I turned 28 about a week ago.
We had guests at the monastery and they brought cookies&cream and chocolate fudge for my birthday.
A spiritual aspirant’s life is constant balancing between the relative and the absolute side of things.
Birthdays are completely related to the temporary side, but it would be quite artificial for somebody like me to only consider the absolute point of view. There will be a time (in some of these lifetimes) when that will be a reality for me, but I still have ways to go. A big part of true spiritual practice is honesty, personal integrity. We have to strive to leave the relative plane of consciousness behind (what would be the meaning of practicing otherwise?), but at the same time repression and dishonesty will only slow us down, although for a while it may look like we’ve actually gained something.
A big part of monastic life is to learn to know yourself, your strengths and limitations, and your standing in spirituality, because this knowledge gives you the tools to know when you’re pushing too hard or when you’re shifting to neutral and kicking back. I have learned so many things about myself and the way things work, as a side-product of practicing Gaudiya Vaishnavism. When you know yourself, you can reach out just enough towards the absolute plane so that you’ll be making an effort but not losing balance and going face down in the mud. And so what if even that happened? You learned something more again, and just picked up from where you left off.
The interplay between the absolute and the relative becomes especially pronounced when I visit Finland and my family and old friends. Here at the monastery my personality revolves around spiritual practice, whereas in Finland everybody only relates to my relative side. It’s not like I’ll force my mother to start calling me with a Hindu name all of a sudden, but they can see I’ve changed, although I’m still the same person in many respects.
Religious fanatics can’t harmonize the pure and absolute goal with where they are at on the map. In other words, they are not humble enough to admit that they are nowhere, and it makes them fly planes on the sides of buildings and run into embassies with a dynamite vest.
In a short-term view it’s so much easier to fanatically hold on to the absolute consideration and condemn everyone else to hell, but that will never make a practitioner grow and actually reach spiritual perfection, because fanatics think they’ve reached it already although the have hardly started on the path.
Have some cookies&cream and put down your bombs for a second.
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