Meditation on the Laws

It is worth while to spare a little time to meditate quietly upon material and spiritual laws. There is, for example, the law of gravity. Knowing it, we should be fools indeed to jump downstairs instead of walking, or to attempt to cross a river on our feet. There are the laws of health, governing sleep and work and food and many other things, and here again we know that disobedience is foolishness, ruinous to health and happiness.

As there are laws for the body, so are there spiritual laws for the soul, of which the voice of conscience occasionally reminds us. Those spiritual laws are interested in the whole of our life’s journey, not only the bit of it that we now know. Yet they are in no wise contrary to material ones, because at last our physical life has a spiritual basis. Honesty and truth-speaking, for example, build up social relations that rest upon our confidence in one another and lead to co-operation and prosperity.

Meditation on the spiritual laws can polarize all our thoughts and emotions into line with them, and make our most common daily contacts with others a spiritual voyage instead of a material battle. To live — not shrink from life, but bring to it all we are and all we have — with love and thought — is the fundamental spiritual law for us. It is three in one at all times, any one of which we ignore at our peril. Some may say: “I will work now, get money, and love my friends at the card party this evening”. But the carpenter who makes a chair, considering the comfort, durability and beauty of it, and happy in the thought that someone will find it satisfactory and will really enjoy it, is fulfilling the spiritual law.