’d be glad to put them on the bed for you.”
Then you get a chance to look around your sleeper, and you ask, “Is there a TV in here?”
Are these ridiculous questions? No. They’re questions you might ask if you are going to indulge yourself in a sleeper because maybe you’d like to lie in bed and watch television as you roll through the countryside. A really good question would be, “How does the toilet work?” With all this, there’s a next sequence of events that is the cause of the next sequence of events that causes the next sequences of events based upon your choice.
So, if you decide to come to a PTS master’s class and get the information, all the information you’re going to get here is about how to get on the train, where the train goes, the tickets, the price, the time, the food, the TV, the toilet, the sheets. All that is in the 10-percent level. The only thing in there that would be spiritual is, you inside of you want to go to New York.
So, what part of it becomes spiritual? You get on the train and go, and that’s the Soul travel. The train is designed to go and take you where it wants you to go. You made sure about that when you got on the train.
In riding a train, maybe you had the experience of passing your point of destination and had to call someone to pick you up two stops down the line. But what if you weren’t able to make the phone call? A good choice is to go into the train station where you got off and ask what you could do to get to your original destination. Now you’re after information.
Maybe they say, “Give this lady a ticket to two stations back. And then kick her off because she might over-shoot it again.” They might or might not say that, but they will tell you where to get off the train. Those are what we call guides in life, the things that clue us in.
This whole thing has been a 10-percent-level approach, except for the part where you got on, took your Soul and got everything settled down, got quiet, and went into the spiritual consciousness. Then you’re on your way.
Baruch Bashan.