Time With God

Let every moment of your day be part of your spiritual path. Apart from knowing that you have a spiritual destiny and purpose, you must also periodically sit down and do a specific technique, a breathing technique or a mantra technique or whatever. You must dedicate some time, maybe ten minutes, half an hour or an hour, when you withdraw from any activity and say, “This is my time with God.” This is a beautiful Sanskrit expression used by the Yogīs: Brahma-Murtha, meaning “time with God”. So set aside a certain part of the day for when you can be with God, and let nothing disturb your time with God.

I am sure that sometime within twenty-four hours you can dedicate five minutes to God. I mean, God is actually worthwhile to spend at least five minutes a day on. During that time you can practise the process or technique you feel the most inspired to do, what you are consciously aware will benefit you to get to the next stage. Your time with God is when you do a technique that will draw you closer to the Divine Presence, not because of the technique itself. The technique itself is not important. What is important is that you feel that using that technique you get closer to the Divine Presence. It is the idea of the Divine Presence that is important; the technique is just a means to connect you.

The difficulty with the modern age is that people have access to too much information, so they can pick up many ideas from many different sources about all kinds of spiritual processes and techniques, like meditation, breathing exercises, chanting and mantras. They spend a short time doing one thing and then a week later they are doing something else, and the overall result is that they don’t get very far.

This is a drawback of the modern information age. In ancient times, information was only given from the point of view of practical application, not as something to be stored in your brain. In those days learning was something else: you learned to be something, to become something and make full use of it. Nowadays it is impossible to make full use of all the information you have. You are bombarded with information, but the fact that you have so much information can be a hindrance because you are not inclined to put any of it into practice, or if you do, very little.

This is the age of gadgets, which is deceptive because everything is given to you. Somebody worked hard to invent something and it’s given to you. So you take it for granted that next week there will be a new gadget and the following week another, and you need do nothing about it whatsoever. This is where materialism spoils the minds of people; they do not see the need to make any effort because everything is just given to them.

Well, in the spiritual field, the teaching is given to you, the method is given to you, the knowledge is given to you, but if you do not put them into practice you will get nowhere. In the spiritual field—and in the Way of the Spirit itself—you cannot reap the benefit of others. You cannot wait while somebody else works hard and attains a higher state of consciousness, and then you get there, too. You will not get there. Your effort is important; in fact, it is the only thing that is important in your life. And this must really be understood. In the spiritual field you have to do it yourself. This is still the Law.

You cannot say that you do not have time to practise because you’re too busy running your business or family. Some techniques can be applied in the midst of your business activities, before or after a meeting, for example, which means that you can practise your spiritual path anytime in the twenty-four hours of a day. (If you are old enough, Soul-wise, you are on the Spiritual Path every night while you are asleep, because for a person who is Awake only the physical body sleeps; the rest of the person is doing inner work on the inner dimensions during the night.)

Most people think that they are doing the Spiritual Path by going to a retreat. Yes, that’s true, but being on the Spiritual Path means being in the moment, in the here and now. That is the Way of the Warrior. If you do not have time to be in the here and now, well, where are you then?

Try to imagine that you are going to die any moment and have only the next five minutes to attain Enlightenment. This does not mean that you should start frantically repeating your favourite mantra. What you have to do is shift your attitude and wake up to the fact that time is actually precious in this process. Unfortunately, young people have no sense that life is very short. When you’re young you don’t feel the nearness of the end; you’re buzzing around all day doing this, that and the other thing, and you think this busyness will go on forever. But as you get older you realize that rushing around being busy all day is not endless, because you are already sixty-five, seventy-five, eighty-five, and you know that the clock is ticking and you can hear the ticking getting louder.

It is not anyone’s fault, just the imperfection of human nature, because the sense of the shortness of human life, the immanence of death, has not been given to human beings. If people were aware of it then they would be more concerned about their lives and their purpose in life: Who am I? How much have I accomplished? Am I fulfilling my destiny? Am I fulfilling my Soul purpose? Am I doing what I was really born for?

We are trying to inspire you to live every day as if it were your last, which means that you have to undergo a miraculous transformation inside yourself. I do not mean stuffing your brain with all kinds of information; that does not transform you. It is more like having to realize that there is a divine purpose in existence—a Divine Plan—and that you are part of that purpose and must therefore live as an intelligent being with a function in the Divine Plan, not just somebody who rushes around with no plan or purpose.

In the busyness of life you must know that there is a path within it for you. In other words, you are your path and you create it out of your total consciousness, your total beingness. And you are unique. We all share similarities in ways of thinking, in ways of doing, in cultures and traditions, but within all that each one of us is still unique. In spite of all the outer appearances, your consciousness—your level of being, how far you have evolved in the great cosmic picture—is yours and yours alone.

Excerpt from The Way of the Spiritual Warrior (Pages 113 – 116)