To live a meaningful life, we must have a vision and goal.
According to the spiritual masters of Vedanta, we are essentially pure spirit expressing through human form. The main purpose of life is to realise this higher Self.
To help us reach this goal, the ancient sages formulated a vision where they divided our life into four stages with practices, duties and disciplines for each stage.
Following these guidelines, our outer life will promote our inner evolution and bring us closer to achieving our spiritual goal. This is what it takes to live a meaningful life.
The four stages run serially from youth, adulthood, senior adulthood to old age. They are called the student, householder, retiree, and renunciate stage of life.
Live a meaningful life through the following 4 stages of life
Student
The student stage is a time for study and the formation of character.
Along with the study of secular subjects like math, science, art and so on, the student stage is when children and youth are taught moral living and an understanding of God and spirituality.
Their spiritual studies include learning how to pray, contemplate and meditate.
From a young age, they are taught values such as humility, generosity, compassion, and duty toward their parents, teachers, and elders.
They are guided in the art of right conduct, self-discipline, and to be truthful in thought, word and deed.
They are trained in maintaining a healthy body through proper diet and exercise and they are also instructed on how to keep their surroundings neat and clean.
This is the time when youth learn to about the purpose of life and the spiritual goal of reaching the Self within.
Householder
The youth who has acquired knowledge and life skills will then be ready to enter the householder stage of life. The traditional view is that he or she may take up a job or a career, get married and start a family.
In today’s world, marriage and starting a family may or may not happen. Even though there may not be children, duties toward other family members such as parents or other elders must continue.
It is the time to acquire wealth, build abundance and give back to society. The main income generators of society are people in the householder stage of life. The sages caution us to ensure that income earned, and desires fulfilled must be through righteous means.
The householder stage is a training ground for the practice of unselfishness, living in self-control and growing spiritually through the performance of obligatory duties.
Duties must never be neglected. They must be discharged to the best of one’s ability, without ego or attachment to the results. Duties are precious opportunities to bring out the spiritual shine from within.
Daily prayers, spiritual study and meditation that were learned in the student stage must continue not only in this stage but throughout our lives. These practices are integral to keeping us on the path of spirituality.
Retiree
In the retiree stage of life, people begin to wind down their careers. The busyness of the householder stage when young children, careers, social and family obligations press on our time and energy is slowly left behind.
The retiree stage roughly begins when the children have left home, and the first grandchild is born.
This is the time of transition when we have less duties and daily activities, and we find ourselves with more free time. To ensure we continue to live a meaningful life even when we retire, the freed-up time should be used for our spiritual pursuits.
Study of the scriptures. quiet contemplation and meditation stake up a big part of our daily life in this stage.
As we gradually increase the time taken for our spiritual pursuits, we slowly prepare ourselves for a full-time spiritual life in the next stage.
Renunciate
The last stage of life is the renunciate stage. In this stage, desires for worldly activities, achievements, and possessions have mostly died away.
Some people actually renounce their worldly life and enter into a monastic life. The majority of people, however, don’t make this choice. We can continue to live where we are, focussing on our spiritual practices while maintaining inner peace and solitude.
Even though our physical strength wanes in old age, the renunciate stage is by no means a time of inactivity and decline.
If we live a meaningful life remembering unfoldment of the Self within as our true goal of life, then old age will truly be golden. It is the time when wisdom and insight have grown.
In this stage, the only priority is the cultivation of God consciousness, contemplation and meditation.
The goal is to realise our higher Self in meditation.
Living the renunciate stage in this way is the culmination of living an entire life with a spiritual focus.
3 disciplines that must be practiced through all the 4 stages of life
The spiritual masters guide us to practice three universal disciplines throughout all the four stages of life. These practices purify the mind and thereby help us to grow spiritually. They are key factors that help us live a meaningful life.
They are:
1…Detach from the outcome of your actions and dedicate them to a divine altar
Our physical, sensory, mental, and emotional faculties are gifts from the divine. We may develop them, but we had no hand in creating them.
My guru, Swami Chinmayananda once said, What we have is His gift to us. What we do with it is our gift back to Him.
And so, it is only good and right to remember the divine in all that we do. We relinquish ownership of our activities and their results and offer them back to where they came.
Dedication then becomes an act of gratitude. It can be as simple as mentally saying, “For you.Thank you”.
We can dedicate all our actions to the divine–even the smallest things such as our daily duties and chores around the house.
Acting in this way converts all work into worship.
2…Share your wealth with the needy
Once a feeling of gratitude comes into our heart, it’s only natural that we want to share our blessings with others. Sharing our wealth with the needy is the second practice.
Wealth here does not only mean the giving of money but includes sharing our skills and talents freely with others.
It’s key to remember to give without expecting any rewards such as monetary rewards, special favors or privileges. There should not even be the expectation of any words of praise or appreciation.
The giving must be without a sense of ego thinking, “I did it” or “I gave…” but it must come naturally from a feeling of genuine humility and noble intention.
When we give out of sincere gratitude, there’s neither a sense of attachment to the gifts nor the giving.
When we share our gifts with those who need it, it dilutes our ego and selfishness and cultivates love and compassion for others. This is surely a practice that helps us grow.
3…Practice austerity
The third practice is one that is very much a personal inner discipline. It is the practice of austerity or self-control.
Practicing austerity is voluntarily imposing self-control for the purpose of gaining inner strength and integrity. It is not meant to be done to achieve worldly goals.
Examples are fasting once a week, maintaining silence for a few hours every day and waking up early for your daily spiritual practice.
Imposing self-control helps to rein in the mind and saves energy which is then channeled into spiritual pursuits such as spiritual study, contemplation and meditation.
Austerity weakens lower tendencies, eliminates negative habits, and brings us closer to our Higher Self.
Live a spiritual life
We are meant to live a spiritual life, not one focused merely on material growth and gains. Those gains are short-lived and left behind when we die.
From a spiritual perspective, worldly activities and relationships are not goals in themselves. We are meant to use them as opportunities to learn and grow spiritually.
Why hold a spiritual vision and goal?
We are spiritual beings on an evolutionary journey through lifetimes. We are here to learn, grow and transform inwardly. The new learning and inner growth we gain remain with us at the soul level as we continue our journey onward to future lives.
Keeping the spiritual goal of unfolding the divinity within as our main purpose in life, understanding the 4 stages we go through, and practising the duties and responsibilities associated with each stage is the way to live a meaningful life.
Reference: The Journey called Life, Piercy, CA, Chinmaya Mission West, 2001.
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