Each person must find their own balance point between pursing worldly goals and finding inner peace.
My apologies for the slow pace of new posts lately. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm, nor have I run out of material. Over the last three weeks, my life circumstances made it necessary to focus on worldly matters.
I could have made other choices. However, the consequences of inaction or inattention would have been more than I wanted to endure.
Sometimes, I wish I were a monk, only concerned about my robe and my begging bowl.
Balance or One-Sided?
Worldly ambitions and spiritual goals rarely align. Most spiritual practices seek to quiet the mind and increase empathy and caring for others. Most worldly pursuits seek to engage the mind and increase selfishness and personal pleasure.
When you lead a spirit-centered life, you often feel like you are swimming upstream, counter to the news and trends in society.
It’s helpful to visualize spiritual practices and worldly pursuits as a continuum with purity on either extreme. Each person must find a balance point somewhere on this continuum where their worldly concerns and spiritual life meet.
For monks and nuns, they aspire to the extreme. Some orders forbid possessions, sex, or any connection to this life to get them to focus exclusively on serving God or preparing for Nirvana.
For most people, they live with an attitude of you-only-live-once, so they pursue worldly goals with reckless abandon, often with little regard for how others are impacted by their behavior. Sadly, most of the world is gathered at this extreme.
Have you ever wondered why most religious orders have monks and nuns take oaths of celibacy? Does God have something against sex?
Realistically, sexual relationships bring in attachments to worldly pursuits, and rarely do they quiet the mind—in case you didn’t notice. If the goal of the practitioner or devotee is to deepen their spiritual connection to God or to quiet their mind, sexual relationships are merely a distraction. That’s why most religious orders forbid it.
For me personally, my balance point is more toward the spiritual side, but I am not an extremist. I am not a monk, nor do I aspire to be one. I own a nice house, and I enjoy playing golf, all of which are part of my worldly pleasures.
While I believe aspiring to the extreme of spirituality is a laudable goal, it’s important to recognize that reaching that extreme may not be realistic in this lifetime, and each person needs to seek out and accept their point of balance.
My distracting personal projects are winding down, and I will be picking up the pace on my writing soon. Thank you for your patience.