Spiritual Pursuit versus
Material Pursuit
It is only spiritual achievement that can give you a sense of fulfilment. Material fulfilment is seldom achievable, but spiritual fulfilment is achievable to the ultimate extent.
Disquiet is a manifestation of discontent. How does this mental state come to prevail? The reason is that all individuals are born with an unlimited desire for enjoyment, without however, having any great capacity to fulfil this desire. It is this shortcoming in human nature that makes people live their lives in a state of mental agitation.
Is it a defect in human nature which is to blame for this? Not at all. It is simply people’s unawareness of themselves that creates this problem. Awareness is the key to a contented life, while unawareness is responsible for all manner of discontent and restlessness.
To properly explain this phenomenon, we have to come to grips with the scheme of things devised by the Creator. According to the creation plan, the scope for material fulfilment in this world is very limited, while the scope for spiritual fulfilment or intellectual development is so vast that only the word ‘unbounded’ can describe its scope.
If your aim is to achieve a state of fulfilment in the material world, you will very soon discover that here the scope for this is very limited. Food, clothes, fame, married life, entertainment – all these things are all too often eventually marred by boredom. Even going on a holiday does not necessarily give you any sense of fulfilment. A person may go on holiday with high hopes of enjoyment, yet return with a feeling of “holiday stress”. This sense of a lack of fulfilment pertains to your physical being, whereas your spiritual being is untrammelled by all such constraints.
Man has a dual personality—physical and spiritual. In physical terms, a person’s body most often has its limitations in terms of height, girth, health, muscularity, athleticism, and so on. Due to these limitations, a person frequently becomes dissatisfied as far as his physical prowess is concerned. On the contrary, his spiritual or intellectual being has no limits to it. The realm in which the mind travels is vast and eternal, like the space stretching throughout the cosmos. The mind travels by thinking, and there are no boundaries to the thinking process. Traversing all kinds of frontiers, it continues unhindered on its journey.
Let us consider the activities of a businessman. These are confined to the material world. Due to the narrowness of his field of action, he is very likely to become a prey to boredom. The American business magnate Bill Gates once rightly said: “Once you get beyond a million dollars, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.”
Scientific pursuit is an example of travelling in the intellectual domain. This is why scientists seldom suffer from the businessman’s ennui. For example, Newton said about himself toward the end of his life: “I was like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Such was the feeling of the great scientific thinker, Albert Einstein, when he said: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”
Greater even than scientific pursuit is the spiritual quest. The reason for this is very clear. According to Galileo Galilee, the domain of scientific pursuit is the study of the quantitative aspect of nature, while spiritual pursuit is concerned with its qualitative side. And, it is a fact that the qualitative aspect of nature is immeasurably more vast than its quantitative dimension.
One who adopts the spiritual pursuit as a matter of intellectual activity is a spiritual scientist. A physical scientist may stop in his research at a certain point, but for the spiritual scientist, even the saying ‘The sky’s the limit’ becomes inadequate. It is only spiritual achievement that can give you a sense of fulfilment. Material fulfilment is seldom achievable, but spiritual fulfilment is achievable to the ultimate extent.
