LIFE IS A SCHOOL
People ask, “Who are we, where did we come from, and why are we here?” Instead, say, “Who am I, where did I come from, and why am I here”? You have come from nowhere, and you are going nowhere. You are the universe itself, and to where can this vast universe go? You are like a bubble in a pond, and the bubble bursts. You are still in the pond. Nothing has been detracted. Not a single ounce of energy can be detracted from this universe, and not a single ounce can be added to it.
It is a complete whole, and therefore, to live holistically, there would be no separation. There is only one purpose for you being here in this life. You have come with a burden. That is why the scriptures say you have been born in sin.
You have come with a burden of past impressions and past karmas, and you have come here to lessen the burden. You have come to this school to learn, to lessen the burden, and every experience gained has its particular value. Any experience, be it good or bad, still teaches you something.
That is how your karma, the impressions, the samskaras, is gradually wiped away. Some people can do it in one lifetime. Many might require hundreds of lifetimes, but each lifetime will reduce that burden or wipe away those samskaras until you have pure consciousness, unity consciousness – the oneness with Divinity and then you, too, can say, “I and my Father are one!”
You have come from nowhere, and you are going nowhere. Nowhere? Now, by shifting the letter “w” a little bit, you are “now here”. That is all that matters, and if I am now here, I will enjoy this hereness, this nowness to its fullest. If you can live one moment of your life in its most total value, you have conquered the entire universe. But people do not do that, and I have said this many times: people either live in the past, you are mulling over something that has happened in the past, or you project the experience of the past into the future and worry about the future. You are going to a party next week. The party is only next week, and you worry about what dress you will wear. You try to find something which you think will be unusual, but do not be surprised if five other women turn up there with the same kind of dress on!
Life is lived with the expectation that something better will happen. Yet, it is well known that expectation is the mother of disappointment. The prefix “dis” nullifies the appointment; your appointment is here and now, and you are appointed to be here and now and nowhere else. You cannot move out of the universe. You are still in the universe, and your vastness of awareness will make you realize that you are the universe. You are everything. That is the purpose of life. That is why we are here to learn more and more lessons. Some of them are difficult.
When your children bring homework home from school, they find the arithmetic, math, science, or whatever challenging, and they ask momma and poppa to help them a bit. They find it difficult, but they are learning. There are so many things we find difficult.
As grown-up beings, thinking beings, we can also think properly. You expend more energy thinking negative thoughts or hateful thoughts than uplifting thoughts or thoughts of love. The purpose of life is to unpattern the patterns that we have created, and thus, you lessen the burden with which you have come. The burdens that you have come with are the patterns and nothing else. You are running in a groove all the time. You have to change, and that change is called growth. You grow, and growth necessarily brings about changes within you, and it is for the better.
You might find these things hard but try to clean an oily pot where you have cooked some fatty foods. You have got to use steel wool or something to scrub it to get it clean. How does a pot feel with that steel wool scraping against it? It makes the pot clean, that is for sure. If you develop this attitude that I do need the scrubbing to make myself clean, then you will find the scrubbing not to be too arduous. I was telling someone the other day who had a lot of pots to wash; I said, “You have washed the pots ten times in your mind, and now you are doing it really for the eleventh time.” It is expending eleven times more energy by thinking about it ten times. Why not just get onto it and it is done, and then sit down with a free mind and meditate if you have nothing else to do?
YOU ARE HERE
You have come from nowhere, and you go nowhere. You are here. When this body is dropped your soul, your subtle body, goes to another plane of existence for evaluation; but still, it is here, it is nowhere else because in that plane of existence there is no time or space. That plane is even here. Many of those soul bodies, millions of them, could be floating around here; they also like to listen to Gururaj speak.
I AM DIVINE
Who am I? That is the most critical question in the world, and no philosopher or metaphysician has ever been able to answer it. That answer can only come from within yourself. When you reach that integrated state of body, mind and spirit, the solution automatically dawns on who you are, and there will be only one answer. You will say, “I am divine,” that is who I am.
But it requires integration and not fragmentation. The lives we live are very fragmented, thus causing greater and greater anxiety and more remarkable and more significant problems. Keep asking that question to yourself when you have no other things to think about because the surface level of the conscious mind does not think; it only feels that it thinks. It does not think, just old thoughts churning and churning around there all the time, and because of the churning, you do not allow the conscious mind to sink lower to a more refined level.
BEAUTY LIES IN THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER
When the conscious mind reaches a more refined level through your practices, you will start answering the question, “Who am I?” The answer will come with total integration of yourself: body, mind, and spirit. You will be integrated not only within yourself but also with everything outside yourself.
The world we live in has only a limited value. It is a relative world, and we view it from the surface level of our minds. Therefore, we see so much turmoil in the world. But the turmoil we observe starts with the turmoil within us. As the saying goes, “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”
If the beholder is beautiful, everything around him also becomes gorgeous, and if there are conflicts, you rise above them. You can do nothing about it. Great reformers have come and gone, Krishna, Buddha, and Christ, and the world is still the same; it was 5,000, 2,000 years ago. Nothing has changed. Still, just as much lust, still just as much greed, all these warring factions, hot wars and cold wars and all kinds of wars because of one reason: people are warring within themselves with the conflicts.
There is always this higher Force trying to express itself, but you are blocking it with your ego self, which is cluttered with all the patternings and dirt; therefore, the light does not shine through.
We unpattern those patternings. We clean the windows of the dirty glass so that light shines through our minds, lightening them up, and through our bodies, lightening them up. You develop that beautiful glow, and the mind becomes kind and compassionate. It assumes the qualities of your Higher Self and that the higher Self is nothing but love. You allow that infinite love to filter through your mind and body.
YOU ARE A GIFT UNTO YOURSELF
Many times, people come to me with all kinds of problems, and they say, “I am not loved; no one loves me.” That is not true. Become loveable, and you will see how people will love you. That is the secret.
“Someone says to me that I am an emotional, mental, spiritual cripple”. I say, Nonsense! You are not! You think you are, so why believe in that way? You are a gift unto yourself, a gift which you have presented to yourself as a life force and that could never be crippled. It flows on and on and on all the time. It can never be lost. Then, with thoughts like that, we wallow in self-pity, guilt, and unnecessary anxieties.
When someone feels that he is going to lose his job, all the anxiety builds up in him. He creates a pessimistic aura around him, making him lose his job. What you emanate, your action, your emanation, that brings about the corresponding reaction. Your actions make the reactions. If your heart is filled with love, love is returned to you tenfold. That is an indisputable law.
You give one, and you receive ten back in return, always! The question of “who am I” will then be realized when the mind is filled with good thoughts. That comes from the subtler levels of the mind, the Superconscious level, which is now infiltrating the conscious level of the mind, so your mind has positive thoughts.
Because of the heightened awareness, your heart opens, and it unfolds with love, so there you have good thoughts and positive thoughts, and you are welling up with love: my cup is running over. That is the secret of life. That is why you are here, and that is what you are. It just requires self-discovery. It is not an uncharted sea. You do not need a compass to find yourself. It would be best to dive more profoundly within yourself and see the incredible beauty of everything.
Even though this world is so beautiful, there is nothing ugly. I can only see ugliness if I am ugly. I can only see beauty if I am beautiful. That is the attitude. Then you know why you are here, who you are, and know that you have come from and are going nowhere. Shedding this body does not mean you are going anywhere because the most essential aspect of yourself is the all-pervading spirit, and that spirit can go nowhere because it is all-pervading.
… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang US 1984 – 36
