And a great way to dole out spiritual lessons is physical death. Wasn't it Judge Roy Bean who said, "I'm sentencing you to be hanged. Let that be a lesson to you!" That's what God does sometimes. That's why so many people die in such inopportune ways.

Yes, God is rooting for you - and that often means God is rooting for you to live. If you and God together define winning as living, God may very well be excited about you living.

But if that means you're not learning what you should learn, God's excitement fades fast.

And so your number one priority needs to be your own spiritual training - with your life and health by-products of that. And often that spiritual training is achieved by saving your own life, and by focusing directly on your health.

So it looks like the spiritual training is a by-product. And it's OK for it to look like that, as long as it isn't - as long as the spiritual training is the main point.
 

This, by the way, is the essence of real courage.

It takes real courage to put your own training before whether you live or die. It's nice if you have herpes, because herpes is a great opportunity to train yourself spiritually - that is, to train yourself in using spiritual power to effect a biological result - without being in a life-threatening situation.

But if you have cancer, you have tougher choices to make about your spiritual training. Cancer is also an opportunity to learn. And if you decide to forego certain proven effective treatments because you want to use the cancer as an opportunity to train yourself spiritually - that is, you want to kill your cancer yourself without using those means - you might want to ask a question:

      Am I just being foolish, or is this real courage?

The ego manifests in unexpected ways. And the ego is the biggest immuno-compromiser. You may think you're going after real spiritual training when it's actually just your ego controlling you into taking a stupid and unnecessary risk.

You know what the surefire way of knowing is? How confident you are.

When you are absolutely certain you can do it, and that certainty is based on experience and a lot of previous victories, risk with the prospect of commensurate reward is justified.

And that's not ego, that's just practical.

  
You can start doing the job with insufficient training.