Benefits of dispassion

 

If your work is very stressful and you don't get enough time for the family, what should you do? Do you spend quality time with your family? Even if you spend half an hour, are you cordial and fully attentive to the needs of your family? It is not the length of time you spend with your family that matters. What matters is the quality of time that you spend with them.

Thinking you need rest makes you restless. 

Thinking you have to work hard makes you tired. 

Thinking you have worked hard brings self-pity.

Hide your dispassion and express your love. Expressing dispassion may bring ego. By expressing dispassion you lose enthusiasm in life and by not expressing love you feel stifled. Hide dispassion in your heart like the roots of a tree and express love like a ripe fruit. 

When you are in the grip of feverishness over the results of your actions, what should you do? Have faith and confidence that the results will be much better than you can ever imagine. With faith you can rid yourself of the feverishness of action and achievement. Feverishness can be a hangover from overactivity. Sleeping, listening to flute music and bathing in cold water can help. 

When you are doing something very important, take a moment to do something totally irrelevant and insignificant. For example, while decorating your house, take some time to mow the lawn or go shopping. Drop whatever you are doing and do something completely irrelevant. This enhances your creativity. 

Relevant action keeps you bound to the action. Irrelevant action makes life a game. Have dispassion. Know that the whole thing will be over one way or the other, and that it does not matter. Meditation and breathing can calm you down.

Dispassion can get you everything, including sleep

 

The Divine can be attained only in deep rest, not by doing. All your spiritual activities are to help you become silent. You will go further when you do not stop to enjoy the bliss or the peace, otherwise cravings may arise.

If existence wants to give you peace and bliss, then fine, your true nature is bliss. But by trying to enjoy the bliss, you step down from “am-ness” to “I am something” - “I am peaceful”, “I am blissful” this is followed by, “I am miserable”. It takes courage to simply say “I am”, period. That “I am” is dispassion. Dispassion means welcoming everything. You can be anywhere and be dispassionate. Dispassionate centeredness brings energy, a spark.

Indulgence in bliss brings inertia. If you are dispassionate, the bliss is still there. When the freezer is full of ice cream, you need not bother about it. Dispassion takes away the sense of scarcity. Passion is a sense of lack of abundance. Whenever everything is in abundance, dispassion happens. And when dispassion is there, everything comes in abundance.

What should you do when you catch yourself indulging in bliss? Just this understanding creates a shift. There is no effort. Knowledge is better than action to make you free. 

Activity and rest are two vital aspects of life. To find a balance in them is a skill in itself. Wisdom is knowing when to have rest, when to have activity, and how much of each to have. Finding them in each other, activity in rest and rest in activity, is the ultimate freedom.

More tiring than the work itself is the memory of hard work. Thinking you have worked hard interferes with the quality of rest. Some people take pride in working hard without any results. And there are others who crave for a long rest without knowing the true rest is in non-doership. 

It is the quality of rest, even if it is short, that helps you to recuperate. When rest is needed, your body will automatically take it. Resting, without thinking about the need for it, is more restful. Desirelessness, dispassion and samadhi are the deepest rest.

Don't mind the time

 

When you are ahead of time, it drags and is boring. When time is ahead of you, then you are surprised and shocked. You cannot digest events. In deep meditation, you are time and everything is happening in you. Events are happening in you like the clouds that come and go in the sky. When you are with time, you are wise and at peace.

When you are happy, the mind expands, then time appears too short. When you are unhappy, the mind contracts, then time appears too long. When the mind has equanimity, you transcend time. To escape from time, many resort to alcohol or sleep but when the mind is dull or unconscious, it is unable to experience itself. 

Samadhi, no mindedness or timelessness, is the real peace. That is the greatest healer. A thought is nothing but a ripple in this moment of time. This moment also has a mind of its own, a big mind which has infinite organizing power. Before you fall into slumber or as soon as you wake up from sleep, in the moments of twilight of consciousness, experience the timelessness beyond mind. 

Life is a combination of form and formless. Feelings have no form but their expressions have form. The self has no form but its abode has form. Similarly, wisdom and grace have no form but are expressed through form. Discarding the formless, you become inert, materialistic and paranoid. Discarding the form, you become a dreamer, a lost ascetic, or an emotional wreck. 

