Why are so many young people looking to the east for spiritual insights?

 One of the criticisms of Christianity, and one of the reasons why many young Christians turn to the East, to Buddhism or to Hinduism, is that in Christianity there is no apparent help with a method of understanding. How do we find God? How do we even start? Good intentions are not always enough. We need instruction in how to make ourselves fit to receive the revelation of God, to receive the eternal birth.

What we need is a guide to the spiritual life suitable for people who are not academics. Generally speaking, sermons, as a whole, are not ideal for instructing people in spiritual development in a simple and systematic way, unless they are being given to a regular audience.

We need to learn, that that as human beings whatever we do, think or experience as humans, we are really searching for permanence, for God.

In search for God

Most people look outside themselves to find God. Yet in doing so, they are making a big mistake because we do not find God outside of ourselves; we need to conceive Him within our own being.

This constitutes for many people a new birth in understanding, a birth that takes place in the depths of the soul. We have to go beyond the senses, and with God’s help acquire the capacity to inwardly empty the mind of all sense experience, because they takes us out of our inner being to the world around us.

This process demands two things. The first is stillness; the second is an ability to concentrate the mind and stop it from wandering into multiplicity. As for stillness, one must still both mind and body, and then practice the presence of God.

 Letting go

If we can learn to let our personality selves go, we are in effect letting everything go. Total letting go is the way to gain all things in the God, who is the real Being of all. God wants no more from us than that we go out of ourselves, and let God be in us.

It is in and through detachment, through letting go, or relinquishing our sense of separation from God and from one another that the new birth in the soul takes place. Detaching and birthing are not successive stages in a mystical path but two sides of the same coin.

We must know that God is born in us when the mind is stilled and the senses trouble us no longer, when we live in peace and joy.

A word about prayer

Most people with a religious background use prayer to petition the help of God for current needs. Yet we should never pray for anything transitory, but pray for God’s will alone “Thy will be done” and nothing else. Then we get everything. In God there is nothing but Oneness, and Oneness is indivisible. If we seek or expect anything more that is not God, but a fraction of whatever we may want to call it.

If we seek God’s will alone, whatever flows from it or is revealed by it, we ought to take it as a gift. We should not question whether it is the result of nature or grace or how it comes or in what guise it manifests. We accept the gift and are thankful.

It is hoped that in spite of our emphasis on the importance of inwardness and of abandoning materialism, we come to acknowledge the beauty and mysticism of everyday life. “For in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28).