 The Spiritual StandardThe fourth flag waves lightly in even the
slightest breeze. Nearly transparent when in shadow, it catches every gleaming ray of the
sun and scatters it in brilliant, dazzling colors. This is the Spiritual Standard, the
fourth dimension of the human experience.
The sign of the Dove graces this
banner, an international symbol of peace among nations and between humans and Heaven. The
dove coos softly, and if you don’t cock your ear and listen, you could easily miss
it.
On the other hand, what often seem
like small things can have a surprisingly large impact. Think of what the olive branch
must have meant to Noah when the dove carried it back to the ark. Such a small sign of
hope can buoy your spirits and give you the strength to wade through even the darkest
trials.
Spirituality has many meanings to
different people, but the most important element is that it is capable of both supplying
incredible power to your life and significantly enhancing every other standard and aspect
of your life. It brings peace, comfort, enlightenment, wisdom, guidance, strength, health
and even miracles.
Just as with other standards,
results may come quickly or slowly, but if you’re sincerely trying, they always come.
Billions of people have learned this through personal experience. Keep right on trying,
even through discouraging times; they don’t last forever.
T wo final notes before moving on to describe the various elements of the Spiritual Standard: 1. Don’t think you will get 50% of the benefits from the Spiritual Standard by putting in a 50% effort. This standard works in the opposite way of the Physical Standard. Where the Physical Standard gives most of its benefits from the earliest efforts, with diminishing returns as you fine tune every last detail, the Spiritual Standard begins with a few benefits available to everyone, and increases exponentially as you draw near the limits of your abilities to follow whatever guidance and wisdom you receive. When you stretch and sacrifice, Heaven responds ten or a hundred fold. 2. Personal revelation is often subtle and can be quite easy to misunderstand, and you’re not rewarded only for effort. Heaven often seems more interested in teaching you to get it right. If it’s not working out as you expected, you may just have to be patient, but you would also be wise to double check that you’re doing it "right."
Regardless of your personal beliefs about what exactly Heaven is made of or what it expects of you, certain threads run through most religions and an awareness of each will provide additional tools to maximize your benefit of them. Read through with an open mind, finding ways to apply each of the following elements to your own life and your own benefit. On the other hand, don’t only make up your mind what you want. Get it? Can you already see what’s coming? Use your spirit or intuition or guidance in case it knows better than your mind what you really want and what will serve you best in the long run. I’ll explain ways to do this as you read along.
The powers behind the Spiritual Standard demand that you grow. It doesn’t make everything easy right off the bat, but it gives you added energy and strength. It teaches you to deal with challenges in the most effective manner. It teaches you not to waste time with anger and bitterness (though feeling some of these emotions may be part of the healing process of getting through them). It teaches you not to despair and that when you do, you can work on in despair. It teaches you about your potential and encourages you to reach out toward it. The life force is all about progress, improvement, and becoming whatever you are destined to become. (Note: you can thwart your destiny by ignoring or avoiding it. Your present and future are yours to choose. You are free to accept or reject your potential, and the choice is made by your actions or inaction.) Consider a flower or tree. They begin as a seed and the life force within them draws them ever upward toward the sun for light and warmth, and down deep into the earth for water nutrition. The life force treats you the same way. It calls you toward healthy living, but unlike a plant, you can make conscious choices of whether or not to follow the call.
Even without a clear understanding of how the universe is under control and why life is okay, Heaven can breath tremendous peace into your heart and mind. When you seek spiritual enlightenment and especially when you obey the principles you find along the way, inner calm is a natural result. And spiritual peace differs from the peace of mind found in the absence of worry. If you won fifty million dollars, for example, you could stop worrying about your house payment and your job. If your fairy godmother appeared and granted you assured good health, you could quit worrying about that pesky flu going around. But spiritual peace can come despite having plenty of reasons to worry. It can settle in and leave you calm even in the midst of the gale. It doesn’t provide all the answers to your dilemmas, but it does give you this assurance: "Everything is okay." You don’t need to understand why, but with this inner calm, you can either sit still and wait out the storm or get back up and keep right on moving.
There’s no question that Heaven is powerful beyond comprehension. Probably everyone has felt some of this power from time to time, though many fail to recognize it. Heaven’s power comes into your life for various reasons. Sometimes it’s simply a divine gift. More often it comes as a reward for your efforts to live divine principles. The power can come from two sources: your own spirit and the Spirit of God. That’s what the Biblical phrase "Health in the navel, marrow in the bones" means. Nutrition both from a parent (the navel, where your mother originally fed you) and from within your own being (marrow, where blood cells are manufactured within certain bones). Just like any other standard, you must work to maintain your spiritual health and balance. Work on your inner spiritual strengths and your connection to the divine.
Remember when you were a child? When things didn’t go your way, when someone else got more than you, even when you suffered the consequences of your own choices and actions, you were quick to declare "It’s not fair!" Maybe you never changed. Maybe you still hang on to the idea that life should be fair. That you deserve as much as the Jones’ next door. That events should always work out the way you want them to. That life should be easy and comfortable. If so, you’ll benefit from a change of perspective. Here’s a list of all you deserve from life: challenges to overcome. Lessons to learn. People to love and to forgive and serve. Character to develop. Joy to earn through living the principles that create it. If you have safety and enough food to eat, if you can walk on your own power, if you have a comfortable place to live, if you have friends you can trust, if you have a job that pays the important bills, then consider yourself lucky. Be grateful and show your gratitude. If you work hard and earn more, great. If lucky windfalls fall in your lap, great. If everything happens to go your way, great. If things go wrong, great. If life is hard, great. Use your circumstances to learn and grow and improve. Even just enduring, if that’s all you can handle, has its value. If you lose more than you win, great. You still have many opportunities to live and learn and grow and make up your losses in different ways. Go right ahead and set high goals. Then work hard and hope to attain them. But no matter what you get and how long it takes, be grateful and take advantage of every situation. If you don’t feel like feeling grateful or don’t believe that anything deserves your gratitude, then consider these facts: gratitude may just be the quickest route to stable and enduring happiness. It flavors your life with a pleasant happiness that not even success can bring. Gratitude opens your life to more positive experiences and brings you unexpected blessings. Even the selfish should have good reason to feel grateful. If you could see the big picture clearly, if you could tune your understanding into all truth, you would recognize that Heaven has given you much more than you realize. You would recognize that failure to feel grateful is foolishness.
