Out of the Indian
approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect
for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principals of truth, honesty,
generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.
Luther
Standing Bear Oglala Sioux
During
this process of learning more about humility, the most profound result of all
was the change in our attitude toward God.
Twelve
Steps & Twelve Traditions pg. 75
Maybe
there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who
have had them. But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all
the others. And these things which they have in common are not too hard to
understand. When a man or woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important
meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that
which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone. He
has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and
being. He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere,
that life is not a dead end, not something to be endured or mastered. In a very
real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of
strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself. He finds
himself in possession of a degree of honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace
of mind, and love of which he had thought himself quite incapable. What he has
received is a free gift, and yet usually, at least in some small part, he has
made himself ready to receive it.
Twelve
Steps & Twelve Traditions pg. 107
Grandfather teach us the principals to live.