A look into the importance of giving and receiving spiritually for personal spiritual growth, with some questions about finding balance in life and the time to give.
Consciousness requires activity; in itself, it’s passive. So, if you want to be self-aware, you have to make the effort to be aware—it doesn’t really happen spontaneously, because of the nature of consciousness or the essence.
You have to do things. If you are only letting nature take its course, then what will happen will be that what is of nature within, emotions, feelings and thoughts, will override anything spiritual and so you won’t change. Even if you have the ideas that you are changing or that you’re being more aware than you were, or that things have improved—it won’t fundamentally change, because you haven’t got to the root of the egos, you haven’t rooted them out and exposed them and seen them for what they are. To be able to do that, you have to dig in, you’ve got to be able to go deep into your psychology, into the subconscious.
For that, things need to be stirred up. Sometimes when you go through difficulties, you learn more from them than if things were easy. This is where you hit the psychological dark side. This is why a person goes through difficulties on the path, because it throws up all kinds of emotions and things within, which they didn’t even know they had, and they’re tested to the limit. And, in all this, if a person helps other people, then spiritual help comes back to them.
It’s a give and take thing. Everything that exists, does so in cooperation with or as part of other things, and they form the whole. So if you are just thinking that you can receive spiritual knowledge without helping in any way, without helping other people, or helping to spread it, then that is a mistake because you break that flow of give and take which exists in nature. It exists everywhere; nothing exists in isolation.
If you simply want to receive spiritual knowledge and do nothing with it, you will receive it in isolation, and the supply will be cut off. And when nutrients and nourishment are cut off from something in nature it dies out, and that is exactly what happens with spirituality. So it’s worth looking at what you can do to help others to progress spiritually, and to be part of the whole. In that way you’re going to get help spiritually too, and this is how to move forward.
By doing this it’s going to help the world. It’s going to help people to change—people who are looking for information on awakening, who are suffering now, going through great psychological struggles, going through difficulties in their lives, making mistakes, looking for this something that will enable them to change, and the means exist to give them that. The knowledge is here, the teachings that can be passed on to humanity. And anyone can become part of this change; it is so very important and is desperately needed.
It’s not going to happen en masse, because most people are not really interested in changing fundamentally. Many like the idea of being more aware, of being more spiritual, but real change takes a lot more than that—it means digging in and discovering things in you that you don’t like to see, admitting mistakes, and essentially humbling yourself.
And because most people don’t really want to fundamentally change, their change is usually superficial. So en masse, the world is not going to make it, but it can be sufficient that enough people who are interested can really do a spiritual work. It’s about providing an opportunity to those who are attracted to awakening, to this real spiritual work.
Q: In terms of helping out, how do I motivate myself when my practices are not going very well?
Belsebuub: It’s a matter of being active, and that’s not just in terms of helping, but in terms of doing the practices. You need to just go and do things, even if you don’t feel like doing them, because entropy acts upon activity. When something starts its engaging, but as time passes the interest often wanes, and the activities don’t work as well. So, you need to actually make yourself do something extra. Another thing to overcome is the inner resistance towards your practices and activities. As the ego is the predominant driving factor, it will usually want to go in another direction to the things you need to do, and when you go to do them the desire or ego produces an unpleasant sensation as it is being denied its food. This is the feeling of laziness and many other states.
To some people, forcing themselves to do a practice may sound contrary to spiritual development. But actually, you’re forcing yourself to activate the essence. And, once you do that consistently, you’ll feel that things go well, they start picking up. If you don’t do it, you’ll stay in the state that you were in when you had the problem. You just don’t improve.
When I was starting out, I used to give talks, often before them I’d feel down and felt as though I couldn’t give them. But I knew that people were relying upon me to actually turn up, they had been traveling for some distance and gave their time and everything, so I had to be there and give the talk. By the end of the talk I would notice that I’d feel much better than before I started. That was because my inner state was lifted by activity. If you don’t really do things to come out of it, you’ll stay in that lower state.
It’s very useful to be able to motivate yourself, but if that fails, just practice and do things that help in this teaching (tiredness, illness, and other personal constraints excepted of course). When you do that, you lift your octave and you start to move up spiritually in the sense that your inner octave is higher, like you’re resonating at a higher level—that makes you more keen to do things and then experiences happen more and more. But if you lose that, if you start to drift back into not trying so much, then you’re on a downward slide and you just get stuck like that. So activity is a key to moving up.
You can only do what you’re able to do, but you do need to see what it really is possible to do and organize yourself from that point on. Remember that this is not a hobby, nor is it merely a spiritual interest. This has its repercussions not only through one’s lifetime, but also throughout eternity. With this, you are working for something immortal within you, so that death is quite different than it would have been and your future beyond this life is different than what it would have been. So what you do with your spiritual work has enormous repercussions upon yourself and upon humanity; it’s worth realizing it.
You mentioned before that the consciousness is passive.
Yes.
What then drives us to do the esoteric work?
It is the Being or Monad transmitting to the essence which then hits through the conscience.
The conscience?
The conscience, yes, it gives a feeling like you should do something. It’s like you’re searching and longing for something—that’s usually as much as the essence can do. You have to make an effort such as being aware for it to be active. If you don’t make the effort your conscience can nag you, making you feel as though you should be doing something spiritual. The essence also gives care and works as love within. The feeling of knowing you should have done something and didn’t do it is the conscience working within. It pushes you to look for spiritual things. But if you don’t act upon it, you will gain nothing.
By practicing a little here and there the essence is getting some strength and light. When you are aware you feel invigorated, as your inner octave lifts when you do a practice of one kind or another. To raise the octave higher you have to make the effort to do more and to push yourself through things to do even more.
In that way, the essence gets its food. And, as you feed the essence, you are not feeding the egos, so your internal psychological energies are different. When that happens, you feel clearer, brighter and happier.
Psychologically, pleasure and pain are opposite sides of the egos; spiritual happiness is in consciousness. So when you feed the essence, or consciousness, you feel happier in a peaceful sense, and that gives you the motivation again to keep going forward. Even the memory of that happiness can make you realize that you are better off not being in the egos, and that you should try to be in the essence. It’s worth making the effort to do it.
For many people, the essence sometimes pushes and pokes them at times in their life, it gives the feeling of wanting to search and gives occasional spiritual feelings. But the feeling of wanting to do something spiritually has to be transferred into action. If you do it, you can succeed in really transforming yourself and your life and be a source of help for humanity, which is suffering so much.
A talk by Belsebuub in California USA, 2008