Is organized religion necessary to take full advantage of the Spiritual Standard? Good question. The answer: Maybe. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to find out. Certainly Heaven is not the author of all the confusion and contention on earth over which religion is true. We humans, in our quest for truth and light (or money or prestige or pride) are to blame for our own intolerance and narrow mindedness. The question remains, however, of whether It is the author of any organized religion in the first place. How can this question be answered, and does it even matter? Many people choose their religion by whatever their parents taught them. They find value and security in tradition, and they have experienced some of the divine power that the religion guided them to. They may have built their identity around their membership to a specific group and even find that their religion fills an important role in maintaining their social life. As long as they remain satisfied with what their religion offers, they won’t often question or look further for more truth and light, either within their own religion or without. No matter where you choose to look for greater light and truth, by all means look! Strive to engender a divine discontent to motivate you to work toward even higher heights. Develop a healthy curiosity by beginning an investigation and seeking more of Heaven’s power in your life. The effort is worth your time. When I strive to live according to the highest principles I know, I occasionally encounter brief glimpses into the surprisingly powerful spiritual presence underlying all life. This gives me knowledge to work toward and increases my faith and confidence that life has purpose and that help exists for all my woes. The question of whether there is such thing as one or many "true" religions will be left to the religions to debate or sort out. One thing is sure, however: organized religions provide an environment where you can make greater spiritual progress than you could hope to achieve on your own. If you’re interested in choosing a religion to participate in, here are a few helpful questions to help you evaluate any congregation.
Have you ever wondered why religion doesn’t make sense to people who haven’t experienced it or who have abandoned it? The reason why is simple – an underutilized or damaged Spiritual Standard hasn’t the power to perceive the spiritual side of the universe that surrounds us. It’s like hypothermia. You go for a hike in the cold rain, the water draws away your body’s heat, and when your temperature drops sufficiently, your mind grows numb and unaware. You don’t even realize that you’re in danger because all of your physical resources have been drawn away to preserve and provide heat to your most vital organs. Recovery can take time and effort. Just as frostbite destroys tissues in your skin and muscles by forming ice crystals that cut, a damaged spirit can take time and care to regenerate and heal.
Why do religions teach the concept of right and wrong? Why do they insist that certain behaviors are right, that others are wrong, while others are only wrong in certain circumstances and right in others? Right and wrong, good and evil, can be difficult to discern, particularly when you don't always want to know the truth. It's a natural tendency to want to do whatever you feel like doing. And we're often tempted to do things that are not in our best interest. If you want a rational "justfication" of right and wrong, then analyze any action to determine if it is for or against life. In other words, does it contribute to an ongoing, peaceful existence or carry humanity ever nearer to death or destruction? Extra-marital sex, for example, often results in single-parent families - not the ideal environment for raising well-balanced children. Can this and the dozens of other dangers be justified just because it feels good? Spirituality often requires the sacrifice of our own selfish interests for a greater, more lasting good. Your spirit knows things may go against life even when you don’t understand why. Learn to listen anyway. It’s the expert on such matters, not your brain. Disobedience to moral principles damages your ability to detect and understand the whisperings of heaven to your soul. Many miracles and blessings have a cause-and-effect relationship with your actions. Obedience brings these miracles to your life. If you're weak and just begining, don't worry about how difficult it will be to keep every commandment - you are instantly rewarded for the smaller efforts that you're capable of, even when you don't instantly see those rewards. You can’t achieve deep, lasting peace without obedience to Heaven's laws. Like it or not. Believe it or not. Remember that you read this and when you get tired of trying and failing to find the peace you long for, come back again and give it a try. The results of an honest spiritual effort will be the sweetest thing you’ve ever experienced! Ponder what’s expected of you like whatever divine commandments you’re familiar with. Obey these and your power of discernment and understand will grow.
Many people want to be good examples. They want to bring the entire world to God. They spend a great amount of energy telling it "like it is." That's their choice and of course there is nothing inherently wrong with doing so -- what if you found a great new restaurant downtown -- wouldn't you be eager to tell your friends? And if you made a new friend, someone wise and loving and powerful, wouldn't you want your other friends to meet this person, too? The point I'll make here is that if you really want to be a light to others, the best way (by FAR) is to simply improve yourself. Be humble, obedient, hopeful, faithful. Let Heaven's light grow in your eyes and face and others will see that light and feel inspired to seek it for themselves.
Humility. One reason for trials. brings amazing joy and peace. flexibility. acceptance of truth. Faith. Half of this is your part- trust. The other half is power-heaven’s part. Trials, weaknesses, lack of experience. They teach you to seek answers and help from the SS. Talk like normal. meditation, pondering. Let it sink in. Let the inspiration and clarity come to you slowly and change you. Love. how you treat people. If you’re not nice to the waiter, you’re not a nice person.seek and know truth. Whether good news or bad, the truth frees you to operate effectively in life. how you treat yourself |