Conscious Conflict -- the Spiritual Fuel for the Vertical
Author: Tom Russell

If specific problems do not disappear immediately, the answer is to simply relax, let go and realize that Truth is working on things. Immediate healings often occur on our spiritual journey. At other times the healing process is slow and deep and goes at a pace that we would perhaps like to speed up.

Impatience is a lurking enemy. It wrecks everything it touches. It is born from the belief that we know more than Truth itself about how to conduct the inner cleansing. The spiritual path often passes through dark woods and heavy storms. Its aim is to take us to insight, not to comfort.

Here is an extremely important principle to understand: Truth often increases conflict in our lives in order to do away with it at a much deeper level than we can presently see. When things get stirred up inside this is good, not bad. Real inner development works by generating conscious conflict.

We can increase our cooperation with inner development by learning to make the most of difficult and demanding conditions. The answer is to go in the direction of our problems, never away from them. Vernon Howard points to this in "1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle" when he writes:

"Learn to love new and strange and unfamiliar conditions which force you to explore and discover."

What could you do that would make the usual patterns object? Give a speech? Write an article for publication? Learn to play a musical instrument? Take advanced training for your professional activities? Sit quietly on your sofa for 15 minutes and observe the mind with impartial self-observation? Not say a word when something inside of you is insisting and painfully demanding that you put your two cents in. Or perhaps it is showing up at a construction site of some kind. Perhaps you're not a physically oriented person and resist getting involved with projects that require physical work and effort. This resistance is fear because the situation is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. You're not the expert at the construction site.

It is different for different people, but the key idea is the same. We must voluntarily place ourselves in uncomfortable and unfamiliar situations (never physically dangerous ones) and learn to treasure these priceless learning opportunities.

When we go against the mechanical flow of our minds (and the familiar postural patterns of our physical selves) the mechanical patterns protest. A different and higher kind of friction is generated. This friction is the fuel that makes spiritual development possible. For this reason we must dare to cause the familiar patterns to protest, and temporarily hurt in order to observe the hurt as it operates. This simple but profound process allows Spiritual Light to shine directly on to our problems and pains. And this is precisely what dissolves them away.

As a sincere spiritual student you have entered on to the most interesting path a human being can walk. It is the path that leads to the Real Thing, the recovery and complete release of your essence. You'll walk this earth in a state of perpetual learning. You'll greet each new day looking for opportunities to consciously choose to not go in the usual direction, to see what happens when a mechanical pattern is refused.

The very high spiritual life that Christ knew and lived you will know and live. Your inner life, though tmporarily blocked in many places, will gradually break lose and flow with the ease and power of a mighty river. It was only necessary for you to find the path that turns in the vertical direction.








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Tom Russell is a financial planner who studied with spiritual development author Vernon Howard for 12 years. He now hosts the www.superwisdom.com website that applies Vernon Howard's teachings to sales, work and entrepreneurship. A free weekly e-zine is available at the site.

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