|
Books: Your Perspective determines Your Destiny Making God "Real" in Your Life |
Sharmaji
Wisdom Spaces in Mind
a talk by Sharmaji
|
When we grow up and still continue to be in the red-colored space then that red signifies something else. It may signify sex. It may signify the lower desires with which we start. We never start with noble desires. No one has ever started with a noble desire. All arrive at them. The beginning is always very coarse, very basic, very elementary…whatever is elementary in our nature. We start with that and there is no point in being ashamed of it. All people grow out of it. That is the red, the color of life. This first mansion of the mind is pure energy, meaningless, stupid energy. It is like a race car with its tank full and a driver at the wheel. Now, you may take it anywhere you like; you are so free at that time. We may live in that space all our lives. The potential is there, the talent is there, but it does not get achieved or accomplished. A talent that is not accomplished is like an embryo miscarried. It might have been the greatest man on earth that would be born in the womb of a woman, but it is miscarried. It is no more. Many of you could prove to be a genius although I know you will not believe me. You think a genius is a separate category. You think that they are different animals from you. You think you don’t have what a genius has. But you have it. A genius shows it, you hide it. A genius is a myth. One day you will know a genius is a myth. There is no genius. Only you are there capable of proving yourself a genius. You refuse to do it. Another person does it. He is called one; you are called a normal person. That hidden talent is there all the time. There are hidden possibilities in all the desires that you have, but we choose the lower ones and reject the higher ones. This choice happens in very early childhood as the child grows up. At that time the influence of the environment is very powerful on the child’s choices because he is not grown up enough, mature enough or discriminate enough to choose what the right path is. On the other hand, the senses are strong, the temptations are powerful and pitfalls very deep. It is very difficult for a growing child to avoid all 3 of them. If he avoids one, he falls into another. And if he gets out of all of them, the environmental and domestic situation, the parents particularly, have such a powerful hold on the mind of a child. The situation existing at that time in the family is so powerful that the child can’t take his mind away and gets bound up by them. Then he spends his whole life in that. The father and mother die…actually physically die, but they don’t die in the mind of a man. Someone has been coming to see me. His mother is dead, his father is dead and all the time he curses his father and mother. They are dead, poor souls. But he still remembers them as if they are still here. When I told him this, he said, “Okay. Okay, but what about my elder sister?” The elder sister is living three-thousand miles away with her 2 or 3 children and never gives a thought to this man. She has disowned him completely as a freak. This man still accuses his elder sister for all his misfortunes. All of us do this in some way. In your mind you live in a space. What is that space? Obviously that space is not the space of present time because there is great ecstasy in the present. In this moment there are no bugs, there are no hot winds blowing, no severe cold winds. It is quite comfortable to be here, why are you not in bliss? You will immediately put something in your mind. You will tell me, “How can I be in bliss when I am passing through such a hard situation at my job? And my girlfriend or boyfriend is deceiving me. It is so difficult.” At this moment they are not deceiving you. At this moment there is no job. You only remember it. But at this moment it is not happening…with you! It might be happening with your boyfriend or girlfriend who is not here. You connect yourself with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife or children. You are never alone. Have you ever noticed? If no boyfriend or girlfriend or children are there, your memories are there. You are so afraid to be alone. You go to the graveyard and call a dead body up. That body comes up. You are not afraid of it. You start rubbing it with rejuvenating oil. You want to bring it to life but you can’t. And you live with it. That is the space you live in. Is it not true? The whole life is spent in a space that is non-existent, in a time sequence that is over or hasn’t happened, with something that just was but never is. One thing you can never do, you can never bring the past back. And one thing you can never do, you can never get rid of the future. It is always with you. Like a shadow it follows you relentlessly. Are you ever conscious of the shadow? Do you worry that someday the shadow will leave you? You never do because you know the shadow will always be there. The future will always be there. It will never leave you. Why do you think about it? Whether you want it or not, it will be there. And it will be your shadow. That is one very uncompromising and