On an individual level, as I try to progress in both my meditative practice as well as my professional career—working during the day and meditating at night—I continue to encounter something between the two that is the opposite of synergy.
When I sit down to meditate at night, the stress and constant go-go-go of the workday distract from my focus.
In the morning, returning to the working world, I find it difficult to break from my meditative detachment in order to jumpstart my energy and perform at my sales job.
On a societal level, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi compares the meditative calm of the Eastern cultures and the modern working world of the West.
“In many respects, what the West has accomplished in terms of harnessing material energy is matched by what India and the Far East have achieved in terms of direct control of consciousness.”
However, according to Csikszentmihalyi, neither are independently sustainable long-term.
“The Indian fascination with advanced techniques for self-control, at the expense of learning to cope with the material challenges of the physical environment, has conspired to let impotence and apathy spread over a great proportion of the population, defeated by scarcity of resources and by overcrowding.”
“The Western mastery over material energy, on the other hand, runs the risk of turning everything it touches into a resource to be consumed as rapidly as possible, thus exhausting the environment.”
Csikszentmihalyi believes, “The perfect society would be able to strike a balance between the spiritual and material worlds.”
The same holds true for the individual. We cannot survive without control over the material world and we cannot avoid suffering without control over consciousness.
My question remains: how do we maintain a balance between the two in our personal lives when it seems that the mindset and skills required for each are counter-productive to the other?
Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 103.