When the lottery hits over $100,000,000, sales of the tickets for the lottery go up. It’s as if the lottery is worth investing in when there’s a hundred or two hundred or three hundred million available and it’s not worth investing in when there’s only twenty million available. This has something to do with the kind of thinking that humans engage in. I have known businesspeople, or at least people who attempted to do business, who could never actually get a business started because every time they wanted to go into something, it was always some sort of far-out scheme that would immediately make millions. They weren’t ready to do the groundwork to build up to making millions, they had to go right for the millions. Of course those kinds of ideas almost always fail because you can’t jump into something that is already complete.
People stand in casinos or sit in casinos for hours trying to strike it rich as opposed to to working and saving their money. It becomes a really terrible habit for some people where they eventually lose what they make in the attempt to strike it rich, because what they make doesn’t seem sufficient for them. They always think in some kind of magical way that they are capable of entering into another stratosphere of wealth.
The spiritual path has those same kinds of problems. People who haven’t begun to do the work on the self of the spiritual path believe they develop the conscience and now don’t need rules and don’t need regulations and don’t need to follow any set pattern of behavior that is externally put on them because their conscience has reached the level that whatever they do is appropriate because they don’t do inappropriate things.
Some people believe in magic formulas and that formula being that whatever they think is so. However they think it is how it’s going to be.
The act of humility in our encounter with the truth is an essential in order to be able to make contact with the truth. Without that being present, the ability to move forward becomes limited. It’s self evident to some and absolutely not evident to others that you can’t move along the straight path unless you become pure yourself.
The hadiths say that everything begins with intention. For some, everything culminates with intention. That’s a very important distinction… begins with intention or culminates with intention. “I want to become pure” is an intention. It should be understood that to bring that intention about, something has to happen.
Some people believe, and again it’s the same kind of thinking that makes people think they can enter into a business and make millions instantaneously, that once they have the intention to be pure, that they are pure. “I think I want to be pure! I’m pure!” The understanding between intention and the culmination of intention and the path in between intention and the culmination of intention is something that we have to be keenly aware of in our own existence.