hopeful fact. It will be your shadow…if you change the shadow changes. The shadow will tell everyone what you are so why should you be thinking of the shadow? You create your shadow. You create your future. What follows you and will always follow you is your future. But it will always follow you and why should you think about it? There is no point in thinking of the future. By thinking of the future, you can’t change the future. The future is a mirror. It will just show you what you are. Even if you don’t pay any attention to it, it won’t hurt you. And it will hurt you a lot if you pay attention to the past because you can’t change it. You can neither change the past nor can you change the future. They are there. But the present is there. It, too, is a mirror. It, too, is showing you what you are…exactly what you are. It will immediately show you what space you are in. That is the space of the mind. The awareness of that space gives you all the power. If you are indifferent to what your mind is doing to you, you are indifferent to your very essence of life, your very potential, your possibility of everything that is going to happen in the future. Sometimes you are fed up with your job and your apartment. You are fed up with your life. You sit in your apartment and imagine that you are walking up a hill and a fine, cool breeze is touching you all over and you feel good. You are not sitting in your apartment anymore. Wherever you sit you carry your space with you, you carry your thoughts with you, you carry your whole world with you. It is a type of infection. You infect the present with the past or the possibility of the future. The future is not going to be like you want because you do not think. Do you really think what the future should be? If you do, it will be exactly like that. You don’t need much time for thinking. A few minutes is enough. You just look into it and change it. “I don’t want that. I want this.” It will change for you. But if you indulge in it, then insecurity and fear comes and you escape into a daydream. When you escape into a daydream, you destroy your future. You are indulging in an emotion, and emotion has no power over life. It destroys life. Emotion pertains to something that has already happened. Those who indulge in emotion too much are the very people who fail in experiencing emotion. When I say that emotion is weakness, people ask, “What is the fun in life? What is the warmth in life.” I explain it this way. Emotion that pertains to the past or pertains to the future is self-abortive. Fear, expectation, memories are self-abortive. Everything that has happened before is abortive. They are miscarried. They are the dead embryos, dead beings. So, whatever emotion comes then is incompetent, impotent, and absolutely worthless and has no power to help you in any way except as a daydream. But the emotion of the present moment is very powerful. I want all people to feel emotion in the present moment intensely. Feel it each moment and then the next moment that is going to come becomes the present moment. Experience it with all your power at your disposal. And go on living in the moment…what you are feeling. This moment you may be very angry. You are in a space that is full of anger. That is okay. But the next moment, suddenly, a very peaceful moment comes. The moment of anger is gone. You do not justify it by transferring it to the next moment. The next moment deals a better deal. It demands something different from you. It brings great love. It offers another possibility for you. We destroy all fresh possibilities by the experience of the past…what has happened. I learned this doing astrology. It was a very strange lesson. In the beginning my predictions would go wrong. I thought, “It should not go wrong. They are correct.” Astrologically they were correct, psychologically they were wrong. There was a man who came to me for his chart. I predicted to him, “You will be sad from June 1 to August 20. After August 20 you will be very happy.” In December the man returned and said, “I have always been sad. You were right in predicting that I would be sad on June 1. But it is December and I am still sad.” I asked, “Did something happen to you from August to September?” “Yes.” “What was it?” “Oh, I got a raise.” “Why did it not cheer you up?” “Because on June 2 my son died…who cares for a raise now?” Now both the things happened. Astrologically both of them were correct. Psychologically the man is suffering from grief because of the death of his child. He will not be aware of the little increment or little raise that he gets at the job. I should have known that certain situations are there in which a person lives for a long time. When the situation is over, a person still lives in it and so all happiness is lost on him. I should have predicted, “A few little things and bubbles will burst but you will not even notice what they are. You will be in total grief.” That should have been the prediction. Human beings live in the past more than they live in the present. That is the space we live in. The second space in the mind is the space of emotion. The first was red, the space of pure energy, passion