Spiritual Principles | Spirituality for Seekers

The Power of Balance

The word balance is used a lot in spiritual circles, but few truly understand that balance is an extremely powerful principle which can change the life of anyone who cares to apply it properly. Most often, we think of balance as being the central point of stillness between two opposing extremes, but it can also be thought of as the equal application of two or more beneficial approaches. On the surface, such approaches might appear very different or even oppositional, but when a balance is achieved between them, a resultant power is unleashed which far exceeds the sum of the parts.

To provide an example of this in mainstream terms, consider the oft-discussed work-life balance. We have all been raised to believe that we need to work hard to make a living in this world, but we also want to devote time to other things, such as developing ourselves and spending time with our loved ones.

Some people run into difficulties because they are either unaware of the work-life balance idea, or because they are aware of it and ignore it anyway. So there are some who become workaholics and amass wealth and status, only to see their health and relationships fall apart, and there are others who spend all of their time ‘living in the moment’ by doing whatever they please and then discovering that they don’t have enough money to pay the bills.

[Note: Our new series on The Spiritual Way to Success teaches a very different way of succeeding in life than by striving in the traditional materialistic manner, but this work-life balance idea is a good illustration of how two different activities can, when balanced, end up serving each other.]

When someone strikes a good balance between working and enjoying the non-work aspects of life, both of those activities tend to be more fruitful. A person will tend to enjoy work more, and therefore perform better at their job, when they also spend an adequate amount of time with their family and friends, and on personal development projects. Similarly, the time which is spent on personal development and social activities will be more enjoyable because they will also have a more comfortable level of income to support them than they might otherwise.

Key Areas to Focus On

Just as achieving a work-life balance can benefit both your work and your home life, so achieving balance in other key areas can bring incredible benefits to various aspects of your spiritual life, as follows:

1 – Study and Application

One of the most common traps that Seekers can fall into is that of spending so much time studying spiritual topics that they fail to apply what they already know. Think of the person who spends every spare moment poring over huge tomes of scripture or reading the latest meditation books but who never lives according to scriptural principles or sits down to meditate.

All study and no application is perfectly fine if you view spirituality as a purely intellectual or theoretical pastime, but if you want to actually develop yourself spiritually you need to make sure that the time you spend studying is balanced by the practical application of the things that you learn.

Remember, just as reading about swimming will never give you the ability to swim in practice, so simply being familiar with spiritual ideas will not make you any more spiritually mature than you were at the outset.

2 – Sowing and Reaping

There are many people in the world who spend a great deal of time desiring a rich harvest, but who never take the time to sow any seed. These same people then complain that the whole ‘sowing and reaping’ idea must be flawed because it doesn’t seem to be working in their own experience.

It doesn’t matter how often you visualise having plenty of friends, winning a lottery jackpot of being the proud owner of a successful business – if you never go out and meet people, buy a lottery ticket or actually launch your business, your chances of being successful are next to nil. This is not because the principle of sowing and reaping is flawed, but simply because you are out of balance, and you are completely neglecting the ‘sowing’ side of the equation.

3 – Activity and Passivity

A third common area of imbalance concerns activity and passivity. Over the past few decades, the word spirituality seems to have come to suggest a fairly passive approach to life, to the point where many view it as little more than being mindful, thinking positive thoughts and living in the moment. All of those things are commendable, of course, but human beings weren’t born to simply sit and be passive. We were born to be of service to those around us, too.

This is easiest to see in the area of compassion. Whilst feeling compassion for all beings whilst sitting on a meditation cushion is important, actually getting out of the door and giving practical help to people afterwards is where that compassion makes the biggest difference to others.

The same applies in the way we interact with our friends, families, work colleagues, and even in how we talk about the government and current affairs. If we claim to be spiritual but we don’t even attempt to change the way we live and speak in our day-to-day lives, what is the point? As the apostle Paul put it:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. – 1 Corinthians 1-2

Achieving balance in the area of activity and passivity requires us to put our spirituality to work in practical ways. By all means spend time on the meditation cushion, or in prayer, but realise that you are doing those relatively passive things in order to expand and recharge your spiritual batteries. When your batteries are fully recharged, that energy then needs to be put to good use in your daily life.

