Your Actions Should
Have a Spiritual Dimension
Only those actions are significant that transform you as a person. In reality, actions that do not transform you have no value.
If there is a hole at the bottom of a bucket, and you pour water into it, all the water will flow out, and nothing will remain inside. The same is true for human beings. Only those of your actions are worthy which provide you with something meaningful about your inner development. If you appear busy doing things, but these actions do not contribute to nurturing and developing your inner being, they have no value whatsoever. Only those actions are worthy that promote awareness in you and transform you as a person, actions that stir an upheaval deep in your soul, in your very being, drawing you to higher levels of truth. This achievement is the valid criterion for gauging the success or worth of any action. Only that action is worthy if it creates this state in you. An action that does not provide you with this is like pouring water into a bucket full of holes.
What is essential is not what you are doing but what is happening to you while you are doing something. If you have many activities that keep you ‘busy’, your being ‘busy’ is ‘idle business’ and nothing more. It is like the air existing, but without oxygen; like the water existing, but without the capacity to quench thirst; like food existing but being unable to provide energy to the one who eats it; like the sun existing, but not giving its light to others. Such existence is the worst sort of non-existence. If your actions do not become ‘spiritual’ food for you, diet for your spiritual nourishment; they are not actions. Instead, they are various forms of inaction or something even more meaningless.
If you pour water on a stone, it appears to get wet. However, the stone does not know the thrill and wetness of water. It has not experienced that aspect of water. On the other hand, when a thirsty man drinks water, it rejuvenates him completely. He enjoys an inner experience of the very reality of water.
This example indicates what people routinely do, on the one hand, and what they should do, on the other. In the name of religion, people often simply perform a set of actions in a perfunctory, ritualistic, and formal manner. They utter words, but these words do not turn into their heartbeat. They do some physical actions that involve their limbs, but they do not touch their souls. All they do in their ‘busyness’ does not vibrate in their hearts and minds.
To be meaningful, our actions must become spiritual experiences for us. They should repeatedly provide our inner being with spiritual nourishment. Our physical actions must stir an upheaval in our non-physical selves. Only those actions are significant that transform us as a person. In reality, actions that do not transform us have no value. They are like a stone that appears to get wet when water is poured on it but fails to experience the sheer thrill of the quenching of thirst experienced by a person when he drinks a glass of water!
