Should we guide a friend or someone we know to a spiritual path if the other is suffering? or if
we think the spiritual path would help them? or should we just trust the universe to help them
find it somehow? or should we rather just let the person find it or seek it themselves? like
some say one has to be ready to be on this path and this cannot be forced on them... yeah correct
we can't force it on people can we, and you certainly can't force someone to
awaken right um you know the harder thing to understand or admit is that people are sort
of swimming in their own dirt and if you offer them a rope and say "okay come on you can come out"
they'll say "no i want to be in this dirt" of course they don't understand that they're making that
choice because of a lack of consciousness but yeah so if we force them out of it
if we try to grab the person and say "you need to get out of this dirt because it's destroying you"
then they're gonna hate you for that and they're gonna and and if you say" it's in the
name of god" or "it's in the name of spirituality" then they then you're damaging that person because
then they're going to hate the idea of god they're going to hate the idea of spirituality
so it's a very careful process if you really want to help that person...
-- rather than trying to be spiritual, try to be more authentic; which means observing the moments
the present moments of that person and simply giving them undivided, unconditioned, non-judgmental
attention, and that is usually more healing than trying to uh impose your own beliefs or
impose your own doctrines onto a person so you can go about this very you just gently really
you know before spirituality is considered uh i think it's important first to just consider
human methods such as you know good therapists and counselors and psychologists
what they're able to do which is just to simply listen to someone - we often most people
it's very rare to find individuals who know how to listen to someone in a very deep and
intimate way because we don't know how to listen to ourselves so you first offer that
offer your your undivided attention as a friend as a human being and if you can just make uh little
uh suggestions here and there you know "have you heard of meditation?", "have you heard of
prayer?" or maybe ask um you know "do you think this is something to do with
your hate for religion?" if that person is is suffering because of that um and then it's
not so much you need to impose your own beliefs about your religion but simply listening to them
and let them un unfold uh like what is very common in in this society is that most people just
lack encouragement to to grow uh, some people just need encouragement it's it's scary how many
parents don't encourage their children positively these days or and it's scary how many people just
don't listen to each other these days you know i know i know a lot of families who the parents are
just not conscious, they're not there for their kid even though they might be in the next room
all the time they're never there for their child because they're so preoccupied with their own
concerns about themselves because they're always in self-pity and they have so much self-importance
that they're not really a parent they're just there materially looking after their child so
uh yes small suggestions here and there about spiritual topics if you detect that there is any
uh resistance towards those ideas then immediately don't continue uh with that idea and just offer
what you can ~ all you can do is offer what you can to the best of your ability if the person still
isn't helping themself then not much you can do and uh like you said you just trust the universe
to help them find it somehow, and they will the universe has its ways uh what is the universe's
way to help someone find their own path? it is called suffering - and you let that person suffer
just like in meditation we try to ignore our own suffering don't we
well and we try to get away from it but and we think when we see someone else suffering we think
it's a "bad" thing and um and we feel sorry for them but suffering is necessary especially if
one isn't following a spiritual path right one of the first thing my my Gnostic teacher taught me
is that there are two ways to wisdom -- the first way is through pain and suffering
and if we do that our whole life we have pain and suffering we gather just a little bit of
wisdom maybe like one gold bar... the other way to wisdom is through walking a spiritual path
which is and then which is without pain and suffering and we also accumulate
hundreds of gold bars so yeah people will people will always suffer if they
are not re generally following or if they don't generally have a sense of positive spirituality
integrated into their own life so allow them to suffer it's okay it's just the process of life