Spirituality and materialism

We might be bought out by our parents under the perception that money is evil. We might be told by friends that in order to be successful in business you need to be cunning. You need to know how to take advantage and exploit other people. We have experienced this during the early of industrial revolution. This not only ensures survival of the business but also maximum generation of profit. People who are good hearted might see living in abundance and prosperity are not in-line with their own values. Most people end up working for others. You can see them in different types of co-operations. Some people work with a boss with only concern of money generation. Employees might often feel un-appreciated and taken advantage of. These further re-affirm the idea that rich people are bad. With increasing responsibility such as family and house loan, most people start to close half of their eyes just to carry the normal life. Some delves themselves in the world of fantasy such as computer games and television. They are trying to escape of the reality. The reality is over-whelming for them. Their dreams are never realized.
What I would like to offer here is a new kind of mentality. A new type of business is springing out around the world. The business is about creating values and delivering those values to the society. As the world education quotient is increasing people are adept of distinguishing values that are benefiting to them.
Let’s take example of newspaper. For consciously aware people, they can easily distinguish between newspapers which crave for sensationalism and report the truth. They are even political bias in some newspapers motivated by various reasons. Do you notice that newspapers based on sensationalism tend to locate locally? Expansion of overseas business is proving very difficult. The newspapers which place the truth seems to travel far around the world.

A suitable business is about creating and or delivering values to others. The idea of values is highly subjective and often depends on one’s conscious evolution.
For some people, such as growing up teenagers, they might place strong values on fame and beauty. They might aggravate towards celebrity news and every gossip of it. For the grown-up, they might interest in learning how to invest their money. They might find books, seminar, and workshop about investing a great value to them. Knowing your own value is the first step. Your business can be an expression of your values. Please a few minutes to list down your ten values and arrange them according to importance to you. Make sure that the top few a reflection of your unstoppable passion.

One of passions is to teach people on how to integrate spirituality and materialism in their daily life. It corresponds to my need to raise the human consciousness about spirituality and to express the abundance. What is yours? We need to find a career where we can express our values. In this way we would be happier. By delivering such values in the form of service or product we would start generating money. Because you put your passion within your career, risks and obstacles pale into insignificance. One of the reasons people feel stressed during work is because their jobs are unable to allow them to express such values. They find it uninspired and they viewed the job as a job. Living within our values and passion inspired us. That’s why some people who are rich might end up saying being rich doesn’t give you happiness. Happiness comes from allowing yourself to express your value system. However, without money it is the cause of so many miseries in our life. We need to align our career and business within our value system. Happiness and wealth will follow.

Remembering who we are

We are living in a fast paced environment. In most of the time we don’t remember who we really are. We are bounded in time. Every weekday, we are awakened by the alarm clock. Hastily, we take the shower, prepare breakfast and get ready to work to run to get into the car/bus/ train. It takes great effort to be there at 8 o’clock at the work place. If we are stuck in traffic jam that would delay us, we normally get frustrated and even sound the barking horn.

Most people think that we work hard. Most people are not really happy with our jobs and the situation that we are in. This creates a tremendous stress and strain on us. The amount of work in our life may overwhelm us until we find it difficult to relax. In the morning, we are looking forward for lunch and in the evening we are looking forward to return home to relax. When we return home, we have bounded to household duties such as paying the bills, doing the house chores, entertaining the family just to mention a few. We have little time to spend on ourselves to relax. Even if we relax, we squander the time in front of TV, games and aimless internet surfing. We really never be really happy. Life seems to bring one problem after the other. As life goes on, we struggle to find the moment of happiness and peace. We can leave the problem by going for holidays. When holidays return, we are back to the ’reality’. We still have not found fulfilment for ourselves. Those problems are not new. As we aged, people try to make their life easier. We start to wonder whether there is way to find the peace in ourselves. Can we find in the world which concentrates so much in materialism? When we start to think about eternal peace and happiness, then we look at the life of a great saints and great mystics. Even though they are prosecuted in physical life, they are still in the state of bliss. They live in normal day to day life and are able to find the happiness on themselves. There are saints that don’t leave the society. They live in the society and are able to find eternal peace and eternal bliss.
They tell us that in each human being there is a spark of light that is God. The spark of light is the true essence of us. It is not the part of physical body that we are trying to comfort. We live in a world with full of responsibilities, we find that when we look at ourselves, we might think that all the time we have is to sustain ourselves. It is the part of our soul to yearn for peace and happiness. For us to gain eternal happiness and eternal bliss, we need to focus our attention to the spark that makes us. It is the source of peace, bliss and happiness. Within ourselves lays the treasure of divinity, the answer of who we are and where do we come from and we do we go after physical death.
The concept of God might be too alienated for some people. How do we start to cultivate the sense of peace and happiness of ourselves to begin with? The answer lays on sweet remembrance of a person. When you have a sweet remembrance of a person, you banish all negative thoughts about him. Your heart lightens and your mind clear. The tongue of a loving heart is always sweet. Whenever you feel sad, frustrated, angry and jealous, you can practice sweet remembrance. If you are stuck in traffic jam, think of something sweet.
Saints keep their happiness with sweet remembrance of the Creator and their connection to it. People who have undergone near death experience always describe a state of bliss beyond human languages when they meet with their higher-selves. They always returned with a renewed interest of life.

Knowing how to reconnect ourselves with the Creator and higher-self is beneficial to your well-being. Techniques on how to reconnect to your higher-self and the Creator can be found in this article.
For those who have established connection with God, would start to recall ecstatic sensation such as the inner music within. There is a forum specially designed for people to share the experience. The recalling the inner music can rejuvenate our spirit and our purpose on earth. Mediation allows us to keep in touch with the source. With sufficient practice, the inner music can be replayed in your mind with ease.
Every day we are left we 3-4hours in the evening with most time spend on the house chores. It is difficult to do something else. We might think that we are very busy and we should feel lucky as in 100 years ago, they themselves are also busy with other activities. We advent of technology, we should make use of it to make our life more convenience so that we can spare more time ourselves to go within. It is the priority that we would set ourselves. This will determine whether the person will meet his/her goal. If we take a couple of minutes on day to day life to focus the sweet remembrance of a person or the Creator, we can find happiness and bliss.
Remembering the true essence of who we are or any sweet remembrance can bring a lot benefits to us:
- Our mind will be still
- No time to criticize anyone else
- No bad thoughts on others
- Our mind will be purified
- Our action will be pure
- A change of positive perspective
We are all connected. Let’s me prove you in mathematics. You have two parents and your each parents have each two parents making them four connected to you. In 100 years, there are 4 generations and hence you are connected with 24 persons. Looking back in 500 years, you are connected to an awesome of 220 persons (more than a million) and if you keep looking back during the time of Christ you are connected to all the population of earth of that time.
When we see our light, we become the pillar of truth and strength of others and strength to others. As we concentrate within, we start to realize the truth self. As we realize our truth self we have the attraction to know more and more.
I ended this article with a saying from Jesus (quoted from Gospel of Thomas No24)

His followers said “Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it.
He said to them, “Whoever has ears should hear. There is light within a person of light and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark.”