I am spiritual but still desire to have material things like safety, security, and marriage. Should I find a balance or denounce and let go of all material things?

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Find a balance. Even though both Jesus and the Buddha both urged you to live lives guided by spirit and that material things make that harder, times have changed since the iron age. Iron age societies were incredibly restrictive and if you had any hope to have access to any kind of spiritual knowledge or information, you had to change your entire life to do so.

I was lucky enough in my early twenties to have the opportunity to train in a unique style of martial arts from Indonesia. As far as I’m aware, this one place in Ogden Utah is the only place you can learn, if I wanted Merpati Putih back in my life, I’d have to uproot my Atlanta life and move back there.

Now imagine if I had to do that just to be spiritual? Now you can see why Jesus exhorted the rich man to throw it all away and follow him. He’ll never have a better chance to learn directly from the Son of Man.

Times and societies, and the people, really were different. I had a teacher to help me learn how to meditate, but you can get guidance online from a million different sources and online videos don’t take breaks, and never tire of telling it to you over and over again until you understand.

One thing giving up stuff does help you do is focus. Focus is very important early on, which is why it’s useful to get started in your teens or early twenties. You don’t have a whole lot to keep your mind occupied. Really hard to be spiritual when you have a job and small kids if you’ve never done it before!

Some people are just called to hardcore practice. I went without a career until I turned around 28 or so. I’m not even sure what balance really means, for me anyway. I do know I was able to work out how to have both a career and keep up my spiritual journey at the same time. But it took me a long time to figure out how. But even now I hold myself back in many ways so that I can have more uncontested time and attention for my spiritual lifestyle.

Everyone finds their own approach. Eventually the dilemma forces you to make a choice, and since you muddled on it for so long, your answer will come straight from your essential self. You’ll probably have a negative opinion of that choice, but ultimately you’ll be happier with it than whatever you were doing before. Our innermost personal attitudes towards things like things and spirit can never really be wrong. They’re vehicles for experience.