Don't Get Caught Up In Illusions

Don't get caught up in illusions. If it isn't spiritual, it isn't significant.

We get caught up in the everyday issues of life, often ignoring our Higher Being, our Spiritual Selves, the real us whose journey of personal growth is why we are each here.

Instead, we become ego driven caught up in trying to "own" more as if we could take it with us at the end of our brief lives. And to raise our level of self-importance, we strive to impress others. We value ourselves by our possessions, as we often value others by their possessions.

Those of us who are immature get caught up in how sports teams fare, screaming at every "unfair" call against "our" team or becoming elated as "our" team acquires stronger players and wins games. Yet none of these things are of consequence or even remembered by most people, however important it seemed at the time.

We immerse ourselves in Hollywood stars, which are pure illusions created by media experts and we ignore the world's wars and all of their death and destruction, which have immense spiritual impact on us all.

We ignore the world's poverty in which about 1/3 of mankind doesn't know where it's next meal is coming from, has no electricity, no clean drinking water, no sewage treatment and little if any education and loses many of its children to disease. The spiritual implications upon all of us are immense.

In stages and caught up in greed, we are polluting the environment and destroying our own planet, the only place we have to live. Rather than working together to solve our environmental problems we allow giant multi-national corporations to destroy the earth for momentary profit and we support them by buying their products.

We fail to see each other as brethren and seldom acknowledge our vast common interests on our short journey together, instead seeing immigrants from poorer countries to richer countries as threats as we fearfully try to contain them.

Yet in a remarkable contradiction it is the wealthier countries that then recruit them to come and work the jobs their own citizens will not do and do those jobs at extremely low wages with no rights or benefits.

Once again the spiritual implications to all of us of this cruelty are huge.

Some people are provided with health care while many are not. Yet health care is essential to every man, woman and child. But many of those who have health care deny it to those without it as being "too expensive." The spiritual implications here are unmistakable.

The world's giant religions know better than to allow all of the wars, poverty, environmental destruction, immigrant exploitation and no health care but do little about it, for they are sustained by the infrastructure that causes it.

Our lives are those of spirits living briefly in body and we all seek spiritual growth and some form of spiritual nirvana. Yet most of us do remarkably little to attain that spiritual growth and some form of spiritual nirvana, content to live in a world of illusion and apathy.

To attain our spiritual goals we must focus on the spiritually significant and address the issues that really matter. We must learn as well to love mankind, not just those that we "care about," learn to be compassionate and forgiving and beyond our own basic needs to share what we have with those in need.

This is what is meant by, "if it isn't spiritual, it isn't significant."

A great place we can start is to love our families and give them the devotion they deserve. From there we can expand "family" to include ever more people as we sincerely care for them and offer them our love and devotion as well.

The intent is of this piece is not simply to be an open ended appeal to mankind but to appeal to you dear reader, and to call upon my own conscience. As individuals we can avoid these illusions and focus on what truly is significant. And as we do, we encourage others to reconsider their own thought process and along with us, to seek out what is meaningful in life.