People sometimes ask, “How can spirituality benefit me practically? Can it help me improve my performance?”

Yes, spirituality enhances our ability to tap our ability.

The ability we have is important for our success, but equally, if not more, important is our ability to properly use that ability. The news regularly reports stories about how talented people fail to do justice to their talents because they lacked the necessary mental strength. For example, promising players may lose their cool at critical moments in a game and end up bungling, stumbling and falling. We lose our cool due to unregulated desires and unwarranted anxieties. Such desires and anxieties trap us when we are governed by a materialistic worldview. Materialism promises us pleasure, but traps our search for pleasure within the material level of reality, wherein due to the temporary nature of things we end up disappointed, if not devastated. The Bhagavad-gita (16.11) indicates the consequences: When our desires are uncontrolled, we sentence ourselves to unremitting anxiety.

Gita wisdom explains that we are at our core non-material souls. Spiritual wisdom widens our conceptual horizons about our identity and destiny. And spiritual practice broadens our experience so that we can perceive and relish higher spiritual reality – our own non-material nature and the shelter and strength coming from our non-material connection with the supreme spiritual reality, God.

Spirituality’s ultimate benefit is to provide us a higher purpose for performance – a lasting purpose that extends beyond the inevitable frustration and destruction that is the fate of all worldly achievement. It takes our consciousness to the spiritual level of reality, where our longing for happiness is eternally fulfilled. Simultaneously, it calms and clarifies our mind, increasing our capacity for purposeful focus, thereby enhancing our ability to tap our ability and translate it into achievement.

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