Friday, January 25, 2008

Inner And Outer Paths

We travel our spiritual paths in inward and outward focused directions. We must first find the sacred within ourselves before we bring it out of ourselves into the world. We work on ourselves first and the world later.
Two of our greatest tools for spiritual development are meditation and ritual:
Meditation (or prayer) is an inner process. We look within ourselves for answers. We learn, we grow. We find the holy within us. Meditation and prayer are ways of connecting on the personal level with the Sacred.
Ritual (or worship) is an outer process. We put our faith into action. We practice compassion. We celebrate the chorus of life. We may gather for a formal worship service or we may simply "practice what we preach".
And these processes should be balanced in our lives. We take as we give, we give as we take. We breathe in, we breathe out -- since the moment of birth, every breath in is mirrored by a breath out. Balance is important. Balance creates the harmony of the world.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Balance

We live in a closed system, where nothing is created nor destroyed, but simply changed. Everything is in balance. Everything which is constructed must one day be destroyed. Every birth must be balanced with a death.
We must understand this balance and work with it. For every action there is a reaction. For every breath taken in one must be given back. And so we should strive for balance to work with the greater whole.

This seems to be a difficult concept for us. For we are, after all, animals; the product of centuries of evolution. And we contain within us some very selfish survival instincts. We want as much as we can get, for our genetic programming tells us that there will be times of need on down the road. Yet, in our modern world our basic needs are so easy to fill. Our own selfishness drives us to want more than we need: more than we can use. And as a result many starve and freeze, due to our greed.