What Is Our Shared Purpose in Spiritual Community?

“If you go on the spiritual journey and you don’t have your fuel, it’s like you’re auditing the spiritual journey. You’re not going to actually take the class; you’re just gonna audit it. You’re supposed to smile like spiritual people, laugh like spiritual people, try to be as peaceful as you can, as little anxiety as possible, but you’re just on the pad pretending to be something that you’re not. And I would say with the spiritual journey, you can’t really audit it. I mean, even when I was in university for ten years, I never audited a class. In fact, that seemed to be the funniest thing to me. I would see people in there, ‘Oh you’re in my class this semester.’ And they’d say, ‘No, I’m just auditing.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, you just show up.’ ‘Show up? Okay, you did that. What else? Well, do you get any credit?’ ‘No, no credit involved.’ ‘Do you have to do tests, papers, exams? Projects?’ ‘No, no, no, no. Just here, taking up space. I’m auditing.’ That is the strangest thing I’ve ever heard, auditing a class, showing up but not participating at all. Just being there without participating.

Well, if you try to audit the spiritual journey, the ego is going to have the last laugh. It’s going to say you didn’t really participate. You didn’t really meditate; you just sat there with your eyes closed. You didn’t really do what was asked of you. You just went through the motions. That’s pretty much the human condition. But we could say most human beings don’t even know the context of what time and space is, or unconscious beliefs and thoughts, or spiritual awakening. It’s more Well, you’re born, and you grow, and you grow old, you get sick, and you die. And then who knows what. You know, that’s pretty much the common view of the world. But you don’t get anywhere at all, just by auditing. You have to participate!”