Intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing. You can be very smart, but still be a fool. The reason for the current state of the world is because the world is run by very smart people.
Intelligence is the ability to read books and digest information. In the end, it can be just another addiction. The mind craves information and knowledge, and feels good when it receives them. In the end, it can be just mental masturbation.
Intelligent people can read a book, assimilate all the information therein, and then tell you all about it. Without ever practicing or understanding. Without wisdom. It is just tape recorder consciousness.
Until I lived as an ascetic in an ashram practicing spiritual purification of my energy body as a full time job for four years, I did not have wisdom. I had an intellectual understanding of chakras, for example, but that was all. I was a fool.
Since leaving the ashram and moving to St. Croix, it has always been my desire to recreate that lifestyle here. And I should pause here to tell you that living as an ascetic is not the painful struggle most people imagine it to be. It is not hard nor is it unpleasurable. The practices which increase our life energy are pleasurable. It is the practices which decrease our life energy which are painful. Most modern people are addicted to these painful practices, and appreciate it when you show them better ones.
Maintaining spiritual purification as a full time job is difficult, however, without the support of an ashram. I have been only partially successful. Ideally, I would like to begin, join, or find an ashram, or spiritual community, of people dedicated to full time spiritual work here on St. Croix. This would also be of benefit to the larger community. Take healing, for example. Imagine the difference in healing quality of someone who has a perfectly clean energy body because they practice spiritual purification full time. Now imagine a community of such people. That is why ancient healers, such as the Essenes, would form their own communities, separate and apart from the mainstream. Not because they thought they were better than everyone else, but because they knew their healing energies flowed more strongly if they could engage in spiritual purification practices which kept their chakra system at peak performance. By pooling their resources, including time and labor–organic gardening for food, for example–they could provide for their own basic necessities without being a burden on others while still maintaining the freedom to practice their spiritual practices full time.
One alternative is to live half in and half out of the mainstream world. Maybe a part time job to pay the bills while you try to continue with your spiritual service to others. It is very difficult to get that to work. Usually, each job interferes with the other.
Another alternative is to live full time as a healer, with your own separate house, land, etc. But then you tend to wind up living wherever the wind blows you, with no stability and usually not in a location conducive to spiritual growth and harmony.
Of course, there are numerous other benefits to such an arrangement, not least to the members of that spiritual community. Their individual spiritual progress is accelerated greatly by living with others similarly dedicated, for example. And of course the people from the larger outside community (St. Croix? The USVI? The Caribbean? The United States? The World?) don’t have to wait until something is wrong to come. They can just visit and share in the energy and learn about a better way, a higher way. Then take that back home with them to their everyday lives.
And make the world a better place.
In spite of all those very smart people.
Sacred Breath 