“Some people spend all of their time thinking about common and ordinary things; no wonder they don’t progress much. Others spend half an hour and more thinking about the good, faith, love, thinking about the great things of the world. These people are cultivating the soil for their future genius.
“God’s teaching is the best soil; whoever falls on that soil will grow and multiply.
“Evil in mind is an abnormal condition. It is manifested through weak people. Strengthen your will; do not let your negative traits manifest themselves.
“Tell yourself the truth about your defects and you will free yourself from the restrictions you are living in.
“Prepare yourself for paradise. With the burden of materialism, one will not stay a second in paradise. The materialism that a man has in his consciousness is so heavy that if he happens to enter paradise with it; he will be expulsed for less than a second or he will go down.
“Arm yourself with Truth, Good, Wisdom, and Love, and begin to erase your sins from the past. Ask for forgiveness and forgive.” ~Biensa Douno
Common and Ordinary Things
Many people will insist they do not spend all of their time thinking about common and ordinary things. They think of great things, important things. They think about the rules of law. Some may think about running a business. Other may be studying and experimenting to make some great scientific discovery. But while those things may seem great on the level of materialism, in reality, they are very much the common and ordinary things that Douno is talking about. Virtually anything about the realm of matter, with the possible exception of escaping from it, is common and ordinary. What is really sad is that many today seem to think they are engaging in some sort of spiritual activity when they are trying desperately to manifest material things. Manifesting is only spiritual if you are manifesting spiritual things. But I’m not even sure manifesting is possible with spiritual things. The realm of spirit doesn’t function like thought-manipulated molding clay. Only matter does that since it is illusion to began with, and has no definite shape.
When Douno says the people who spend all their time and effort on common things “don’t progress much,” he doesn’t mean in the material sense. Of course such people become governors, senators, and business executives. He means they don’t make any meaningful progress. In other words, they don’t make spiritual progress.
Cultivating Yourself
Spending thirty minutes developing yourself daily is indeed cultivating yourself. It doesn’t have to be thirty minutes a day. It could be a few hours a week. It might be only fifteen minutes a day. The important thing is that you never stop learning, never stop growing. This is important for your mental self but is even more important for the spiritual self.
In today’s materialistic world, the spirit and soul are, on average, the least developed parts of humanity. And then we wonder why we live in violence and poor health. We wonder why we are never satisfied with what we have. The answer is that deep down some part of us is craving a spiritual awakening. That is what we need more than anything else. Cultivating yourself includes body, mind, and spirit.
Truth, Love, Wisdom
Douno says we need to prepare ourselves for paradise. That certainly sounds like a good idea. But how? You have to have some understanding of what heaven is in order to be ready for it.
If your boss tells you that it would be great if you learned to operate a glopstugel, it doesn’t help you any if you don’t have any idea what a glopstugel is (I certainly hope you don’t, I made it up).
Douno helps by telling us to arm ourselves with truth, good, wisdom, and love. While that is certainly a big part of cultivating yourself, even here there are some problems of understanding. In order to prepare for heaven, you need to go beyond ordinary truth, ordinary wisdom, and self-serving love.
If, for example, you see an oak tree across the street, and I ask you what it is, if you say it is an oak tree, you think you have told the truth. But you haven’t. You have only told the truth within the boundaries of the great illusion of the world of matter. The real truth is something much deeper that few people ever see, or even realize exists.
Wisdom is even more confusing. In today’s world, knowledge and wisdom are often confused. Many think that being wise simply means having a lot of knowledge. Others will say that wisdom is knowing how to use what knowledge you have. While that second one is correct, it too comes with a caveat. First, if your knowledge is limited to the world of matter, it is incomplete and inaccurate. In such a case, it is impossible to truly use it wisely.
Love and good are also too vague to truly understand. But there is an answer to this dilemma.
Awakening to Gnosis is Cultivating Yourself
Our mind is limited to an understanding of the physical world. The soul knows the realms beyond the physical. But that doesn’t do us any good if we spend our entire life on Earth with our soul dormant. We are born into this realm with our spirit and soul in a coma-like state. They are not dead, but they can’t really function until awakened. Doing that takes effort. While there may be some very rare cases of the soul awakening without effort, just sitting back and waiting for that to happen is like planning on winning the lottery to finance your retirement. Make the effort to awaken them.
It takes energy to awaken our spiritual faculties. Energy that comes from God, down to the spiritual sun, and then down to Earth. So we need to turn to the spiritual sun and actively take in that energy. We need to do that regularly. That is not just cultivating ourselves, it is cultivating our real selves, our permanent selves. Cultivating yourself means seeking out and excepting that energy that awakens and nourishes the soul.
When the spirit and soul are truly awakened, they understand the real truth. They also know real love, real goodness. That gives them real wisdom.