Your entire experience is an illusion

 

When something is unbelievably beautiful or joyful, you wonder if it is a dream. Often what you perceive as reality is not joyful. When misery is there, you never wonder if it is a dream. You are sure it is real. This is knowing the real as unreal and unreal as real. In fact, all the miseries are unreal. A wise man knows that happiness is real, a quality of your very nature. Unhappiness is unreal, as it is only an affliction of memory. When you can see both as a dream, then you abide in your true self.

A nightmare is mistaken as a reality only while you are dreaming. Keep wondering whether your waking reality is a dream and you’ll wake up to the real.

Illusion is an error of perception and knowing illusion as illusion is knowledge. Our experience of the world is based on perception that is erroneous, so our experience of the world is an illusion. And each experience leaves a hangover that clouds the intellect. The experiencer is the only reality. Look for the seer, the experiencer, in between experiences. Wake up this moment. Shake your head of all past experiences and look at the pure being that I am and that you are.

What is maya?

 

There are 5 aspects to your self:

asti - is-ness

bhaati - knowledge or expression

preeti - love

nama - name

rupa - form

Matter has 2 aspects: name and form. Consciousness has 3 aspects: asti - it is, bhaati - it knows and expresses and preeti - it is loving. This is the secret of the whole universe. Maya - ignorance or delusion - is not being aware of the three aspects of consciousness and getting caught up in names and forms of matter.

Why are we imperfect? So that we can grow to perfection. Life is a movement from imperfection to perfection. A seed contains the tree but to become a tree it must cease being a seed. The seed is not a tree. A sapling is not a tree.

So in life you can either see imperfection at every step, or you can see movement from one perfection to another perfection. Wherever you put your attention, that will grow. If you put your attention on the lack of something, the lack will increase.

How can you always be happy? Forget about "always" - then you will be happy. In always wanting to be comfortable, you become lazy. In always wanting perfection, you become angry. In always wanting to be rich, you become greedy. Fear arises when we do not realise that only life is for always. This projection of the nature of Self - which is "always" - onto the temporal - which can never be "always" - is called maya. All ways do not lead you, only one way leads you. 

If you remove "always" from your dictionary, then everything is "all right". Drop "always" and all will be right - that is intelligence.

Divine love and infinity

 

When you love something, it becomes alive. With love, the whole creation becomes personal. For children, everything is personal. Children make each toy come alive. Even a tree has a face, even the sun laughs, and even a stone attracts reverence when it becomes personal. In love, you raise even objects to life. If you remove love, even people become objects. 

Violence is removing love. How could a person kill another? Only when they see them as an object, not as a person. People who see God as impersonal do not progress. The impersonal cannot attract your love or reverence. When we personalize something, we make it real. So then, what is reality? You are the reality. You are not the thoughts, you are not the emotions, nor the actions. You are not even a person. 

There are 3 kinds of love - the love that comes out of charm, the love that comes out of familiarity, and Divine love. The love that comes out of charm does not last long. Out of unfamiliarity you are attracted, then once you become familiar, you quickly lose attraction and boredom sets in, like most love marriages. This love may diminish and bring along with it fear, uncertainty, insecurity and sadness. The love that comes out of familiarity grows. You are more comfortable with an old friend who is a familiar person, rather than with a new person. But this love has no thrill, no enthusiasm, no fire in it. 

Divine love supersedes all other love. Divine love is ever new. The closer you come, the more charm and depth is there. Divine love has comfort, familiarity and enthusiasm. There is never boredom and it keeps you on your toes. Worldly love can be like an ocean, yet an ocean has a bottom. Divine love is like the sky, limitless, infinite. From the bottom of the ocean, soar into the vast sky.

Beyond an event is knowledge. Beyond an object is infinity. Beyond a person is love. Knowledge is beyond events. Every event colours your awareness in some way, pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, anger, jealousy. Each event gives you a false notion of what reality is. Truth is beyond all the colours of particular events. Behind every object is infinity. Objects are limited and changing, yet they exist in infinite space that never changes. Reduce any object to atoms, you will find that within each atom is contained infinite space. Beyond all objects is infinity.

Beyond each person is love. A personality changes. A body, a mind, a complex of behaviours is always changing. Beyond each personality there is unchanging love, love is what you are. When you lose your self, you’ll find your self. The event behind the event is knowledge. The object behind the object is infinity. The person behind the person is love. Maya (delusion) is when you are stuck in events, personalities, or objects. Brahman, divine consciousness, is seeing beyond all these. See? Just a little shift.