Harmony, Sympathetic Joy, Purification

How do you achieve harmony in your life and how do you most effectively live in harmony with other living beings? Everyone is seeking harmony in their life, yet in today’s world so few seem to be able to accomplish it. That is because very few people have attempted to purify their lifestyle. Instead, they are affected by the marketing efforts of companies that want to complicate lives and fill them with innumerable gadgets that clutter life and lead us away from the simple aspects of living a pure, spiritual life. It is no wonder that most of those considered saints of the past renounced almost all luxuries in life to keep their life simple and pure in its focus on serving God. Each time you add another material aspect to your life you complicate it and make it more and more difficult to return to the purity of simplicity. All of these material conveniences only serve to distract us from the harmony with nature that people are meant to have. The other element missing if you want to achieve harmony is the concept of sympathetic joy. The ego usually gets in the way and causes the individual to want everything good for his or her self personally, often at the expense of others. This attitude creates the competitive mentality that is so prevalent in today’s world. If this competitiveness is replaced with the concept of sympathetic joy, whereby you gain happiness from seeing others accomplish their dreams, then you will live in harmony with all other living beings.