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.