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questions on walking on spiritual path. please suggest.
misecmisc1
I am a HinduIndia Veteran
hi all,
some questions came to my mind, so thought of asking you all:
1. why is walking on spiritual path so difficult? on reading about spiritual path, everything seems so plain, obvious, virtuous, nice to do, good, beautiful - but when it comes to practical reality, why all the good qualities like no-hurting, honesty, non-attachment, tolerance etc just goes out of the mind and even if the mind may somehow rarely remember it, still it does not want to do it.
i think the answer to this is the delusion of our mind, the attachment to 'I' and then greed and hatred which comes along with this delusion.
2. how do you keep walking on the spiritual path? this question is mainly for people - who are quite experienced, aged having following the spiritual path for a quite long period in their life. my question is what is the motivation which keeps you walking on the spiritual path. i am a family person with a wife and a daughter - currently i have less work pressure and also at my native place with my parents, so somehow have some spare time for me - to read about what spirituality says and doing some sitting. but after sometime later, my work pressure is going to increase and i will be moving back to my work city, which will reduce the time for my spiritual journey to quite a large extent - or who knows may totally end it because of no time. as you would have got that - i have not been able to use my mindfulness off the sitting(even not in sitting), so till now i am not able to find spirituality in daily activities because of my lack of mindfulness. So those who are walking the spiritual path for a quite long time now, please let me know how you keep on walking on it and still surviving in the materialistic world - so it is a question to lay persons in a way, because if one becomes a monk, then at least to some extent that monk can walk on spiritual path somewhat freely.
if you have been practicing for a small duration, then also please feel free to suggest on the above question.
if the above questions seem stupid to you, then please feel free to consider me an idiot who has till now not found any sync between the materialistic worldly ways and spirituality ways.
please suggest on the above questions. thanks in advance.
some questions came to my mind, so thought of asking you all:
1. why is walking on spiritual path so difficult? on reading about spiritual path, everything seems so plain, obvious, virtuous, nice to do, good, beautiful - but when it comes to practical reality, why all the good qualities like no-hurting, honesty, non-attachment, tolerance etc just goes out of the mind and even if the mind may somehow rarely remember it, still it does not want to do it.
i think the answer to this is the delusion of our mind, the attachment to 'I' and then greed and hatred which comes along with this delusion.
2. how do you keep walking on the spiritual path? this question is mainly for people - who are quite experienced, aged having following the spiritual path for a quite long period in their life. my question is what is the motivation which keeps you walking on the spiritual path. i am a family person with a wife and a daughter - currently i have less work pressure and also at my native place with my parents, so somehow have some spare time for me - to read about what spirituality says and doing some sitting. but after sometime later, my work pressure is going to increase and i will be moving back to my work city, which will reduce the time for my spiritual journey to quite a large extent - or who knows may totally end it because of no time. as you would have got that - i have not been able to use my mindfulness off the sitting(even not in sitting), so till now i am not able to find spirituality in daily activities because of my lack of mindfulness. So those who are walking the spiritual path for a quite long time now, please let me know how you keep on walking on it and still surviving in the materialistic world - so it is a question to lay persons in a way, because if one becomes a monk, then at least to some extent that monk can walk on spiritual path somewhat freely.
if you have been practicing for a small duration, then also please feel free to suggest on the above question.
if the above questions seem stupid to you, then please feel free to consider me an idiot who has till now not found any sync between the materialistic worldly ways and spirituality ways.
please suggest on the above questions. thanks in advance.
0
Comments
But anyway, I keep walking my path because I feel that's the main reason why we are here. There is nothing else to do other than this. Sure, we have every day distractions, like watching TV and going to work and relationships and having sex and walking the dog and winning the lottery and so forth. But that's not why we are here. We are here to learn how to find true contentment, which I believe is in the form of enlightenment. Once everything else falls by the wayside, we start to develop a clearer picture. Then we begin to understand we must first walk the path for ourselves, and then walk it for others as well. So that's why we keep walking; because there is always somewhere to walk to! There's part of your problem right there. Don't put yourself down -- even jokingly -- and love yourself more. The only person who is expecting you to be perfect is you. Don't do that to yourself. Your spiritual path will become much easier when you learn to accept that these things take time, and to simply go with the flow.
Life only has to get in the way as much as you allow it to. I know this isn't exactly what you asked, but long story short, my motivation is simply having the time to myself to do those things, and adequate time with my husband, my kids and my family (and to a lesser extent friends). Because that was more important than the other things, we worked towards that and it remains a constant motivator. My spiritual life IS my life. It isn't part of my life. It is how I live my life, therefor my life is a constant motivator to make changes in the material world to have a better spiritual life. It translates to better and stronger relationships with the people around me and that, again, is a strong motivator.
Its a good question.
I will sum it in 2 points:
a) Buddhist practice / spiritual path its like any other task or skill.
U need practice, effort, and good instructions if u want to get good. In the same way u develop the skill of learning to ride a bike, get a degree, so on.
b)Whats the catch?. That its the skill to develop personality, and that makes it particulary tricky. If u are a football player u can stop playing, if u practice buddhism u cant -_-, because it deals with stuff that its there all the time.
Thus from this perspective everything we're comprised of is trying to feed on some limited resource, from our biology (physical food, sensual pleasure) to our personal identities (social recognition, reproduction, personal power) to our tribes and nations (physical resources, political and military power), and all of these components have been relentlessly optimized by natural selection to defend themselves when their source of food is threatened. The hard work of spiritual practice is taking apart these defenses. And the best way for something to defend itself is for its potential enemies is not to even know it's there. Thus we never look at why it's so important that we reproduce, that our nation prevails, that we rather than someone else should survive in a crisis. These things are just taken as givens. So much of the work in spiritual practice isn't even on the radar when we begin. Shorter version in Buddhist terms: these defense mechanisms are a big part of our karma, and renouncing them is scary and painful.
