Everything has a prerequisite. If you want to bake a cake, you need a hot oven aside from all the ingredients. To have a hot oven, you need electricity or gas to heat the oven. To have that, you need the delivery system to bring the power to the house. Before that you need to have the ability to manufacture the electricity or refine the gas, along with the ability to manufacture the wires or pipes and all that entails.
Look for the cause of the cause of the causes. In a forest, pick one tree, from the tree, one branch, then one leaf, then one vein, through the tree to the roots, to the soil, to the rain that feeds it, to the ocean that evaporated to become rain.
You are looking for an event to happen. Whatever that may be, something must cause that to happen, and something must cause that cause to happen. Keep going along that chain of causes until you get to one that you have the power to control. Make that happen and then do your best wherever possible to aid in the continuation of the chain of causes until it brings the achievement of the event.
This is simply the fact that people do not think about. Likewise, for personal growth and enlightenment, there are many requirements as well, many prerequisites in order to have an experience. The spiritual and profound experiences cannot be made to happen at will. They happen spontaneously because that is an experience which is beyond the capacity of the intellect.
For the mental and emotional environment to be correct for this experience to happen it must be prepared. That is the prerequisite. What are the prerequisite conditions for a spiritual or profound experience to occur?
There are several and some of these prerequisites have prerequisites for them to be able to occur. One is the elimination of fears and concerns. In order to achieve that freedom, one must have financial security so you never have to worry about paying the bills, medical, food, shelter etc, including any extra activities, travel etc, all for the rest of your life. Each person must determine what their financial needs are and see to it that they will be met without any risk of that source failing throughout the rest of their lives. That gives us the first and most important level of personal worldly freedom.
Other factors are negative emotions. There are two kinds of negative emotions, one we can eliminate fully and the other we have to deal with in other ways. We must eliminate anger, hate, bitterness and all negative emotions from our life. In order to do that, we need to understand the mechanical process which creates a significant portion of the negative emotions in our modern life. That is one of the subjects covered in my course, which explains the machinery and process to which well more than half of our anger and negative states arise so they can be eliminated.
That is the prerequisite for further development in eliminating negative emotions. There are different levels of negative emotions, surface and deeper. Understanding the machinery helps us to eliminate the surface negative emotions, and only when that happens, can we then proceed with working on reducing the deeper negative emotions.
Then deeper negative emotions may never be eliminated and so the next step is to avoid the causes that bring up those deeper negative emotions. This can actually be done if you are willing. Funny enough, humans being as strange a species as they are, many people deliberately set up their life to cause themselves trouble, which brings up negative emotions. That can all be avoided if you want. This gives a prerequisite of living in the right environment under the right conditions, which is easier than it sounds.?
I believe the reason people do not achieve their goals is due to the lack of awareness, attention and effort put into discovering or creating and guiding the cause of the cause of the cause of the event. By neglecting the cause of the event and merely believing or wanting the goal, the goal cannot be achieved. If you put all the perfect ingredients to bake a cake into a cold oven with no heat you will never have the cake. Yet you will think, ‘I have done everything correctly, I have put in the correct ingredients, I made the mixture perfect, I turned on the oven, why don’t I get a cake?’
Because you have ignored one of the essential causes to baking the cake, to make sure the power is on. Understanding that will bring us the patience, humility and wisdom to search for causes and work towards causes which are small steps and perhaps may even appear to be unrelated to the event.
We are an impatient species and want only the goal. If a necessary cause appears to be irrelevant, we will ignore it, that is if we even see it to begin with, and because of that not achieve our goal. That is a key factor in success be it personal, financial or relationship. For instance, in a relationship, if you want a certain person to want you, you must first be appropriate to the person you want. You will have to refine your character which could take years. Of course no one wants to spend that amount of time because in the process, the goal may disappear. By the time you are ready, they are gone with someone else!
That is why personal and material goals are difficult to achieve, because what it takes is something we do not want to give, time. The character traits that are necessary causes to achieving this are patience and perseverance.
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