Everything we experience during our short stay here on Earth can be thought of as a challenge, an opportunity, a test of our ability to liberate ourselves from ignorance.  Every encounter we have with material things, with each other, and emotionally within ourselves contains a lesson.  All that is required is to pay attention, to "listen" with our hearts and minds.  We can actively engage in life's lessons or we can "sleep" right through it all until death.

Teachings come in many forms. No one teaching fits everyone.  Along with the lessons learned through our normal day-to-day experiences, we pursue other spiritual type activities that we hope will help us understand who we are and what this life experience is all about.  In our search for greater understanding we might get involved with certain religious type movements, traditions, sects, methods, or spiritual practices.  At the beginning of our journey, we try a little of this or that.  In the process we experience moments of connectedness.  But to be enlightened we must remember not to cling anywhere--cling not to this or to that.

There are many methods to choose from within the spiritual smorgasbord.  But there comes a point where the pull in us starts to draw us in one particular direction more than another.  There are many routes to enlightenment but everyone strives to find their own optimal path.  No one single route is perfect for everyone.  But there is a route because the ultimate destination is the same for all of us.

The entire universe we experience is of forms and we tend to get lost in this world of continually changing forms.  We get caught in the illusion of life and don't see what lies just behind the stuff of life.  When we start to get glimpses of what lies behind this world of forms, some of us experience elation while others get the hell scared out of them because they want to hold on to who they thought they were.  The moment we begin to see what lies behind the world of form, we start to give up our concept of separateness.  We become unattached to our individual differences--to having the universe the way we thought it ought to be--suddenly we don't see differences in form.  An interconnectedness, a oneness and wholeness is experienced.

When we start our spiritual journey, we are confronted with all the things we're afraid of--what we might call the uglies of life.  Life inevitably imposes upon us many experiences both pleasurable and painful.  Initially we fight and struggle against the suffering and pain.  But as we become more conscious of where the journey is going, we begin to realize that the pain and suffering is a teaching, a lesson in progress.  We start to see suffering as a grace--as an opportunity to confront our fears and resolve them.  Ultimately, we decide to accept whatever comes down the pike of life and work with it.  We discover that suffering is the fire of purification--we use our suffering and pleasure as a teaching.  We use it all to get liberated, to get free.  Whatever comes along, we work with it--including the moment of death.

When we learn how to not get totally lost in our melodramas, we stop creating more pain for ourselves.  Letting go is an act of spiritual purification.  If we want to get on with it, we have to give up that which we cling--give up our excessive preoccupation with emotional relationships and material things.