There are two mistakes the spiritually oriented person can make in his relationship with the world. The first is to get drawn into taking sides in worldly disputes. I am not talking about the conflict between good and evil. To take sides in that conflict is essential but sometimes we project good and evil onto worldly scenarios and forget that these are basically spiritual things referring to the spiritual plane and our relationship with God. That can and does spill over into the material world of creation but real good and evil are always rooted in the spiritual and when we think of them that is what we should be thinking of to make sure we are approaching them as they actually are and not as we might imagine them to play out based on worldly priorities and criteria.
The second mistake is to have no relationship at all with the world. This is the typical error of a certain category of mystic, the sort who forgets that though we should not be of the world, we are in it and cannot ignore that basic fact. To be born into this world means we have a task to perform here, and although that task might be to reorient both the world and ourself to the spiritual plane it is not to reject and deny the world as the arena of God's creation. If God looked at what he had created and saw that it was good who are we to say otherwise?
It can be a delicate balancing act. Our concern should at all times be the spiritual but the material is part of the spiritual as Jesus demonstrated when he took his body with him into heaven. He did not get involved with the world as the world but he loved it as the creation and sought at all times to render it more open to the spirit. This requires reorientation and purification and that also should be our attitude towards the world.
Nowadays there seems to be one crisis after another that clamours for our attention and demands we take a side. Increasingly, good opinion tells us there is a right side and a wrong one and we can be swept up into an emotional reaction or else just be fearful that we might be perceived as bad people if we don't follow everyone else. But I would suggest that often we don't have to take sides in other people's arguments. I am not saying we should stand back and let evil prevail but nor need we get involved in conflicts that fundamentally do not concern us. The immediate problem every human being has to face is within himself and has to do with his relationship with God, but we often ignore that in favour of something external to ourselves which is fundamentally less demanding and can be satisfied with gestures.
3 comments:
The difficulty is that neutrality seems to be impossible; so we are compelled to take sides.
But that does not mean we should spend time and effort on analyzing problems, nor that we should do anything significant about our taking of sides.
As you say, there are just SO Many issues, and we cannot do very much - and to try to affect major issues is a snare.
SO, I don't think the problem is about taking sides - where, when an issues is significant, it is usually obvious that both sides are bad, but one is clearly the worse. This can be inferred from the provenance of perspectives and stories.
Anything unanimously/ vigorously supported by the mass media, globalist financial and corporate institutions, government and the usual culprits - is going to be the worse side, compared with any other that they oppose.
Having decided That business, we cannot and will not do anything substantive about it - but it does help put the matter to bed, and lets us move one to more important things.
So my intent would be to check provenance, take sides, do nothing, move on.
It's true that it depends on the situation whether we actively take sides or not but that's why I differentiated between good and evil from the spiritual perspective and the worldly one. This was really to do with worldly issues and how we can get pulled away from the spiritual by getting caught up in the worldly.
Good day William.
As yet, my approach to others on necessity has not left the internet. Soon, this year, I will take time away from working, and yet that still leaves others to need to do more than toil their own time away. The internet is not an appropriate space for such discussions for it is used as a means for people to escape what they truly are, and my approach is directed to this deflection not just in the data medium but reflected as well in the open. Lest someone forget themselves and cause a disturbance for someone else, they hide themselves for those others and obscure their selves from gaining the realization of what who one is. Merely human interaction is never enough to gain this knowledge and is intuited as a hinderance in all but the most sensitive to the question.
Bless Us.
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