The world doesn’t offer me much anymore…

“And each time I divest myself of these material possessions, the more free I feel.“

The more I live a contemplative and neo-monastic life, and the more I devote myself to my spiritual growth and development, the less the world offers me anything. I can foresee the point where the world, as we know it, will offer me nothing.

These opening words may be alarming to some. For in a certain context they may speak to one’s will to live in this world. I understand should anyone judge me and these words, expressed as they are. For some, these words may speak to a despair and disenchantment. And such despair and disenchantment can be interpreted as speaking to one’s desire to no longer live in this world.

Let me assure you that I have never felt such a will to live, I have never felt such a purpose in life, and I have never felt so at peace with my awareness of the world offering me little, if anything. Please, allow me to explain further through my teacher’s writings. In his lecture “Disenchantment: The Infinitely Blessed Path to Awakening or Provoking the Divine,” my teacher, Richard Harvey, speaks of this spiritual despair and disenchantment from an enlightened perspective…

But there is another kind of despair and disenchantment. It may be very difficult for us to spot the difference, to know why and how it is different. This despair is different in essence because it is spiritual in nature. It is also sane, supremely sane, and in the life of spiritual seekers, those who are in search of themselves, this despair, this disillusionment, and this disenchantment with life signifies a threshold, a spiritual transformation, a movement through the veils. It is a vital step in your liberation from the chains, from the bindings of the world and your attachments to it.

Spiritual disenchantment begins in a variety of ways. Objects, activities, and events that gave you pleasure, interested or fascinated you, seem dull. You feel less enthusiastic about pursuits that previously entertained or enthused you. It may only be in small increments. You may hardly notice. There’s a hint of danger about this incremental incursion, this slow motion surge of disinterest, of apathy or inertia. Occasionally, the experience of disenchantment is sudden, unexpected, in a deep realization that your heart has changed in some radical way that you cannot for the moment understand.

To tread the spiritual path you must become free of material attachments. This does not mean that you don’t own anything, that you give away your belongings and acquire a begging bowl and a loin cloth. It does mean that you live lightly, without clinging, depending, or putting your sense of achievement or wealth into material things. The reason for this is simply that material things will fade. They are merely temporary. They are not the truth. 

They are of the world of appearances and therefore merely temporary, adaptive reflections of Brahman, of God, of the Divine.

When you identify yourself with what you do and what you have and what you attain—the material things—you must of necessity be afraid, because what you have acquired you could lose, what you have saved up can be taken away from you. All this is very well for a materialistic mentality. It is a kind of gamble, learning to work the world, climb the ladder, increase your stock, make wise investments. But for the spiritual seeker it just will not do. The seeker must dedicate herself to the life of the sacred and the spiritual and the attitude she must adopt is the attitude of courage. She must intend to be beyond fear, to reside in fearlessness.

Some seekers, when aware of their despair and disenchantment with this world, do become fearful; and some will become lost in this fear and boomerang back to a material existence based out of their fear of letting go of a material existence. I have been one of the fortunate ones, I suppose. I realized early in my transformation that I wasn’t giving up anything by giving up what the material world had to offer. The more I clung to the offerings of the material world, the more I gave up my peace.

I have not raced to give up all my material and personal possessions. It feels like a more gradual divesting of these material possessions. And each time I divest myself of these material possessions, the more free I feel. What I am also divesting myself of are the archetypal paradigms, beliefs and systems that are associated with living in the material world—health care, finance, education, relationships, etc.

So what’s left when we let go of our attachments to the material world? What do you think?

Shanti, Namaste, Agapé,