Right Livelihood
If you seek enlightenment, then career is a very important idea on your agenda.
A Buddhist is working not just to get paid, but working to advance spiritually. You shouldn't create a syntactical break in your mind between your career and your religious practice.
Is is necessary to have a strong focus. Work will give you that focus.
In Buddhism you study how to release the kundalini to the levels that would certainly afford career success. If we move it further, into the planes of knowledge and wisdom, it enables the practitioner to do just about anything.
It is possible to renounce everything and attain enlightenment. But most people don't want to renounce; they wish to run away from responsibility and hard work.
Everyone in advanced meditation practice should be involved with the economic support of the spread of the dharma. We live in a material world, and it's very expensive to teach meditation.
The advanced student of meditation takes an active part in supporting the work of their teacher. They happily work more hours or do whatever is necessary to help out more.
Work sustains us as bodies and it consumes a great deal of energy. The conservation of energy is the component theme of Buddhist practice and yoga. That is why people live in monasteries.
The idea of the walls of monastery was to keep everybody else out because you wanted to develop a certain type of life. Most people in the world had different ideas on the subject.
The ashram is where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds. You feel that it's selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don't just love the one, you love the many also.
You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time. That alone gives you a couple extra hours a day to meditate. In a monastery you lead a relatively simply life. You don't need a lot of possessions.
The problem with monasteries, ashrams, convents is these institutions become extremely political. In other words, they're really small societies, and much of what you hope to avoid in societies you find there.
Ashrams often become places where there is a hierarchy and a pecking order and not much enlightenment. That is what some people are drawn to. But that has nothing to do with enlightenment.
It is better when you are in the world. You know how much pain there is. You can tell how established you are in the light. To remove yourself from the things you desire or things you find difficult to deal with is no answer.
You don't want to become so sensitive that you can't interact with people in the world. If you get to that point, you are not practicing. You are running away from the world, and you've made yourself weak.
Go out into the world, do your best all day, try to think higher thoughts, try to be kind and compassionate, but don't let people take advantage of you.
It is necessary to be occupied almost all the time, to have your mind focused; otherwise, you get very spaced out. There are many variant psychic forces and powers that roam through the worlds. You can pick them up.
There are lifetimes where one goes off into the Himalayas and meditate in a cave. But this is not really one of those lifetimes for most people. Our earth has changed.
Some people have a very strange idea that material success does not coincide harmoniously with self-realization, which is absurd. The aversion to material success, or the clinging to it, is an attachment.
Material success is not something that will bind you, unless you become attached to it, any more than poverty will liberate you.
What matters is to aid others, to have a group dream.
As Buddhists, our only task is to keep our room clean.