or lust. The second is the state of emotion. Ninety percent of people live in this state, and so, most are sad because they feel things at a lower level. In the space of emotion there is no productivity, no creativity or possibility of doing anything. There is only one possibility…that soon you are going to land yourself into trouble. When we think that we are thinking, we are really feeling. Whenever you say, “I think it is like this…” what you really mean is, “I feel it is like this…” and that feeling is not the feeling of the higher mind as when a psychic says, “I feel that...” Within a space there are spaces. In the higher mind a psychic or a spiritual person feels things in a different space where things are not personal. Most of the thinking which we call thinking is really feeling. Now, the emotion which has made you so weak is the very emotion that can take you to the heights of realization. It depends on how you use it. If I connect all my emotions to a particular woman, you can write down my fate blindfolded. You know very well what is going to happen to me. Because when I relinquish all control over myself and hand over the reigns of my life and destiny into the hands of an ordinary mortal, how the mortal will handle my life is easy to imagine. I’m in for trouble. But the moment I transfer my emotions to a higher level, to a secure level, to a level which will look after me and is very powerful, then a beautiful light emerges and all that emotion becomes a source of power because that emotion adds beauty to life. I may turn out to be a beautiful poet. I may be become a visionary. I may become a prophet. And what I say about myself is true about you. If you use all that emotion for a higher purpose then your whole life changes. Let one person who is very emotional and sensitive say he is happy. He is not. Only good people suffer in life and the hard-hearted people go scott-free. They are very happy. Emotionally all people who are living in the financial district might be having trouble from their girlfriends or boyfriends, but they are getting by all right because they don’t pay much attention to it. Their eyes are glued on their career. They think of what they want to get in life. They have thick skin…you can’t even pierce it. They may be treacherous, unreliable, but they are not very sad because they live in another space. They live in the space of wealth. They live in the space of their own career or creating something good materially in their life so emotionally they are insensitive. Naturally they are not very sad or depressed because of their approach to life. We live in a particular state of mind and we interpret everything according to that. Someone talks very dispassionately yet you take it personally. This happens so many times. Once a funny thing happened after class was over. A woman came up and said, “Shame on you.” I said, “What have I done now?” She said, “You shouldn’t have talked about me like that. Suppose you know about me, okay, but you should have some decency. You shouldn’t have talked about me like that openly.” “I do not know what you are talking about. As I am talking to you now many things may apply to many people.” She left. Then a very sturdy, hefty fellow comes very psychically threatening at me. “Look here! It is not good what you are doing.” “What is it that I am doing?” “First, you threw pictures into my mind and afterwards you start picking those pictures and telling everyone how I’ve been feeling all these days. This is not decent.” (That fellow still comes. He meditates regularly. Now he is very different.) He continued, “How did you know everything about me?” “I don’t know. Someone told me.” “Who told you?” “That woman standing over there told me.” [chuckling] I thought it was the best way to do it. He goes to that woman and says, “Look here, lady, may I ask you one question. How did you know about me?” She looked up at him, “Look here, young man, I don’t know you. What are you talking about?” He said, “You told Daya everything about my life. That is why he was talking about me.” She said, “No, no, no. Take care. He was not talking about you, he was talking about me!” And now, they were quarreling with each other. Let them decide among themselves who I was talking about. I was not talking about either one of them. I was not even aware of them. All of us live in a particular space. That space is very sensitive and very familiar to us. If anyone mentions it we think that person is talking about us. They may or may not be. What is that space in which I’m talking about? I’m talking about the space you live in. What is the home that you belong to, where you go back to again and again just like a musician when he sings a song? The first line is the permanent line to which you come back over and over again. It is called the refrain. We come back to it again and again. In India we improvise the song when we sing and we go over different notes, we go to the variety of notes all relevant to us but finally we come back to that one line. We fall back on it. There is a refrain in your mind. There is a particular thought in your mind. There is a space in your mind and