4 – Physical and Spiritual

The fourth area to look at is the way in which you balance your attention between the physical and the spiritual in terms of your body, work and environment. We should never use our journey along the spiritual path as an excuse to neglect our material body and its needs, or to view them as being less important than they really are.

Whilst you are, in essence, a spiritual being, you are currently reliant on a physical body to experience the world of the senses. It is therefore important to take adequate care of your physical body, not only by giving it sufficient exercise, rest and a healthy diet, but also by ensuring that you provide it with proper clothing, shelter and warmth. For most people, that means working for a living so that the bills can be paid on time, a proper diet can be maintained and sufficient exercise taken.

Instead of making the mistake of viewing the physical and the spiritual as oppositional states, they are perhaps better viewed as two sides of the same coin, at least as far as your current life is concerned. Just as a physical existence would feel lacking without attention being paid to the spiritual, so your spiritual existence needs the physical in order to be able to effectively express itself to others and to the world in general.

Balance in All Things

A great many of the problems and difficulties that we face in life arise from a lack of balance in one or more areas. Work too much and your personal relationships might suffer. Exercise too much and you might pull a muscle. Meditate too much and your muscles might lose their tone. Eat too much and you might get fat. Eat too little and you might get too thin. However, when such imbalances are recognised and steps are taken to correct them, the problems which they had previously caused will often take care of themselves.

By considering each of the four areas of life described in this article, you can work to achieve a nice balance in all of them. Not only will you soon notice measurable benefits in each area, but you will probably discover that your spiritual life also becomes far less compartmentalised, allowing you to experience the whole of your life as a unified spiritual work in progress.

The Power of Seeking

by Ian Leave a Comment

Being a spiritual seeker is much more than just a label. Of course, there is nothing wrong with calling yourself a Seeker, but if that is all that you do, you will never experience any of the real-world – and often life-changing – benefits that come from the actual practice of seeking.

Calling yourself a Seeker when you don’t spend at least some of your time actively seeking is much like calling yourself a cyclist when you don’t even own a bicycle – it might sound impressive to some, but ultimately the label itself is hollow and meaningless.

Spirituality for Seekers exist to encourage you to actually do the work of seeking, and not to simply think or talk about that work.

In one of my early posts (What Is a Seeker?) I defined a Seeker as ‘an individual who is actively looking to discover and use spiritual truths with the intention of living a richer, happier and more meaningful life, but I didn’t go into very much detail about the ‘actively looking’ part of that definition.

Today I want to address that topic, and I sincerely hope that you will take your time and consider my words carefully, because if you find that they resonate with you, and you begin seeking in earnest, you will unleash a power in your life that is almost impossible to describe.

‘Seek, and you will find.’ – Matthew 7:7

Seeking is the act of looking for something. A treasure-seeker is someone who looks for treasure, a pleasure-seeker is someone who looks for pleasure, and a spiritual seeker is someone who looks for spiritual truth.

However, there is more to it than that, because the spiritual seeker will always find what he or she is looking for.

The treasure-seeker can set out and seek for days, weeks, months or years and never find any real treasure. Similarly, the pleasure-seeker can look in all sorts of places and never find any real pleasure.

But, as Jesus famously told his followers, those who seek in the spiritual sense will always find what they are seeking.

Unfortunately, most people who are familiar with the ‘seek and you will find’ promise don’t take it seriously enough to apply the principle and reap its rewards.

The Rewards of Seeking

The rewards of seeking in the spiritual sense can be truly infinite.

In the spiritual realm, seeking can strength your connection with the divine, increase your awareness of yourself as a spiritual being and reassure you of your eternal and deathless nature.
In the psychological realm, seeking can bring you as much love, joy, peace and happiness as you could ever want.
In the material realm, seeking can improve your health, increase your physical energy, revolutionise your personal relationships and put you on the road to total abundance in your career and finances.

In short, there is no problem in your life that spiritual seeking cannot transform into something positive.

But there is one important condition….

You Must Seek Correctly

‘Seek, and you will find’ is more than an old saying. It is, in my experience, a basic principle of the universe (which I have previously referred to as the Resonance Principle and which others call the Law of Attraction) but here Jesus presents it together with the key to unlocking its full potential.

That key is to seek, which means to look in a deliberate and specific way.

