Handling negativity

 

Negativity cannot remain without a support. Positivity and happiness can exist without any reason. 

The mind goes on trying to find a support for its negativity. It looks for a hook on which to hang its negativity, if not this person, then that thing or that person. This perpetuates maya. The creeping vine of negativity needs support in order to grow. But negativity or aversion for even one person can guarantee a one-way ticket to hell, you need nothing else.

All negativity is an indicator for you to move to your centre and to broaden your vision to cosmic intelligence. Instead of focusing your attention on a support for your negativity, look at the seed of the negativity. 

With meditation, silence and Sudarshan Kriya, the source of negativity is nipped at the root.

Don't fight blame

 

When you follow fun, misery follows you. When you follow knowledge, fun follows you.

When a worldly man is miserable, he blames the people around him, the system and the world in general. When a seeker is miserable, he blames the world, but in addition he blames the path, the knowledge and himself. It is better not to be a seeker so that you blame less. But then a seeker, a sadhak, also enjoys everything much more. There is more love in life and more pain. 

When there is more joy, the contrast is greater. A certain level of maturity is needed to see things as they are and not blame the path, the self and the world. If one jumps across this chasm of blame and misery, then there is no fall. It is like a quantum leap. 

The Divine does not test you. Testing is part of ignorance. Who is it that will put something to a test? Only one who does not know something. God knows your capacity, so why should He have to test you? Then, why is there misery? It is for titiksha, forbearance in you. And forbearance can be increased by prayerful surrender and by things that vigorously challenge your patience.

When someone blames you, what do you usually do? You blame them back or you set up some resistance in yourself. How do you feel when someone blames you? Hurt, unhappy, sad, heavy? This is all because you are resisting. What you resist, persists. You get hurt because you resist the blame. Know that when someone blames you, they take away some negative karma from you. 

If you understand this, you will only feel happy about it. If you resist when someone blames you, you are not allowing them to take away the negative karma. Even if you don’t react outwardly, you may still be resisting inside. Actually, it’s fine to resist outside, but inside don’t resist. You will feel immediately lighter. You can feel happy - Oh, good, somebody is blaming me and taking some of my negative karma.

The ignorant person says, “Don’t blame me” because it hurts him. An enlightened person also says, “Don’t blame me”. Do you know why? Because it might hurt you. You can tell someone not to blame you out of anger or out of compassion.

The way out of confusion

 

Decision comes only when there is confusion. When there is no confusion, there is no need of a decision. If there is a piece of wood and a biscuit on your desk, do you decide which one to eat? A decision is always about choice and choice is always confusing. The more decisions, the more confused you are, swinging always between pain and pleasure. So, all decision makers are confused. Are you confused, decided or happy? When you are confused there is no freedom.

Action is spontaneous when there is no actor. In you, there is an actor and there is a witness. An actor is either confused or decisive, but the witness just observes and smiles. The more decisions you make, the more confused you are, and as a result you swing between pain and pleasure. The more the witness grows in you, the more playful and untouched you are. Trust, faith, love and joy all manifest in and around you.

How to handle doubts

 

Doubt cannot come where there is a sense of closeness. Doubt needs distance to appear. You never doubt something that is dear to you, close to you. The moment you doubt something, it is no longer dear to you; a distance has come. You may doubt yourself, but you do not doubt that which is yours. Self-doubt is a lack of closeness to oneself. Belongingness, closeness and intimacy are all antidotes for doubt.

A doubt is a gray area. Gray area is something which is neither white nor black. Now, how to solve a doubt? Accept a doubt as either black or white. See your doubt as white and there is no doubt. See the doubt as black and accept it. Either way, you accept it and move on. See someone as either honest or dishonest and accept him. Then your mind is quiet. Then you are not in the gray area of doubt. Have conviction - “He is dishonest and yet he is still part of me. I accept him as he is”. 

That’s it. Finished. Doubt is an unstable state with footing neither on this shore nor that shore. From there tension arises. One way or the other, take a direction and regain your footing. Have you noticed that you usually doubt only the things that are positive in your life? Negative things you don’t doubt. You doubt a person’s honesty, and you believe in his dishonesty. 

When someone is angry with you, you have no doubt about his anger. But when someone says he loves you, a doubt creeps in, does he really love me? When you are depressed, do you ever think Am I really depressed? No, you take your depression as a fact. Yet when you are happy, you doubt – Am I really happy, is this really what I wanted You doubt that you are capable, but do you ever doubt that you are incapable? 

See this tendency to doubt the positive things in your life. Put doubt in its proper place and doubt the doubts. Doubt the negative and put your trust more in the positive.

Learning from mistakes

 

Wanting to correct a mistake brings doership and doership is the foundation for mistakes. Those who try to correct mistakes get caught up in more mistakes, but those who recognise them are freed. When you acknowledge a mistake, you try to justify it without taking responsibility for it. And sometimes you accept that you made a mistake but you feel guilty about it.

