Approach

The quality and depth of understanding one is prepared to offer another, or anything at all, largely depends on one’s approach or attitude.
 

Approach here meaning not so much how we physically approach someone or a teaching, but our motivation, our reasons and intentions underlying our engagement with another or a teaching.

How we approach each other, the underlying emotional motivation is hardly ever brought into the light, or exposed and examined.  In almost all our worldly endeavors we are not required to have a deep understanding of our approach, our motivation, but simply to obtain what we want.

Most commonly we approach life, we relate to life, we pursue our desires in life, through the “alone-emotional sensation” created by our awareness caught or trapped or fixated at the level of our physical or bodily separateness from each other and all nature.  We fundamentally approach everything and everyone with the underlying sensation of emotional disconnection, of Love or Life disconnection. because our fixation of awareness is at the physical level of existence.

In this way we approach what could be our understanding and practice of the Spiritual-Emotional-Reality-Realisation of our existence in the same way we approach our physical-emotional reality of existence.  In other words, we approach what we call Spiritual Understanding or Practice with our awareness actually devoted to the physically based “alone-emotional sensations”

At the manifest level, the physical level, others and things are in fact physically separate from us and so our approach is to obtain them, to go “out” and get them. When our awareness is more than less captivated at the level of our physical separateness, we feel unfulfilled, alone, unworthy and unloved, unless we have added that which seems separate from us.

In other words we seek to add something to ourselves rather than become responsible for where our awareness is caught in order to transcend that level of awareness.  It is not by adding what is seemingly separate or absent from us, such as another person or some thing, that we become Enlightened or Fully Aware to our always-present Complete Life existence. 

Our approach to the Spiritual Master, our approach to Life (in fact our approach to each other) is from the point of view in which our awareness is fixated on the physical-emotional separate dilemma and motivated to do something or get something or realize something within that level of awareness.

Our common approach to all our attempts towards Spiritual Understanding and the Practice of those Understandings is with our emotional-psychic attention always regressing into awareness of the physical  rather than awareness of the spiritual.

Spiritual Practice is the result of our Passionate Love Attraction to the One Spiritual Reality over and above the many different and separate physical realities.  In other words, it is only by Love of the One Spiritual Reality that our awareness is released or liberated from its fixation at the level of all that seems separate from us.

Approach is everything. How we approach influences and dictates our understandings or misunderstands, our insights or confusions, our liberation or bondage. 

The term “relationship” is commonly understood in the context of physically-based intimacy or association between two people or groups of people.  The term is mostly used to describe our feelings of physical and emotional “closeness” to someone.

We tend to talk about our relationship with someone on the basis of a personal association with him or her, and most especially if sex is involved.  Our relationships form around personal interests and personal likes and dislikes.
Our usual relationships or relatedness to others and the world is one based on our search for love and security and consolation and salvation. 

In terms of Spiritual Practice and Its Intended Realisation of Inherent Love, we have a very gross understanding of and approach to the term “relationship.”  We speak about the Spiritual Reality, we seek the Spiritual Reality, we practise all kinds of meditations and mindfulness and rituals and beliefs, but we are hardly ever in Relationship with the Spiritual Reality.

Almost all forms of spiritual practice do not begin on the understandingand practice of our Inherent and Present Relationship with the Spiritual Reality.  The common method or form of spiritual practice is based in the search for the Spiritual Reality. We commonly set out or endeavour to Realise the Spiritual Reality in the same way we pursue our physical relationships. That is, we begin with the sensation we are separate and therefore are motivated to seek some form of relationship with another to be fulfilled.  We are mostly unconscious to the fact that our relationships are based on, and tenuously held together by, the search for happiness and love rather than our own Present Self-Responsible Relationship with Life that is the Source of Love.

From the Enlightened or Spiritual point of view, we are constantly in relationship with our self-consciousness, our ego-self.  We must first of all understand and transcend our emotional neuroses in every functional area of our life if we are to enter into Relationship with the Truth or Spiritual Condition of our bodily life.

If we are to Realise the Divine or Spiritual Condition of our own form, and all existence, we must come into Relationship with the Divine or Spiritual Condition in our form as human. Long before the advent of  our current affluently-fuelled society that glorifies the individual self  it was never in doubt that one must go to and enter into Spiritual Relationship with a Realised Renunciate Master, for the purpose of Real Spiritual Practice and Realisation.

When the Spiritual Relationship to the Renunciate Heart Master is alive in the student it is the most potent stimulus and transformative influence in her or his consciousness.  Without, or apart from, the Living Spiritual Relationship to the Awakened Being, understanding, rituals and practice are an illusion of the ego the state we are usually always in relationship to.

The Unconditional or Spiritual Relationship to the Living ego Renunciate Master makes Spiritual Life possible, whereas our relationship with our egoic self and its self-concerned search for love and happiness only further binds us to our self and all our rituals of lovelessness.

The entire Way is based and makes Its Way in the Direct Relationship with the Conscious or Spiritual State of the Renunciate Being.  It is through the Direct and Tacit Relationship with the Awakened Spiritual State of the Renunciate “Teacher” that one begins to Awaken to the Spiritual Identity or State of their own bodily existence. 

The only thing that is threatened in the Spiritual Relationship with a Living Spiritual Master is the ego, not your Real Life. 

The Spiritual Relationship with the Living Renunciate “Teacher” is commonly misunderstood, resisted, avoided, scorned and rejected in favour of all other forms of spiritual practice, wherein the ego can remain comfortably spiritual. 

Orientation is preparation. Orientation is to change the focus or direction of one’s attention.
Orientation to the Ashram and the Life of the Hermitage is fundamentally an introduction to the re-orientation of attention that is required to understand one’s Real Self.

Our common orientation or focus of attention is on our physical separate self, our bodily-based idea of self.  The awareness of our unlimited Spiritual Nature is limited because our attention has become fixated on the physically different and separate aspects of existence. 

Re-orientation of Conscious Attention is necessary in order to approach, with some understanding, the beginning stages of help, encouragement and instruction in the Way of ego Liberation.

Orientation to the Ashram is not merely an orientation to the physical Ashram and the community of students and devotees.
Orientation is the first stage of understanding the adjustment, or recalibration, or change of direction in one’s Conscious Attention.

The individual must see for him/herself that attention is always going towards the search, the sensation of a problem, the sensation of needing someone to reinforce a sense of worth.  Most people are always looking for worth, happiness and love outside themselves.