Materialism and Your Sanctification.

When I was younger I began a practice of meditation. My spiritual life had been eclipsed by selfish living and pursuing a materialistic life shortly after becoming a born again Christian. My excuse was that I was young and I hadn’t really thought of living a holy life, until I became so miserable that I felt I had no choice but to seek God again. I took on a new mindset in life, and I stopped pursuing materialistic things in my life like partying, drinking, drugs, and women. I was never really money motivated, but my beliefs about money changed too. I didn’t want to become a hermit, so eventually on my new path I would seek and find employment.

What brought me happiness at this point in my life was my pursuit of God. I began a meditation practice and all that stuff that the world says it needs to be happy no longer made me happy. What made me happy was the joy I felt while practicing meditation. I believed in God, so it wasn’t a Buddhist meditation, it was a mixture of Hinduism and Christianity. I don’t think I converted to Hinduism I still considered myself Christian, but the fact that I was meditating drew me away from practical Christianity. However an aversion to materialism isn’t just a Hindu thing, it can be found in Christianity too.

The gnostic heresy that matter is evil and spirituality is good is not exactly what I am getting at. I’m not saying matter is bad, what I’m saying that when we pursue matter more, which is materialism, our faith is affected and we loose a bit of our holiness. It’s easy to say ”Just seek holiness” but what happens when we need to feed, cloth and shelter ourselves, especially in a climate that is very harsh in the winter. There are holy men in India who basically give up everything and become like beggars living off the charity of others. These men are respected in India, but living like a hermit or beggar in a North American town just makes you a beggar, even if you are doing it for a holy reason.

Finding a balance between spirituality and materialism is harder in North America because our way of life and our economy is based on materialism. This is what drew me as a young man to pursue a spiritual path in my 20’s based on Eastern mysticism. I was trying to find the truth, and the balance between our overly consumer mindset and culture, and the desire to find a way of living in North America with a way of life that was less materialistic and consumer oriented, which unfortunately over the years has gotten much worse. This is Mike.

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