Mistakes are dropped when you are troubled by your conscience, viveka, or when you experience grief. There may be flaws in any action, any situation or any person. Treat a flaw as you would treat a flower. Just as a flower has to wither away with time, so does a flaw. A devotee asked, "Please forgive me if I have committed a mistake". Why should you be forgiven? 

You ask for forgiveness because you feel a pinch and you want to be free from it, isn’t it? Let the pinch remain. The pinch will not let the mistake happen again. Forgiveness removes the pinch and then you keep repeating it. But how do you know a mistake is a mistake? A mistake is something that gives you a pinch. If it has not pinched you, it is not a mistake at all. It is the pinch that pricks the consciousness and that pinch will not allow the mistake to be repeated. Live with the pinch and not the guilt. It is a very fine balance.

Guilt is about a specific action but a pinch is about a specific result or happening. You can only feel guilty about what you did - not about what happened. But whatever happened, whether because of you or someone else, it can cause a pinch in you. You can get beyond guilt through wisdom - by knowing the nature of mind, the nature of consciousness and by having a broader perspective of the phenomenon. 

You can learn from your mistakes. But learning is at an intellectual level while you feel the pinch at an emotional level. The drive of your emotions is much stronger than your intellect, so a pinch will not let the mistake recur. But you cannot be driven by your emotions alone. Your intellect acts as a brake for your emotions. Feel the pinch. The pinch will create an awareness that what happened was beyond your capacity. This awareness will bring you to surrender and surrender will free you from guilt. So the steps of evolution are from pinch to awareness, to surrender to freedom.

Blessed are those who do not see a mistake as a mistake. It is hard not to see your own mistake. Outwardly you may justify yourself or try to prove your innocence to someone else, but a mistake pricks the conscience. Do not justify yourself. Instead, feel the prick of the mistake. That very pinch will take you out of the mistake. A mistake is something that brings misery to you in the long run. So why would someone knowingly commit a mistake? When you point out a mistake to someone, do you see him separate from you or do you make him feel a part of you? 

Do your words make him more stressed or do they create more awareness in him? Often you do not point out someone’s mistake when it is required but not pointing out a mistake, with due consideration to time and place is also a mistake. When you make a new mistake, it is not a mistake. Instead, you have learned a valuable lesson. But when you keep doing it over and over again, that is a big mistake. A mistake simply means you have ‘missed taking’ a lesson that has come your way. Do not lament over your mistake. Just learn a lesson from it. You will not be judged by your mistakes but by your virtues. 

Mistakes are of the earth. Virtues are of the Divine. The fool keeps making the same mistakes again and again and never learns from them. Wise is the one who learns only from his own mistakes. Wisest is the one who learns from another’s mistakes. Once somebody made a mistake and I asked him, “What punishment can I give you?” The person replied, “Do not punish me, Gurudev, I won’ t make the mistake again”.

After some time, I asked another person who had made a mistake, “And what punishment can I give you?” With a bright smile he replied, “Any punishment, Gurudev?” At this I turned to the rest with a smile and said, “See, he is so confident of my love for him that he is not afraid of any punishment”. Where there is love, there is no fear. Do not be afraid of being punished by God. Trust in the love that He has for you.

Understanding fear

 

Because fear is love standing upside down, everything that can be interpreted with love can also be interpreted with fear. A child clinging to its mother can be understood in both ways - the child clings out of love, or out of fear. This primal instinct of fear can be totally transformed through awareness of Divine love.

Fear is an impression of the past reflecting the future of the present. When people deny fear, they become egocentric, when they recognize and accept fear, they go beyond it - they become free from it. Total lack of fear is possible only in utter chaos or in utmost orderliness. Neither a saint nor a fool has fear, but everywhere in between there is fear. 

Fear is essential to preserve orderliness in the world. It is a primal instinct. Fear of death preserves life. Fear of wrong maintains right. Fear of sickness encourages hygiene. Fear of misery makes you righteous. A child has a pinch of fear so it is careful and alert while walking. A pinch of fear is necessary to keep things moving smoothly. Do not try to eliminate fear. Just meditate and know that you are nobody or that you belong to someone special.

Whenever a boundary is broken, it creates some fear. This fear creates aversion, this aversion in turn brings you back inside the boundary, and to keep yourself in the boundary, you set up defences. But when you try to defend your position, it becomes a stress and every time you work to defend your position it makes you weaker.

On the path, people use even knowledge as a defence against criticism. Do not use knowledge as a defence. Knowledge is like an umbrella for you - a shelter, not a weapon. Of course, sometimes "do not use knowledge as a weapon" becomes an excuse not to be in knowledge. I say, drop all your defences. Anyone can make a mistake - even you. Do not defend your mistakes, just accept them and move on. 

