Spiritual Straight Talk
Sadhguru: To seek the Divine, should you withdraw from worldly affairs? How can you withdraw from worldly affairs anyway? It all depends on what it is that you are calling as worldly affairs. I am tending to this coconut tree; is it a worldly affair or not? Very much it is. I am cooking my own food, washing my own clothes, are these worldly affairs? So you have to do these worldly affairs, otherwise how to live here?
What kind of worldly affairs you want to do is your individual choice. Everybody need not join politics, isn't it? Even in the social situation, somebody is in politics, somebody is just a clerk in the office, somebody is running a whole industry, and somebody is just sweeping the floors. It is just a choice of what to do in your life and how much.
It is only people who do not know what they are doing with themselves, and who are just doing what everybody else is doing, who complain in this manner. They neither have the intelligence nor the awareness to do their own thing.
Such people are always complaining about spiritual people. ?Oh! These people are not being responsible and doing worldly affairs ? they are doing their own affairs.' The man who is in his own house or in his office is also there just to do his own affairs. He is not interested in the well being of the world.
When people have made their lives unmanageable, enslaved and entangled to the situations around them, they become very jealous. They will always complain about people who devote their lives to the spiritual path. They will say these people are running away from the world.
People who are withdrawing from excessive activity are not causing any damage either to themselves, or to society or the environment or the planet. It is only people who are doing activity in absolute unawareness who are causing tremendous damage and threatening the very life of this planet. They are the people who are taking the whole humanity to global suicide.
So in a sense, one of the most responsible things you can do in the world is to withdraw from activity. Today it is of utmost importance like never before that we have an inner sense, an awareness of life, and that we experience life as part of ourselves and every other being as part of ourselves.
Devoting oneself to know the Divine within it is not so simple. It takes tremendous maturity to simply sit quietly. It doesn't come because you are lazy or irresponsible; it comes because you are aware and conscious.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is an international spiritual teacher, author and authority on yoga, with profound spiritual and cultural insights on health and human values.
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Send your questions for Sadhguru to Isha Foundation, 10 Belcaro Circle, Nashville, TN 37215 or email: info@ishafoundation.org
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