you come back to it over and over again. At times you may become infused with great thoughts and are thrilled with the possibility of doing something different. And for a couple of days you are in a dream-like state. Then you go to sleep and in the morning you are the same again. You have come back to your home. Become aware of that that space you have taken in your mind as your home. If you have a job that requires traveling, you might stay for 3 weeks in hotels and only 1 week at your home. You stay for a very short while at home but you still call it “your home.” And the hotel where you stay for 3 weeks, you do not call your home. And if the food at the hotel is not good you say, “I don’t care. I have got a very good home. When I go back, I will eat anything I like.” You belong to some place. In the same way, in your mind you belong to a space. The realization of what that space is will be a powerful lightning bolt, a great understanding about yourself and realization of what your life is. See that space. You might spend a lot of time in depressing thoughts and very little time on bright and ennobling thoughts. Don’t judge yourself that way. The time spent in a particular space means nothing. As the example that I have given, you might spend more time out of your home and less time in your home. It depends on what you consider your home. You may spend 5 minutes within yourself which is very happy and optimistic, but then afterwards you start shoplifting, doing all the nasty things of life. You start telling lies. You start deceiving people in your emotional relationships. Then you judge yourself as that because you think that you have been doing these things all your life. You forget that you might be staying there just for a short while. In essence you are different. It depends what you think you are. That is what makes all the mischief in the world. And there are no 2 opinions. There is only one truth. Essentially you are great. You can’t imagine what great men have done. They never let the people know because everything was covered up. That is what the power does. When the kundalini is awakened, she totally destroys the past. The greatest poet India has produced in centuries, ten thousand years ago, Valmiki, was the worst man on earth. He was very cruel. He was a robber, he was a cheat, he was a thug, he was everything. He became a great saint because he suddenly realized that “I have always been living in hotels.” It’s time for you to realize you might be spending all your time in hotels. Where do you live now? Why do you feel so bad when the omelet is burnt up and the food is not good? Why do you own it? You might be having it everyday…again it means nothing. Do not identify yourself with the things you have been doing, good or bad, whatever they are. If you recognize where your home is a great assurance will come to your mind. You have a space entirely your own, exactly as you want it to be. Everything is perfect there. Everyone is going to look after you there, and you are very secure. You feel insecure only when you are in a space which is not yours. If a person is not interested in wealth or material things and he is pushed into a particular job by external influences, he will always feel insecure, he will not feel good. He will always be afraid the job will be lost and he will pick quarrels with people because he doesn’t belong to that place. But the moment you find yourself at the place where you belong, all negativities disappear. You accept everything and know that you can handle everything that comes because you are the master. There is a space in the mind where we live. Go into your mind. Think what that space is. See, does it belong to you really that intimately, that inextricably? Is it really that important that you must stay there? And even if you have to stay there, why should you stay there that long? The valley is there, okay, and I know that it is very difficult to go up the hill. It is always difficult to go up a hill. It’s very easy to roll down into the valley. It’s very comfortable. You don’t have to work much. When you go up it is slippery and very hard but your home is there somewhere. And when you know where your home is, everything changes. Then your idea about you changes. You become a different person. You become possessed by that home. It is very difficult for a person who has identified himself or herself with a particular way of life to do. If I tell that person, “You are not what you think you are. I see in my mind’s eye that you are very great,” that person will think that I am flattering him. No, it is possible. There are many destinies. If that person follows the particular path of destiny, he can rise very high. I have seen people who touch the very bottom of sin, fault and stupidity rise to the very highest. It depends on whether or not you believe that space is your home. You may question it. You never question a hotel. Do you question your home? Wherever you stay, whatever unwanted, unsolicited thoughts invade the mind, you never question them. You take them as real. And when beautiful thoughts come to you, when you sit down in meditation and tell yourself, “Here