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THE NOTION OF GROWTH
Yet all our ideals, values and intentions, - as high as they might be, - never justify all the means used for their achievement. Each single step towards an ideal needs to do full justice to its core. Each action that does not correspond to our original aspirations makes us deviate from the fundamental direction in which we move.
All obstacles, opposition and problems we encounter during the realization of our ideas, serve only to correct our flawed concepts of reality and to break up situations in which we got trapped. It is our own will and our own consciousness that causes both these - positive as well as negative - experiences.
There is no reason to regard our body and its experiences as something base, bad or less evolved, as many religions do. And it is of no use to regard as valid only those activities that are directed towards spiritual goals.
The desire to turn towards new, more comprehensive, 'higher levels of existence arises automatically when we completed the themes of the stage of development we presently reside in.14 As long as this has not happened yet, we should experience our bodily life without reserve. Any concept that we might accumulate guilt and sin by this is entirely without basis.
Real growth is caused - irrespective of any concepts we might believe in - always and exclusively by the removal of karmic blocks, never by reaching a certain 'final' material status.
14 Persistent feelings of boredom and general discontent are usually
indications that our consciousness is searching for new levels of experience.
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