Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
A.H. Almaas
Read between
October 8, 2024 - July 3, 2025
Society is necessary for the basic security and social needs of human beings, but the human being needs more than that. The fulfillment of the true human potential requires meeting much deeper, finer needs.
The finer elements of the human soul are there to transform your personality so that it grows out of those childish patterns. Contact with essential qualities is supposed to have an impact on who you are, so that you can become a mature human being and be what you are meant to be.
The learning we do here, and the kind of experiences it generates in us, constitute a certain kind of nutrition, to help us to grow up. These experiences change us, and this change will manifest as a transformation of the values and principles that govern our lives. While this transformation will affect the rest of our lives, it will be most apparent in our relationships, in how we conduct ourselves as individuals with other human individuals.
It is not the objective of the Work to satisfy childish needs. The objective of the Work is to guide you to grow and mature so that you can live in accordance with your true nature.
It is not based on the values and principles that most people bring with them, but on quite different values. A large part of the work here involves the friction between these two value systems. The interaction between them produces a grinding, a honing that is supposed to expose the old beliefs and the infantile patterns so that we can drop them.
To be genuinely involved in this Work, you have to be willing to suspend your beliefs about what life is all about.
it is not enough to simply understand what is happening inside yourself; your understanding must manifest in your actions and in your interactions with others. That is where the work of integration can happen, and that is where the impact of the refined elements of your nature will transform your personality.
You cannot be a genuine human being if your outer life does not correspond to your inner life.
It is the very nature of being a mature human being to respect others as real human beings, too.
Another human being is an expression of the most sublime thing there is, just as you are such an expression. If you don’t relate to that human being with respect, appreciation, and recognition, you are not respecting or recognizing that sublime element in yourself.
Every other human being is just as precious as we are, and worthy of as much respect and love and consideration. This understanding needs to manifest in our conduct in each moment.
First, we have the work of essential realization. The next step, which is harder, is to learn how to manifest that realization in your life.
The principles and the values you live by must change from acquisitiveness, competition, jealousy, and rejection, to an attitude of graciousness, generosity, respect, and gratitude.
If you are interested in becoming a truly mature human being, you must conduct yourself according to the highest values you know, all the time.
The refined values of love and compassion and truth are not going to become part of you and manifest in your life if you are just sitting on your ass and meditating, or trying to understand yourself.
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You have to work at living your life in accordance with those values until it becomes second nature.
