4.4 What is the time of testing?

Karma tests and guides you at each moment of your life. Every moment of your life is an opportunity to advance further along the path along which reality is guiding you. Committed daily practice of the meditation, together with these teachings, will empower you to understand the truth of this through experience: no belief is necessary, although in the initial stages it may help, according to your nature.

The tests, imposed on your life by karma, become more concentrated, more severe, as you approach the first, or psychological, stage of enlightenment. This is experienced as a period of great complexity and difficulty in your life. Committed daily practice of the meditation will empower you to resolve and leave behind the difficulties of this stage.

The purpose of this period in your life is to test your capacity to be objective about what you experience. Your primary psychological characteristic, prior to the first stage of enlightenment, is to experience reality through the filter of your emotional and intellectual projections. This emotional and intellectual subjectivity of your ordinary personality becomes understood as self-deceiving and illusory, relative to the post-enlightenment objectivity which you will attain when you have freed yourself from emotional and intellectual limitations.

These emotional and intellectual projections are to be understood in the way you see things, as coloured by your own attitudes. Learn to become aware of the reality of situations, independent of your needs and desires. The method of achieving this is committed daily practice of the meditation, understood within the context of your ordinary daily life.

Through the workings of karma, you are tested by the circumstances of your life. This is a natural consequence of your awareness moving outside your personality and towards wholeness. The circumstances of your life come together spontaneously to test how far your self-awareness has developed and how capable you are of operating with a sense of detachment from your own needs and desires.

You are being tested on your ability to operate at arm’s length from the constraints of your personality. The key to release from the pre-enlightenment tension into a serene objectivity in the midst of conditions lies in gaining detachment from the all-pervasive influence of the emotions. Practical advice on the handling of your emotions is contained in chapter 6.