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Says an old zen koan:

A student went to his teacher and said fervently, “I look forward to understanding your teachings and achieving Enlightenment! How long will it take for me to get this prize and master this knowledge?”

The teacher’s response was casual: “About ten years…”

Impatiently, the student added, “But I want to understand all the secrets faster than this! I’m going to work hard! I will practice all day, study and decorate all the sutras, I will do it ten or more hours a day! In this case, how soon will I reach the goal?”

The teacher thought a little and said softly, “Twenty years.”

You can’t rush someone’s spiritual path. As they say, “Haste is the enemy of perfection.” Before starting the practice of Meditation, some students reveal this anxiety, this rush to reach a place and, among these, even more rationalists, tend almost to want to negotiate a deadline with their Soul for evolution. It doesn’t work and it’s never going to work that way.

Spiritual evolution requires time, dedication but above all, constancy and perseverance. It is perseverance that will cause the turtle to overcome the hare on the spiritual path. Entry into the path cannot be by impulse but by insight. A lot of people confuse momentum with insight. Insight is an intuition and intuition is a communication of our spirit to our ego, our personality. When we get some insight during a meditation or a simple period of silence or contemplation, the source is our Higher I, our guide, the Guardian Angel, a Being of Light or, in other cases, even a vulgar disembodied spirit who temporarily leaned on the person at that moment to convey the message to him.

The impulse, on the other, is the source of the ego. It is to blame for not having done anything rigorously for its own spiritual evolution except to worry exclusively about its worldly affairs of the moment in the last 15 or 20 years, and have never dedicated to living life consciously. Nothing against living. On the contrary. If our Soul set out for one more incarnation, it was in the sense of greater spiritual progress and learning and this will only achieve more quickly being incarnated than being disincarnated. An incarnate spirit can evolve in 10 years what a disembodied would need 100 years.

Thus, in Spirituality, making decisions by mere emotional impulse of guilt or other emotion is quite different from making a decision by insight. We should never forget the tripartite structure of a human being with regard to the source of decision-making:

Animal part – instinct
Human part – intellect/reasoning
Divine part – intuition

All these sources of information are necessary in our lives but it is important to have wisdom to know when to use each of them.

Instinct is excellent to ensure that we survive on a physical level with regard to meeting biological needs.
The intellect is necessary to the civil engineer who is performing physics and mathematics calculations to build a bridge.
Intuition is necessary to know the meaning of life and to relate to the Spiritual plane.

Instinct is the most immediate source of information. Tell us what we need to do in the very short term. However, the most appropriate source for spirituality is intuition. Thus, the decision to evolve spiritually must start from intuition, from a part of us that feels the need to find meaning in what it does, in the situations of life that it is going through at the moment. You can’t be rushed.

Many times, I have meditation students who want to evolve spiritually with great rapidity. This desire is of great merit. However, it is not supported by perseverance and a large part will eventually succumb to facilitaism and laziness. The fact that they have to get up 20 minutes early to practice meditation with a mantra in the morning and the fact that they have to practice another 20 minutes at night is for some, in themselves, a deterrent. However, they seek Wisdom, Inner Peace, Equanimity, and Balance that only Meditation could bestow upon them. I recommend Transcendental Meditation as it is one of the most scientifically studied since it was revealed by S.S. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

A good part of beginners are attached to various mechanisms of self-sabotage of the ego and the only way to defeat these same mechanisms is through Wisdom, the inner observation that is made during the process of Meditation itself. Sometimes they argue, “I don’t have time to practice Meditation. I have a very hectic life” to which I answer to them: “For that very time, you need Meditation. If I had a life full of peace, I wouldn’t need Meditation. By any chance, you refuse to go to a doctor, arguing that you will not be able to take the medication because you are sick?”

Now it is precisely when someone is sick that they should see the doctor. Likewise, it is precisely when one has a lack of inner peace, of meaning of life, that he should practice Meditation. If a person is in Peace he will not feel so much motivation to heal his spirit. Healing your spirit means loving yourself more, seeking the Source and feeling loved by it, observing yourself, and finally resting in a state of consciousness that transcends the limitations of the mind to which you create space, time and matter. The mind creates our reality at all times. Who we really are remains unchanged at the center of time and space as space and time move through us as mind-created experiences. To better illustrate the idea, I will show the dear reader another zen koan:

Two monks argued about the temple flag, which flithed in the wind. One of them said:
– It’s the flag that moves.
The other said:
– It’s the wind that moves.
They exchanged ideas and couldn’t come to an agreement. Then Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch, said:
– It’s not the flag that moves. It is the mind of the lords that moves.
The two monks were perplexed.

Spiritual evolution depends not so much on the technique he uses to reach Enlightenment as on his determination to achieve self-mastery. It will do not help to try to practice 6 to 7 hours in a row of Transcendental Meditation to correspond to 20 to 30 mins in the morning and afternoon for a week since the creation of the habit is extremely important in any spiritual practice. Spiritual evolution is not something that one can temporally compress.

Just as the dear reader, every day, takes his breakfast, his lunch, his snack and his dinner and, eventually, his supper, to feed his body, should also every day have a certain time for spiritual practice to feed his spirit. In this sense, it would not do much good to fast for 6 days in a row and eat a lauto lunch on the seventh day to match all the meals that you should have consumed and not consumed. The reader will rightly argue that this would not be beneficial to your health and that having a large meal at once does not equate to consuming small meals several times a day, depending on the body’s need.

For the same reason, the Zen master, in the first koan, denounces being fully aware that those disciples who are more fervent at the beginning of the walk tend to be the ones who first give up. It is of little use to learn a technique of Meditation, Yoga or Reiki and then not to apply it for laziness, comodism or lack of faith. However, since everything in life is lessons of self-learning, at least in this way the beginner becomes aware of his difficulty in following something that at first seduced him so much by the promise of achieving what the most persevering in practice achieve. The disciple must humbly recognize his own inner weaknesses and never project his own faults into anyone. It will simply slow down its evolution. The true master is the inner master. The outer master is just a mirror of the inner master. Everyone has an inner guru, a guide who guides you along the walk. However, few are willing to retire to silence so that they can hear it, amid the incessant appeals of the voice of the ego that tries to distract him through the chain of desires that imprisons him.

The spiritual path requires patience, humility, self-demand, faith, devotion, perseverance, discipline, and not attachment to results. These are the values that must be accompanied by the self-proclaimed disciple of any spiritual practice for evolution, be it Reiki, Transcendental Meditation, Yoga or Chi Kung.

Spirituality serves to bring meaning to the life of the human being. It is not always possible to eradicate all diseases and sufferings through spirituality. However, with the sense that Spirituality gives to the life of the human being, the effects of these problems are greatly mitigated.