Mental and Spiritual Levels

Looking for heaven in some future time and place is absolute hell. This is because you have wrongly employed time and space to separate your spirit from the heaven of the present pure moment...

See the difference between the mental and spiritual levels. The mental level consists of thoughts, attitudes, memory, imagination. When rightly used the mental level guides your performances in work or play and other everyday matters. A distorted mental level builds egotism which makes life hell on earth.

The higher spiritual level does not employ thought or imagination but sees and acts from pure wisdom. The mental level thinks but the spiritual level knows. The spiritual level accurately guides the mental level when the individual wisely permits it.

Most people stop their inner development on the mental level, believing it to be the spiritual level. Ordinary religious people suffer emotional hell because they don't see that hell operates on the mental level but heaven does not. They fail to see the painful contradiction of calling themselves saved while still living in frantic fear and hidden hostility. To be saved means to be saved from yourself, including rescue from self-deception, self-betrayal and self-injury.

Vernon Howard