Life in the spiritual world
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
British (General)Transcript
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Chapter one. The Spiritual Life in the World. A lecture delivered in the City Temple, London, October 19, oh seven. The complaint, which we hear continually from thoughtful and earnest minded people a complaint against the circumstances of their lives, is perhaps one of the most fatal. If my circumstances were different from what they are, how much more I could do? If only I were not so surrounded by business so tied by anxieties and cares so occupied with the work of the world, then I would be able to live a more spiritual life. Now that is not true. No circumstances can ever make or mar the unfolding of the spiritual life. Spirituality doesn't depend upon the environment. It depends upon one's attitude towards life. I want to point out to you the way in which the world may be turned to the service of the spirit instead of submerging it, as it often does if people don't understand the relation of the material and the spiritual, if they separate the one from the other as incompatible and hostile. If on the one side they put the life of the world and on the other, the life of the spirit as rivals, as antagonists as enemies, then the pressing nature of worldly occupations, the powerful shocks of the material environment, the constant lure of physical temptation and the occupying of the brain by physical cares. These things are apt to make the life of the spirit unreal. They seem to be the only reality. And we have to find some alchemy, some magic by which the life of the world shall be seen to be unreal and the life of the spirit the only reality. If we can do that, then the reality will express itself through the life of the world and that life will become its means of expression and not a bandage around its eyes. A gag which stops the breath. Now you know how often in the past this question of whether a person can lead a spiritual life in the world has been answered in the negative, in every land, in every religion, in every age of the world's history, when the question has been asked, the answer has been no, the man or woman of the world cannot lead a spiritual life. That answer comes from the deserts of Egypt, the jungles of India, the monastery and the nunnery in Roman Catholic countries, in every land and place where people have sought to find God by shrinking from the company of others. If for the knowledge of God and the leading of the spiritual life it is necessary to fly from human haunts, then that life for most of us is impossible, for we are bound by circumstance that we cannot break to live the life of the world and to accommodate ourselves to its conditions separating the sacred from the profane. I submit to you that this idea is based on a fundamental error that is largely fostered in our modern life, not by thinking of secluded life in jungle or desert in cable monastery, but rather by thinking that the religious and the secular must be kept apart. That tendency is because of the modern way of separating the so called sacred from that which is called profane. People speak of Sunday as the Lord's Day, as though every day were not equally for serving him. To call one day the Lord's Days is to deny the same lordship to every other day in the week and to make six parts of life outside the spiritual, while only one remains recognised as dedicated to the spirit and so common talk of sacred history and profane history, religious education and secular education. All these phrases are so commonly used hypnotist the public mind into a false view of the spirit and the world. The right way is to say that the spirit is the life, the world, the form and the four must be the expression of the life. Otherwise you have corpse, the void of life, an UN embodied life separated from all means of effective action. I want to put broadly and strongly the very foundation of what I believe to be right and sane thinking in this matter. The world is the thought of God, the expression of the divine mind. All useful activities are forms of divine activity. The wheels of the world are turned by God and we are only his hands which touched the rim of the wheel. All work done in the world is God's work or none is his at all. Everything that serves humanity and helps in the activities of the world is rightly seen as a divine activity and wrongly seen when called secular or profane, the clerk behind his counter and the doctor in the hospital are quite as much engaged in a divine activity as any preacher in his church. Until that is realised, the world is vulgar, rised and until we can see one life everywhere and all things rooted in that life, it is we who are hopelessly profane in attitude, we who are blind to the beautification vision which is the site of the one life in everything and all things as expressions of that life.