How do you deal with a boss who tells you to produce more and more and to use pressure techniques to sell, when you're interested in God and liberation? Where is that beautiful pine forest grove for meditation as you're sitting on the 405 Freeway at 5:00 o'clock, and the traffic is definitely not moving? What do you do with the violence, when someone pulls a gun on you inthe street, when someone breakds into your home and rips everything off?  How do you deal with the incongruities of existence, of a world of people who are cruel to each other, sometimes without even realizing that they're cruel? How do you deal with it?

 

Very, very skillfully.  Living and working in the world.

 

It is necessary to be part of an organic fellowship. This is the advice of the I Ching, that ancient, venerable Chinese book of wisdom to which I subscribe so heavily. The I Ching counsels us -- the sages who wrote the I Ching a long, long time ago -- that the wisdom of the self-taught is heavy and ponderous. While you may make a certain amount of spiritual progress on your own, it's lacking in something. It's heavy, it's ponderous.

 

Something occurs in learning with others that's marvelous. The edges of our egotism are slowly worn down. 

 

- "Living and Working in the World", The Lakshmi Series