First benefit: Becoming an alchemist.
People always ask me, “What can I get out of the spiritual path?”
And I’m not offended because it’s ordinary in a materialistic world for an unawakened person to ask that question repeatedly to find out if it pays or doesn’t pay to take the path.
The short answer is yes and no.
- Yes, because you will get to know yourself and reality much better.
- No, because you may be happier in your ignorance 🙂
It’s like the Matrix pill.
Ultimately, you must choose whether to take the blue or red pill.
For those still wondering which path to choose, I want to share the first three benefits I experienced when I started my spiritual path.
So you decide if you want to sleep or wake up little Neo 🙂
First benefit: Becoming an alchemist.
“Alchemy is really a key word. It means to transform human beings into gold, to transform the infamous things like fear, ignorance, hatred and shame into the most precious thing there is: love and fulfillment.”— Deepak Chopra (book: The Way of the Wizard)
I look at myself years ago and see myself as a kind of chimpanzee driven by primal urges, incapable of thinking about anything other than eating, sleeping, spending lots of money, and f*cking.
My conscience was the size of a mustard seed. And that was the problem.
Because being intelligent guarantees you success but success doesn’t guarantee that you expand your consciousness.
Usually, what gets you success is money. And money, when you have a conscience the size of an almond instead of a tool, becomes poison.
In short, when success comes early in life, and your level of consciousness is not sufficiently developed, it will only lead you to two places: the cemetery or the jail (I tell you from experience).
I remember that from 17 to 33 years, I had a hornet’s nest instead of a head, and every time something didn’t go as I wanted or someone was against me, all the wasps (thoughts) would prick my hive (brain) until my anger overflowed.
All that changed for the better when I started my spiritual awakening.
So the first benefit you get when you start your spiritual path and increase your consciousness is to lower your reactivity: fear, ignorance, hatred, and shame. And that allows you to take better advantage of life’s opportunities.
That’s how you transform your reactivity into gold (love and fulfillment) like an alchemist.
The second benefit: revelations.
Buddhas do not cleanse wrongdoing with water, nor do they remove suffering with their hands, nor do they transfer their understanding to others. Beings are liberated by teaching the truth, the nature of things. — Buddha
The second benefit you get from spirituality is revelations.
There are things you don’t understand until you can move them from the brain to the heart.
That is the difference between intellectualizing (reasoning) and internalizing (making knowledge part of you).
Whatever you can internalize and feel true as part of your being is a revelation.
The revelations that come into your life are subtle but powerful. And they have the power to change you completely.
I had two alarming ones.
- The first: I discovered that I had become a chain smoker because, in that way, I was embodying my father and symbolically keeping him with me even though he abandoned us.
- The second: is that my problem with food (I ate enormous quantities) was a defense mechanism acquired since childhood. During school, I suffered bullying: I was bullied, beaten, threatened. And the child I was discovered that food after school made him feel good — as if spaghetti with tomato could embrace me inside and compensate for the horror I had experienced.
I used substances (nicotine, carbohydrates) to mitigate the suffering in both cases.
Conclusion: my soul was looking for something I could not find, and since I could not give it to it, I tried to compensate for it with food and nicotine.
Once I internalized that, I could change it. And today, I don’t smoke and eat a healthy diet.
So what the revelations achieve in you is to facilitate the process of healing addictions because you not only intellectualize their roots but internalize the reason for your bad habits.
The third benefit: real love
“All I had to do was see myself for who I was, love myself for who I was, and then just share that love.”- Joan Brady (Book: God on a Harley: A Spiritual Fable)
And the third benefit that I found when I started my spiritual path is understanding true love.
Real love is not romantic love. Real love is more like loyalty.
And that kind of love is what I ask of every person who comes into my life today.
I’m not talking about attachment; I’m talking about acceptance.
Every relationship has problems, dull moments, and even great tragedies. But all that is secondary when you learn to love by expanding your consciousness.
So is the physical. And that’s a big break.
Because you get rid of the social and advertising conditioning about love relationships.
And you take off the pressure to have a perfect body or to be with an attractive partner who meets the current canon of beauty.
And you focus on the person you’re with liking you, period. And that person feels the same way about you.
Recap for the memory
- Spirituality will help you control your reactivity and improve your life so much that in a few years, you will look back and see that you were a Neanderthal compared to the person you have become.
- Spirituality will fill your life with revelations or truths that you will internalize and heal your life. It’s like running your antivirus and then deleting all the cookies and malware taking up your RAM.
- Spirituality will show you what true love is, freeing you from so much social pressure that you will live relaxed like never before. You will stop being jealous and stop feeling rejected. And that will make you gain quality of life.
Now it’s up to you whether to take the red pill and wake up from the matrix or the blue one and continue sleeping, little Neo 🙂
A virtual hug
Morpheus (AG)