When you are totally defenceless, that is when you will be completely strong. See the whole past as a "happening" and the present as a "doing". If you see the past as a "doing", then ego and regret come along. And when you see the present as a "happening", then laziness and unawareness set in. If you apply the "doing" for the future, it brings tension and worry. 

If you apply the "happening" for the future, it might bring some confidence and also lethargy. Let the "happening" be for the past. Let the "doing" be for the present. And the future is a mix of both. The wise will see "doing" in "happening" and "happening" in "doing" simultaneously. 

Only someone who is 100 percent in "doing" can recognise the “happening". Are you confused now? One who does a lot of work will never say he did a lot . 

When someone says he did "a lot" of work, that means he could do even more, he has not done enough. Work does not tire you as much as the sense of doership does. Be 100 percent in "doing" without the sense of doership.

Three essential things everyone must do, to be happy

1. Look back in the past and see that it was futile feeling insecure. This gives you strength.

2. Know that there are good people on this planet. They will always come to your help. There is a power which is going to guide you and help you out. With this wisdom and understanding, get over insecurity.

3. Third is to get rid of prejudice. There are many types of prejudice. There is prejudice between generations where young people will not sit and share with senior citizens. There is a generation gap. There is prejudice about class, about gender, about religion, culture, language, and so on in many parts of the world, so many types of prejudices. Wisdom is to rise above prejudice and see the whole world as one family. 

If everyone has this idea of a "one world family", there will be no war, no crime and none of the problems that we are facing in the world today. See how many people are being killed. There is so much violence in the world. This is all because of lack of a broad vision and wisdom. With meditation, yoga and breathing techniques, get over stress. 

With wisdom, get over prejudice, and reflecting on your own life and having the confidence and faith, get over insecurity. Once you get over stress, insecurity and prejudice, then you are like a child, full of joy, and happiness simply wells up in you. 

Happiness is already there, it is just covered by these three things, and once you removed all these three things, it becomes obvious. 

True austerity

 

Austerity is often mistaken for poverty or self-denial. It is neither. Austerity comes out of maturity. It is a sign of social health. People who practice austerity are often resentful of richness. This is a very pitiable state. Such austerity is not born out of maturity but out of compulsion. True austerity has tolerance for richness and is never resentful. In fact, one who is mature will have pity for one who is not austere. Vanity is poverty of the spirit and austerity brings freedom from the pride of vanity. But taking pride in austerity is also vanity. 

Austerity is not opposed to celebration and vanity alone cannot be celebration. Celebration dawns in the spirit. Only one who is rich in spirit can practice austerity. One may be rich materially but if he is poor in spirit, he can neither celebrate nor evolve. 

Austerity comes out of abundance, and austerity brings abundance. If you feel a lack in any area of life, immediately start austerity. Austerity not only brings freedom but nurtures sharing and caring.

Love vs lust

 

In love even an object is elevated to life. Stones and trees speak to you, the sun, the moon, the entire creation becomes alive and divine. In lust even a living being becomes a mere object. You want to even use people like objects.

- Lust brings tension, love brings relaxation.

- In lust there is cunningness and manipulation, in love there is playfulness.

- Lust focuses on a part, love focuses on the whole.

- In lust you want to grasp and possess, in love you want to give and surrender.

- In lust there is effort, love is effortless.

- Lust brings violence, love brings sacrifice.

- Lust demands, love commands.

- In lust you are mixed up and confused in love you are focused and spaced out.

- Lust is dark and monotonous, love has many modes and colours.

- Lust says, "All I want you to have is what I want". Love says, "I want you to have what you want".

- Lust causes feverishness and frustration, love causes longing and pain.

- Lust imprisons and destroys, love liberates and sets you free.

If someone's lust is interrupted, they become angry and start hating. Hatred in the world today is not out of love, it is out of lust. 

Shiva, the embodiment of innocence and love, was meditating. His meditation was disturbed by an arrow of flowers from the lord of lust. As soon as Shiva awoke, he opened his third eye and the lord of lust, Manmathava - one who churns the mind - was reduced to ashes. Lust grips the mind, tires the body and dulls the intellect. Lust when indulged brings inertia, and when suppressed brings anger. 

Lust is nothing but primordial unharnessed energy. The same energy when harnessed manifests as enthusiasm, sparkle, sharpness of intellect and love.

What can you do to sublimate lust and transform it into love?

    - Be playful. People who are in the grip of lust cannot be genuinely playful. When you are playful, then there is no lust.

    - Be generous. When you realize that you are here only to give, then lust is sublimated. Lust makes you possessive and greedy.

    - Take cold-water baths.

    - Moderate your intake of food.

    - Undertake creative challenges.

    - Remember death.

    - Be in love with the Divine.