PAPER 160: Section 4.
The Balance Of Maturity
P1778:4, 160:4.1 While you have an eye single to the attainment of eternal realities, you must also make provision for the necessities of temporal living. While the spirit is our goal, the flesh is a fact. Occasionally the necessities of living may fall into our hands by accident, but in general, we must intelligently work for them. The two major problems of life are: making a temporal living and the achievement of eternal survival. And even the problem of making a living requires religion for its ideal solution. These are both highly personal problems. True religion, in fact, does not function apart from the individual.
P1778:5, 160:4.2
The essentials of the temporal life, as I see them, are:
- Good physical health.
- Clear and clean thinking.
- Ability and skill.
- Wealth -- the goods of life.
- Ability to withstand defeat.
- Culture -- education and wisdom.
P1779:1, 160:4.3 Even the physical problems of bodily health and efficiency are best solved when they are viewed from the religious standpoint of our Master's teaching: That the body and mind of man are the dwelling place of the gift of the Gods, the spirit of God becoming the spirit of man. The mind of man thus becomes the mediator between material things and spiritual realities.
P1779:2, 160:4.4
It requires intelligence to secure one's share of the desirable things of
life. It is wholly erroneous to suppose that faithfulness in doing one's daily
work will insure the rewards of wealth. Barring the occasional and accidental
acquirement of wealth, the material rewards of the temporal life are found
to flow in certain well-organized channels, and only those who have access
to these channels may expect to be well rewarded for their temporal efforts.
Poverty must ever be the lot of all men who seek for wealth in isolated and
individual channels. Wise planning, therefore, becomes the one thing essential
to worldly prosperity. Success requires not only devotion to one's work but
also that one should function as a part of some one of the channels of material
wealth. If you are unwise, you can bestow a devoted life upon your generation
without material reward; if you are an accidental beneficiary of the flow
of wealth, you may roll in luxury even though you have done nothing worth
while for your fellow men.
P1779:3, 160:4.5
Ability is that which you inherit, while skill is what you acquire. Life is
not real to one who cannot do some one thing well, expertly. Skill is one
of the real sources of the satisfaction of living. Ability implies the gift
of foresight, farseeing vision. Be not deceived by the tempting rewards of
dishonest achievement; be willing to toil for the later returns inherent in
honest endeavor. The wise man is able to distinguish between means and ends;
otherwise, sometimes
overplanning for the future defeats its own high purpose.
As a pleasure seeker you should aim always to be a producer as well as a
consumer.
P1779:4, 160:4.6
Train your memory to hold in sacred trust the strength-giving and worth-while
episodes of life, which you can recall at will for your pleasure and edification.
Thus build up for yourself and in yourself reserve galleries of beauty, goodness,
and artistic grandeur. But the noblest of all memories are the treasured recollections
of the great moments of a superb friendship. And all of these memory treasures
radiate their most precious and exalting influences under the releasing touch
of spiritual worship.
P1779:5, 160:4.7
But life will become a burden of existence unless you learn how to fail gracefully.
There is an art in defeat which noble souls always acquire; you must know
how to lose cheerfully; you must be fearless of disappointment. Never hesitate
to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure under deceptive smiles and
beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the end results
are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world
of unreality and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.
P1779:6, 160:4.8
Success may generate courage and promote confidence, but wisdom comes only
from the experiences of adjustment to the results of one's failures. Men who
prefer optimistic illusions to reality can never become wise. Only those who
face facts and adjust them to ideals can achieve wisdom. Wisdom embraces both
the fact and the ideal and therefore saves its devotees from both of those
barren extremes of philosophy -- the man whose idealism excludes facts and
the materialist who is devoid of spiritual outlook. Those timid souls who
can only keep up the struggle of life by the aid of continuous false illusions
of success are doomed to suffer failure and experience defeat as they ultimately
awaken from the dream world of their own imaginations.
P1780:1, 160:4.9
And it is in this business of facing failure and adjusting to defeat that
the far-reaching vision of religion exerts its supreme influence. Failure
is simply an educational episode -- a cultural experiment in the acquirement
of wisdom -- in the experience of the God-seeking man who has embarked on
the eternal adventure of the exploration of a universe. To such men defeat
is but a new tool for the achievement of higher levels of universe reality.
P1780:2, 160:4.10
The career of a God-seeking man may prove to be a great success in the light
of eternity, even though the whole
temporal-life enterprise may appear as
an overwhelming failure, provided each life failure yielded the culture of
wisdom and spirit achievement. Do not make the mistake of confusing knowledge,
culture, and wisdom. They are related in life, but they represent vastly differing
spirit values; wisdom ever dominates knowledge and always glorifies culture.