A peculiarity of mankind today is our inability to understand anything spiritual. It is like we have been collectively conditioned to be like this and that no matter how we try we will always be this way and think only about earthly things and seem to concentrate all our efforts in this direction.

Right from childhood we were all taught that the purpose of life was to get an education of some sort then get a job and make a material living, get married and have children and provide materially for our families. The yardstick for success was to have done well materially, that is to say, to be comfortable in the material sense, having enough money and so on. This is then our ultimate goal. To be materially self-sufficient. 

Man has become material man only able to think and act in this way. The real understanding of spirituality and of anything that goes beyond the compass of this earth is lost to him. He is simply incapable of it. He seems to have lost the capacity for spiritual understanding or for an understanding for things that go beyond this earth.

Wherever anything spiritual is discussed he is at a loss and he is even hostile to such discussions and would be keen to dismiss it as fantasy and even deception and lies and non-existent. 

When, however, he starts to face serious difficulties and obstacles to his earthly aims he is then willing to give spiritual matters a thought temporarily until what oppresses him is resolved and then he returns to his customary way of living. Therefore what ails the man of today is a combination of hypocrisy and ignorance and indolence and a complete lack of ability to understand spiritual matters.

He even blames the Creator for all his problems forgetting that these problems were a reaction to the decisions that he himself has made and as such he must blame himself and accept these reactions as just consequences. He, even, sometimes in his helplessness comes to the conclusion that he must have been created this way and that his lack of ability were not his fault but that of the Creator’s.

Man was not created this way at all. Man was created with the ability to have a free upward gave towards the spiritual. He is a spiritual being and as such is endowed with all the abilities to understand everything spiritual. He is of the spirit and as such is in a position to be completely conversant with the spiritual realm and all that this offers.

His lack of ability in this direction means that he has lost something which was integral to him when he was created. He has lost the ability to connect with the spiritual, the ability to sense the spiritual and understand it. He as a result has lost the essence of his existence. 

We became earthly or material men when we collectively placed the earthly intellect above all else. It is the intellect that we worship and through this we lost our spiritual abilities. This is the reason we give preference only to earthly matters because this is what we understand through our enchainment to the earthly intellect. On the other hand if we had given preference to spirituality we would be spiritual men with spiritual understanding and as such the understanding for God. 

As it is, however, we do not have an understanding for God at all because the way thereto is through spiritual understanding which we do not have. The earthly intellect therefore is the main obstacle to a spiritual life. We should recognise this in time and dethrone this usurper and give the spirit its rightful place: the ruler over our lives which will guarantee not just the understanding of God but also entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.