If there is a so-called condemnation of materialism versus God or spirituality, then what does it really signify? Again, we come back to mind. This is within our mind. When we set goals and values in life based upon the material plane—obsessions and possessions, acquiring and using—and if that is where our thinking and ambitions end, then we are materialistic. It is not using matter that makes us materialistic. Any holy person, Enlightened Being or Prophet would use some matter. They will have a body and food and clothes, et cetera. In that context they would be called materialistic but that is not so. Materialism is where our mentality gets stuck in ambition and ends there, whether it is money, success, acquiring more and more ”things,” or more and more modes of communication—a telephone in every hand, a TV in every room.
     Now again, there is nothing wrong with this or that item, but to use material things selfishly is materialistic. Later we’ll come to see that everything is divine, but selfish people will use that and say, “This is all divine, so it’s fine with me.” Materialism is where your focus or purpose of life is based on material things, which makes us selfish, greedy, attached, possessive, competitive and jealous. Therefore there are fighting, diplomacy, politics, and so on. When our purpose is based upon materialism we can only create disharmony with our fellow beings, within our nation and within our own mind. Materialism eventually breeds competition, jealousy and quarrels because it creates agitation and tension, domination, superceding, and other games of the mind. Therefore the result of materialism is disharmony, which becomes a devilish force, to use traditional language. There is no other evil involved.

HEN WE SPEAK OF MAKING GOD NUMBER ONE or of living the spiritual life, what does it mean? One way is to renounce or reduce your dependence upon certain material things so that your mind is lighter. This allows you to devote your concentration and consciousness to the higher pursuits of Spirit, of God, the realm beyond materialism. When you depend less upon things in order to devote time and energy to spiritual pursuits, you get joy and fulfillment of life in the higher sense. Even then you are using some matter. So the spiritual way is not against using matter as a whole but for reducing our dependence on it.

     But there is another way. Material life may remain in fullness, but you do not use it in a haphazard manner according to what you want and like. There is a lawful way to use things, according to spiritual or natural law, dharma. To have the material life in fullness we have to use matter according to dharma, where there is a utility sense and respect for everything in nature, which is Mother Divine. But your aim and purpose do not end there. In your mind you hold to the purpose of joy, of the Spirit, of God, the highest in you, and then live the material life proportionally, where it belongs. That is what in America you call “God first” or doing for Number One, which in Sanskrit is Brahmasatyam.
     If you are looking only to the material plane in varying degrees and ignoring the spiritual, then you are not only subject to life and death, which even a spiritual or Enlightened Being would be, you are also subject to misery and pain because the material has a heavy or degrading tendency. Its very nature pulls you downward into what has been called tamas, inertia. Due to that heaviness—not so much the weight of the body but of the mind—materialism slowly pulls you down and brings up latent pains, which with a spiritual focus—upward, cheerful and lighter—would subside. Therefore if you dwell only within this small inert circle of consciousness, moving through life with whatever variables it may have, the time comes when you complain, “For me life is just boring.” I say, “You have been a materialist,” but they don’t want to hear that. They are bored or lonely because they want something. The counter-question is: how many things have you had and had and had, and still you feel lonely? Are you not going on and on in the same circle of materialism?
     Try to understand the material without condemning it. If I cannot see you, me, and everything around me as Divine Mother Nature, I am doomed. Therefore I have respect for everything. But if I tell a person, “Your feeling lonely and bored is not because your life has been misplaced or somebody has wronged you or placed you in a wrong situation or given you a hard time,” they would not like to hear that because self-pity is one of the ignominies of the ignorant, unfortunately. Turn your thinking around a little bit: how many things, how many relationships, how many enjoyments and pleasures have you had? I’m sure you can fill a whole notebook. The Vedas have called it insatiability. That is what is making you lonely. Because the things you were searching for through materialism are not there but you are still seeking them. You are trying to chew gum after it has lost its sweetness. It’s just rubber. That chewing gum has become shiteela, which in Sanskrit means it is no longer capable of giving you satisfaction.