Take Responsibility for Your Life

There are a lot of misunderstanding about what spiritual life really is. Including the idea that if you don’t care about personal hygiene or your appearance, if you are very poor, or refuse to make any plans for the future but choose to float around in a careless bubble of “be here now”—you’re somehow a spiritual person.

If we really to want to taste the happiness of genuine spiritual life, we need to learn how to live a life of full responsibility. There is no need to renounce the world. You can be a busy mother taking care of a demanding child 24 hour a day, but if you see that child as a spirit soul, a spark of the Supreme Soul, then you will be able to spend all those 24 hours actively working to fulfill your spiritual duty, spiritual responsibility. Thus helping your child toward true spiritual wellbeing becomes your spiritual life.

In this talk we take a closer look at what ‘responsibility’ actually means, and why it’s so essential for us in order to live a meaningful life.

Highlights

– 0:00 You can’t run away from responsibilities
– 2:05 Spiritual life does not mean wandering around like a beggar, having no job and no obligations. Neither does it mean disregarding our material responsibilities and hope that someone else (or God) will automatically take care of us.
– 12:42 Being a renounced person (sannyasi) requires a very high level of spiritual qualification, depending completely on the mercy of the Supreme and spending one’s time giving spiritual guidance to others. This was a system of the past, and most people who apply it today simply become a burden to society.
– 21:31 Real renunciation means in the consciousness. The saintly kings of the past were extremely wealthy, but simultaneously not attached to any of that wealth or power; simply assuming the position of king as a spiritual responsibility, protecting the citizens from being overpowered by lust and anger.
– 31:13 Some people think that you have to go to India to advance spiritually, which is just part of the illusion that, “I am my body”. The reality is that westerners are gullible, naive, easy targets for the many fake gurus of India who want to exploit us. Balakhilya shares a story from a public lecture he held in Queensland, Australia.
– 39:29 What we teach in this podcast may externally not look spiritual at all. You might go to a factory and work for eight hours, coming home with dirty clothes and a tired body, but may be on a very high spiritual level. Some other guys are sitting around in the twilight zone totally in illusion, still conditioned by material nature.