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How to Begin on the Spiritual Path

Now, if you asked me, “How can I start? What should be my next step on this path?” I would answer that everyone has to begin differently. A spiritual problem that needs to be cleared away first may otherwise obstruct the next stretch on the path. It may be a rigid prejudice that would make it impossible to be open to someone else’s words. One must identify the problem and ask to be open about it. However, no answer will be forthcoming unless you open yourself so that you can say, “I am ready to accept the answer if it is God’s truth, even when up to now I believed its opposite.” Open-mindedness has to be always present on this path. A person has to devote much work, willpower, and time to reach this state of mind. If you have not invested all that, then you need to ask yourself, “What are my imperfections? Where are my faults? What is my greatest fault, which might be the greatest obstacle to my spiritual ascent? What are the faults which I have already recognized, but about whose consequences and extent I have not given myself a clear account? And what are the faults with which my fellow-humans have confronted me?” Think about them. You will find yourself saying, “This is unjust, it is not true that I have these faults”—and you might even be right. Yet there must be a grain of truth in such opinions, perhaps differing from how they were expressed to you or how you understood them. Consider them with honesty and with absolute goodwill to get to the truth. The greater your resistance, the likelier it is, my dear ones, that you can find the grain of thrush in what you have been reproached with and until now not acknowledged.

Make a list of these faults so as to keep them in your awareness and thus prevent them from disappearing again. This will help you very much. Then take the list to your personal spiritual friends—whether in the body or not—and by opening yourself, you will receive an answer, a deeper understanding, and will perceive connections. Whoever is ready to hear even what is unpleasant, saying, “Father, your will be done, I want the truth about myself and will not recoil from it in cowardice, vanity, and oversensitivity,” will indeed receive the truth.

Your happiness will be greater when the truth coming through is one that you resisted, because it will be a greater confirmation of the reality of the experience than hearing an answer which you had actually hoped for. In the latter case, you could tell yourself that the answer was only wishful thinking. When, however, something that has been resisted comes through, then, my dear ones, you will actually feel the presence of your spirit friends, and that confirms the presence of that other world, the existence of which is so often doubted, the world which you cannot see and touch. Such an answer will steady your weak faith. Consider it as the first answer from God, given only when a human being is willing to take the first step, that of overcoming his or her resistance to change. The reward is great, because the security which comes from getting personal answers and knowing the reality of the spirit world through one’s own direct experience cannot be obtained from any amount of words, whether heard or read. But the “outer” words are also necessary; they give you the impetus to do what is needed.

This should be the beginning of your path. After that you will notice little things every day and then can ask your spirit friends, “Help me to recognize the meaning and purpose of this particular experience and see how it might further my development.” Again you will receive answers. I wish to warn you, though, that the preparation for and eventually the hearing of something that is uncomfortable must take place again and again, not mechanically, but with an ever-renewed readiness. In no way does it suffice to do this only once. If the door is closed, truth cannot get through, and the door is closed when one is not completely ready to accept that which is uncomfortable and unflattering but true. If you recognize and follow this, then you will again and again receive answers through recognitions or sudden inner knowledge.

An answer may come to you, perhaps a few days later, through the words of a fellow human being who is inspired. This is one of the ways God’s world helps you. Therefore you need to keep your eyes and ears open for a message. This is a test, an opportunity to learn humility by being open to such help, and by listening to another person who has something to tell you. This is then the second step for you to undertake. When you pass this test, a new, wonderful experience of deep recognition will follow that again confirms the reality of the spirit world. Such an experience has the same validity as when the answer comes directly from within. You will feel evermore clearly in what a wonderfully organized way you are guided on your path.

I would like to add that whoever continues on this path and reaches a certain solidity in the work will one day come to the point of feeling the need to give God something back in gratitude. At first, it may seem as if a sacrifice were being asked of you—a sacrifice of time, of course, but in addition a commitment which feels burdensome. It feels like a sacrifice to let go of something, to overcome something with a great effort. You see this in the beginning only as a hardship. You focus on the price you must pay, on what you have to give. The happiness that will come from such victory over oneself seems in the beginning only a promise whose meaning is not understood. Yet whoever is ready to begin to pay the price will soon recognize that one gets a hundred times more than one gives.

- Excerpt taken from Pathwork Guide Lecture #8 Mediumship—How to Contact God’s Spirit World