The Resonance Principle is constantly at work in the life of every individual on the planet, but most people who read about it from Law of Attraction books make the mistake of thinking that it only works now and again. They therefore try to work with the principle by creating a vision board or writing down some affirmations, and so on, but then they live the rest of their lives as if the principle doesn’t apply to how they behave at the workplace, or in a traffic jam, or in a crisis. Sometimes those people get what they placed on their vision board, or what they were affirming for, but just as often they get something completely different which isn’t at all what they want.

The principle of seeking, as Jesus presented it, is a neutral principle, and like a two-edged sword, it can work for you or against you. If it is used consciously and deliberately then you are likely to be amazed at the results that you get with it. However, if you leave it to work without you using it in a deliberate and conscous way, it may well bring you the very things that you hoped to avoid.

‘For the thing which I fear comes on me, That which I am afraid of comes to me.’ – Job 3:25

The Old Testament character of Job complained that his fears had come upon him, but according to the principle of seeking which Jesus taught, that was only to be expected. After all, fear is nothing more than seeking out the negative aspects of a situation. Job focused on the downsides – seeking the negatives – so much that he eventually found what he was looking for. His big mistake was in not realising that he was effectively seeking his own downfall. If that realisation had occurred to him sooner, he might have changed his habits, begun seeking correctly and experienced a complete turnaround in his situation.

How to Seek Correctly

Whatever you seek, you will find, so to seek correctly means deliberately seeking what you want to experience, and to completely cast out of your mind that which you do not want. You don’t need to focus on the latter half of that equation, as that would mean focusing on what you do not want. Instead, focus all of your attention, as consistently as possible, on seeking what you do want in any and all situations, and that alone will force what you don’t want out of the picture.

Do you want to experience better health? Then you should focus your attention on all of the good aspects of your health right now. It may be that you have a certain illness or condition, but if you focus on that you are only seeking more of the same. Of course, you can and should treat the illness or condition, but as far as your mind and spirit are concerned, you should seek out the areas of wellbeing that are not affected by that illness or condition and appreciate them fully.

For example, if you have a broken leg, be sure to get it treated , but start focusing on the fact that you also have a second leg that is perfectly healthy, as well as two arms, functioning internal organs, and so on.

Do you want to experience greater levels of financial success and abundance? Then you should focus your attention on all of the prosperity that you currently enjoy, even if it isn’t as much as you would like to have.

You have access to the internet, for example, which is a form of abundance, and so you should appreciate it. You may also have a car, which is better than no car. Or you might have an umbrella to protect you from the rain, which is better than no umbrella. If you have some money, no matter how little, appreciate it fully. And even if you have no money, you can focus on the abundance of the natural world, which is all around you.

Do you want to experience better relationships? Then you should focus your attention on all of the things that are already going well in your relationships. Forget about any problems that you may be having and seek only the good in the relationships, so that the good may flourish and the problems may wither away of their own accord.

The Principle is a Promise

You don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from the words of Jesus any more than you need to be a farmer to benefit from a sack of potatoes. Simply consider that Jesus presented this principle as a promise.

Seek, and you will find.

Not, ‘Seek, and you might find’ or, ‘Seek, and you could find.’

Seek and you will find.

In any and every situation or circumstance, no matter how challenging it might first appear, make it your job to seek out the positive aspects, however small they seem, so that they can flourish and prosper. Seek out the calm in a crisis, the silver lining in the cloud, the benefit in the bad news, or even the spiritual lesson that you are learning from the experience itself.

Seek out those things and focus on them.

Appreciate them.

Express gratitude for them.

And let the power of this spiritual principle take care of the rest.

The Resonance Principle

by Ian Leave a Comment

The Resonance Principle states that you experience external events that are largely in tune with your spiritual expectations. Although this principle is often referred to in today’s popular literature as the ‘law of attraction’, it is one which has been taught and used for many thousands of years.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of this concept was Jesus. Although the words of Jesus have religious connotations for many these days, if you were to strip away thousands of years of tradition and look at them exactly as they were written in the gospels, you would find that they have a rather direct and practical tone, and provide plenty of advice on how to use the Resonance Principle in your daily life.

