Keeping a Balance
Keep a balance. These three little words are loaded with meaning and apply to countless situations in our lives. We lose our balance in so many ways: focusing on our jobs to the detriment of our families, with one more email, one more phone call, one more issue to fix – the list goes on and on.
We get so busy with being busy that we forget the importance of balance. But if we go off balance, we won’t be able to sustain ourselves on our chosen path. So, the Masters say: “Keep a balance.”
The law of karma leans heavily on the concept of balance. Karma is the law of nature which requires us to reap the consequences of our actions. It is nothing more nor less than the well-known law of cause and effect.
All human activity is a search for a balance between survival and happiness – in other words, a search for a balance between the logical mind and the soul. To live in balance we must have both logic and soul, but many of us believe that is impossible. The world tells us to reject the soul while spirituality tells us to reject the mind.
We may think that since meditation is the key to the spiritual path, perhaps it would be best to spend as many hours each day in meditation as possible. We may think it best to avoid marriage, leave off developing any profession, not have children, live in solitude and meditate all day. But when we go to extremes, our God-given natural system begins to revolt. Therefore, we need to maintain a balance.
Thus, the Master says that we should live in the world as a householder. Masters also have families, yet they keep their balance. Whenever we go to extremes in any aspect of our life, we lose perspective and balance.
Why is it so difficult to maintain a balance? Our culture has always taught us to be special, to be better than others, to be competitive. We attach our worth to being considered special and superior.
But spirituality is not about being unique. By living on the surface of life for so long, our effort has been to be special. But this is the opposite of spirituality, which is to melt and become one with existence. The more we try to be special, the further we get from the truth. If we genuinely make the effort to become one with everything, with God, our internal struggle will completely go away.
Discontentment and expectations also lead to a loss of balance. We magnify our needs and justify why we should not have to wait to see them fulfilled. If we live this way, whatever we have is never enough, so we sacrifice all to get more, and in doing so lose our balance.
Adversities and difficulties in life can also cause us to lose balance. We all have personal troubles. We have times in our lives when a loved one passes away or is struggling with illness, or when it seems as if our family is falling apart. At times we may feel like the whole world is against us. And sometimes we may feel spiritually dry and bereft – we feel forsaken, which may cause us to lose balance.
However, Maharaj Charan Singh often referred to adversity as a blessing in disguise, for it is during the most difficult times that we are pulled closer to the Lord. The mystics explain that suffering purifies us and makes us worthy of eternal joy within.
As harsh as it may sound, a death in the family, financial difficulties, illness or humiliation are all signs of the Lord’s grace. We should be grateful for any occurrence that reminds us of him and his love for us and makes us shift our focus to him. We can also take comfort in the fact that adversity is a balancing of karma and strengthens our power of resistance.
How can we maintain consistent balance in our lives? We need to take a step back and define our priorities. We need to consider both the physical and spiritual aspects of our lives. The physical aspect of life includes how we treat other people and ourselves – even our own bodies. After all, without mental and physical health we can’t enjoy life, including meditation.
Our spiritual life is what defines our foundation, our identity and our reason for living. We should try to remember that we are not the centre of our own universe; we need to prioritize making God our focus. We can do this by taking to heart the Master’s simple, down-to-earth advice to keep a balance.
When we first come on the path, in our excitement, we may suddenly want to become ascetics and renunciates. We may try to shut ourselves in a room so that we can meditate all day and run away from our responsibilities. But the saints caution us to live a normal life and fulfil our responsibilities. They advise us to live with detachment and weave meditation into our everyday lives – to follow the middle path and be moderate.
We must be ordinary people, living ordinary lives. We must just make meditation a part of our ordinary routine. Even when life becomes challenging, with professional and family obligations, we can place ourselves in the Master’s refuge. The Masters emphasize that to find balance in our behaviour and actions, we need to bring our mind to a state of stillness where we can experience peace of mind.
How can we do this? For most of us, the mind seems totally uncontrollable. It flits from one thought to another and hardly ever stops. If we give up worries, then desires march in and we start obsessing and worrying. Our challenge is to quieten and calm the mind.
Mystics give us various hints on how to achieve this inner balance – how to find the point of equilibrium. The masters tell us that if we want to return to our source and become one with the Lord, we have to achieve inner stillness.
When we feel we can’t possibly control our mind to restore balance, let us remember that the Master himself has come to lift us out of this worldly existence. He is always there to help us, but it is our responsibility to maximise our efforts to do our simran and become good and balanced human beings.