Effort Is Like a Medicine

The purpose of all spiritual paths is to become effortless, but when most of us read the word 'effortless' we immediately think on laziness. Spiritual effortless in fact has nothing to do with indifference or apathy, but it means to flow with the whole. When we have become one with the whole everything in life will become flowing, relaxed, effortless. You won't find a single enlightened person, who ever will put effort into something, because effort comes from the ego, but an enlightened will act out from his soul. He has become a channel for God. And in a true harmony something like effort doesn't exist. Do the musicians when they play in an orchestra really bother themselves when they play their concert? No, the musical practice needs effort and discipline for at the end to play perfectly effortless in a big harmony of thousands of tones.

Like in music it is in spirituality — in Kabbalah. All our effort is there to cleanse ourselves from blockages, which cause our instrument to play imperfectly. The body is the instrument, the player the soul. And so we have to practice every day the same patterns of practice again and again until our mind becomes such cleansed from all selfish thoughts, that it becomes a pure channel for the divine reality. In the end of the spiritual process there's no effort or discipline remaining, that would us bother in any sense. This doesn't mean that we wouldn't meditate or pray anymore, but life has become easy, nearly without any gravity at all, that is drawing us down. But until this it's mostly a long way to go — a way of steel discipline.