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Originally Posted by Erock  I know that a lot of people that post on these boards are spiritual seekers, and I'm wondering how you all balance spiritual searching and everyday life, because they don't seem to go hand in hand (or maybe they do). Right now, I'm having an internal conflict between these two different ideologies:
1. Setting goals. Dreaming about the future. Fulfilling desires. LOA. Trying to experience everything life has to offer, including all of its sensory pleasures. Experiencing all emotions. Taking the good with the bad. Creating memories, and trying to always do something new. Meeting tons of people, and making a lot of friends. Trying to make a difference in the external world, exc...
2. Becoming very quiet on the inside. Trying to stop all internal chatter. Eliminate the ego. Watch emotions as a silent witness. Curb all desire. Keep the mind always in the present and avoid thinking about the past and future. Always staying aware of my spiritual essence, and avoiding all sensory pleasures, for they breed unneccessary desire. Trying to become enlightened, or realize the true nature of reality. Trying to make a difference in the internal world first-for that is what really matters.
How do you guys balance these two, because they seem to go against each other? Is balance really the way to go, because a lot of the most successful people seem to take one of these two paths to the extreme. The most successful spiritual seekers always seem to be in isolation, and the most successful people at fulfilling desires always seem to be dreaming big and doing revolutionary things externally. Right now I am kind of half-way between, and I don't feel like I'm making any progress because they conflict so much.
Anyway, if you have any input on this it would be fantastic.
Erock |
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Originally Posted by Erock Thanks a lot. If anybody has any personal stories about them dealing with this, or any insight that would be awesome, but otherwise I have learned a lot. |
I'll try to convey how I do this balancing act. To me the two roads you describe in your startpost for this thread are not in opposition, they each have a purpose. Understanding the purpose is the key to knowing when to focus on what and how to balance them.
To me, when I suddenly wake up from sleep, or when I meditate is when I most clearly KNOW who and what I am. If you catch me in that moment and ask me my name, I would not be able to answer you instantly. I will only be aware with absolute certainty that I exist and that I am aware of that fact. I am aware that I have a body, and I am hyperaware of all the information coming through my senses, and I have more senses alert, sort of like I sense an energetic atmosphere around me - I can sense the mood of the collective around me in the building, I can sense the emotional weather of the day in a way. All inputs are sharpened and my focus is all around me. If somebody then do anything to catch my attention, even in a low key way I feel it like an explosion when it enters. In this state there are no words in my mind, no labeling of what I sense, no analysing, no interpreting, no comparisons, no meaning, everything just registers as it is very strongly. I know who I am, but I do not know my name, my adress, my tasks for the day, my boyfriends name or any definitions of what I sense around me. I am completely present in the moment and there is no filter that reduces my experience. I feel very peaceful and powerful at the same time.
Then my mind wakes up and starts commenting on what I experience and reminding me of the days agenda, and what happens then is that the experience is immediately reduced. My mind cannot multitask and process all that sensory information at once, and it starts to chunk it up to make sense of it. After chunking, generalising, deleting and interpreting, not much is left of the original experience, but I still have an inner knowing that there is much more going on than my mind can deal with. With interpretation arises emotions depending on the interpretation. But I still have the knowing that the emotion is a response to a lesser understanding and distorted truth than what this ME that I experience before my mind "wakes up" have access to.
I think the purpose of your route number 2 is to get to that sort of inner wordless, pictureless, soundless KNOWING of who you are, and experiencing the world through all your senses (which actually are more than the five most people are familiar with) without the filtering process the mind needs in order to process information. The problem for most of us is that the mind so much wants to come along into this sort of experience, and it just can't without ruining it. Many spiritual teachings focus on detaching and disidentifying with the mind. I think the key is this: is your mind your servant or your master? Having had the sort of experience I describe gives me the definite knowing that I am not my mind, so even though I can get lost in the minds processes, I don't feel like that is a problem. Thinking is fun, and the inner me greatly enjoys all I can do with it. The essence is that I know the mind distorts reality, so I never take anything I think at face value, and I know I can never express in a communication with the mind involved who I am or what is the truth about reality. With that knowing firmly established, there really is no need to take path number 2 to any extreme. I'll drop in once in a while on that path if my mind takes off and start producing to much trouble with it's distortions and my body get hijacked with hormones and chemicals that clouds my clarity of the inner knowing. Having had experiences of clarity gives the advantage of recognising when it is missing, and then I can choose to haul myself out of the distortions and back to the presence of the inner ME experience by shutting out the busy engagement in life and meditate until clarity returns. It is like be on a sliding scale of awareness, I can go up and down depending on what seems to be needed at the moment, and what I prefer to experience.
It does not resonate with me that there are any shoulds or don'ts involved in these paths. I feel it is all about preference. If you have not experienced what it is like when the mind is turned off and your mind is trapping you into all sorts of trouble, I think the second path may be very attractive and relevant to follow. If your mind is reasonably functional and most of the time produce results you are happy with, the attraction of path 2 would maybe not be so great. What I mean is that path 2 is not any better, or more right for being spiritual, but if you ar not getting the life experience you want with path 1, it is a tool you can pull out of your toolkit for this earthly existence to improve your experience. A person that never uses that tool is no less spiritual than an enlightened master, we cannot NOT be spiritual, it is an impossiblity. It is really about the degree you choose to experience your spiritual self, and whether you choose to let your spiritual self be the creator of your experience or whether you will let the "mind program" run your life and reduce your spiritual self to just record the experience passively. Whatever you choose you will grow and be a co-creator and co-destructor, question is what do you create and destroy, and are those the kind of experiences you really want to have? If you are conflicted about it, then what you need is inner negotiation to become clear on your preferences. In order to do that you need to ask your inner parts what their intentions are for their wishes and desires, then find a path that can cover all the intentions in order to have all parts supporting your choices and not getting in each others way. A good way to do this is to set up several chairs and assign each part/desire a chair. Then sit in one chair at a time and write down the desire and the underlying intention for that desire. When you have them all down, then allow your mind to help figuring out a path that will cover all the intentions. The desires are secondary to intentions. Desires and emotions are just the subconscious parts way of kicking you into action to achieve the intention. There are always more ways to achieve those than the subconscious knows about, and the subconsious can be instructed to operate in another way that produces less conflict.
I hope this was useful for you, this works for me at least. Sometimes I even choose to stay in inner conflict with the pain that comes with it, as it is my experience that this can be like working on a rough diamond if I allow it to be for a while. The end result shines more brightly. That's when it comes in handy to not be heavily identified with the mind and emotions and being able to detach from them and just observe. Taking an observer posistion and just accepting the process enables me to not act destructively and delay decisions so they won't be to clouded by the pain. Whenever I fall out of the observer mode with painful stuff going on I will do something stupid, detaching prevents those dire consequences from occuring.