Applied Spirituality - The Monk and the Entrepreneur
I’m an entrepreneur, a husband, a father. Not a monk. And yet I crave the same inner peace and depth of consciousness as those on the monastic path.
Over the last decade I’ve been living what I call Applied Spirituality. With the guidance of masterful teachers I began to see that inner peace and full conscious awareness don’t require withdrawal from the world. My karmic purpose calls me to do more than sit in a cave meditating (as blissful as that sounds).
Inner Peace
Inner peace is achieved when your capacity to maintain equanimity exceeds the intensity experienced by your nervous system. Two levers: decrease intensity, or increase capacity. If you’re not a monk, decreasing intensity isn’t an option. So the first practice of Applied Spirituality is to increase your capacity - through specific nervous system training I’ll explore in future essays.
Conscious Awakening
Inner peace isn’t enough. At some point you start wondering what it’s all about. Conscious awakening is a stabilized, moment-by-moment awareness of awareness itself - what remains when you strip away all sensation and form. But becoming aware of awareness requires becoming aware of everything that is NOT awareness. Which expands your sensitivity, and thus the intensity hitting your nervous system. Start with inner peace practices. The second practice of Applied Spirituality is increasing awareness, best done through meditation or Practicing the Art of Consciousness.
Doing both while doing it all
Maintaining equanimity in the face of nervous system intensity, while holding stabilized awareness of awareness itself, while starting companies, making money, having sex, raising a family, helping people - this is in many ways a greater challenge than the monastic path.
But what else are we here for?