I am out of everything,” you doubt it. You tell yourself, “I am no saint. How can I get out of all desires? How can I get out of all filth, all lust, all snares and temptations of life? I can’t do it?” How can you get into it? If you are worthy of getting into it, you are worthy of getting out of it. You always think that when you get into it that it is what you deserve. But when you want to get out of it, you think you don’t deserve it. Who has told us all this? It may be the inherent fear of sin, it may be the threat of religion…that once you go wrong, you go wrong all your life. Maybe they forgot to tell you that one thing you can never do is to go wrong…ever. Go on trying. Sin is never committed…only you acted stupidly. Sin is the wrong understanding of karma. It’s how you commit a sin. It is not the act where the mischief lies, it is the way you commit the act or the mischief. You can do anything you like in your life. You can do the worst thing, but do it in the right way. The world and the law will see what you have done. God does not see what you have done because he has done the dirtiest things on earth himself. See how you have done it. No one sees your intentions when you are in a court of law. But God sees. You have to pay if you go against the laws of the world. That is nothing. That is a different space again. There is another space that is judging you all the time. Judge yourself keeping in mind different tenets of morality, different standards of understanding and different limits of possibilities that you have in your life. Never think low of yourself. Never think that you are not capable of doing something because then you will never do it. Think of a noble thought right now. Tell yourself that from tomorrow you will be the best man that ever existed. The mind will tell you, “Forget it. You! You can’t do it.” Unless you despise that attitude of the mind you won’t get rid of it because you have created your mind. You always thought, “This is all I can do.” Now I ask, “What is the maximum that you hope you can do in your life?” Whatever you say is not even one-thousandth of what you can actually do. But we never set those goals because we live in that space. The space decides everything…where we live, where we belong. We are what we think we are. We create everything because we think we are like that. “I am that what I think I am.” That is the final reply to all simple thoughts. If you think you are sinful, you are a sinner, most definitely you are. I’m convinced of it. I will never say another word. If a man comes to me and says, “I am a sinner,” I will say, “Most definitely you are. And keep away. There is no hope for you because you think you are a sinner, so you must be a sinner.” The worst man may come and say, “I am beyond all sin.” I say, “You are God himself. You are beyond all sin.” If you think you are beyond all that, you are beyond all that. It is not self-deception. If it comes in your mind, “Perhaps I am not what I say I am,” there you are destroyed; everything is destroyed when you live in 2 spaces. All of us live in a space in the mind. There is an old story that I read when I was very young. King Richard was sitting in prison. There was no hope for him to win. And a spider was trying to go up the ceiling. It didn’t make it, it fell down. The king wryly smiled and said, “Just like me.” Again the spider tried to go up. And when it was one yard away from the ceiling, it fell down. The king again wryly smiled and said, “Just like me.” The spider did it 5 times and failed 5 times. Incidentally the king had 5 times tried to win and had failed. Each time the king said, “Just like me.” But the spider made it on the 6th time. Now the king thought, “I should be true to what I have been saying, “Just like me.” And so he won. He got out of prison and regained his entire kingdom. Fate tries you, destiny rewards you. If you are not afraid of fate, if you are not afraid of being tried, then destiny will bring all blessings to you. Here is a true story. During the gold rush days in San Francisco a man had a piece of land. He had dug a deep hole and found no gold so he sold this land. The person who bought it, dug only one foot down and found a huge strain of gold. All along the man was only one foot away from the fortune. So who knows...if up till now you have lived in a particular space and you think that you have failed, you have to make deeper inroads. A breakthrough might be just around the next corner. But if you lose hope an inch away, you have lost it. And if you persist…no one has ever failed. No one has ever failed. Even lifetimes don’t matter. You will start next lifetime at the point where you had reached. There is hope for all people. What happens in your mind is your home. At least you take it as your home. If you don’t want to own it, then disbelieve in it. Tell yourself, “My personal life is not very important. The environment is not very important. I can very well live in any space in my mind that I like.” But have faith in that space. If you doubt in that space, it will not belong to you. How easy to believe that we are bad, and how difficult to believe that we are