Journey of the individual

"Your first challenge in change will be with yourself. That is the most important. It will be with yourself and in your primary relationships: your partner, your loved ones, your family and so forth. If you feel a spiritual emergence arising that you must respond to, you will have to change your relationship with your family. You cannot change and have relationships around you not adjust according to that change. You must do it, not wait for someone to do it for you."

Beginner's mind

"Here you must start from the beginning and constantly set aside things you think you understand, things that you believe in, things that you believe have to be in the world and things you hold true about yourself, others and life in general. You must keep opening yourself to something new.... If you have a beginner's mind, you will have an open mind. Here you will be able to see things as they are and not as you think they must be or prefer them to be."

"Become a beginning student. Open yourself. Assume nothing. This makes you really available. This makes it possible to give you instruction. This makes it possible for you to learn from instruction."

"To be free of the past is to be free of the mind that represents the past, which is to be free of your thoughts as they are today. This allows you to have new thoughts, new experiences and to have a new beginning in life. In reality, this is what it means to be born again--to wipe the slate clean, to see things as they are and not as you have always interpreted them to be, to be open to new experiences without being conditioned against them by your past fears and disappointments."

Renewal of the mind

Without [a foundation in Knowledge], your mind will continue to reinforce its old ideas by interpreting every new experience, every new encounter and every new relationship in such a way that these ideas are validated. What a great loss this is to you, for you are denied access to people, you are denied access to new experience and you are denied access to Knowledge. Here you are frozen in the past and bound to reinforce it at all times. Without a greater authority in your life, this is what the mind will do. It will calcify and become hard and brittle. It will become impenetrable and impermeable, something that defends its point of view without any regard to reality or to changes in circumstances. This imperils you and imprisons you. This denies you and isolates you. This prevents you from having access to others and learning from them This denies your gift and your ability to receive the gifts of others.

"The thinking mind must constantly be stirred by new experience and by adaptation to new experience and new understanding in order to be vital and capable of learning. It is like stirring concrete. If you do not keep stirring it and adding water and new things to it, it hardens. And once it hardens, it can only be broken.

People who are learning and living The Way of Knowledge are constantly being renewed and refreshed because they are close to life, and they are close to Knowledge. Their thoughts change, grow ad evolve. Their ideas change, grow and evolve. Their conclusions change, grow and evolve. They can do this because there is something greater. There is Knowledge, the dynamic force of life within you, within the world and within the Greater Community as well. Knowledge brings you to the edge of life where you have to learn and adapt, communicate and contribute. This keeps you young, alive and close to the heart of life. Your mind, then, becomes constantly relevant to the present and is able to prepare for the future."

References

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