(Naturally, this is not a very helpful worldview for a spiritual practitioner to focus on as a matter of course, but it's the cleanest explanation I know for the difficulties of the spiritual path.) In the parts of my life where it's not operating, I drift along, defaulting to ignorance and hostility much of the time. It is painful and futile.
Buddhist practice helps me to perceive life in more productive ways than the worldview I outlined above can offer, and allows me to respond to present circumstances as circumstances demand, rather than as I demand. That makes me less of an asshole. (Believe it or not.)
Plus, my successes in conventional terms never brought me any joy, just something else to chase. Perhaps this is because my conventional successes have been so modest or I am psychologically damaged, but if that proves to be the case, I see meditation as the best way past that damage. You might want to look at Tibetan Buddhism. It is a fairly tidy aggregate of spiritual practices modified to accommodate a bunch of personal and political defense mechanisms. All Buddhist institutions have these kinds of modifications (have to, to survive), but to the best of my knowledge Tibetan Buddhism has taken it the furthest because it has been tied up with political power for so long. The only drawback is many Tibetan Buddhists don't see the defenses for what they are, so students of it need to assimilate it with a careful, critical eye.
2. For me I have practiced to some extent for 12 years and suffering (attachment/aversion included) goads me into practicing. You can definitely take time for your family but do you think you have 30 minutes a day to meditate and/or study? It's important to not beat ourselves up about what we are simply not able us to do and instead work on connecting in a positive way. You can watch your triggers of negativity and use them to take a breath and remember impermanence or do metta or whatever is you practice.
. . . but seriously . . . actually I was being serious . . .
Because the pain (suffering) of those actions is above what the person experiencing the situation has the ability (either lacking capacity, willingness, or know-how) to experience*.
It is exactly the same mechanism by which people experiencing personal tragedy or natural disasters seem not to experience reality completely. People need to be told multiple times that a loved one died, or when witnessing an accident different people may give completely different stories of what happened. The only difference between this and just the everyday-slipping out of mindfulness is in the duration - how long the situation is going on.
In everyday life, it is brief remarks, thoughts, whatever, that cause us to adjust reality to the extent that we usually don't even notice. This causes us to react in ways that are hurtful to us and other people. This is why we sit (meditate) - it makes one see that, hey, i slipped out of mindfulness there, and there; and maybe i would have acted differently in that situation etc.
To give an example:
being tolerant, in an situation where you want to react in a way that is anything but tolerant, simply put, sucks massively. That horrible feeling you experience if you do it (are tolerant) is exactly the feeling you are avoiding by not doing it. So if that feeling is strong, the motivation to stray off the path is just equally as strong. So there it goes, out the window, it doesn't work even before we tried it
* its like: "this sucks to much" to/from "it can't be that way"** -> which you can see is a manifestation of the second noble truth (the source of suffering is attachment); we want it to be a different way.
This can then be followed by rationalizations, making someone else an enemy, forgetting about it, whatever gets rid of the problem (but usually without solving it, only waiting for the next situation to trigger it again).
** because if its how (we think) it is supposed to be, we don't suffer over it generally.
thanks for your replies.
another question: how to handle situations in which we are surrounded by persons, who are almost totally engrossed in materialistic worldly ways? means, when for example, when someone criticizes you for trying to walk on spiritual path - which as per them is a complete waste of time - how to handle this situation without me criticizing others or without me getting angry on them. another situation - suppose a child hit my daughter, now should i get angry on the other child for hitting my daughter because that child has some bulliness character in her and has hit my daughter because of no appropriate reason - in this situation, if i do not get angry and scold the other child, then my parents and my wife may think i am a coward, who even does not have guts to scold a child of other family for hitting my daughter - but if i get angry and scold the other child, then i will act as per my deluded mind and it will show me that my trying to walk on spiritual path is superficial. so in a way the question is how to act spiritually in material worldly situations? please suggest. thanks in advance.
However, one thing I did do is that night, I talked to my kid about how to handle the neighbor boy and how to change his thinking. That in no way was what he did ok, but that he does those things because of how uncared for he feels. That he doesn't have parents who care if he beats someone else, or whether he is beaten himself. That kids behave that way because they are crying out for attention from someone, even if they don't know it. That the best thing we can do is be kind and polite whenever we can, and to keep our distance if we must. It did help my son see the other boy in another light, and helped him to try to look at the other side of things. It's never as easy as a kid is just mean to be mean. There is a reason they behave that way and when they have no one in their lives to ask why and help them, then they get out of control.
Our situation was a bit abnormal because of the age difference. If you are talking kids who are 5 years old, it is completely normal (though still not ok) for them to randomly hit each other. It is their expression of emotion that they do not yet have words for. They have not been taught what emotions are or the proper expression of them. They hit for the same reason babies cry. Because they don't know what else to do. Let the parents know it happened, but it is ok (at least in some situations) to tell another child that it isn't ok to hit just because you are frustrated/mad/whatever. I've said it to kids many times, and their parents always appreciate the reinforcement.
As far as your spiritual path, why on earth does it matter if someone else thinks it's dumb? What others think does not matter. They think anything is dumb that they don't understand. It is their lack of understanding, not you. Most of the time, it is not worth your effort or time to correct them. If they ask questions, answer honestly. Sometimes being honest means saying "I don't want to talk about it." Stop worrying what everyone else thinks of you. Most of the time our perceptions about such things are wrong, anyhow. Every single time I've wondered what my husband will think about something I've done, I've been wrong.