Theos-Talk Archives (October 1998 Message tt00019)

>RefJerry s.  Oc5t. 2 message
>Your statement on acting unselfishly and with detachment results in no
>gain at all, goes directly against the Law of cause and effect›
>Every action  results in an effect. If not gain then WHAT?

Gain (and loss) are maya. They are two sides of a single duality.
You cannot, therefore, have one without the other. If you believe
in gain, then you have to accept the possibility of loss because
they go hand in hand. On the other hand, once you realize that
you are, in essence, spiritual and already perfect, then neither
gain or loss will have any hold over you.


>The desire to advance along the SpiritualPath is of course Ego
>motivated, but as we have a lower ego and a higher Spiritual Ego, which
>is it?

Its both. Both the lower ego and higher Ego are maya, an illusive
sense of identity or separation from others. Whenever I think that
I am more spiritual than another person or farther along the Path than
another person, I am actually separating myself from others even more
and thus compounding my illusive existence. In short, when I believe
myself to be farther along the Path than any other person, I am really
deeper into the illusion of separateness and by definition, not any
farther along the Path at all. I know that this seems confusing at first,
but its really a logical necessity once we equate spirituality with
selflessness. There is no real difference between the lust for gain
by the ego, or the lust for gain by the Ego. Both cause a sense of
separation, and thus are maya.


>Impersonal Love is of course the key to Enlightenment.
>We could go on and on but I think fundamentally  we aaare in agreement.
>     Dorothy

But how do we ever get to "impersonal love?" We can't simply
say, well I want to be spiritual so therefore from now on I will
love everyone as myself and then I will progress along the spiritual
Path and become an Adept. It doesn't work that way (this is a self-
deception similar to the Christian idea that whenever we help others,
God writes it down in the Good Book and so we get personal
merits). Altruism and impersonal love must be spontaneous, not
forced, if they are to mean anything at all.

Jerry S.