What matters is the pathway. What matters is that you walk down and enjoy it. If you are practicing buddhism, if it's real yoga, then your life is better everyday. That doesn't mean that better things happen to you, that's just life. Who knows what will happen. It's an adventure. But if you're really practicing correctly, the litmus test of true practice is that you like yourself better, you like your life better. You feel better. You can see, every month, every week, every year, an improvement in the states of mind you exist in, an improvement with how you handle both difficult situations and easy situations.

 

The best way to learn buddhism is, of course, if you have an enlightened teacher or if you don't have an enlightened teacher, a teacher who is much more advanced than yourself.  There are two types of teachers: exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric teachers can explain the outer forms of yoga: how to conserve energy, gain energy, utilize that energy to go into higher planes of consciousness. They can explain practices, teach you all kinds of valuable things and techniques, but they don't have the transmutive power of the full kundalini.  Only an enlightened teacher, an esoteric teacher, can actually empower you, transfer power from themselves to you, so you can much more rapidly escalate your spiritual development. 

 

If you're going to college and if you have a scholarship, or in graduate school, if you have a fellowship, you can progress much faster. Instead of having to work a job and go to school, you can put all your time into school and get through a lot more quickly. So empowerments are designed to aid or speed the student's progress on the short path.  Normally it would take a much greater period of time to amass all the power necessary to go into enlightened states of attention. But an enlightened teacher can actually transfer power to their students in the same way that a wealthy person can give somebody money.  It's something tangible, power. 

 

You can't transfer knowledge, not really. You can't transfer heart, in the sense of loving things. You can expose someone to it, but you can transfer power, certain types of graded kundalini. So part of the short path is the transfer of power and this power is to be used to aid yourself and to aid others, never for anything destructive.

 

 - "Buddhism", The Enlightenment Cycle