Spirituality is the bridge that connects us to the ultimate source of all existence, the sea of nothingness.  Therefore, a spiritual awakening is reestablishing the connection to the source, discovering your own roots, in a sense.  The first order of business that we must accomplish in order to know our own roots is to know the root of our physical manifestation first and foremost: namely, Earth.  To know that your life and Earth are not separate but one, that you are a part of the great biosystem called Earth. 

The academically gifted are clearly talented. There are children who are able to learn conspicuously more than others even though they study for the same period of time. Such children should continue to develop dreams of becoming a professional, such as a researcher or a professor, in a field they enjoy. The problem is children who are forced to study, even though they have neither the interest nor the talent for it. Left with no other choice, these kids study to keep from disappointing parents or teachers, but they fall behind children who are better at it and always have the bitter taste of defeat in their mouths.

From a translation of Ilchi Lee’s book The Power of the Brain

To discover and develop their child’s talents, parents must develop the eyes to look within themselves. The dreams of children are readily stained by the ambitions of parents. If parents take a cookie-cutter approach to their kids, trying to stuff them into the familiar molds of their own experience, the children will grow to fit those molds, but no more.

Children who seem to be good and obedient on the outside are always struggling with themselves on the inside. The brains of children have their own formula for survival; they always seek to conform to their parents in everything, as a matter of instinct, in order to be loved. An even greater danger is that the poor relationships with parents that children develop when they are young will stay with them, in distorted form, on into adulthood. Unable to stand out boldly and play the leading roles in the story of their own lives, children grow up to be servile and timid, and live their lives trying to please others and live up to their standards. If you truly want your child to be happy, you should begin now training to see correctly, hear correctly, and feel correctly. Only then will you be able to properly raise your child.

Say a flower recognized itself as a flower and bloomed forth in all its glory; however, if the said flower did not have anyone who could appreciate its beauty and with whom it could share its fragrance, then what good is this flower in such a place?

Observe your own body.  It breathes.  You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.  Who, then, is breathing?  The collection of information that you mistakenly think it’s you is not the main protagonist in this drama called the breath.  In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you.  You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going.  The expression, “My life” is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption.  You don’t posses life; life expresses itself through you.  Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

I recall seeing a sign in a national park.  It read, “Please take with you what you brought and leave what was here already.”  This should be the basic axiom when dealing with Earth.  Earth is not ours to do as we please.  We have just been granted temporary stewardship of Earth.  We did not purchase Earth with money.  What we can attain during our time on Earth is not more land nor higher skyscrapers but inner maturity.  We have been granted permission to use the grand “toy,” the whole of the natural environment, from the trees, forest, seas, air, and earth, as tools to facilitate our inner maturity.  This is why we have a responsibility to return the toy to its rightful place in its original condition.  Such awareness should be the basic minimum that guides our actions. 

As long as we are in this physical form, we have to eat, excrete, sleep, and engage in social relationships.  Every moment of your life is a series of choices, and to make a choice, you have to judge the situation beforehand.  In another word, you have to weigh the situation on your internal scale.  Then you have to take responsibility for the choices that you make.  Although everyone starts with their scales at “0,” we put so much stuff upon them as we live our lives that we eventually forget what is was that we have on the scales and lose our sense of the “0.”

And you have to start with something that is easy, enjoyable, and natural: like breathing.  After you experience and internalize the effects brought about by these new changes, you will feel sense of something larger in your life and a need to share them with others.  As you embark on this road, your attitude toward life will change, your worldview will change, and you will have become a pebble that causes a new “enlightened” cultural ripple to spread outward. 

However, your instinctive trust in the energy of your own life force, especially confirmed by your own conscious experiences, will help you overcome these doubts and hesitations.  When we feel the strong, pulsating energy of life and marvel at the process of life that does not require our conscious manipulation, we have no choice but to trust it and be humbled by it.  Trust in life and listen to it.  Listen to the rhythm of life.  Listen to your own breath and pulse.  Learn to resonate consciously with that rhythm.  No, don’t learn.  Stop learning and just listen and observe.  Observe how you breathe, how your heart beats, how your skin palpitates… Now, express your life’s rhythm freely, for it is in that freedom that Truth resides, Life lives, and Creation is consummated.