Guest Post by Radiant Warrior – Jason Chan

The Spiritual Path is a Progressive Path.

At first, sticking to a particular spiritual practice may seem like very hard work. But the more you persist, the more the path becomes easier and easier. With every step of your spiritual growth and expansion, you will experience more and more peace and joy, and deeper and deeper love – and nothing in the whole world can compare to this love, this peace and this joy.

We are all being called home to love by a divine presence, and responding to this calling is an ‘effortless effort’. When we say a sincere ‘yes’ to this calling, we are embarking on a miraculous journey, and our final destination is never in any doubt.

To begin with however, many spiritual seekers try this and try that – going to a Buddhist workshop one weekend and a yoga workshop the next.

We all tend to meander a lot when we first start out on our spiritual quest, and we can waste quite a lot of precious time dipping in and out of a lot of different types of teachings and practices.

‘The path is straight and narrow’ means that sooner or later, your mind has to gear into one direction with great determination and unwavering focus, so that you can make real, lasting progress on your spiritual journey. But before you reach this relatively advanced stage, you will inevitably face a lot of temptations to deviate from the path for a while.

You will be tempted by a lot of worldly desires, such as the desire for a sexual relationship, or you will find you have endless excuses for not practising, such as ‘I am too tired’ or ‘I don’t have enough money to go on a spiritual retreat this year’.

However eventually, if you are really determined to live each day in love and peace, your spiritual path will become straight and narrow and you will deviate from it less and less.

Even a very advanced spiritual practitioner cannot afford to slacken off from their daily spiritual practices. Moreover, spiritually empowered individuals need to keep cultivating genuine humility in order to avoid the strong egoic temptation to claim any spiritual powers, such as healing or psychic powers, as theirs rather than God’s.

Gratitude and respect are also very important aspects of the straight and narrow spiritual path. Without being truly grateful for all the divine assistance and grace that pours down on us as we connect to the light, we can become arrogant and self-satisfied.

The ego really does not want you to awake, and so it will even pretend to be a spiritual master in order to trick you out of genuinely awakening and healing any further. You as a personality self are always the problem, not the solution, and so you need tremendous determination to rise above the extremely deceptive egoic thought system.

Every time we raise our consciousness to another level, we will need to assimilate new energies for a while, and so our spiritual growth tends to go in cycles. For some periods of time, nothing much may seem to be happening, and then we will suddenly break through to another level.

My sincere advice to all genuine spiritual seekers is ‘Please don’t try to push your consciousness too high too fast. Just keep gearing into the next level of your growth, and then when you reach another level of consciousness, stay there for a while enjoying the fruits of all your effort’.

This is a truly miraculous way to live, and totally worth all the incredible effort that it will take you to stay on the straight and narrow path until you reach your final destination.

©Jason Chan September 2011

For Details of Jason’s forthcoming talk at Naked Dragon on 14th Sept 2011 – please click HERE

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