Imagine if you lived in a monastery high up on a hill somewhere with limited access to the rest of humanity, with limited access to anything, and your life up in that monastery consisted of growing your own food, staying self-sufficient, very little interaction with anybody, and prayer. A separation from the world; something like holy men going into caves, something like disappearing from the everyday complexities and/or distractions of the world.
The problem, of course, with a monastery is that when you enter the monastery you take yourself with you so all of the dilemmas that you had before you went in the monastery, all of the confusions and instabilities that your mind had prior to going in the monastery, are still with you. So the work that you have to do in the monastery is not much different than the work that you have to do anywhere else if that’s the kind of work that you want to do.
So, if it is your priority to become attached to God, attached to Allah, and separated from the world, one of the things that your imagination will tell you is that if you isolate yourself it will be easier for you. Now this may or may not be true, depending on the strength of your mind and the push of your mind. But for most of us, we have established lifestyles within the world, and we have jobs within the world, and we have obligations and duties within the world.
So the question that we have to ask ourselves is: is it possible to create a situation for ourself internally that is the same as if we were in a monastery even though we’re not? Can we use the example of the monastery to separate ourselves from the world? For instance; do you thing they discuss the politics of the world inside a monastery? Do you think they draw comparisons between how much wealth one has, or another has, inside a monastery? Do you think they suffer from not having enough fame when they’ve isolated themselves in a monastery?
Well, outside of the monastery, in the world, we have to ask ourselves the same questions. What is it we’re involved in? What is it that we spend our time on? Are we all caught up in the fact that there’s a presidential race happening in America, and has that become very important to us? I know lots of people for whom politics is their religion, and it becomes a constant unending topic of conversation. For other people its sports, I choose sports over politics because it’s less relevant, and most people understand it’s less relevant. Even though the politics isn’t that relevant either, people give it a passion as if it were.
So, the question is can we make our priorities such that the world has a very low priority? People who go off to the monastery have basically decided that the world isn’t a priority at all…
