I learned today that one of the greatest evils in life is being 'spiritaully lazy'. Now what exactly does that mean? According to Scott Peck it means that a person is unwilling to motivate themselves for spiritual growth or even simple everyday tasks that contribute to your mental health.


Even people that appear to be busy or working might just be putting up a front for their laziness. Even if you work a 9-5 and see your kids regularly, the goal of your activities might only be to protect your inner laziness from criticism. I know many people that are workaholics and I haven't found one that fits this profile. Although it wouldn't suprise me if there were more in my life than I knew.

At any rate, I am in a challenging position of cutting myself off financially from my family and I wanted to talk for a second about my own laziness and the inherent problems that come with it. Without working on myself and accomplishing even small tasks every day, my life would suck and I would be very unhappy. My challenge is to read, go to regular meetings, go to my job and write in my journal. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake. Oh yea, and be honest.

I am curious about peoples impressions on the concept of spiritual laziness and maybe even some suggestions for personal improvement.

-Loop

If spiritual laziness is non-committal, non-diligence in spiritual (religious) conviction and apathetical application to religious teaching then what in God’s name is "spiritual diligence"? Taliban/Al Qaeda/Hisbollah fervour? If that’s the case I’ll just cruise along in my spiritual laziness, thank you.

Honesty, conscious cleansing, and a clean philosophy on life are far more important than spiritual hokus-pokus.

You seem to presuppose that your spirituality is essentially devolved from your behaviour and controlled by your conscious self.

What perhaps should be your concern is a total negligence of all matters spiritual in your daily life, which could indeed lead to the gradual hibernation of your spiritual self.

It is perhaps healthier for one's spiritual self and activities related to your spiritual self to be intermingled with one's 'reality dealing' self and this is achievable if one guides one's normal behaviour by your own spiritual guidelines. In it's basic form this could be like the 10 commandments or not eating pork or not causing life to be taken or whatever however your own spirituality guides you.

In this way you can avoid the arguably 'protestant work ethic' approach you seem to be considering ie beating yourself up about being 'lazy' and not doing certain things at relatively defined time.

Are your goals good mental health, positive spiritual well-being, writing your journal, doing your job? They should not perhaps be all cobbled together as part of the same 'goal' category and it may be useful to you to define your own life strategy (eg to lead a mentally and spiritual positive life) and from there define your goals to implement the strategy.

Either that or become a Rastafarian, smoke weed a lot, and let most things including your mental and spiritual wellbeing, take care of themselves. And it's surprising how often they do.

Rule number 1: no stress

You have to work at it, Loop! No joke intended, but you can get what you want if you're very creative. "go to meetings?" AA by chance (pls forgive me if I'm totally off base)? Maybe there are other other issues involved.