really good. Have you seen it? If I tell anyone that you are a saint, you say, “Forget it. How can I be a saint?” It’s just like a priest I met. This story really happened. Once I went to a priest and told him that Christ had possessed me for about 15 days. It was true but he disbelieved me, “How can Christ possess you?” It was Christ who told me, “Go back to him and tell him the devil has possessed you.” I went back, “Father, the devil has possessed me.” “That is very true.” Then I said, “I spit on you. You are hardly a priest. You think the devil can possess me. He is strong enough and Christ is so weak he can never possess me. What are you talking about?” It doesn’t make sense at all. The devil can possess a human being and Christ can’t? I was very young at that time. What I meant was a higher consciousness had possessed me. We believe more in the negativities and we do not believe in the positive side of mind. But the reality is, we can very easily go to that higher space, as easily or more easily then to the lower space. Both pull you. It is very easy to roll down the hill and lie in the valley, but you will have to make some effort to reach the top. It is tough living at the top…it is so beautiful. That is as true as ever. We have very little faith in the high thoughts. And all our belief and love and conviction goes in favor of our depressive thoughts…sadness, weaknesses, what we call weaknesses. This space exists all the time. It doesn’t come now and leave you. It clings to you. When you open your eyes, it comes to you. When you go to sleep, it stays with you. It comes to you in your dreams. The moment you are conscious of it, then something very deep begins to happen. The first result will be, you will have a beautiful dream. You will have a very strange dream. Bright light will be there. Someone will be talking to you and telling you, “Right now you are getting out of it.” Again I may tell you that these mansions after mansions are very high. Even if you live in a bright way, don’t think that you have no negativities. You might have been imprisoned by certain preconceived notions about the possibilities of your life and lots of things are still there for you to do but you do not believe that you can do them. I call this a negative thought because there is no limit to what you can do. That is why I say, one day a genius will be considered a myth because the genius that is imprisoned in you, the tenant that is hidden in you, is worth nothing. Its only worth is when it comes out in the sunlight. It will come out only if you have a belief in it. And if you don’t believe in it, it will die with you. In any particular line you can flourish a lot only if you know that you can. How easy it is for each person, at least, to tell himself or herself, “I can do anything I like.” It is so easy. It is so easy. Do whatever you want. Go ahead. Put everything at the stake and do it. It is better to die at the stake then to die in a prison house where you just go on dreaming, looking through the window at the birds that are flying in the sky. If you can escape, escape. They have even escaped from Alcatraz where they thought no one could escape. Can’t you escape from your own thoughts now? One day you will have to escape from everything. Every person has to escape from the religion he was born in. One will have to have greater understanding about patriotism so far as the country he was born in. One will have to have a revised understanding about one’s parentage. Think about it. You were born in one religion. It is not necessary that it is your final way of thinking. There are lots of reasons you were born into it. Disown everything. Disown your self, disown your thoughts. Don’t belong to anything. Then see what you want. Your parents were there just by accident. Give them whatever you can…make them feel good. Don’t hurt them. Give them their due. Give them respect. Give them the love that is their right. But do not destroy yourself for them. Still I say, disown them in the sense that you don’t sacrifice your life. Sacrifice money, sacrifice love, sacrifice attention. Give everything to them. Do not criticize them for they are father and mother. Give them all the respect. But grow out of them. Do whatever you like for your country. Give your life for your country if it is invaded. But don’t sell yourself to the follies of the politicians. Grow out of that. Don’t identify yourself with those negative things that your country has grown with and might have wrong ideas about. Whatever it is. All countries have their biases. It is the same with religion. Every religion has something to get and something to lose. You were born in a religion. Look at it again. You might be living in a wrong space. You need not disown it, but sift the facts and then see how to change that particular conception of reality you are living in. You need not relinquish your religion. Belong to it. But here in your heart bring about those changes which are very healthy in your own mind. You need not tell anyone how you have changed. When I go back to India they will not know in what way I have changed. I will talk to them in their language. I will