' The years are passing '...

Everyone wants to live. Few want to know how to live.

If people permit work to take up so much of their time that they have none left for their devotional prayer or mystical meditation or metaphysical study, they will be as culpable for this wastage of life as they will be if they permit transient pleasures to do so.

Those who have no higher ideal than to chase after amusement and to seek after pleasure may look upon religious devotion as senseless, metaphysical studies as boring, mystical meditations as time-wasting, moral disciplines as repulsive.

Those who have no such inner life of prayer and meditation, study and reflection, will necessarily pay, in emergencies or crises, the high price of their hopeless extroversion.

The needs of external life are entitled to be satisfied in their place, but they are not entitled to dominate a man's whole attention. The neglected and unnoticed needs of internal life must also receive their due.

It is quite true that man must eat, find shelter, wear clothes, and amuse himself. And it is also true that if a fortunate fate has not relieved him of the necessity, he must work, trade, scheme, or gamble to get the money for these things.

But all this is insufficient grounds for him to pass through life with no other thoughts in his head than those of bodily needs or financial strivings. There is still room there for another kind of thought, for those concerning the mysterious elusive and subtle thing that is his divine soul.

The years are passing and he cannot afford such a wastage of time, cannot afford the luxury of being so extroverted at the cost of having lost touch with the inner life.



-- Perspectives > Chapter 3:
Relax and Retreat > # 15
Paul Brunton