Sacrifice

Sacrifice is an important concept for anyone interested in leading a religious life, but most people today seems to think that sacrifice means giving something up. This is how shallow our religious sense has become. Sacrifice really involves the art of drawing energy from one level and reinvesting it at another level to produce a higher form of consciousness.

Learning the value of meaningful sacrifice is not the same as denying pleasure or practicing asceticism. There is a wonderful saying from the Judaic tradition suggesting that every legitimate joy you deny yourself on earth will be denied you in heaven. This speaks to the false spirituality of asceticism. Trading in one thing to get something better is not a spiritual act at all; in fact, it is highly egocentric. You shouldn’t make a sacrifice in hopes of getting something back from God. I see many people who pray so that God will make things go the way they would like, or go to a church to achieve social standing or some other worldly goal. This is not sacrifice at all. Properly, a sacrifice should be suffered simply because it is necessary for the transformation of consciousness -- to get beyond the wishes of your ego, not to satisfy those wishes in some backhanded way.