At this stage of learning, you are likely filled with craving.
It could be love. It could be social success. It could be wealth or academic achievement.
There is something you want, and challenging yourself to obtain it becomes your soul’s challenge.
So you make efforts to obtain it.
And you observe, experience, and fully come to know what it’s like to have it.
This is essential for overcoming the challenge.
If you lack this experience, you’ll crave more and more, seeking further experiences.
If that happens, this stage can go on endlessly.
So what happens then? You endlessly repeat success and failure, loss and gain, lack and fulfillment.
These phenomena become reinforced over time.
Why? Because your actions for the sake of experience are constantly accumulated as soul experience.
The more these experiences balloon, the bigger their manifestation as phenomena becomes.
Success is one thing, but there will always be a phase of loss.
A phase of loss will inevitably arrive.
For example, if making money is your goal,
making money always involves someone else spending money.
Or, if you want to win in a competitive society,
winning always means someone else is losing.
That’s why there’s always a “loss phase” paired with the gain.
Therefore, if you keep on experiencing, you’ll eventually need to enter a phase of letting go, or it will become painful.
So, it’s necessary to observe without getting lost in the experience.
To observe, you must first acquire what you desire.
Then, thoroughly feel, accept, and contemplate the process of acquiring it.
Furthermore, after obtaining it, you must also thoroughly feel, accept, and contemplate the experiences you gain from having it.
This way, you can fully experience it to the end.
Before the factors expand and the backlash grows too great, bring the process of experience to completion.
I believe this is the best way.
Instead of just getting lost in enjoyment without understanding, knowing from the start that this is the first step, and that the point is to experience, will help you observe things more calmly.
Carefully observe and analyze what you gained, what you lost, what was difficult, the pleasure, the expectations, and what you actually received.
This is the way to master this first step.
Also, if you thoroughly complete the experiences at this stage, sometimes the next stage of “letting go” becomes so simple that you barely even notice it.
That’s why I believe it’s good and much easier for the soul to thoroughly experience things early on.
To fully experience.
The soul itself desires experience, so go ahead and challenge yourself as much as you want.
To desire is to be unfulfilled. This is a stage where the challenge is to take action.
① Indulging in or absolutizing what you have gained. Your perspective becomes clouded, and you can’t have the experiences you need.
② Abandoning observation and contemplation. This also prevents necessary experience.
If you do not progress in your experience, you’ll remain at this stage until your factors are saturated. Then, your desires and actions become more extreme, and the loss phase becomes increasingly severe.
Forcibly suppressing or denying your rising desires out of guilt.
At first glance, this may seem pure, but since your soul isn’t satisfied, it will inevitably explode somewhere.
This makes it easy to swing to extremes, so don’t treat desire as evil or immaturity—just recognize it as a challenge to experience, and don’t deny it.
In reality, the 1–4 step process is not something people always go through one at a time; it’s common to have multiple challenges at once, so there’s never superiority or inferiority based on which stage is most prominent.
After all, since we are all part of cosmic consciousness, it’s not something to compare.
| Step 2: Letting Go⏩ |
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