Life is a beautiful mystery

 

There is one ‘‘I don’t know’’ that comes out of ignorance. But when one goes through knowledge then it becomes a transformed ‘‘I don’t know!’. This ‘‘I don’t know!’’ is wonderful. This is how you can turn every question into a wonder. The difference between a wonder and a question is that a question is associated with sorrow and restlessness whereas wonder is an expression of joy.

Purpose of knowledge is to create awareness of the Being. This creation is enormous and infinite. It is a mystery. Mysteries are not to be understood but to be lived. Love is a mystery, sleep is a mystery, your mind is a mystery and all that you see around is a mystery. Your life is also a mystery. Trying to understand mystery is confusion, but living it fully is called enlightenment.

What is your life? In the time scale, millions of years have passed and millions will come in the future. After all, how many years are you going to be here on this planet?  May be 60 years, 70 years or 100 years? Your span of life is insignificant. It is not even a drop in the ocean. In terms of space you simply don’t exist! This understanding dissolves the ego. Ego is ignorance of your reality, ignorance of your existence. Just open your eyes and see, ‘‘who are you? How are you on this planet? This brings awareness and then you do not worry about small things like, ‘‘this person said this thing to me and how could he do that to me” etc. You will see that all the smallness will simply drop away.

Ignorance has its necessity. Ignorance keeps the joy in the game. In a game if you know the result before you are playing you won’t be playing sincerely. If you know you are going to win or lose the game, there is no charm in playing. The game is joyful when its results are unknown. Nature is so kind and loving that it does not tell you about your future and does not remind you of your very old past. But, even with the short little memory it has given, you try hard to make your life miserable!

Have you noticed that the mind is not at all stable; it is like a roller coaster, crowded with thoughts going up and down. This is because you want to know all the time. You try your level best to understand your feelings and your emotions and get into more and more confusion. This is what has happened with psychology today. It tries to explain to you why you feel like the way you are feeling. The question ‘why’ arises always when you are unhappy. Nobody ever asks, ‘‘why am I so happy?’’ or ‘‘why is there so much joy and beauty in the world?’’ Everyone wants to understand, ‘‘why am I not feeling good?’’ or ‘‘why this pain is given to me?”.

The more you try to understand and try to dig it; you seem to understand less and less. The mystery deepens and there is just an illusion that you know all. But that’s for a short while. Just be in the innocent state of ‘‘I don’t know!’’ and you will see the mind becomes quiet. This makes life simple. This life is a beautiful mystery. Just live it!  It is only when you live the mystery of life that joy dawns.

The power of true prayer

 

Often people say behind every successful man is a woman. But I say behind every success, there is the Divine saying “I am behind you”. And Divine dawns in you when you pray and cry for it. You don’t need any special qualifications or abilities to pray. Whether you are wise person or not, whether you are rich or poor, you can pray.

Prayer is a vital tool to improve your life. When you feel the obstacle is too much to handle, deep prayer can work miracles. What you can do, you do. What you cannot do, you pray for it! Whatever you do, know that the higher power has the final say and you can tap that power through your prayers.

Prayer doesn’t mean just sitting and chanting some words. It’s about being in that serene, calm and meditative state. That is why, in the Vedic tradition, before prayer comes dhyana (meditation) and there is dhyana after prayer. When the mind is focused, the prayer becomes far more powerful. 

To whom you pray is not important. Whereas religion puts words to the prayer, and adds symbols and rituals to it, the prayer itself transcends them. It happens in subtle level of feelings and the feelings transcend words and religion. The act of praying itself has the power to bring transformation. 

Be sincere in your prayers. Do not try to outsmart the Divine. Usually you give the time that is leftover; when you have nothing else to do, no guests to attend to, no parties to attend to, you go to the Divine. This is not quality time. Don’t be in a hurry to get what you seek from the Divine. When your intention is to get a boon from God, you are in a hurry. But when you know your own God, you are not in a hurry to get something out of God. You hurry to get something that throws you off balance and makes you small. 

True prayer, however, is just the opposite of wanting to possess. It’s about honouring and offering everything to the Divine. Honouring brings devotion and it leads to surrender. Devotion brings a healing touch to the life. Devotion and faith is the central core of prayer. A true prayer can’t happen without devotion and faith. Having faith is to realise that God’s protection is there for you. Devotion is an inner flowering. Unless you are lit in devotion to the Divine, your life will remain restless. In devotion, longing will arise in you. And when there is longing, true prayer happens by itself.

