Are Your Spiritual Endeavors Effective?

There is a simple touchstone for determining how effective your spiritual practice is, whether it involves sitting in stillness, being absorbed in movement, letting devotion and worship flow from your heart or giving yourself in service. Does it take you to the Source of your being? Does it dissolve your sense of being separate from everything else, or at least weaken the illusion that your are a solitary being in an indifferent universe? This, to me, is above all other measures and benefits.

Adventure in the Bush

Ranger in Namagdi National Park Visitor Center: most of the trails are closed due to recent flooding but there's a nice hike up this valley. Just watch out for the snakes, with this sun they'll be out and in the tall grass they'll be hard to see. Me: Snakes? What kind of snakes? Are they venomous? Ranger: Oh, yea they're all poisonous. There's the brown snake, the tiger snake, the death adder, the mulga,… Me: uh, what'll happen if I get bit, is the area patrolled? Ranger: well, you might die. Cell phone coverage is a spotty back there.

I drove to the Orroral Campground, where there was a single car, 2 kangaroos munching the grass next to it. I put on my running shorts and shoes and took off into the forest, following the Orroral river upstream, treading carefully and slowing to a walk when the grass obscured the trail. The trail climbed, then descended into a lush valley. I could see hundreds of kangaroos in troops about the valley, and rabbits scampered in all directions as I followed a barely-visible trail further upstream. Eventually I came to the site of a former NASA tracking station, now just concrete foundations. Aside from the 3 people I had passed on the trail just a short ways from the campground, I didn't see a single other person or car in the valley for the whole afternoon. The valley was magical, enchanting, dreamlike. The songs of birds I had never heard before, the breeze dancing in the tall grass, the brilliant blue sky adorned with billowing white clouds all made me very happy that I had come. And I didn't see a single snake.

I later learned that Australia is the only continent where venomous snakes (70%) outnumber non-venomous ones.