Show Me

I’ll give credit to my wife who, when I protested during an argument that I really did love her, in a brilliant intuitive insight, looked me in the eye and said: “Show me.”

Not being originally from this culture, she was unaware that “show me” is a recognized phrase – as witnessed by the license plate “MISSOURI - THE SHOW ME STATE”; the song “Show Me” from the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, etc. (The story ends: I showed her, convincingly.)

Well, the same can apply in matters that we like to call “spiritual”. A guest was recently expounding upon his views in our living room. He started with the spirit world and the existence of a veritable pantheon of evil hobgoblins and energy vampires, explaining that God didn’t create just Man, but rather a whole series of beings on different levels. We must also take into account aliens, including the Greys and the Reptilians. In the same breath, he acknowledged Neville’s instruction that the Creative Principle is within Man himself and that the Hermetic principle is correct: the universe is psychological in nature. Everything is a mental projection. From there he went on to consciousness and the various bodies of man, energy levels, being in and out of phase, auras and chakras (take a breath) and later continued with dimensions, recurrence and reincarnation, and deja vu.

I could have interrupted and said: “Show me.”

This experience was reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s discussion with his prospective student, Ouspensky, who, by the time of their first meeting, had already written in a learned fashion on metaphysical topics. Gurdjieff said: “If you understood everything you have written in your own book, I should come and bow down to you and beg you to teach me.” (PD Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p.20).

Exploration of different topics, of course, is good, and staying with only one religion or philosophy for a lifetime (especially out of a sense of duty to an institution) can lead to stagnation. However, the whole point of a spiritual search is not to jump around indiscriminately, but to arrive at one single plausible teaching, and use mental discipline to explore its lessons to the depths.

At any point, if the study is legitimate, you will be able to say to yourself: “show me” – and answer convincingly.