The right measure begins with this: letting yourself be touched, but not affected. Because being embodied in matter, it remains our field of experience, it therefore has great utility for our spiritual evolution. Not being material beings wanting to have a spiritual experience, but rather spiritual beings having to undergo a material experience…
The intensity of material experience must be strong enough to affect the psyche and reach the soul, therefore leading us to change internally. Pushed to our limits during moments of crisis, we will be forced to transform ourselves.
But if this intensity is too strong, without a dimension greater than it, matter overwhelms us and pushes us even further into the spectacle of earthly illusions. The initiatory dimension is then missed: beings are attached to pleasure or blocked by suffering or fear. The being is totally imprisoned by matter and its illusions, instead of being freed from it.
Maintaining this balance between involvement and liberation, between investment and detachment is very difficult. Because it means questioning our relationship with matter, to find a new accuracy. This relationship is very important, because it determines the relevance of our incarnation, and the balance between the intangible and the tangible.
This right relationship with matter is as follows: getting involved in it while freeing yourself from it. When man renounces his empirical relationships with things and beings, when he takes a step back from his objective reality: only then can he discern God as being a source of his experiences. He can also discern his interiority as the source of his external experiences. He then arises in his spiritual consciousness.
If moments of pleasure have not allowed him this change in relationship to his reality and to himself, suffering may force him to take this step. This step back that he achieves puts him at a distance from the material world, but at the same time brings him closer to the spiritual world. Man can sense divine grace when he recognizes the creative laws at work and can then cooperate with them.
Once man has awakened to his spiritual nature, he orients himself towards the divine and is no longer completely subject to the laws of nature. This divine reality being eternal, he can renounce in his body, his heart and his mind the instabilities of the temporal world, and connect to the stability of divine laws. These eternal laws being always perfect in their manifestations, man can only accept them and pass through them in conscience. Held in balance by the reflections of truth in matter, human consciousness cannot help but remain in the divine presence, even in the midst of error and chaos.
If man remains obedient to divine guidance, he will never be overwhelmed by the negative conditions of his life. Events, both positive and negative, become in this case means of perfecting one’s nature. The right relationship to the world is therefore a balance between involvement and detachment, between the celestial and the earthly.