Objective advice can only come from someone who is experienced and knowledgeable. One without the other just won’t work: without experience, knowledge is unfulfilling, and without knowledge, experience is temporary and incomplete.
Experience comes with practice. If we have the “know-how” but don’t put what we know into practice, we will be lacking in experience.
With experience our knowledge increases, but only if we take the time to ponder and consider our actions. Deliberation leads to “liberation.” It means that when we meditate we gain the knowledge to change our course of action and free ourselves from negative thinking and “self-confining experiences.”
When we are a prisoner of our images we are confined to our little ego (our small self-identity). It is okay to have an ego (we all have one), but we should make our ego as big as the Universe: we should identify with the entire creation and realize in essence (physically speaking), we are just star dust. From the point of view of Consciousness, in essence (spiritually speaking), we are the eternal energy of the Cosmos. This energy is the conscious self (SOUL) devoid of all material and mental trappings.
Practicing the principles of Consciousness is the only way to free ourselves from self-delusion. Anyone who preaches but doesn’t practice is suffering from self-delusion. People who deliberately practice self-delusion (people who “know better” but don’t “do better”) eventually become bad people who hurt not only themselves but others too.
Most people who suffer from self-delusion are just ignorant. In other words, they just don’t know better. The Wise will help you to know better so that you can do better, and together we can do our best. When everyone is doing their best, this world will become “heaven on earth.” But even if others remain spiritually lazy, we should at least do our best and make our own mind heavenly.
The Wise make their mind heavenly; others make their minds heavy with self-doubt and self-delusion. Good advice, put into practice, will remove both the symptoms (self-doubt and self-delusion) and their cause: Ignorance.