All creatures in life are created to reach their natural fruition. The Great Life generously provides all of them with everything they need to fulfill their promise. This same abundance holds true for our spiritual awakening as well. Everything we need to succeed is forever raining down upon and within us.
The spiritually awakened life is not something that one achieves, like an award for fine art or some other measured performance. The true Higher Life comes to us naturally and reveals and expresses itself in anyone who realizes that, like the sun above us, this Living Light within us is always present.
It is we who are absent from this eternally indwelling Life, not because these vital forces are withheld from us, but because we waste them. Following are 21 Ways We Waste our Vital Life Forces, and for whose loss we remain sound asleep spiritually. Study these thieves closely and catch them in the act of stealing your chances for Higher Life as they drain away your vital life forces.
All forms of useless talking
- Being wrongly involved in the life of anyone else
- Daydreams of any nature
- Using excessive emotions
- Keeping "accounts" on those who have displeased you
- Sitting in judgment of anyone for any reason
- Becoming identified with anything
- Useless thinking, such as speculating "why?"
- Overindulging yourself
- Resisting your environment or the unpleasant manifestations of others
- Being concerned with how others see you
- Defending yourself from imagined enemies, as with quips or sarcasm
- Puttering around in order to keep yourself feeling productive
- Any form of sexual imagination
- Rushing through or to anything
- All forms of frustration, including impatience and anger
- Doing anything in half measures, or leaving things hanging
- Telling "little" lies
- Taking part in any dialogue with yourself
- Seeking any form of vengeance or retribution, embracing resentment
- Wrestling with anxious feelings and trying to think your way out of pain
For extra benefit, make a list of ways you suspect your own vital forces are being wasted. Then stop throwing away your chance to know Real Life!
- Guy Finley
(A special writing that complemented Guy Finley's talk on 7/23/2003.)
