Useful Teaching Connection

How do we determine whether a spiritual teaching is truly useful, valid?

Are we more conscious, creatively functional, happier, emotionally content, prosperous (prosperity does not negate spirituality!), physically vital and mentally freer, as a result of our association and involvement? And, how well do we ‘live the teaching’?

Beware of teachers who do not seem to have the capacity to manifest genuine, spontaneous humor (not sarcastic or intellectually generated “humor”). An intellectual with basic metaphysical understanding can pose as a knower of Truth, while being compulsively driven to acquire adulation and status.

A useful connection with a teaching or teacher will always be confirmed by a wholesome feeling in the heart center. Otherwise, one might feel a sense of contraction in the same area – which should not be mistaken with the initial apprehension and nervousness one might feel upon meeting a teacher for the first time. The teacher and teaching will feel ‘right’ for the individual at her/his current stage of spiritual awakening and the relationship will bear good fruit.

Though Reality gives faultless direction
to all beings,
It expects no followers.

All live under the dominion of Reality
consciously or not.

– Steve Ridley