The Inner Light: A Beginner’s Guide to Spirituality and Finding Peace by Sumaa Tekur

Author:Sumaa Tekur [Sumaa Tekur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House India
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Material and Spiritual Fulfilment

The purpose of balancing the material and the spiritual is to feel fulfilment. Every time we satisfy a desire or reach a goal, fulfilment is achieved. Material fulfilment can be had when we feed off external factors, be it objects or people. At different stages of our life, material fulfilment keeps evolving. As a child, it would be, perhaps, to get warm milk just as we were beginning to feel hungry. As a teenager, fulfilment could have been to get our hands on a video game that we had always wanted.

As a young adult, the preoccupations are with first love and a desired job. As we grow older, desire takes on the need for expansion. Everything that earlier fulfilled us is no longer enough anymore. So, it takes on the role of a bigger house, dining at fancier restaurants, longer vacations to more exotic destinations, deeper commitment in a relationship, more sex, a better-looking body, a bigger bank balance . . . the list of desires is unending.

With these material desires, the control does not often rest with the one who desires. We are always dependent on several external factors for our desire to be fulfilled and for the goal to be reached. This puts us in a state of constant anxiety because of the number of uncontrollable variables. The only way to manage material fulfilment is to balance it with spiritual fulfilment.

Spiritual fulfilment is an unending well of fulfilment that is already available within us. In order to feel fulfilled spiritually, we do not need any external factors to work for us. We don’t need to have control over anything else but ourselves. It is the mind’s ability to get to a state of peace and calm no matter what else is happening around us in the physical world.

This is not escapism, quite the contrary actually. Spiritual fulfilment, or the inner light that enables us to see clearly both within and outside, shows us the real nature of our desires. We might still want what we want. But we are in a better position to assess the possibility of fulfilment, and also are able to manage the emotions that surround this fulfilment or the lack thereof.

Our minds are naturally inclined towards material fulfilment because we have trained ourselves to find happiness there. But lasting happiness comes from within. And an entire industry of self-help and self-care is dedicated to finding this kind of happiness.

The happiness that comes from spiritual fulfilment is not derived from anything external and is readily available to us always. And in more spiritual traditions the way to reach it is through meditation, contemplation, and prayer. It is the never-ending grace that flows through us. And to tap into it, our inner light must be switched on.

When the inner light is on, we can see not only the beauty and extent of the spiritual fulfilment that is already present in us, but we also understand material fulfilment in all its dimensions in relation to what we already have.

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