WHEN YOU COME TO A SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK, YOU RESPECT MATTER.
THEN YOU WILL UNDERSTAND WHY GOD CREATED THE MATERIAL WORLD
IN THE FIRST PLACE.

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      If you want things to change around you, to avoid suffering and boredom, but you still want to maintain your materialism, you are asking the impossible. It is you who have to change. When you get to spiritual Illumination, you also use matter. You are automatically dharmic; you couldn’t be otherwise. Dharma is your instrument. That is why the Prophets come to uphold dharma, whether Rama or Krishna or Christ or Buddha. Do you think they come just to have fun and a great time here—including battles and wars—and then go back to where they came from? They come to balance the creation, to bring harmony and to protect dharma. And when they balance it, whatever the conditions of that age, then they go back to Spirit. The world then goes on for some time in more harmony, cooperation and peace. That is what we are all hankering after.
     Enlightened Beings deal with matter too, but to them matter is not materialism. It is a reflection of the Divine. So matter becomes symbolic rather than the end in itself. To the spiritualist, matter is sacred. What is spirituality? What does it signify? It means you are paying back your forgotten allegiance to the Source of your very life, call it Spirit, Pure Consciousness or God. Therefore perhaps pujas (rituals) came into being: sages saw the sacredness of things rather than simply the heavy pull of the material. When you come to a spiritual outlook, you respect matter. Then you will understand why God created the material world in the first place.
 

      Before that we thought, “It’s just for fun and enjoyment, for me.” But when you come to this understanding you will know why He created the gross in the first place. He could have avoided it. He could have created only the astral plane; the devas or angels would be enough to travel around, be happy and have fairy tales. Why did He create the three-dimensional world with weights and measurements? When we see through spiritual eyes, we see the beauty in it. God wants to express right here into earth consciousness. He wants to manifest divinity even in this grossness. As it is in heaven, so on earth. Therefore all is sacred. We worship in the temple and do rituals with a different attitude than if we were sitting in a businessman’s shop with a cash box nearby and money as Number One.

THEREFORE PROPHETS, ENLIGHTENED BEINGS, GURUS or guides come to shake you up a little, to remind you of your goal, your dharma. Are you doing just sensuous play—all the time just what you want? That is a part of life, no doubt, but are you forgetting the whole aim of your life, what you should be and what it should be? Dharma does not deny pleasure—I will repeat it ten times—but pleasure has to be according to dharma. This is true of all areas of art, culture, poetry, prose, writing, handicrafts, music, or any talent. Is anybody thinking these should be according to dharma? We may call it by any name—modern art, abstract art, junky art, crazy art—but whatever infatuation or instinct arises in the brain is not necessarily dharmic. When we paint, when we sing, when we write or talk or create anything, let us do it according to dharma—and then see how it comes out.
 



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