How ability maturity and spirituality can work together in our life – Maturity provides us the ability to use our ability properly; it underlies the steady temperament by which we can avoid getting carried away by life’s binaries. 

If we want to become mature, where can we get the necessary resources? In our education? It is concerned primarily with training us in ability, such as technical or vocational skills for earning a living. In our culture? It usually glamorizes celebrities with extraordinary abilities, even if they don’t show much maturity; their personal lives may well be characterized by temper tantrums, dissoluteness and an entitlement mentality. Thus, our social structures such as education and culture don’t aid us much in developing maturity; that’s why the onus falls on us to develop it ourselves.  

In our individual quest for maturity, one powerful resource is spirituality. Here’s why. Maturity centers not so much on keeping small things small as on keeping big things big so that small things don’t matter so much. The Bhagavad-gita (15.07) reveals that the ultimate big thing is our spiritual connection, our devotional link with the ultimate reality. We are, at our core, spiritual beings who are parts of the whole, the ultimate reality. Our life has a grand purpose: spiritual evolution and material contribution. By evolving spiritually and contributing materially in a mood of service to the whole, we can best fulfill our potentials. Through spiritual evolution, we develop maturity, which can be said to  be a combination of intelligence and equanimity: the intelligence to know which things are small and which things are big; and the equanimity to ensure that our emotions don’t make small things big or big things small. 

 

One-sentence summary:

Maturity provides us the ability to use our ability well; our maturity can be increased by our spirituality, which helps us keep big things big and small things small. 

 

Think it over:

  • Why may our social structures not help us in developing maturity?
  • How does spirituality reveal the ultimate big thing in life?
  • How does spirituality help increase our maturity? 

 

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15.07: The living entities in this conditioned world are My eternal fragmental parts. Due to conditioned life, they are struggling very hard with the six senses, which include the mind.

How ability maturity and spirituality can work together in our life

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