The essence of Life

 

Head understands head and heart understands heart. The nose can only smell; eyes can only see; ears can only hear. Similarly, the heart can only feel while the head can only think. We try to put the heart in the head and the head in the heart and it doesn’t seem to work. Your heart feels something is beautiful, whereas head says it is beautiful. We cling on to the word in the mind but we don’t feel it. We repeat the word ‘beautiful’ in the head but it doesn’t seem or feel beautiful.

Same thing about love, you talk too much about love, you get stuck in the head and it doesn’t rise in the heart. In silence, love emits, radiates.  We experience ourselves in the things we love more.  That is why, when we lose the things we love, we feel hurt; we feel unhappy.  Suppose you love your piano very much and you hear that something has happened to your piano, something gets cut off in you.  Or, if something happens to your car or your dog, you feel a loss. So you are not just living in your body, but also in that of the objects / people you love.  But if you can expand this existence even more to cover the entirety, you will know that there is no loss and you are total. 

You are a blue pearl.  Blue is beautiful; blue is something that is big, vast and infinite. All that is immense, that is infinite in creation that has depth expresses itself in blue. The sky is blue, the ocean is blue. You are a blue pearl, in the sense that you can’t be measured.  You are so deep in your being. Though you are in the body, nobody can measure your being. The being in you is not just the blue infinity; it’s a shining radiant infinity that is deep and immense. Blue pearl means that which is shining, that which is radiant, that which is infinite; yet, it seems to be finite.

When we start listening to our heart, then we know that all is one; and one God is in all. See, in our body we have so many cells and each cell has got its own life.  Many cells are being born every day, many cells are dying but they do not know you. You know if something is wrong with one particular cell; you can feel it.  Similarly, though we all have small lives, there is one life that covers and governs all the other lives.   

We are all floating in an ocean of life; a big life. It is not just empty space all around us; it is lively big life. And in the big sea of life there, all shells are floating and each shell has got a little water in it which is not the water separate from the water in the sea. So, we come out of our shells and experience, “I am not just in the body, but I am expanded all over; everywhere, it’s me there and it’s me here. I see myself in everybody”. That is the essence of life!

Experience the joy and peace of Gratitude

 

We all have experienced the joy and peace of gratitude. Life flows smoother and your outlook is brighter when you feel grateful. Gratitude comes when you feel full. When you don’t feel any sense of lack, then you feel gratitude. You cannot be grateful and feel lack—the two cannot co-exist at the same time. Certainly, you’ve experienced both, but only at different times. When you feel grateful, you also feel full. When you feel any lack, grumbling begins in some corner.

With knowledge, you experience gratitude and become grateful. And when you are grateful, the law of nature ensures that the gratefulness increases and that you are given more. If you are grateful, more positive things will flow to you. If you are grumbling, the grumbling and negativity will increase.

For those who do not have the knowledge, there is no way out of their grumblings, because grumbling becomes their nature. And once they start grumbling, demand arises, and when the demand arises, everything is taken away from them. Even what little joy, peace, or love they have in this world will be lost.

This is all in accordance with the law of nature. Whatever seed(s) you sow, such fruit you will personally bear. If you sow the seed of lack, only lack will grow. Conversely, if you sow the seed of plenty and the seed of gratitude in your life, these elements will blossom in your world.

Open your eyes and see what surrounds you. When you recognise through this knowledge what you have been given, then you become grateful. And in that gratefulness, everything grows. This is the reason why grandmothers in India have a habit of saying, “Everything is full.” If something is less than full, or empty, they never say, “This is empty, we don’t have this.” Instead, they say, “We have a lot of this.” It is an attitude of “plentitude” in the mind. When you feel that you have plenty in the consciousness, the ‘plenty-ness’ grows.

Love is of three kinds

 

There are three kinds of love. The love that comes out of charm, that which comes out of comfort, and the Divine Love.

The love that comes out of charm does not last long. It comes out of unfamiliarity or out of attraction. In this you lose the attraction fast, 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 comfort and familiarity grows. But this love has no thrill, no enthusiasm, joy, or fire to it. For example, you are more comfortable with an old friend who is a familiar person, rather than with a new person.

Divine Love supersedes both the above. The Divine Love has ever newness. The closer you go, there is more charm and depth. The Divine Love has comfort, enthusiasm, and familiarity. There is never boredom, and it keeps everyone on their toes.

Worldly love can be like an ocean, yet an ocean has a bottom. Divine Love is like the sky which is limitless, infinite. From the bottom of the ocean, soar into the vast sky.