Expectations and trying to duplicate others
QUESTION: Masters, even after reading so many books, talking to so many spiritual people, attending many workshops on different spiritual subjects and trying hard to meditate, (in which I never succeeded), I am still the same person, full of anger, negativity and without a sense of purpose in this life. I even tried to take a PLR session, which I think failed as I could not be regressed to any past life. Is my interest in spirituality any way connected to any of my past lives or I am not yet eligible to pursue the path of spirituality? ~PMS, India
ANSWER: All the reading and studying that you mention will only allow you to see what has worked for other people. There is no guarantee that it will assist you or be appropriate for you at all. You have a resistance to letting go; you need to feel you are in control at all times. This keeps you from getting into a meditative, mindless state, and from allowing your unconscious to take over during hypnosis, thereby preventing a connection to your past lives.
The spiritual path is one of letting go of the ego judgment that controls society and merely evaluating what is occurring around you. Anger means that you disagree with what someone has said, believe you have not been treated fairly by others, or are mad at yourself for your lack of accomplishments. All of these things have to do with life lessons.
Your purpose for coming to Earth is to find out who you are (a soul) and learn the powers and abilities that that knowledge brings with it. This is a spiritual path, so if you examine this, you are pursuing spirituality.
The first step in awareness is learning what is negative and what is positive. Negativity is tied to the ego, and positivity is where unconditional spiritual love can be found. Examining how you feel and react to events will tell you how you are doing in becoming a spiritual being. If you feel anger and do nothing about it, you are not spiritual at all. If when you sense the anger you go into the feeling and find out what it is connected to and then deal with the cause, you are moving along the spiritual path.
Whenever you find yourself entering into a judgment, replace that opinion with an evaluation of the necessity of that action within your life. Love yourself for being able to make the choice of going from anger into love. Once you begin consciously making positive choices, you will be able to go into a mindless state with no judgment, which most call meditation.