tell them that what they are doing is perfectly all right because what is the use of uprooting them? If you uproot a plant when the plant is very big, the plant dies. There is no use of uprooting those people. They have lived in those traditions. You only have to give a new meaning to it, new understanding to it. So whatever your roots are, see how you can blossom forth in the best possible manner. What is the best climate for you? I went to the redwood forest and there was a plate with an inscription saying that all the trees are trying to reach sunlight and those who can’t, you find them lying dead. Many of us are doing that. All of us are trying to reach the sunlight. What is that sunlight? Pierce through your present space of mind and reach out to the higher space. There is great hope, happiness and bliss there. Is it not true that all of us live on a particular merry-go-round? The same kinds of thoughts go on running around and around, and we don’t see beyond them. Then each one is a prisoner of that merry-go-round. We live in our own closed mind. It is a terrible thing I am telling you. If you break into the mind of another person you will get a terrible shock. Try doing it sometime. It is just like a powerful orbit. Each person’s mind is a different world. A different sun is there…a different earth and moon are there…and different thoughts are there. A person goes around and around, around and around, caught in the orbit…they can’t get out of it. What is your orbit? You are as great and as small as the thing you are going around. Never forget it. If you are going around something very ordinary, you are a very ordinary person. And each one of us is going around something…even the greatest and the best of us. All the saints included. Self-realized beings included. A self-realized being goes around and around, around and around. There is no getting out of it. Each of us in one’s own mind is in an orbit going around and around something. We never look at that thing. See what it is. What are you going around and around? Is it worth it? The moment you will know it is not worth it, you will break away from that rigmarole and throw yourself into another orbit. You can always do it because of personal power. But you sold out by your dedication to the orbit. You give yourself to it and then you go around and around forgetting yourself. Look at your life. Each time I asked this man to look at his life, he starts crying. If you do that, you will never see. Look at life unemotionally. If you could do that even for 5 minutes, that is enlightenment. A great joke is there. Behind the pain is a great joke. But the moment you look at it emotionally you only see the tears and you start crying. Once an old woman from the village who had never seen a movie was sitting in a movie theater watching a movie. In the movie people were beating a man who was innocent. The old woman stood up, “Don’t beat him! He is innocent! Don’t beat him!” “Oh Grandma, he is just on the screen.” Then she turns to us and says, “It may be on the screen but they are beating him and he is innocent.” Who can convince her? It may be unreal, you tell yourself, but it is there and I can’t take it. That is a funny thing. You, yourself admit it is unreal and still you take it. Question everything that has happened to you. Question how real it was, how transitory it was, how meaningless it was, and how you have taken it into your heart and given it a place there and you nourish it, cherish it, relish it all the time. You don’t want to let it go as if it is a prized jewel. It means nothing. No experience that has happened in your life means anything, whatever value you give to it, it is nothing. Now, an experience is everything at the time you are in it. Suffering and torture have great meaning only while you experience it. You can make it the greatest experience. Extreme pain…a great experience is there, but the moment it is over, throw it out of the window. Be ready for the bliss that will come to you. But if you remember it, then you are always in that pain. You can learn a lot from an experience that has not ended. You can learn a lot from an experience that is not finished, that is not over. Whatever you can learn from an experience, you can learn only till it is not over. The moment an experience is over, you can learn nothing from it. New things are held back because we are closed to them by still looking at the old things so life becomes stagnant and dead. The best thing is to forget the old things because the time is over. Everything is guided by time. During a specific time period, you are expected to learn something. Then time changes, your life changes. You are thrown into a very strange state. You are taken up by a new scheme of life, a new way of life. Go into it whatever it is. Watch it…pain or pleasure…don’t define it. Just go into it. Learn everything you can. Even while you may think that you are not learning, the pain or the pleasure itself is learning. Go through it. The moment it is over, give it back to the river and say, “It doesn’t belong to me anymore. Let new things come.”
COPYRIGHT© 2003
J.M. Sharma, U.S.A. All rights reserved.
|