Below are four skill that you develop as you decode your spiritual messages. Each corresponds to one of the sections in my book and builds on the preceeding skill. Click on a link to read or listen to a description of that skill.
Spiritual messages are the moments when the spiritual dimension breaks through to help and guide us. We find them most easily in situations where things turn out better than we expected and we somehow think that it might be the results of a spiritual intervention. Messages are thus the experiences that make the spiritual dimension real and relevant to us. They are the experiences on which our beliefs rest. The first skill we develop by decoding our own messages might be called spiritual reality testing—the ability to discern and correctly interpret the actual effects of the spiritual dimension. The importance of reality testing is obvious in our material life. We need it to develop our potentials, form real relationships and succeed at school or work. It helps us deal with the complexities of modern life in ways that are distinctively our own. Sound spiritual reality testing is equally basic to our spiritual development. So, the first three exercises are aimed at helping you check out your ability to engage spiritual reality and improve it. The exercises will help you describe in as objective a way as possible the experiences on which your beliefs rest, then add on the meaning that you give to these experiences and only after doing these to identify the belief system that has helped you make even better sense of your experiences. You will become in effect a spiritual researcher or detective who carefully examines the bits of evidence you collect to find clues to what the source of these messages might be telling us and use that information to improve your everyday life.
The second set of exercises—four through eight, helps you identify what you can do to take what you have learned from your messages and use it to improve your life further. The exercises help you formulate plans to think, feel and act in line with the perspective that your messages induce in you and observe the feedback that you get. They help you identify the elements that you deem crucial and improve them. They will focus on the two elements that I have found particularly important: our attention and intention. By clarifying what it means to you to have a state of spiritual attention and what it means to you to act in the direction that they seem to suggest, you can see how refining them improves the quality of the spiritual help you get in that particular situation.
What are the rewards of this kind of spiritual mastery? Not only will you solve everyday problems more effectively with this spiritual help, but you will also discover a new kind of pleasure, the one that comes with work, mastery and greater overall competence in an important area of life. This feeling can be better understood by analogy to the one we all experienced going to school. We may not have liked doing homework at first but as we saw the value in what we were learning we began to work better, for we discovered the pleasure of learning and mastery. So, this different kind of spiritual pleasure that comes with greater mastery of the lessons of our messages is essential if we are to continue our spiritual development. For only when we are convinced that we can engage spiritual reality better in our own life-circumstances will we make the kind of ongoing efforts required for real change so that we can enjoy even greater benefits that this greater understanding of our messages promises to bring.
In the third section, exercises nine through fourteen, we will take what we have learned and see how to use it to develop the kind of spiritual intelligence that will enable us to get spiritual help with the daily challenges of our own everyday life. The best way of doing this is to find and systematically apply a set of principles formed by a spiritually mature person—and carefully observing the feedback that we get. Just as we have to master the fundamentals of any other complex subject, so we do with our efforts to engage the spiritual dimension. The exercises help you to identify the benefits of applying these principles and the synergy that comes from using a system of principles.
The more you learn about how the material and spiritual dimensions work together, the easier it becomes to generalize from a combination of your own and others’ experiences. You might see, for example, how your emerging spiritual intelligence is in line with the emotional intelligence that you use to run our everyday lives—and how that helps you develop both at the same time. You might see how the different areas of life contain different lessons so that you can use different aspects of everyday life to improve different aspects of your spiritual character. With each step forward, you feel the kind of deeper happiness that comes from fulfilling your own potentials and getting the most out of your own life. You are now at home in a world that is both material and spiritual.
In exercises 15-18, I help you form a developmental perspective on the stages you go through learning to decode your messages by making systematic analogies with the stages of normal child development. These analogies will help you see where you are in the process of learning to decode messages and what milestone you need to master. They will help you will form reasonable expectations of the kind of help and feedback that you get when you engage the spiritual dimension so that you can enjoy the rewards specific to your own stage. The better your understanding of the kind of feedback you are likely to receive, the better your ability to decode it. And as you have already heard several times before, the value of any idea that you form about your messages needs to be tested by applying your understanding and seeing the feedback you get—are they the benefits you predict. With your current ability to decode messages in everyday life in a better perspective, you will be better focused on the lessons that you need to learn, less troubled by the ups and downs of life and generally more optimistic about your future—happy to be engaged in this process that you now understand.