Consider the following extract from Mark 11:22-24:

‘Have faith in God. For most certainly I tell you, whoever may tell this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” and doesn’t doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is happening; he shall have whatever he says. Therefore I tell you, all things whatever you pray and ask for, believe that you have received them, and you shall have them.’

In this short speech, Jesus is talking about the power of faith and belief, and he is saying much the same as the contributors to the modern-day book The Secret – believe that what you want is happening, and it will happen.

If you accept that the universe operates according to the principle of cause and effect, and that every action you take as a spiritual being has consequences (as stated by the Karmic Principle) then it isn’t any great leap to give credence to the Resonance Principle.

Since actions have consequences, your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes – all of which tend to precede your actions – play a very important role in the creation of your personal experience of reality. Believe that you will succeed in a certain endeavour, for example, and that belief will cause you to act as if that were the case, and that confident action will itself make it more likely that you will actually succeed in the endeavour.

The problem with most modern books which talk about the Resonance Principle is that they talk about the power of belief as being all that one needs to bring about an effect in physical experience, and that is not often the case. Most of the time, in order to affect change, the power of belief must also be followed up with the power of action. Even the Bible, which many people view to be all about matters of belief, says the same thing:

‘For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, even so faith apart from works is dead.’ – James 2:26

These words, in the context they were spoken, warn so-called ‘spiritually minded’ people against thinking that faith is enough to facilitate change. Whilst faith alone can shift a mountain of guilt, fear, insecurity and other subjective experiences, it isn’t something that should excuse non-action in physical terms.

For example, one shouldn’t simply pray for those who are homeless or starving, but should also take action in order to alleviate their condition directly.

As far as your journey as a Seeker is concerned, I would certainly encourage you to explore the Resonance Principle further (and I will be writing about the intricacies of how to work with it in a deliberate manner in the future), but to do so with the understanding that it is not the only principle in town. Whilst the power of faith and belief can be enormous, and even life-changing, it is even more effective when followed-up with the power of effective action in the physical sphere.

Having said all of that, spend some time thinking about the Resonance Principle as it applies in your own life. You might want to listen to your intuition as you consider the following two questions in particular:

– If the Resonance Principle is valid, and your faith (meaning your beliefs and expectations) helps to create your experience of reality, how has your faith shaped your life up until this point?

– Looking to the future, how (if at all) would you change things if you thought that your beliefs and expectations would shape your future experience?

As always, note your responses down in your spiritual journal, and feel free to add to your notes at any point as new insights occur to you.

For those of you who would like to study the Resonance Principle in more depth, here are some titles that I have personally found to be of value:

The Master Key by Charles F. Haanel

The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles

You’ll See It When You Believe It by Wayne Dyer

The Magic of Believing by Claude M. Bristol

The Karmic Principle

by Ian 1 Comment

We live in a universe which operates according to the law of cause and effect, which means that every action has consequences. Kick a ball in bare feet and the kinetic energy of the movement will cause the ball to move. Kick a brick wall in bare feet and the kinetic energy of the movement will probably cause one or more of your toes to bruise or break. Although the consequences that we experience in life can be as varied as the actions we take, the basic principle of cause and effect is constant.

The Karmic Principle, which is also known as the Law of Karma, states that the very same law of cause and effect also applies on a spiritual level, and that every action you take – or fail to take – as a spiritual being will be followed by corresponding consequences. The only difference here is that the chain of cause and effect can be harder to discern.

Think negative thoughts on a regular basis and you will probably act in a similarly negative way. Those negative actions, in turn, will reap negative results. Fortunately, the principle applies in a positive way too. Think positive thoughts on a regular basis and you will act in a more positive way, which will lead to more positive results.

The words positive and negative in this sense are, of course, quite arbitrary concepts which have no real meaning, for what is viewed as positive by one person might be perceived as quite negative by another, but that is a topic for another time.

Some traditions talk about the Karmic Principle only in relation to how a person experiences his current life, but others say that the principle works over multiple lifetimes, which means that you may, in this current life, be reaping the consequences of your actions in previous lifetimes. At the same time, the actions that you take in this current lifetime is setting the stage for the consequences you will experience in future incarnations.

