Taste the sweetness of Life:
When you exist here as body or mind, your suffering is inevitable. Your body and mind are always subject to the forces of duality, so circumstantial aspects will rule.
As long as this is so, you being happy or unhappy, peaceful or not, is not in your control – the way you are right now depends on the situations you are in. Meditation means to transcend limitations of physical body and mind so that you exist in a state where body and mind are not deciding the quality of who you are. During meditation you are in touch with the source, the basis of your body and mind. The basis of all creation is what you are referring to as God. Body and mind are something that you gathered from outside. They are not the basis of life, they are only the surface.
The physical reality of existence is only the peel of the fruit. Only as a protective layer for the fruit, the peel has some value; not by itself. You have to feed your body, clothe it, decorate it, and pamper it in so many ways. This seems very important right now. But if that something which is the basis of your body and mind, that which you have never experienced so far, leaves this body, nobody is interested in this body anymore. The fruit is gone. Nobody is interested in the peel alone. Only because the fruit is inside, we value the peel. But right now, you have gotten so deeply involved with the peel that you have forgotten about the fruit. If you are eating the peel of life, how can life be? It has to be bitter. But the problem with the peel is, it has spots of sweetness in it. Right now, your whole life is about searching for these spots of sweetness. These spots of sweetness have come only because of the fruit. If you transcend the peel, if you go beyond the peel and taste the fruit, your life will become completely different. Physical existence is just the peel of life.
Right now, your whole experience of life is limited to the physical existence because you experience life only through your five senses. Sense organs can only experience that which is physical. They cannot experience anything beyond that.
If you want to experience something beyond the physical existence, you need to go beyond the five senses. Right now, you can only talk about God; you cannot experience God. But if you can experience the fruit beyond the peel and access that which is the source of creation, there is a possibility for you to live every moment of your life in the company of the Divine – an intelligence and competence that will make your life magical and blissful. If you do not utilise this possibility, why exist here as a human being? If we have just come here to eat, sleep, reproduce and die one day, we don’t need this kind of intelligence; we don’t need this kind of body. Once you have come here as a human being, you have come with the capability of knowing and experiencing life beyond the physical dimension. That is what meditation means – to know life beyond the limitations of the five senses; to know life beyond the sphere of that which is physical; to know and experience life at the source, not the surface. To live, and to live totally.
OverCome Ego, be Happy !!
Who doesn’t wish for happiness? Can money buy happiness? Do great achievements bring true happiness? Riches, success and achievements may bring name, fame and pride, but they do not always bring happiness.
If lack of money and success creates sorrow and suffering, their possession does not give happiness either. The question then is how can you be peaceful and happy, irrespective of whether you are a success or failure in life?
Krishna says in the Bhagvad Gita: “There is neither intellect nor bhavna (feeling for God) for the ayukta or the one who is not united, and to one devoid of bhavna , there is no peace. To the one without peace, how can there be happiness?” Krishna says, clearly, that unless a person is tuned into God he cannot have peace and without peace, he cannot be happy. Krishna also says that an un-united person does not have intellect.
So if you want happiness, unite with God. For this, you don’t have to abandon the pursuit of riches, success and achievements. God is self-knowledge and wisdom of sameness towards all beings because all are God. An egocentric person remains alienated from wisdom that is God. If you are free from ego, you look at all beings as God and so are united to the wisdom that is God. You will be free of sorrow and will attain peace and happiness.
Krishna says that we do not have right to the fruits of action and, therefore, we should perform actions, leaving the fruits to God. How can you avoid worrying about the fruit while performing actions? When a person regards the fruits of action (success or failure) as ‘mine’ and performs focused on the object, he is automatically worrying about the fruit.
Moreover, in doing so, he fails to abide the law of God, which says that one does not have right to the fruits. What you have to really do is to steady your intellect with the thought that the fruits of actions are of God. And when the fruit accrue in the form of success or failure, joy or sorrow, you have to mentally renounce the fruit to God. Since you do not contemplate the objects, you will not be attached to them. You will break the chain that starts with attachment and gives rise to desire, anger, delusion, confusion of memory, loss of intellect and death. Your intellect will become steady.
Krishna calls the wisdom of steadying your intellect by renouncing the fruits of action to God as Buddhi-yog or discipline of intellect. In this state you can be freed from constant births in different bodies. If you don’t, you are bound by actions. You lose your intellect due to attachment, desire and anger and perish, only to take another birth in a new body.
To steady our intellect we have to bring change in our thoughts. We have to remain engaged in usual actions and enjoyments as earlier but with a steady intellect fixed on the thought that all fruits of action are of God. This will free us from desire and ego, and gain eternal peace and happiness.
The same wisdom that will give peace and happiness to us will also give us Self-realisation and make us immortal. It will lead our world to a new age where we will live in peace, happiness and oneness, realising that we are in union with God.
