I mean it in the sense of equality: One thing doesn’t have more weight than another. Everything has the same importance. And balance is different from equanimity. Equanimity means an inner state of being nonreactive to anyone or anything, being peaceful—not subject to disturbance. Equanimity doesn’t speak to a relationship between elements. Balance, on the other hand, means that there are various elements, and that there is an equilibrium or appropriate relationship between them. That balance then allows our development to move in an optimizing way. That’s why, when I notice that people don’t have balance in their life, it indicates that they’re having difficulty with the aspect of Brilliancy.

You will see how your value and respect, your consideration and love towards people, depends on the truth. You will see that when you see someone loving the truth, you will naturally tend to love them more. It’s as simple as that—not because it is good to love them, but because you can’t help it; it’s a natural thing. You notice that the more you love the truth, the more you respect yourself, and you cannot help but respect other people who love the truth. It is natural to love the truth when the state of balance is reached. It is not something that should happen, not a moral or a judgmental perspective. What makes things beautiful, what brings grace and dignity, is truth; balance is the spontaneous, natural result. Truth has these three elements, as well as others. What makes something beautiful is the truth in it. What makes something graceful is the truth in it. What makes something dignified is the truth in it. Falseness brings in ugliness, awkwardness, and indulgence and lack of self-respect.

Balancing does not lead only to the truth; it leads to the correct relationship to the truth. The more your consciousness is balanced, the more you cannot help but like the truth. You don’t like it because it is good to like the truth. You don’t like it simply because it is useful to like the truth, or because it is more spiritual to like the truth, or because it is more practical to like the truth. You just like it. It is the nature of the balanced human consciousness, the nature of the soul – when it is acting normally in its natural functioning – to love truth, because truth is the very nature of the soul and of all reality.

From the perspective of our Work, generally speaking, three elements need to be balanced or need to stay in balance as a person is engaged in the process of development. Basically, the three things are understanding, being, and doing. Most individuals tend to emphasize one of these over the other two. Some people are more balanced towards the understanding aspects of human experience. Some people are balanced more towards the being elements, the actual felt experience part. And some people are balanced more towards the action, the doing part of human experience. This imbalance creates a disharmony that affects all three elements. Our work involves developing these three elements into a harmonious unity, and this involves balancing them. A constant balancing needs to happen again and again.

Human development has three elements or three stages. One is that of understanding and knowledge, as in insights and intuitions. Then there is realization, which is abiding in beingness. After that is the state of doing, which is the embodiment of the beingness and the knowledge in your life, in how you live your life.

Human life can be lived with beauty, grace, and dignity. But this refined mode of life is not easy to come by. The point of being human is not to achieve success, riches, comfort, or security. These things may be important or necessary, but only to the grosser side of human life. When there is disharmony or imbalance in one’s consciousness, one’s values tend towards the grosser side of human nature. The refinement of human consciousness requires harmonization and balancing of all the human elements. The more harmony and balance in one’s consciousness and in one’s life, the more it will become a life of beauty, grace, dignity, and efficiency. We are not saying that there is something bad about ordinary human life, nor that one should seek something better. It is a matter of harmonization and balance. The absence of that balance or harmony predisposes us towards certain assumptions, certain expectations of what our lives should be like. Then our consciousness becomes stabilized with the idealizations of certain elements to the exclusion of others, which only leads to more imbalance and disharmony. That is why a consciousness that is not balanced usually does not know how to balance itself, for this consciousness can see things only from an imbalanced perspective. In turn, what this consciousness believes or feels that it needs and wants is determined by that perspective. The consciousness first needs to be balanced and harmonized before it can see what is truly needed.