Be very Careful what you ask God for

I have always been one of those people that when they ask God for something strongly they get it. However, I have also learned the hard way that though God might give you exactly what you want most of the time the consequences of getting what you want might be completely different than what you expect.

For example, in my teens I thought it would be useful to become enlightened and to learn to soul travel. God has brought both these things to me. However, what it means to be able to soul travel and what it means to actually be enlightened are completely different than what I thought in my youthful ignorance.

First of all, being enlightened not only means being at peace in your heart while at times you must watch all your older relatives go crazy or die or both, it also means that you are responsible for everything you have learned becoming enlightened. So, for example if your enlightenment takes you to becoming a doctor, nurse, paramedic or EMT, then you are responsible for keeping almost anyone you might meet in distress alive until more help comes. This can become very problematic.

In regard to soul travel, in some ways it is like traveling anywhere on earth. You might go like I did to India in 1985&6 and spend 4 months there and Nepal and two weeks in Thailand but the experience of it makes you a completely different person internally than anyone you knew before you left home to the point where it becomes very difficult to have a meaningful conversation about the changes with anyone you knew back home. So even though your life has completely and unconditionally changed forever there is no real way to convey what has happened to your friends back home because there is no real way for them to experience it properly unless they had been there with you for four months and met Living Saints, watched people die on the streets from starvation and lack of medical care, watched children run after your horse carriage saying "Bhakshish!" which roughly translated means, "Help me I'm starving!" until they almost pass out trying to keep up with the horse cart and so you throw them some coins so they don't fall down or pass out from the exertion! They haven't seen several thousand lepers in a line begging without noses and sometimes without hands or feet while you know as an educated westerner that about $4 to $8 worth of medicine then might save their lives and prevented leprosy and would have kept it spreading to their children and theirs and theirs. They haven't met an American friend then who shared in tears of the women he met who was cutting off her children's toes with a hack saw in Calcutta and when he stopped her she cried and said to him, "If I don't do this my children won't be able to beg and will starve" because at that time there was no public education only private and they were "Untouchables" that would die without an education or the ability to beg to stay alive.

So, be very careful what you ask God for because God gives us things not only to help ourselves but also to help others, and if we don't help others with what he gives us all he has given will be taken away. We are all given these gifts to make not just our lives better. We are given all the gifts and benefits in life to make other beings lives better too. That's just how it all works!!!