4 Ways To Listen To And Execute Your Soul's Will For Lasting Spiritual Fulfilment | The Obedience Episode | Mindful Living After Spiritual Awakening | Ep.47

So we are both following the path of Sri Chinmoy, our spiritual teacher, and Sri Chinmoy is-- gives a lot of emphasis on the quality of obedience.

So in his writings and also when I was with him, he would give talks, and very often he would emphasize the importance of obedience.

And when I just started out, I did not understand this quality.

I did not understand what does he mean with obedience.

And so what is it? What is this obedience? And so-- But it was clear that for Sri Chinmoy it was one of the main qualities.

I just found one of his aphorisms that said, "Obedience, obedience, obedience.

This is indeed God's first law, last law, and only law." And so, Vaajen, I have two questions for you.

One is what should we obey, and the second is how should we obey?

Yeah.

Well, I think, uh, uh, obedience gets a bad name in the world, and especially in the Western world, where we've come from through the Christian tradition, which had a really large emphasis on the external obedience to a fixed and written set of rules.

Like, so this is what we call a scriptural tradition.

So it's a tradition where there is a holy book, and the holy book has all of the rules, it has all of the expectations, and it explains and, and tells you explicitly how you should behave in the world.

This is really the idea behind a scriptural tradition.

And so what this does is it's we're putting our obedience into something outside of ourselves.

And this works really well up to a point, and that point is your life is so complex and unique and personal to you that sometimes it's very hard to know what rule to use in any particular situation.

So if you're basing your way of life on a set of rules that was handed down 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago or more, it's, it's very unclear what you should-- how that applies to the social media age or how does that apply to, to my cell phone or to my social media or my, um, y- you know, any of these different things that we've developed over the centuries.

It's not clear how to apply those sets of rules to the modern situations we find ourselves in.

And then also it's, it's very difficult because your situation is very nuanced and very complex.

So the relationships you have with the people around you, um, the situations you find yourself in, a lot of those situations have never occurred before and will never occur again.

So hoping to have, like, a one-size-fits-all book of rules to explain how you should deal with every situation in life, it just doesn't seem reasonable that that is gonna be the best strategy to have in life.

And, and I think over time as well, having a scriptural or a external set of rules judging your life at all times, people found that very oppressive.

And so especially in Europe, at some point there was a real move to try and kill God.

And, and the reason for that was because God was always watching you, God was always judging you, and this really got on people's nerves at some point.

If you felt that every moment and everything you're doing, that there was someone watching, and he was writing down and judging all of your actions, at some point you would wish that person away.

You would just wish that they, they just would stop bugging you for a while.