This passage from Take Off Your Shoes speaks so very directly to where I am in my life right now. I thought I would post it and ask if anyone else has experiences to share about 'not serving two masters.' I had the wonderful opportunity to step away from this-worldness for the last three years and do what I wanted, which was school, philosophy and spiritual seeking. I had to return to the 'real world' though and it came in the form of a nursing job that is very in the middle of it all. I'm relaxing and learning to do what this paragraph speaks of, the idea that I'm a seeker first and a nurse second....this makes all the difference and I'm starting to find a way to bring more to those around me.As the New Testament teacher put it, we cannot serve two masters. Once we have begun this spiritual unfolding, this quest for Truth, nothing less will suffice nor really feel right than a determination to see it through to the end, whatever the cost - and in a this-world sense, the cost is high, including in the price as it does everything we now believe about everything. Whatever may have been the primary, driving purpose of our lives heretofore, our new focus must be to seek the Truth, and all our activities must be seen as ways or means to accomplish or facilitate that effort. Thus, for example, we may continue our former professions, but not as doctors, farmers, or bus drivers who seek, but as seekers who doctor, farm, or drive buses. Not as spouses or parents who seek, but as seekers who are spouses or parents. The seeking, then, is first, and becomes the motivating force behind, the purpose for, and the environment of everything else. And, to the extent that we are thorough in this endeavor, we will discover that we enjoy more and are better at some of what we used to do. Only some, I say, because much we will discard as no longer relevant or contributory. With fear, anxiety, and the threat of insecurity less the underlying foundations of our lives, we will find it easier to walk when we used to run, to embrace whom we used to grab, and to flow with what we used to struggle against. And while there is more to this pilgrimage home than that, more that cannot be spoken because what it is, language isn’t, this is a way to it. Our first step must be to come to terms with the knowledge that we are not what we think ourselves to be and neither is reality, that our neighbors, relationships, and experiences speak to us of much more than we now hear, for in a plutonic universe, our beliefs, our lives, and we, and everything else, are not many but one, and the sooner we see that, the sooner we see.