From: Graham Sutherland Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2003 9:48 AM To: De Mellos club Subject: Is the spiritual path easy, hard or both? >Grace is unearned and free. So the conventional wisdom dictates. It >is true but then I think there is a paradox running here. Those who >do not search for grace are less likely to find it than those who >do. Not infallible as a guide I know. >It can be argued that the Budddhas enlightenment was spontaneous, as >indeed it was. he also searched for some time. >The guy who discoverred the benzine ring I think was in the same >situation. He found the solution, I was once told after taking a >drug, only after searching for some time. >My point in all this rambling graham, is that laziness is my enemy, >my personal devil if you will, I know that some will say that >salvation, or whatever you want to call it requires no effort. This >is of course true. It does however require much preparation. The way I see it, finding God, spiritual enlightenment etc is like learning to wiggle one's ears. At first we have no idea what to do so we expend great effort trying to get every muscle in our head moving. Eventually we begin to get some slight movement in the ears. Then over a long period of time we learn to leave out all the extraneous and energetic muscle activity that is unrelated to the ears. When we have finally learned how to do it, it is simple and easy. All of the effort involved seems stupid and unnecessary. (like De Mello's "master" that felt like a fool when he became enlightened) I don't think we can possibly learn to wiggle our ears without also exercising unnecessary muscles. The important point for me is to realize that much of what we do to find God and spiritual enlightenment is just like the extraneous muscles that have nothing to do with wiggling ears. We do seem to need to try everything until we start getting some significant positive feedback. Then we can begin to see and let go of all the stupid and unnecessary extraneous effort.