How can we do our best in both spiritual and material life?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, how do I do my best in my material life also and my spiritual life also? Sometimes we need a quiz to compromise something like that. We can avoid this thing in spiritual life and we can give them practical advice.
See, this is also one of the topics I will be taking later, in detail about how to see our material life. But two principles I will talk right now. First is that, to ensure that we have some basic commitment to spiritual life, we should differentiate.
This is my spiritual life, this is my material life. I should be able to spend some time for doing my sadhana, for associating with devotees. So, that kind of separation in terms of analysis, so that there is some basic time allocation, that is important.
But once we have done that, then it is not that all the time we have to keep differentiating. This is material, this is spiritual. Ultimately, what is spiritual? Spiritual is actually more of a disposition than an action.
It is more of a disposition. Spiritual means to have an attitude of silence. So, sometimes people come to a temple and they come to a temple just to show people I am so pious.
So, they are coming not to take darshan but to give darshan. So, when they do that, they are coming to temple but is that really a spiritual activity? So, they are not coming with a service attitude. So, we have to understand that ultimately spiritual means to cultivate an attitude of service.
So, whether it is in our job, whether it is in our family, we cultivate an attitude of service. It is by Krishna’s arrangement that I am right now in this family, I am right now in this job. Krishna is the ultimate controller of everything.
So, let me do the best that I can in a mood of service. So, now there is, again we have to have a realistic conception of what my best can be. Sometimes if you think professionally the best means working 16 hours, 18 hours.
And that is not necessary, it is not necessary to become a workaholic to do sufficiently well in one’s professional life. What happens is when we start thinking of our work only as material, we become neglectful. We become evasive of responsibility, we become careless, that is not good.
We decide okay this much is the time I want to work and in that time we put in our best effort. And sometimes we may have to put in little more time, sometimes we may get time, we may do other activities also. But this is something which we learn by experience, how much time, how much energy to put in and it may also depend on the particular necessity of our socio-economic situation.
But broadly speaking whatever we do we try to do it well. And the balance is a matter of learning by experience. Sometimes in spiritual life say there is a festival, there is a yatra, at that time our spiritual activities will become actually more.
Other times there may be an urgent project in our company, there may be some important festival in our family, important occasion in our family, say marriage or pregnancy or whatever something like that. Then at that time our material life will become material activities, family activities or professional activities may take more time. So that is basically we balance.
Sometimes we may move this way, sometimes we may move this way. We have to be flexible about that. So broadly speaking we try to permeate both our material and spiritual life with an attitude of service.
And we don’t think that it’s only when I come to temple I serve Krishna. Even when I am home, even in my office I am serving Krishna. How? Because usually people come to know that we are devotees.
So people observe how we are behaving. At least at that level they see that it’s a nice pleasant responsible person that is creating some positive impressions. So that I will talk about elaborately later.
But suffice it to say here that we should try to permeate all of our activities with that mood of service to Krishna. And by doing that depending on situation sometimes we may have to do one more, sometimes we have to do another more. So we may have to consult friends, other devotees to differentiate between what is necessary and what is excessive.
Even in our material life and sometimes it can happen in devotional life also. Sometimes we may just start getting too involved in services and then neglect other aspects of our life. And that neglect may create bigger problems afterwards.
So we need to have a sense of balance and if we have some friends with whom we discuss they also understand our situation and they may give us some guidance. If we have some spiritual guides we can talk with them also. But it’s a matter of balance we learn by experience.
So the principle is the more we cultivate a mood of service the more we will find that we will get the intelligence. वदामि बुद्धी ओगंतं येनिमां उपयां दिते. When we have that mood of service how to act in a way that we are more closer to Krishna that Krishna will guide us.
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