Applying spiritual knowledge to everyday life

Bimal Mohanty

We talk about being spiritually knowledgeable and yet are spiritually ineffective.

We talk about being spiritually knowledgeable and yet are spiritually ineffective. After all what good is acquiring knowledge? What benefit does it give us without its application to life?
Sri Aurobindo has said knowledge has its full value only when it leads to some greater gain than itself, some gain of being. Simply to know the truth and to remain in the pain, struggle and inferiority of our present way of being would be a poor and lame advantage.
Therefore knowledge - and here we are talking of Adhyatmic knowledge - must necessarily be translated to our everyday life for our greater good.
Why does it not happen? It does not happen because we simply fail to see the underlying similarity between the spiritual environment on one side conceived by our mind and the mundane world, which is our work-field.
To an ordinary person, the spiritual environment and the worldly environment in which he or she lives, are alien to each other and often contradictory. People always say that the so-called spiritual world is mystic and unreal, and the world we live in is real and rational.
We mean thereby that perhaps the two are inseparably different. One world is too full of ethical dos and don'ts and the other unfortunately full of compromises. One is rational and the other is irrational.
Reconciling both requires very deep understanding and knowledge of both the worlds and the causes of this apparent contradiction. Because only then perhaps we shall understand how rational the spiritual world is and how much relevance spiritualism may have in this so-called rational world of ours.
The key words are knowledge and understanding. That is the first step. Once the mind gets clearer and clearer the intellect automatically tries to find solutions to the problems. If solutions are not immediately found then at least some rationalization is achieved.
Rationalization should not be however confused with compromise. Compromise is acceptance of defeat. Rationalization is a temporary acceptance of a position without side stepping the imperativeness of finding the right solution.
To be able to bring about a symbiosis between these two apparently different worlds, we must look at the commonality between the two first. And that would lead us to essentially understand that the governing principle of both the apparently contradicting environments are no different from each other really.
One of the accepted methods of trying to understand a complex problem is to imagine a model and look for commonalities of character. Theoretical approach or theories as such, do not satisfy a doubting mind. Practical similes do. We shall therefore relate our problem to a practical model.
Most of us spend all our working hours in a structured environment. Most of us work for a living. We work in an organizational environment. It may be a business organization, a department or an institution.
Everywhere exists a structured organization  managed with set rules and procedures. Even such people like housewives etc although not part of any organizational environment, yet in their own sphere, work to a defined set of rules and procedures.
In effect they also function in a rudimentary organization for the sake of smooth and chaos-free functioning.
Therefore for the sake of our understanding let us choose the model of an organization  any organization  to explain how what we find in our own working environment is indeed no different from the greatest of all organizations which is this universe. It is all a matter of same management practices in different scales.
There is a reason and a rationality behind everything that is taking place in this gigantic organization. What will happen under what circumstances, what actions the natural laws will permit and what they will not permit, all these can be logically expressed.
When we realize this  and more and more similarities we shall discover as we go along  it would be clearly be seen how with only a simple re-orientation of perspective we can translate the higher spiritual concepts directly to our own day to day life.
(Courtesy Ahwan.org)