Are Spiritual People Useful To Their Families?
Everyone has a Svadharma, duty to themselves, kutumba dharma, duty to their family and samaja dharma, duty to their society, in addition to various other dharmas.
Loukika Dharma (Worldly Duties) :
Your duty to yourself demands that you look after your material and spiritual requirements.
Whatever you earn materially you share with your family. This clearly contributes to their material well-being.
You earn money by contributing to the material welfare of society. That is why they reward you with your share of material prosperity.
In a country that was robbed of its material well-being at gun-point by the colonials, it is very important that our society regains its material prosperity.
In our country a person who achieves material prosperity for themselves, their family, their caste and the society achieves great admiration and respect.
It is apparent that a person who achieves material progress is valuable to themselves and others.
Adhyatmika Dharma (Duty to your Inner Self) :
Spiritual Pursuits also take a huge amount of time, energy, effort and commitment. The very food that a spiritual person eats, their shelter and their few material possessions are the wealth created by others. Spiritual people try to take as little as possible from the material world. They resist material accumulations.
They are admired since they are doing something that “us ordinary mortals” cannot do.
We seek spiritual people out when our material existence or samsara breaks us. When we lose health, happiness, loved ones, dreams, wealth. When samsaara inflicts a blow on us that causes us more pain than we can tolerate, we seek spiritual people, places and practices.
Thus society does benefit from spiritual people, who heal our wounds, dissolve our pains and give us new strength, confidence and joy. Sometimes we even gain a little wisdom and change a little for the better.
But what about the families of spiritual people?
Did the families of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Dayananda Saraswathi, Gandhiji, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Raghavendra Swami, Sankaracharya, Gautama Buddha, the Rishis and all others.. benefit from the spiritual people?
I think of Sankaracharya’s widowed mother, Gautama Buddha’s grieving wife, Gandhiji’s lost son and so on.
Krishna says “yoga kshemam vahamyaham”, that He will look after those who are devoted to Him. Does this include their families or only the specific devotee?
In so many cases do I see a grieving relative of a spiritual person. If the relatives are not grieving for a person on a spiritual pursuit, it is clear that they themselves are advanced spiritual people.
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