Whether or not you, as a Seeker, believe in the idea of past or future lifetimes is really quite irrelevant, because the fact remains that the Karmic Principle is at work right now, irrespective of your views about what happens after physical death. That being the case, it makes sense to spend some time thinking about the principle and the role that it has played in your life to this point, and how you might work with it more mindfully in the days, weeks, months and years ahead.

Consider the following, being careful to listen to your intuition and recording your responses in your spiritual notebook:

– Every action has a consequence, so every effect that comes into being must have had a previous cause. What are some of the decisions you have made, words you have said and actions you have taken in the past that have brought you to where you currently are in life?

– What past actions do you regret, and why?

– What past actions are you pleased about, and why?

– What kind of actions (of thought, word and deed) have you been taking in recent days and weeks?

– What kind of consequences might those actions bring in the days and weeks ahead?

– What kind of consequences would you like to experience in the future?

– What kind of actions (of thought, word and deed) are most likely to result in you experiencing your desired future consequences?

By thinking carefully about the Karmic Principle in this very practical and down-to-earth manner, you can begin to live in accordance with it in a more mindful and productive way.

The Unity Principle

by Ian 1 Comment

Imagine that you have, right there in front of you, one whole apple. Any apple will do, but for illustration purposes you might want to imagine a crisp, fresh, green one, with a leaf growing from the stem. When that image is firmly established in your mind, imagine that you slice the apple into five separate pieces, and that you arrange those pieces on a plate so that none of them are touching.

Now, how many apples do you have on the plate?

The answer is, I hope, rather obvious. You have just one apple, exactly as you did before you started cutting the fruit. The division of the apple into five separate pieces didn’t increase the number of apples that you have, nor did it reduce the number.

Alright then, how many whole apples do you have on the plate?

This question can be a little trickier to answer, because many of you will tend to think of the word whole as meaning undivided, and you have clearly divided the apple by cutting it. In that sense, you might quite rationally respond that you no longer have any whole apples.

In a mathematical sense, however, having all of the parts which collectively comprise the whole means that you still have one whole apple. As any mathematician will be happy to confirm, having five fifths is pretty much the same as having one whole. The overall quantity is therefore exactly the same even though the whole has been divided into five separate pieces.

What’s the point of all this apple talk, you may ask? Well it’s not a thinly disguised attempt to become the next Jamie Oliver, believe me. I simply wanted to illustrate the point that dividing one whole thing into separate pieces doesn’t actually change the mathematical number of things which actually exist. All it really does is change the way the one whole is arranged in physical terms.

The Unity Principle states that there is no real separation between you and the rest of the universe, or between the universe and the Creative Principle itself. On the contrary, everything is actually just one whole thing, and the only reason you experience a feeling of duality, or separation from everything else is because you choose to view yourself as an individual rather than as equally valuable and important pieces of that whole.

If it were possible to separate an ocean into an extraordinary number of individual droplets of water, would the ocean cease to exist? Yes and no. Yes, because ocean is the word we use to describe a vast amount of water, but also no, because that vast amount of water is still there, albeit in a different form. If you were to bring all of those droplets of water together again, the ocean would be just as apparent as it was at the beginning.

What if you were to view the contents of this universe in exactly the same way? What if, rather than viewing yourself as an individual human being which is separate from everything else, you were more mindful of the fact that you are also a part of a much greater whole?

The atoms which make up your physical body have been around since the beginning of time, and they will remain in this universe until the end of time. Why, then, do you view your physical body as being quite separate from the universe at large just because its atoms are currently arranged in this particular way?

Similarly, for those of you who have embraced the concept of yourselves as spiritual beings, why view yourself as a spiritual being which is quite separate from the Creative Principle? Why not instead view yourself as a temporary and only seemingly separate manifestation of the one Creative Principle?

Examine spiritual traditions from around the world and you will often find that their founders spoke about ‘being one’ with something greater than themselves. Some spoke of being one with God, whilst others spoke of being one with the universe, or simply of the concept of non-duality, but the terminology is not nearly as important as the basic concept which is being described, which is the concept of unity.

If, as a Seeker, you choose to look for God, I would suggest that you don’t become too attached to the idea of looking for the whole, because that apple may have already been sliced. Instead, consider looking at yourself, your neighbour, your enemy, your pets and everything else in your experience, and recognising that God may well have been right in front of you all along, cleverly disguising itself as separation.