To seek the Divine, should you withdraw from worldly affairs? How can you withdraw from worldly affairs anyway? It all depends on what it is that you call worldly affairs. Is cooking your food a worldly affair? Yes. Is washing your clothes a worldly affair? Yes. You have to do these worldly affairs. Otherwise how will you live here?

What kind of worldly affairs you want to do is your individual choice. Everybody need not join politics. Even in social situations, somebody is in politics, somebody is a clerk in an office, somebody is running a whole industry and somebody is sweeping floors. All of them are doing worldly affairs. So you cannot really withdraw from worldly affairs. Every person has a right to choose what type of worldly affair he does and how much of it. It is only those people who do not know what they are doing with themselves and who are just doing what everybody else is doing, who complain in this manner. They neither have the intelligence nor the awareness to do their own thing.

Such people are always complaining about spiritual people, “These people are not being responsible. They are not doing worldly affairs, they are doing their own affairs.” The man who is in his own house or in his office is also there just to do his own affairs. He is not interested in the wellbeing of the world. He does not know what his real affair is and has gotten himself into such a mess that he does not even know how to get out of it. Because he is unable to get out of it, he thinks that somebody who is able to manage his own affairs the way he wants it in his life is on the wrong bus.

It happened like this. One day, a drunk somehow pulled himself onto the bus, stumbled around over the passengers, dislodged suitcases and briefcases, landed on a seat next to a prim and proper old lady and fell on her. The old lady pushed him off and said, “I hate to say this young man, but you are going straight to hell!” The drunk suddenly sprang up and blurted out, “Oh no! I’m on the wrong bus!” So drunken people do not know who is on the wrong bus.

If somebody manages their lives the way they want, to the extent they want, these people who have made their lives unmanageable, enslaved and entangled to the situations around them, become very jealous. They will always complain. They will say these people are running away from the world. Right now, the way the world is going, if a lot of people continue doing too many things on this planet, this planet will not even last another ten years. Fortunately, fifty percent of the people are lazy. The other fifty percent, who are too industrious, are busy destroying the world.

People who are withdrawing from excessive activity are not causing any damage either to themselves, to society, the environment or the planet. It is only the people doing activity in absolute unawareness, who are truly destroying this world. Not knowing what they are doing, simply imitating somebody, they are doing more activity, more briskly than anybody else. They are the people who are causing tremendous damage to this planet. They are the people who are taking the whole of humanity towards global suicide.

So right now, the most responsible thing you can do in the world is to withdraw from activity. Withdrawing from activity is not so simple. It takes tremendous maturity to simply sit quietly. It does not happen because you are lazy or irresponsible, it happens because you are aware and conscious. -Isha Foundation New Zealand